Subject: Review: The Wolves of Memory

From: [email-masked] ()
Date: Sat, 16 Apr 1994 16:52:09 GMT

George Alec Effinger bases this novel on a rather pessimistic
assumption: that as machines become more and more intelligent man will
abdicate control of his destiny to them.  He combines this with the
cynicism that machines will be just as bureaucratically inept and petty
as the worst civil servant.  From this grim viewpoint he crafts a tale
of man's spirit refusing to be crushed.  Or appears to; for in the end
he twists it back upon itself until one questions whether it is man's
spirit or the machine's that has emerged victorious.

The setting is a futuristic Earth society that has fallen willingly
under the rule of a vast computer intelligence called TECT.  The main
character is one Sandor Courane; a failed basketball player, a failed
science fiction writer, and a failed assembly line worker.  Three
strikes and you're out!  TECT sees these failures on Sandor's part as
cause for exile - to a colony planet in the Epsilon Eridani system.

But even lightyears cannot place the colonists/prisoners outside the
reaches of TECT.  The computer is seemingly omniscient and omnipotent.
And here Sandor discovers that all the colonists are susceptible to a
disease that will gradually and inexorably destroy their cellular
structure.  The disease is always fatal, untreatable, and irreversible.
And only through TECT can they research its cause and possible cure.

The first manifestations of the disease are noticeable in the victim's
memory lapses.  Effinger utilizes this in his writing style.  The story
is told in a disjointed series of vignettes that occasionally repeat
themselves and are not always chronological in order.  When I first
realized this was the going to be the structure of the novel I was not
enthused, but it worked well despite my apprehensions.

I have to note that Effinger prefaces the story with a couple of
quotations; the one from A.J. Languth's JESUS CHRISTS in particular sets
a tone of slightly irreverent humor that runs as a mild undercurrent
throughout the story.  I don't know how easy/difficult this book is to
find, but it's worth picking up should you run across it.