Subject: Book Review - The Sykaos Papers

From: [email-masked] (Danny)
Date: 13 May 1994 06:53:20 GMT

~Title:		The Sykaos Papers
By:		E.P. Thompson
Publisher:	Bloomsbury 1988
Subjects:	science fiction, anthropology
Other:		482 pages

It's not often one of the world's best known historians turns his
hand to writing science fiction.  _The Sykaos Papers_ stands in a long
tradition of science fiction novels that use an alien or a human from
an alien culture stranded on Earth as a device for critiquing various
aspects of society.  (Robert Heinlein's _Stranger in a Strange Land_
is perhaps the best known example of the genre.)  While Thompson
does employ many of the standard cliches of science fiction, however,
he always seems to be able to find something new in them.

Oi Paz, a scout from the planet Oitar (where things are rather
different) crashes and is stuck on Earth.  Suffering severe culture
shock, he eventually ends up as the subject of a military organised
research institute, where he studies the researchers as they study him,
in an entertaining anthropological duality.  (The study of a scientific
research community at work under military discipline is reminiscent
of Stanislaw Lem's brilliant _His Master's Voice_.)  When the fleet
from Oitar arrives on the Moon, and the power balance between the
United States and the Russians is disrupted, things really warm up...

Not unexpectedly, _The Sykaos Papers_ does have a message (Thompson
is, of course, a Marxist), but it never becomes narrowly didactic
or polemical.  The obvious Earth customs - money, the media, the
military establishment and so on - come in for criticism, and Thompson
also finds room to poke fun at less obvious targets such as the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the French.  But the tone is
always humorous (_The Sykaos Papers_ is an extremely funny book),
so this never grates.  

Social critique of this kind is only as good as the construction
of the alien culture used for comparison.  I won't give any of the
details away, since the anthropological research provides part of
the interest of the book, but Thompson has done a remarkably good
job of producing a plausible but completely alien culture.  (This can
not be entirely uncorrelated with his brilliance as a historian; in
my opinion science fiction has benefited greatly from an increasing
number of writers with social rather than hard science backgrounds.)

As a novel _The Sykaos Papers_ is not so outstanding - fiction is
obviously not Thompson's natural genre - but it contains more than
enough in the way of interesting ideas to be worth reading, and is
also highly entertaining.  _The Sykaos Papers_ is highly recommended.

--

%A 	Thompson, E. P.
%T 	The Sykaos Papers
%I 	Bloomsbury
%C 	London UK
%D 	1988
%G 	ISBN 0-7475-0117-3
%P 	482pp, hc
%K 	science fiction, anthropology

10 V 1994
Danny Yee ([email-masked])