From /tmp/sf.4146 Tue Aug 9 02:00:17 1994 Xref: liuida rec.arts.sf.reviews:572 alt.books.reviews:3327 rec.arts.books:85979 sci.anthropology:7102 rec.arts.sf.written:60564 Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: danny@cs.su.oz.au (Danny) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,alt.books.reviews,rec.arts.books,sci.anthropology,rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Book Review - The Sykaos Papers Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 13 May 1994 06:53:20 GMT Organization: Basser Dept of Computer Science, Sydney University, Australia Lines: 62 Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu Originator: mcb@remarque.berkeley.edu ~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 (danny@cs.su.oz.au)