The hock shop from everywhen

kw: book reviews, science fiction, science fantasy, time travel

Sometimes I read a story thinking the author bit off too much to chew. This time, I felt that I'd bitten off too much. Psycho Shop by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny doesn't quite have the totally breathless pace of old pulp SF, but manages to cover a great deal of ground anyway.

What starts out as a bit of investigative reporting for our hero, Alf, turns into as weird a riff on all possible archetypes as I've seen. Nobody is what or who they seem to be. A most unlikely personage even turns out to be God, or at least the Demiurge.

The idea of note here is that the master of a far-future technology can trade bits of his client's personality in and out, rather more simply than changing a spark plug in a lawnmower engine. And when you're done, you may have started out a lawnmower, but now you can also trim hedges (Oh, what a metaphor!). Most of the creative tension of the novel involves exploring just how far such shenanigans can be taken…including in a very Frankensteinian direction.

Other curious ideas abound. Lots of writers have tackled interspecies romance; these authors attempt to raise it so sacramental levels (can't be done). Many have characters whose repressed memories drive the plot; here it seems to be the plot. But the word "character" is almost violated by the actors in this drama. Almost entirely affectless, they inhabit a story whose narrative tension is carried by dialogue, with hardly a hint of feeling. You know what they are doing, but not what they are thinking. It reminds me of the Foundation novels of Asimov: nearly all dialog, but his robots were more human than the "human" characters. There are no robots here, just cat-people, snake-people (scions of a far-future technology) and at least one people-people.

For a novel about a time-traveler, there is less time travel than any other I know. Nearly all fo it comes at the end. Riding into the sunset is a little hard when the "sun" is setting on the existence of the Universe. So the star-uncrossed lovers manage to sidestep that eventuality.

When I return to mundanity from a time-based fantasy, I always have the same question, that mirror's Fermi's question about aliens: "If time travel is possible, where is everybody?" Don't say it must be too espensive. Everything is too expensive at first, but the price always drops.