An ugly messiah story

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

I am a pretty tolerant fellow, but a hundred pages into Norman Spinrad's He Walked Among Us, which telegraphs its message with a cover photo of someone walking on water, I'd had enough. I decided not to go down this garden path any further. I'd had enough profanity and vulgarity, and metaphorically rubbed shoulders with too many scumbags. In fact, only one principal character had not yet been revealed as a scumbag (but who knows; I never will). I jumped ahead to the last ten pages or so of this 540-page tome to check my early conclusions. Spot on.

I picked up this much. About 100 years into the future, time travel has been invented, but they can only afford to send one time traveler back. Their incentive to do so is that our generation has so totally screwed up the environment that Earth is nearly uninhabitable. So what kind of ambassador to the past do they pick? A stand-up comic. They figure, because they can read it in old, old issues of Variety, that a comic can say he's from the future without being either jailed or committed to an asylum. Meanwhile, he uses his stand-up routine to tell today's folks just how bad they are making things for their grandchildren.

The time traveler, one Ralf, connects up with a real sleazeball of an agent, who brings in a stable of "talent" to polish his act. Among them is an over-the-hill science fiction writer (only in his 40s, but already writing bombs instead of blockbusters), who happens to be in the midst of writing just such a future-messiah story, but he hadn't hit on the comic as hero until he met Ralf. So the book gets rather recursive.

In the end, which I did read, Ralf does raise the consciousness of enough people to get the future changed for the better. Now, if the author could make that into a high-concept story without the stream-of-consciousness drone of so many people whose minds I hated visiting, it might have been a book to take me somewhere I'd enjoy going, along a path I would not mind traveling. No such luck.