jethrien

Title: Mindkiller
Author: Spider Robinson
Genre: Science fiction
Thingummies: 3.5

Synopsis: Two parallel stories follow a man whose sister has disappeared and one who has rescued a woman from suicide-by-brain-stimulation. They end up on a collision course as they each attempt to fight a shadowy conspiracy that may well be able to control people's minds.

Thoughts: This book is deftly put together until just about the very end.

I found the two plot threads equally compelling, which is a tough trick to pull off. The characters are each highly damaged but interesting people, and I enjoyed watching their interactions with those around them. Norman is an alienated, depressed professor; Joe has...well, I don't want to spoil anything, so we'll say an unusual job and some even more unusual problems. Both have been withdrawing from the world, and each is pulled back in by a crusade. Norman wants to find his missing sister; Joe is a reluctant white knight protecting a woman on a mission to destroy the companies whose addictive wireheading nearly killed her. There are a couple of real surprises here, one of which I managed to guess and then the author succeeded in lulling me back into disbelief before plausibly revealing how he had accomplished the trick. It worked, startlingly well.

The problem is, when they finally do all track the villain down in his lair, we get one of the most egregious infodumps-via-villain-monologues I've seen outside of bad comic books. It's then interrupted by a badly foreshadowed deus ex machina. Which then redeems itself by turning into one of the better Mexican standoffs I've seen, including a foreshadowed non-deus ex machina that genuinely works. This all limps in to a conclusion that does work, but is somehow not quite as satisfying as I would have liked.

In retrospect, I should have expected this--there are a couple overly talky scenes early on, in which the characters inform each other via slightly stilted dialogue what the themes of the book will be. But the ideas were sufficiently interesting at the time that I was willing to grant some leeway I'm revoking in hindsight.

The book was written in 1982, relatively early in Robinson's career. There's a lot of potential here, and another two books in what appears to be a very loose and spaced out trilogy. I'm hoping that he grows out of some of these tendencies.

The writing date is also particularly amusing at this point, in ways that aren't at all fair. The book is set between 2006 and 2011, and like most science fiction written about the near-future, it's entertaining to see what holds up and what doesn't. On one hand, the existence of Google and cell phones actually does not harm the plot in the slightest--Robinson got lucky there. On the other, the description of someone as having hair the color of audiotape is strangely anachronistic, and the most impressive computer really imaginable has an entire whopping four terabytes. Which I guess is still impressive memory these days--I've only got about a terabyte and a half at home, and adding that much might cost me another couple hundred dollars. Oops. More problematic is the lack of social renaissance in the cities. But while this is entertaining to nitpick, it's not really kind. He did a pretty good job, all things considered.