2015 science fiction. At a regional American SF convention, things are
going with the usual level of chaos… until the entire con hotel gets
kidnapped by time-travelling androids.
Which you'd think would be a recipe for excitement, adventure,
and really wild things. Not so much, it turns out.
There have been a couple of books set at F/SF conventions before:
Deep Secret, which I loved, and Bimbos of the Death Sun which I
enjoyed on initial reading but which now feels to me mostly
contemptuous of its fannish idiosyncrasies. This one is… more of an
oddity.
It's a very slight book, at less than 80,000 words, and its main
problem is that it tries to do distinctly too much. (This is often a
first-novel problem, but Alexander has apparently written fantasy
before.) There's a huge cast, but most of them only get one or two
mentions, and nobody ever really develops a personality. There are
lots of things that might make interesting plots, but they're either
left unresolved or neatly parcelled up and no longer a problem.
For example, the con chair Andie Mae Wilkinson has led an
organisational coup against Sam Dutton, who'd been doing the job for a
quarter of a century; she burned some of her allies in the process, in
order to have sole power… but why? What did she want to do
differently? Apart from a couple of minor programming tweaks, we never
find out. And Sam has turned up as a regular member, but… it turns out
that he's completely uninterested in having a big fight, he's just
curious to see what she's changed. So, er, that was that then.
(This is a con chair who also runs Ops whenever she's awake. Which,
well, I'm sure there are conrunners who are that stupid. And this
Ops has live video feeds from all the meeting rooms.)
I don't know whether this is meant to be a roman à clef; I don't
know California fandom these days (this is a mixed con but it seems to
be more film/TV than books). There are certainly lots and lots of
references made to visual SF, and if you like the sort of person who
would rather play spot-the-reference with a quote than say something
original you'll probably find several of the characters amusing.
On the other hand there's also quite a bit of philosophising about the
nature of humanity and its relationship with the robots it creates as
they become more intelligent, which sits oddly against the comedic
background of the usual things that go wrong at conventions. There's
discussion of the Asimovian laws, in which it's apparently news to
people that nobody in the real world has ever attempted to emulate
them. As Rudy Rucker put it in Software:
The mass of humans were born slave drivers. Just look at the Asimov
priorities: Protect humans, Obey humans, Protect yourself. Humans
first and robots last? Forget it! No way!
But nobody here has read Software, so they have to work it all out
from first principles.
The writing is pedestrian, the characters are nonexistent, and the
plot is predictable from the moment time travel is mentioned. The book
doesn't offend except in the sense that an American Budweiser offends:
not by being unpleasant, but by being nothing at all. At least it's
short.
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