Algorithm by Jean Mark Gawron

Would the assassin strike as per instructions?  If, as some seemed to think, he was a mathematical entity, an alternate syntax, an indeterminate component in a suddenly altered system, then he would.  Do you understand, Guillemet?  No, Guillemet did not understand, but understanding was not called for.

I purchased 1978's Algorithm, a novel by Jean Mark Gawron, for a pittance partly because I liked the cover illustration, which brought to mind those lines from "Helpless Dancer," "And in the battle on the streets/You fight computers and receipts," and because of the blurb from Samuel R. Delany, an interesting character and an important member of the SF community--though it seems not important enough for the goofballs at Berkley to make sure his name was spelled correctly on the cover of this book dedicated to him by his pal Gawron!  Embarrassing!

(Remember when we read some of Delany's porn--wow, that was really something.  More respectable and impressive as literature was Triton, but it had its own share of illegal-at-time-of-printing sex, didn't it?) 

Well, whether we have Pete Townshend or "Chip" Delany to credit for embarking on this adventure, let's hop to it and read Algorithm, a 211-page novel by a guy who is, apparently, an expert on Eastern languages and computers.

It is the spacefaring future, and Earth is a minor component of an interstellar civilization, a little place the economy of which relies largely on tourism from offworlders and has practically no police or government.  A couple of decades ago a powerful Federation of seven worlds more prosperous and influential than Earth sent a ship full of mercenaries to take over Earth, but the effort was an abortive failure and some of the surviving mercenaries settled down on this big blue marble after their employers abandoned them.  Our protagonist is one of these immigrants, Danton, a black man with ugly teeth.  Danton is a major celebrity, a writer whose verse and fiction are astoundingly popular, and the idol of the black leather clad motorcycle riding subculture of hipsters called Proets.

Danton is at the center of a mysterious intrigue like something out of a Batman story.  The media has received from an unknown party a somewhat cryptic message apparently indicating that there is an assassin on Earth, and that he will slay one of the twenty-five people whose portrait photos accompany the mysterious message.  The message hints that the people of Earth may choose who of the twenty-five will be killed.  Two of the twenty-five people pictured are famous celebrities, one of them Danton, the other a fabulously wealthy businesswoman, the Wunderdamen.  The Wunderdamen owns an artificial island out in the Atlantic, twenty miles from New York City, named Monotony; Monotony is a sort of amusement park and tourist trap with the worlds' finest brothel as well as performance space for the Proets, and most of the novel takes place on the island.

The assassin story dominates the news cycle and public attention, as well as the attention of the world's creative elite.  Everybody speculates on the assassin's identity, when, how and who he will strike; some are not even sure he is real at all, and  many suspect the assassin, hoax or not, is a ploy by the Federation to offer an excuse or pretext for another attempt to conquer Earth.  Dozens of attention-seekers who are suffering mental illnesses come forward claiming to be the assassin.  All the Proets write poems and plays about the mysterious assassin, and the Wunderdamen declares a Carnival on Monotony dedicated to the theme of the assassin--many of the characters spend most of the book dressed in wacky costumes, attending the Carnival festivities.

The Wunderdamen's chief of security, a woman nearly seven feet tall named Guillemet, is selected as the lead figure of the Carnival, like the queen or the grand marshal or whatever, but with the title of "victim."  Guillemet is probably the second or third most important character in Algorithm, after Danton and the Wunderdamen, and she has to do the actual risky work involved in the Wunderdamen and Danton's scheme to figure out if the assassin is real, and command the effort to ambush him if he is. 

Algorithm has many additional characters, all of them suspects and potential victims, and most of them get killed.  Gawron gives each of these characters, most of them creative types, a distinct look and a mysterious backstory, but doesn't give them particularly interesting things to do; mostly they make allegedly witty remarks, philosophize, and strike poses--they certainly don't exhibit emotion in a compelling or entertaining way; mostly they are sad or tired, not in a tragic way that moves the reader, but in the performative way of mopey art school kids.  The characters also lack compelling relationships with each other--they are all standoffish and distant, too-cool-for-school, meaning they have weak motivations that inspire little interest in the reader.  Among these flashy but ultimately flat secondary characters are a man whose skin is as reflective as a mirror and who walks around naked, attracting attention but not engaging much with others; a young poet early in his career who also works as a prostitute at the Wunderdamen's brothel; and a TV news anchor who is also a juggler who will whip out his balls and start juggling in order to get attention or just kill time.  Perhaps the most well-rounded and interesting character in Algorithm is an apparently intelligent and conscious computer.  The computer can't open its eyes wide or hold its head in its hands to express surprise or misery the way the human characters can, so, in its efforts to emulate humanity, it includes in its lengthy stretches of dialogue stage directions describing such actions, Gawron drawing attention to the performative nature of all his characters' emotions.

(Another sign of the characters' essential artificiality comes when a minor character remarks that the Proets are always seen hanging around their motorcycles, but never riding them.)     

As the novel proceeds many of the characters get killed, people's theories of who the assassin is and what he will do are proven wrong, and we get fragmentary descriptions of the life and theories of Novak, a scientist whose sex and sexual orientation Gawron deliberately keeps mysterious for much of the book, the individual who revolutionized human life and made space travel possible by "bridging" the "strange gap between microsystems" (exemplified by the electron, the movements of which are unpredictable) and "macrosystems" (exemplified by billiard balls on a pool table, whose movements can be predicted.)  There are a few fight scenes and chase scenes and scenes of suspense in which a character holds a gun on another character and we don't know what is going to happen, but these scenes are kind of hard to follow and not very exciting, in part because we don't care if any of these bland and fake characters gets killed.  The characters use logic and math and science and technology to try to solve the problem presented by the assassin, and figure out other related mysteries, like how the mercenaries got defeated by a planet with no regular government, but without success.  Algorithm is a record of a long series of failures, a long tale of futility, and the fact that so few conclusions are reached make it a frustrating and unsatisfying read. 

In the final chapter the Wunderdamen has long talks featuring digressions about the nature of communication with the all-seeing computer she putatively owns and we get hints of what is really going on, the true nature of Novak, and how responsible this sad and lonely machine is for whatever is going on. 

"How is it we speak?  How is it that language touches home?  How can we understand one another, as you have promised, when I have never walked in spring rain, pined after an ephebe, or snorted cocaine?"

The last chapter of the novel's five also features a final public performance which includes a metaphorical resurrection, and more characters, including the sad computer, being killed.  Then the Wunderdamen leaves Earth, apparently to negotiate the surrender of Earth to the Federation.  At the bottom of the last page we see the dates "Paris '73/New York '76," I guess Gawron reminding those of us languishing in the countryside among the cows and goats that he is living it up in major world cities among all the smarty smarts.

A big theme of Algorithm is our inability to really understand our environment and our universe, our inability to acquire reliable knowledge and experience certainty, and there are many examples of characters who can't tell their dreams from reality, can't distinguish lies and the truth, mistake a person for another person, hear voices but can't recognize the speaker or discern the words, conceal their identities and histories, and so on.  Near the very start of the novel Danton has to navigate through a building built by a famous master architect who has integrated into the building energy fields that alter light so that it is hard to distinguish right from left, rendering the building a labyrinth, and that is just the first of multiple scenes of people trying to make their way through mazes.  Much of the novel's text is made up of long speeches and lengthy stretches of allegedly clever dialogue, and much of it illustrates or expounds on this theme of unreliable knowledge and total ignorance.  We get from Danton in the first chapter this academic jabber:

"Novak's Equations have laid bare our logical systems and called forth from them new truths.  They have shown us that a grammar is a grammar only when traced through the framework of its home system.  Failure to recognize a change of system leads to apprehension by an old and inadequate grammar, to systematically produced nonsense."

Later, one of the mental cases who claims to be the assassin relates his experience with his therapist:

"She said that the madness was signaling something here, not in anything I said, but in the method I was using, that in this method was something of the way the madness worked to maintain my certainties of things which were not at all certain--by making certainty a constantly shifting mood."

Still later, he says

"But how do you know that that monster doesn't exist when you aren't even sure what the Juggler means by a monster?"

Algorithm is also about cultural production, about the creation of art and the transmission of curated information.  There are many oblique references to literature and pop culture: a woman's big pet dog is called the Questing Beast; the conscious computer diagnoses itself as healthy because it can still sing "Daisy," and later uses the word "kimosabe;" in its final speech the computer refers to Frankenstein and Pinocchio.  Many of the characters are artists or creators or patrons of one sort or another, and we have many scenes depicting in detail movies the characters watch, photographs they look at, poetry readings they attend, dance performances they witness, the workings of what amount to high tech art installations, and so forth.  I am going to go out on a limb and say that Gawron doesn't mean for us to like these works of art or be impressed by them.  As if Gawron is teasing us, multiple times his characters, after the author has inflicted upon us a long speech or a long description of some artistic production, express their boredom or weariness.  I think maybe Gawron means to suggest that all these performances are not a reflection of vitality but of its opposite, decadence.

A central support of my theory is the dialogue of a diplomat from off world.  He condemns the Earth  characters' response to the message from the assassin, saying that Earthers aren't taking the problem of the assassin, as they are all the problems facing Earth, seriously; instead, the people of Earth are treating the apparent appearance of as assassin as just another spectacle and as raw material for their derivative art works.  The diplomat points out how partygoers didn't rush to help a fellow reveler who fell off a rafter and cracked his skull, and calls Earth people "a race of watchers" and accuses the Proets and those who hang around them of being "passive observers in an affair that should deeply concern you...."  He expands his analysis, saying that Earth is in the midst of a media age in which the ability to experience events at a distance through mediating art forms has atrophied people's ability to respond to events directly and authentically.  An addiction to fictional depictions and long distance recordings of, say, war and violence, has left people unable to respond appropriately to real war and real violence, and a society of such people will be unable to deal with challenges and will thus fail.

So, I'm interpreting Algorithm as a comment on or satire of the kind of creative people Gawron, a college professor, is presumably very familiar with, and of our society of TV watchers and magazine readers as a whole--the omnipresence of art and media has left us unable to deal with real problems, problems which, ironically, are the very topics of our fiction and the very source material of our media--we watch lots of fiction and news reports on the TV about war and politics and crime, but this perhaps paradoxically makes us less able to deal with the real problems of maintaining order and defending our freedoms internationally and domestically.

Gawron's themes are not bad, but, seeing as this book is mostly conversations between hipsters and very lengthy descriptions of hoighty-toighty avant garde performances, it feels long and slow.  (Delany's claim on the cover that it is a "breakneck chase" is mindboggling...perhaps Delany is playing with the book's themes, offering a totally misleading assessment in a nod to the book's theme of how difficult it is to acquire accurate information.)  I've already expressed my unhappiness with the action scenes and with the characters.  Algorithm may be a smart book by a smart guy who has a lot of knowledge, but reading it was a chore rather than a pleasure, and in the end I hadn't gained any kind of insight or experienced any sort of catharsis as a reward for grinding through its 211 pages.  Maybe if I was as intelligent and as well-read as Samuel R. Delany I would have enjoyed it, but MPorcius Fiction Log has to give to Algorithm a thumbs down.