"Once upon a time there was a robot who wanted to die..."

The label "fiction" is a strange thing because it doesn't really mean anything--when you pick up a work of fiction it could be just about anything. This oversimplifies things a lot, but one way to map fiction would be along an axis stretching from one extreme of highly realistic, representational works to another extreme that shuns the documentary impulse.

There are all sorts of problems with that model, but it can be useful--just ask yourself, what makes fiction seem like non-fiction and what makes fiction seem false--not necessarily lacking in truth but rather "created" or "written" or "literary." One way to think of this might be as a spectrum ranging from "What is known" to "What is imagined." Hopefully you understand I'm not saying "Fictive" fiction doesn't convey truth...

Genre loyalists might disagree with this statement--again put forth as an oversimplification--but science fiction is an interesting genre because it falls fairly distinctly into those two camps: hard science fiction engages Science (and speculative science) to create a setting and a plot that feel real; the other stuff gets more... uh... speculative... imaginative.

That said...

I just picked up a reissue of Walter Tevis' Mockingbird. I knew Walter Tevis wrote novels that became films (The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hustler, The Color of Money). I didn't know he was an English professor.

Mockingbird takes place generations into a future in which robots (the fleshy kind; think Blade Runner) run everything, humans are illiterate and drugged up on mood leveling drugs, privacy is mandated by law, and human birth rates have been dropping so the death of the species is imminent. Citizens are shuttled about by Thought Buses--vehicles controlled by telepathic robot brains--and live in fear of the shadowy Detectors-- telepathic robot enforcers who threaten reeducation or time in a gulag.

Three characters share alternating chapters: Spofforth, Bentley, and Mary Lou (although Mary Lou does seem to get short shrift).

Spofforth, the last of the Make Nines (the most sophisticated, intelligent robots ever built), has lived for generations, and is burdened with stewardship of humanity. What he really desires is to die. The novel opens with his attempted suicide. He brings Bentley, a teacher who has taught himself to read from a children's primer, to New York where he can pursue his studies in deciphering the titles on silent films. Bentley meets Mary Lou at a zoo populated by robotic animals, visited by robotic children, and patrolled by robotic guards. They fall in love.

Jonathan Lethem (a fantastic novelist in his own right) introduces this novel with the statement "Walter Tevis is a maker of fables, and Mockingbird is one of his finest..." This is the great pleasure of this book. Lethem accurately points out the echo of earlier works--like Brave New World and 1984--but Mockingbird doesn't have the same political or social pointedness of those books. It feels more personal than that to me. It is a story about totalitarianism, about illiteracy, about social responsibility and the need for interaction, but more importantly it is the a story of one man's self-discovery.

Not perfect by any means, Mockingbird is less science fiction than it is melancholy futuristic fable. And like most fables, the story doesn't feel real--it is heightened, intentional. Fables aren't about depicting the world realistically and finding the message; they are about painting a message, making a statement. And the best ones makes that painting feel real enough to speak to their audiences. Fables are clearly fiction but find their power in pointing to truth. Tevis paints a picture of a sad and lonely world, but the book's final vision is one of recognition that there is a cure for those conditions. Even in its grimness there is finally hopefulness and liberation.

--Brad Katz