Why The Computer Connection Doesn't Suck

Some books date better than others. One kind of book that doesn't always date well is science fiction. It's something about archaic futurism - underwater cities and flying cars. That sort of thing. World's Fair thinking. Let's call it The Epcot Effect.

A friend of mine just passed along one of those books - a collection of stories really: The Complete Venus Equilateral. It's about a communication space station orbiting Venus. It begins with the following dedication:

To James Clerk Maxwell, whose electromagnetic equations founded the art of electronics and thus made Venus Equilateral possible ... And to my son, George O. Smith (Jr.), who may someday work there.

You get the idea. Venusian space stations. Underwater cities.

Sometimes, though, you stumble across one of the old science fiction novels that's just so ... so ... wacky, that it doesn't really suffer The Epcot Effect. Alfred Bester's The Computer Connection is one of those books. Boy oh boy oh boy - it's one of those books. Throw your sensibilities out the window and go along for the ride:

The Molecule Men (Molemen), a band of immortals (virtually, since they can get killed and can contract Lepcer, a cancer-like disease) are organized into a sort of multi-millennial cabal. A strange multinational melange of characters (men and women, large, small, white and black, even a Neanderthal), they have been buying real estate and building portfolios, doing research and documenting history. You get the idea.

Edward Curzon (Guig, from Grand Guignol, to his friends; Glig to Natoma, the native American princess he takes as his wife ... but see, now I'm giving stuff away) has decided to recruit Sequoya Guess (brilliant scientist and Natoma's brother) into the Group, but to do that, he has to kill him. You see Molemen cross over to their quasi-immortality when subjected to the intense sensation of horrible excruciating death; that and they might be epileptics. (If I'm losing you, you're getting the idea.)

Well, without giving too much away - Guig, Fee (full name Fee-5 Grauman's Chinese), Jacy (as in JC as in INRI ...), M'butu, Hillel, Pepys are successful (I won't say how) in facilitating Sequoya's transformation, but ... ooops ... he inadvertently gets "possessed" by Extro - the super-computer. Now there's trouble. Oh yeah, and there's aliens and mutations and cloning and a trip to a methane moon where they're very careful about letting you bring anything combustible and double-crossing and political incorrectness.

Hopefully, you get the idea that this is pretty much a fun read. Not too deep. In addition to the insane plot - about as far from Epcot as you can get - Bester has an amazing way of just playing with language. Just a taste here - page one paragraphs one and two:

I tore down the Continental Shelf off the Bogue Bank while the pogo made periscope hops trying to track me. Endless plains of salt flats like the steppes of Central Russia (music by Borodin here); mounds of salts where the new breed of prospector was sieving for rare earths; towers of venomous vapors on the eastern horizon where the pumping stations were sucking up more of the Atlantic and extracting deuterium for energy transfer. Most of the fossil fuels were gone; the sea level had been lowered by two feet; progress. I was heading for Herb Wells' hideout. He's perfected a technique for reclaiming gold (which nobody wants these plastic days) and is schlepping ingots back into the past with a demented time-dingbat which is why the group has nicknamed him H.G. Wells. Herb is making gifts of gold to characters like Van Gogh and Mozart, trying to keep them healthy, wealthy, and wise so they'll create more goodies for posterity. So far it's never worked. No Son of Don Giovanni. Not even The Don Meets Dracula.

Okay. The book will have to sell itself on its own ... um ... merits? All right, the book will have to sell itself. I might not go that far, but if you are looking for a really great careening and silly, dare I say madcap ... okay ... madcap read. Bester. The Computer Connection. Damned amusing.

--Brad Katz