Review: Algorithm

Algorithm is a science-fiction novel by Jean Mark Gawron, written between 1973 and 1976, and published in 1978.

I may have just lied to you; if so the lie is contained in the word "novel". The book reads like E. E. "Doc" Smith and Jacques Derrida got drunk and started hitting each other over the head with typewriters. There is clear narrative sequencing and pacing, but that doesn't really help.

Partway through, I was asked what the book was about. My best and clearest response was this: "It's about a person I don't like very much doing things I don't care about or sympathize with in an attempt to prevent someone who may or may not even actually exist from performing an act that may or may not be an assassination in either a literal or metaphorical sense." (And I stand by that statement, even though the waveform of the Schrödinger's-plot did eventually collapse.)

There's also this mysterious thing called the Novak Transformation which is allegedly a mathematical construct (like the Fourier Transform); it actually seems to be an extended allegory for something-or-other that falls into the 'you haven't convinced me to care about this' category. (There's a technobabble explanation starting on page 123 that rambles about exactly like crank math.) I'd like to think it's perhaps supposed to be some sort of mapping between physical and metaphorical spaces, the way the FT maps between the time and frequency domains — but I doubt it; that, I'd probably have grokked.

Yeah, I dunno. It's a shame; I was drawn in mostly by the back-cover blurb:

The Novak Transformation had altered the very shape of the universe and left proud Earth an outcast, a sleazy pleasure-colony at the outer edge of the Federation of planets "Way Up There."

I think a good book could be written to match that blurb. It would probably involve a cyberpunk/noir-like Earth conjoined to an epic-scale SF setting in which the Novak Transformation had actually, y'know, altered the very shape of the universe.

As it is, I can't see fit to give Algorithm better than 1/1. Perhaps my opinion would have been improved if I'd come into it expecting the depravity of jaded philosophers, rather than that of a jaded populace. And then, perhaps not: I'm not sure Algorithm knows the difference.