| Title | : | Michaelmas |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0425038122 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780425038123 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Mass Market Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 247 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1977 |
By the time of the novel, Michaelmas has successfully used his power to create & sustain a powerful version of the UN to ensure world peace. He stays in the background, however, as a journalist, albeit a highly influential & respected one whose opinions can still influence public opinion. However, as the novel progresses, he slowly learns that a possible extraterrestrial presence may be interfering with the new world he has worked so hard to create.
The novel is remarkable for its prescience, because it appeared less than a decade into the Internet era, long before its current prominence & ubiquity. Its description of journalism & its professional culture are likewise highly developed, mainly due to the late Budrys' residence near Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, which appears in the book.
Michaelmas Reviews
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4.5 stars. Excellent story by one of the best SF writers of the 60s and 70s. This is an underrated gem that deserves to enjoy a much wider audience. Recommended!!
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Too much dialogue that was mundane and went nowhere. I read it through to the end in order to understand what was going on. If you hold out you will find out but I can't say it was worth it.
Michaelmas is a media personality with a little black box that is a computer that can tie in data from all over the world. It is an intelligent computer and Michaelmas can have conversations with it, which they do. Mostly the conversations comprise of the box, named Domino, informing Michaelmas of news events. I could not discover what was important about any of these newsworthy items or how they moved the plot along.
Because Domino allows Michaelmas to be practically omniscient, he is confused when certain things happen outside his radar. More conversations occur, in fact the book is mostly dialogue, for the next couple hundred pages until we are finally enlightened. I won't give away the ending and maybe other readers out there would enjoy the book because it is futuristic and the back drop allows one to imagine a world with intelligent computers. But the mystery was not mysterious enough to hold my attention.
The one positive was that it was a quick read and will be one more book toward my book reading goal. -
This was my third read by the author and by far the least favorite. The first two were interesting, intriguing, good if not great. This one was managed to hit none of those highs, even though the quality of writing itself was still present. Something about the story just didn't work for me, first it reminded me of the (superior) Who? with the questioned identity aspect of it, but then it just got muddled with the politics of it all. This novel (published barely into the digital age in 1977) is known as being prescient in its description of the technology, but I found it read dated, the author still (much as with Who?) obviously hung up on the competitive relations with the Soviets. The narrative was wildly discursive and prone to monologues, a weird feature for such a relatively slender volume and it did nothing for the general pacing. It still read quickly enough, but it just didn't engage at all and, frankly, were it not for the completist in me, there'd be no reason to finish it. The extraterrestrial angle comes in much too late, though it does salvage the story to an extent. This hasn't put me off the author, but while I picked this one up based on his previous works, I might not have pursued his other books had this one been my first choice. Read a month too soon (Michaelmas being generally celebrated on September 29th) and to no apparent reward. There's a chance I just wasn't in the right mood.
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The Cold War has ended, and the world is experiencing peace. UNAC, a UN-like global organization, is planning a joint interplanetary mission to the far ends of the solar system on behalf of all mankind. (And yes, if you like the Ronald Moore-created show For All Mankind, you should like this book). The lead pilot of the upcoming mission crashed, and was presumed dead, before the novel began, and the task of piloting the mission has been passed to one of the victim’s colleagues, a Russian cosmonaut. But now, the famous director of a high-tech and secretive medical facility claims to have rescued the pilot and to be nursing him back to health. This announcement causes an uproar, since the Russian cosmonaut had been promoted to the top position, and now what, they’re just going to push the Russian aside and let that resurrected American be in charge again? Over someone’s dead body.
So begins a fascinating Cold War thriller. The main character is Laurent Michaelmas, world-renowned reporter and journalist, who, unbeknownst to everybody, secretly controls the world, with the help of his assistant artificial intelligence, Domino. World peace exists because Michaelmas and Domino have been ensuring it, and indeed, the creation of UNAC itself is the result of years of careful manipulation and control behind the scenes on the part of Michaelmas and his AI. With the sudden return of this presumed dead American pilot, Michaelmas knows that, if something is not done quickly, the Russians and Americans will jump at each others’ throats, UNAC will tear itself apart, and the world will plunge once again into unending conflict and war. At all costs, UNAC must be saved.
Something, however, appears to have other plans. Through Domino, Michaelmas is used to having control over everything on Earth. Now, though, an equally powerful and invisible entity seems deliberately to be trying to destroy all that Michaelmas has accomplished. The original crash of the American pilot is suspicious. His miraculous rescue and reappearance is even more mysterious. Is that even him? Is he the genuine survivor? A clone grown in a vat? Something else? What is really going on in that medical facility? Meanwhile, one of Michaelmas’ journalist-colleagues dies in a helicopter accident, and was he asking too many good questions? At the same time, somebody has planted incendiary devices in fifteen different places around the hotel room where the Russian cosmonaut is staying. Certain politicians are in bed with certain media companies for mutual benefit, to help drive certain narratives for political purposes, and Michaelmas needs to unravel exactly who is doing what, and for whom, and how to stop it, before the joint mission is called off, and world peace crumbles.
Michaelmas may have an AI with which he tries (and mostly manages) to control the world, but he is not an evil overlord, or even a morally corrupted man. He is a good and selfless man, who has sacrificed companionship and a life of ease, in order to personally bring about a human utopia. The novel never questions or gives us reason to doubt Michaelmas’ intentions. He spends most of the novel acting as detective and puppet master. He knows what is required for peace. At one point, the Russians are implicated in sabotaging the American pilot’s vehicle to get their own cosmonaut into the command chair, and Michaelmas knows that if this fact were revealed, UNAC would fall. There is no hand-wringing, no extended Trekkian moral dilemma. He simply silences the truth, using every power at his disposal. And we go along with it, since Michaelmas is such a good and wise man. Of course the world can’t know the Russians are behind it! That would ruin everything! And then, we’re not even sure the conclusion is true. Are the Russians being framed?
This is a smart, complex thriller, heavy on dialogue and political intrigue, replete with commentary on the media (what other science fiction thriller spends 60 pages building tension toward an explosive….press conference?), and with a simple, reliable protagonist who we like and want to win. The final twist may appear to come from left field, but if you think about it, it is the only possible explanation for what has happened, and that possibility was built into the book’s plot from the very beginning. Parts of the dialogue in the first quarter of the novel may feel somewhat obscure, but the novel picks up, and clears up, and by the time the press conference comes along, I believe you’ll be hooked. -
In the year 2000 (yes, that does seem to be the year this takes place), war has faded from the Earth, and humanity growing ever-closer together is getting ready to explore the rest of the solar system. Humanity doesn't know that one man is responsible. The Anderson Cooper-like Laurent Michaelmas is not only the world's top newsman; he is the man behind the curtain. He has a superintelligent computer, Domino, and together they run everything, gently nudging humankind forward. But when a Swiss doctor announces that he has cured an astronaut thought vaporized in a shuttle explosion, Michaelmas suspects that something alien is behind it. This novel is by turns interesting and half-baked. Much like the action in Lem's The Investigation and the Strugatskys' Definitely Maybe, the conspiracy and Michaelmas-Domino operate through accumulations of slight probabilities, an overheated wire here, an anonymous tip there. But this setup raises many more interesting questions than it answers. Why is Michaelmas running the world? How did he create Domino? The conspiracy plot seems to be a mismatch of ambitious aims with slight means, like trying to destroy the Great Pyramid by sanding it down with a nail file. The minor characters notice something is strange with the world ("like being stuck in Jello"), but the interesting idea that humanity might not really appreciate sidling toward utopia is never really addressed. However... a few days ago, I saw a graph that showed a sharp drop in deaths by war since the 1950s. That seemed to me to be a Michaelmas-Domino result. But then there is the recession, where no one's hand seems to be on the tiller at all. Both are equally discomfiting.
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Intelligently speculative, this novel delights in the implications of words unsaid between characters, in the difference between presentation and actual opinion. I do enjoy the political (lower case p) conversations. So, yes very clever, what about the story.
Renowned newsman Michaelmas and his super loyal, super powered AI have been steering the world towards a duller future for years. (Domino is a dead ringer for her 'descendant' Jane in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.) But when a dead spaceman is brought back to life with evidence implicating the Russians in his death the prospect of excitement rears back to life.
Written in the 70s you might think that the world Politics would have dated, but apart from the odd bit of terminology they really haven't. Populist xenophobe politicians are still with us, as are tyrannies, and Russia today has gone a fair way back towards the way it was when the book was written.
At the start is seems certain that Michaelmas' enemies are on to him, he seems surrounded by modified people, hungry and ambitious, so the denouement is slightly underwhelming in the ease with which he unravels them, though the ending is written is a slightly elliptical style which could be interpreted as saying that they managed to get to him too in the moment of his triumph.
The Russian spaceman (due to take over from the formerly deceased American spaceman btw) appears to be an absolute nutcase, given 2 or 3 whole pages in which to spout his philosophy of future nomadic triumphalism.
Oh, and there is a bit about Aliens too with rather pliable imaginations, but I'll confuse myself trying to explain their involvement.
All in all, like, will re-read. -
During the mid-eighties I met Jeff, Algis' son, through Tom Kosinski and began hanging out at On the Tao, a restaurant/bar in the Rogers Park neighborhood above which Jeff lived. It was in honor of this new acquaintanceship that I made a point of reading one of his father's books intentionally, sometime during the fall in Michigan, even though Jeff personally wasn't much interested in the genre.
'Michaelmas', while prescient as regards the world-wide web, did not, unfortunately, impress me very much as a novel. -
The copy I read was hand corrected by Algis at a party in the 90s. There are over twenty typos he deemed reprehensible. And beer.
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Take a short story. Split it up into paragraphs. After each paragraph, insert two pages of horse_ebooks tweets. That is the experience of reading Michaelmas.
Honestly due to the migraine I got after reading even a quarter of a page, it was quite difficult to finish this book. Michaelmas contains word choice and sentence structure that can only be best described as … puzzling. Dialogue that appears to have been written by someone who lacks theory of mind? And a plot more suited for a short story (which apparently Michaelmas started as) than a novel.
I had to reread every page like five times. At first I assumed it was my fault that the book was incomprehensible and not the book's, until I came across some more egregious examples of complete disregard for the reader. For instance, Algis will regularly use pronouns like "that" or "it" to refer to subjects or objects that are either ambiguous, or mentioned several pages ago. Here's just one example:
"With the passage of time, Domino was beginning to learn more and more about how Michaelmas's mind worked. He didn't like it, but he could follow it when instructed." (46) Is 'he' referring to Domino? Michaelmas? Is the first 'it' referring to Michaelmas's mind? Domino (a machine)? How Michaelmas's mind works? The action of following Michaelmas’s mind? The fact that Domino is learning about how Michaelmas's mind works? What does the second ‘it’ refer to? Commence migraine.
Another problem with this book is that literally every sentence in it feels out of context. It's a bit hard to give concrete examples in this review you might read them thinking they're out of context because they're just quotes, but NO. They read as out of context even IN context. Here is one example:
"Michaelmas obligingly turned in his seat and peered back through the rear window at sun-browned legs in football striped calf socks scampering two by two up the old white steps to class. But to be young again would have been an unbearable price." (42) Ok, so Michaelmas is ogling up some calves, following so far. But… why would being young have been an unbearable price? In what way? After the quoted text, the book abruptly switches to describing a hotel room next and this thought about being young being an unbearable price is never returned to as far as I can tell.
Very young children and the severely autistic lack the ability to recognize other people as sentient, with rich inner lives and their own experiences of consciousness. Algis writes dialogue like he never learned at age 3 that 1) other people have a own conscious experience of the world and 2) the conscious experience of other people is not equivalent to his own in that they cannot access the information and frame of mind Algis himself had at the time of writing. Here’s an example. The context is a reporter named Watson is talking to Michaelmas about a third man who might have been mysteriously brought back to life. Just to let you know: as far as I can tell, there is no context for legs or runners.
"Watson looked nakedly into Michaelmas's face with the horrid invulnerability of the broken. 'I don't have any legs left,' he explained. 'Not leg legs-- inside legs. Sawed 'em off myself. So I took in a fast young runner. Hungry, but very hot and a lot of voodoo in his head. Watch out for him, Larry. He's the meanest person I've ever met in my life. Surely no men will be born after him. My gift to the big time. Any day now he's going to tell me I can go home to the sixties. Galatea's revenge. And I'll believe him." (35) So of course after reading this, my thoughts: ah, the character has aphasia, and our author is demonstrating how people with brain damage in the language centers of the brain talk. But no, the character does not have aphasia.
Ok one more example:
"Frontiere moved his eyes as if wishing to see the people behind him. 'If necessary, an announcement will be made that it is not planned to change the flight crew.' Michaelmas cocked his head. 'In other words, this is an excellent fish dinner especially if someone complains of stomach.'" (68) It's SO CLOSE to making sense. But it just … doesn’t. What is an excellent fish dinner? The announcement? Not changing the flight crew? Does the complaining of stomach part mean it’s actually a bad thing that they’re changing the flight crew? Complains of stomach what? Upset stomach? Complains of having a stomach? I’m just lost here. -
Too bad I don't have the edition with the aging, balding reporter on the cover. Looks a bit like a chubbier Frasier. That might have added half a star to my rating. The one I have is just weird, nonsensical and forgettable.
Budrys borders on the prophetic in this book. Although it dates from 1977, it is pretty accurate in predicting the feel of the present, if not the technical details. He doesn't really predict the internet, but in this novel, almost every computer can be reached by every other computer. The story even depends on it.
I liked the idea of some guy using an AI to keep an eye on everything that's going on in the world and gently nudging it into a peaceful (if somewhat boring) direction. I also liked the protagonist and the AI's characters, as well as their verbal sparring. The ending seemed like a winner at first, but it ended up in a direction that was too vague and unbelievable for my tastes.
This book's biggest problem was the writing. There was a good story in there, somewhere, but every character sounded the same. Most of them also spoke overly sophisticated. What comes to my mind is a few pages of pointless pontification by some Russian about his native region and the difference between city dwellers and the people with six legs. Those are people riding horses. Why doesn't he just say so? Probably for the same reason these useless pages are in the book. They make the book more literary. And that's my problem with this book, I'm not even sure whether it's literature or it just has a thin veneer of sophistication and tries to pose as literature, but since I hate literature it was a chore to read it.
I constantly felt like I was missing some underlying meaning in the conversations. It didn't help that I had trouble remembering who was who. That leaves me unsure whether this was a good story idea with a bad execution or a good story, meant for people more intelligent than me. Oh well. -
Full review:
https://sciencefictionruminations.com...
"Michaelmas (1975) has a promising premise: Laurent Michaelmas is a famous newsman and via advanced technology he has developed, he can communicate with an artificial intelligence named Domino. Domino’s abilities are profoundly useful for Michaelmas’ profession—it can control other computers and hack electronic [..]" -
Nach 30 Jahren nochmal gelesen. Die Idee mit der allgegenwärtigen künstlichen Intelligenz ist erschreckend vorausschauend, aber nicht sehr ausgearbeitet. Und die Auflösung über extraterrestrische Intelligenz und Philosophie einfach nur Geschwurbel und ermüdend. Ab in die Tonne damit.
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Overall solid piece, Budrys gives a unique take on the themes of social engineering and the information economy take to their most extreme.
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Well written, but a not entirely successful techno thriller.
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Odd.
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Ėmiausi nes kažkas iš lietuvių įvardijo Budrį su šia knyga prisidėjus prie kiberpanko subžanro pradmenų. Tai visų pirma trumpai apie kiberpanką.
Kiberpankas atsirado, nes vieną fantastų kartą galutinai užkniso senesnės kartos optimistiška, idealizuota ir it šuns kohonės blizganti klasikinė fantastika. Na, dar ir modernizmas, kuris “naujosios” fantastų kartos, pasirodo, laikytas naivoku. Tai ką jie padarė? Ėmė tuometines tendencijas (technologijos, virtuali erdvė, korporacijų augimas) ir nupaišė tokį ateities pasaulį, kuriame mokslo ir technologijų pažanga netapo pretekstu visiems iš džiaugsmo susikibti už rankučių ir šokti rateliu. Priešingai. Technologijos persismelkia visur, tame tarpe ir žmogaus kūną, bet tai paverčia pasaulį hiper-kapitalistiniu (arba post-kapitalistiniu), o jame žlunganti visuomenė turi savo kainą bet kam, tame tarpe ir moralei. Itin svarbus elementas yra pagrindiniai kiberpanko veikėjai. Jie kilę iš žemiausių visuomenės sluoksnių, neretai - visiški padugnės. Taigi, tie eiliniai juodadarbiai keliauja per tokį nesvetingą korporacijų ir technologijų valdomą pasaulį ir nevengia veikti tokių dalykiukų, apie kuriuos “senoji” fantastų karta net su žmonomis neaptarinėja.
Ar “Michaelmas” toks? Visiškai priešingai. Todėl kiberpanku šitos knygos pavadinti negalima. Gal proto-kiberpanku (nes veikia galingas dirbtinis intelektas), bet ir tai, mano galva, būtų pritempinėjimas. “Michaelmas” visgi yra politinis fantastinis trileris. BET. Knyga maloniai nustebino. “Michaelmas” išleistas 1977 metais ir aprašo labai netolimą to meto ateitį. Neretai senesnės, netolimą ateitį paišančios fantastinės knygos, kelia šypsena, nes gerokai prašauna pro šalį. O “Michaelmas” galėtų puikiai sueiti kaip iš šiandieninės perspektyvos parašyta knyga, kurios veiksmas vyksta idealiai išieškotoje alternatyvioje praeityje. Ten dirbtinis intelektas, kompiuteriai ar hologramos veikia kartu su juostinėmis kameromis. Kieta, nes dabar vyksta praktiškai tas pats, tik mūsų dabartis dar šiek tiek atsilieka nuo Budrio 1977-ų metų netolimos ateities. Pagrindinė tema knygoje - informacijos valdymas ir prie ko tai gali privesti. Šiuo atveju, prie naiviai idealaus pagrindinio veikėjo. Visgi pabaigoje įvykių posūkis kala kabliu į žiauną ir sėdi sau visas nustebęs, nesuprasdamas iš kur čia žvaigždutės prieš akis. Vertinu keturiais, o ne trimis, nes autorius - nors ir Amerikos, bet lietuvis - puikiai ištyrinėjo temas, apie kurias rašo; įkalė truputį filosofijos ir gerą pabaigą. Vertinu keturiais, bet ne penkiais nes tai fantastika, kuri ima naujas technologijas ir timpteli jas į ateitį, o ne sukuria kažką tokio, apie ką niekada nebūtum pagalvojęs (kas man asmeniškai yra įdomiau). -
Laurent Michaelmas created Domino as a means to be able to communicate with his wife. His wife died and Domino has evolved into an AI. Michaelmas has become a world famous reporter. Between them they have guided the world into an era of peace and an absence of poverty. Walt Norwood died when his space capsule blew up and crashed. Now Limberg says they rescued and healed him.
I read this once before in 1981. That was back before the internet and when long distance phone calls could run up massive bills. What I do remember, not the plot, is Michaelmas having created an AI buddy, and my rating would have been VG+ or Excellent. I've only read the first half so far. That may be the difference. Or it could be that it was much more unique back then.
Michaelmas, Norwood, Campion, the UNAC people are headed to Africa. If the Russians sabotaged Norwood's flight that's it for UNAC and there'll be political ramifications as well. All the work Michaelmas and Domino have done the last twenty years may be for naught.
Good read, inner dialogue is one of my favorite plot devices and I really enjoyed the conversations between Michaelmas and Domino. The ending had Star Trek-ish type science that I accepted freely forty years ago, but is a harder sell today. Four stars now, probably four and three-quarters when I was twenty. -
Published in 1977, this is a novel about a man who has a portable computer and an internet connection. Hopefully the prescience will not stop there. This from chapter 13:
“Somewhere among her followers, or in her constituency, was the next person who'd try combining populism and xenophobia. It was a surefire formula that had never in the entire history of American democracy been a winner in the end.”
I write this in the year of Brexit and the election of Trump.
Anyway, Michaelmas is using the internet to secretly rule the world. The problem with the novel is that it is a series of scenes of Michaelmas in uninteresting places (his apartment, a press conference) while information is fed to him.
Despite the flat means by which the plot is unfolded the novel is not without merit. Budrys throws out some interesting thoughts on the effects on the soul of the slush of the information superhighway and the healing effects of the natural world; autonomy and control and their illusory nature. There is also some fine writing when Budrys let's his characters monologue. -
This book takes me back to my youth when I despised reading. Books and I never connected when I was younger. I was often offended by pages of description. I have an imagination. You write "rolling hills" and I got a picture. Please don't describe them for 3 pages. After reading this book I wonder if youthful me was too hard on authors.
I still believe there is such a thing as too much description, but this story doesn't suffer from that. Instead, it is the type of description. Unnecessary and complex, it feels like the author is showing off. I don't mean that the language was something that forced me to have a dictionary by my side. No, the book just doesn't read easy. Much of the action is cluttered with opinion or asides that aren't needed if you can tell a story. Don't tell me how to feel, show me.
Overall the story is interesting and I wouldn't object to a sequel but I don't think I would seek another piece by this author.
