What Entropy Means to Me by George Alec Effinger

What Entropy Means to Me Reviews

• 
  Lizz

  I don’t write reviews.
  
  What a story! The basic premise sounds interesting, but not riveting: on a planet called Home, Seyt has a literally innumerable amount of brothers and sisters, suspiciously spawned from the Father and Mother, debt refugees from the planet Earth. The Father left decades ago down the River and the ever-weeping Mother morphed into the role of a deity in the lives of the family. After Mother dies, the first-born Dore goes off in search of Father and never returns. Seyt, still sad at his brother’s disappearance and finding major dissatisfaction in the growing theological sects of the family, takes on the task of writing the adventures of his lost brother. As his writing continues, it contributes to further familial schisms and exposes undeniable truths.
  
  Now twist all of that on its head and dive in. This is a really fun story. It’s delightfully unexpected.
  
  “Human relationships are not as fragile as swooning poets would have us believe. Indeed, rather than the gentle wildflower, love is most like the sturdy, tough vine. It grows and turns and twists, sometimes strangling its support in its blind upward surge. People just don’t understand the human mind. Even after these thousands of years of practice, we still haven’t learned the basic facts. The true place of humanity in the scheme of things can be approximated by the appalling frequency with which one hears the words “contrary to popular belief.”
• 
  Craig

  Definitely not the cup of kangaroo for everyone, but for those of us in the mid-1970s who were trying to play our Beatles LPs backwards in order to hear the hidden messages, and who enjoyed arguing all sides of what the light-show sequences of 2001 were subliminally teaching us, Effinger's What Entropy Means to Me was a bizarre and beloved bit of New Wave nonsense that we spent fun hours attempting to parse the theme and message and moral of at to, you know? Effinger infused quite a bit more humor into this book than any of his subsequent ones. It reminds me more of a Gene Wolfe flight-of-fancy than anything, but Wolfe was never this amusing. I'm not sure even Effinger ever knew exactly quite what entropy meant to him or where he was going with it, but we all enjoyed the ride... or, what a long strange trip it was. It was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1973, but lost to Asimov's The Gods Themselves.
• 
  Terry

  2.5 - 3 stars
  
  Obviously a first novel and very New Wave-y, in some places to the point of excess, _What entropy Means to Me_ is still a very ambitious book which tackles the idea of story itself and its impact on our lives. It isn’t always successful and is definitely a very weird book. It will likely take a few chapters before the reader becomes familiar with what is going on (assuming he ever does), and even then the bizarro elements and shifting of the narrative can be quite confusing to the reader. In essence the story is about a large family of brothers and sisters (known as the First family since their parents were the initial settlers of the world) who inhabit the planet known only as Home. Their parents were exiles from Earth and seem to have brought with them little more than a huge assortment of books and, apparently, a number of chairs with which the yard of their rambling home is littered. See, weird, right? These books play a central role in the story as they have proven to be an inspiration to one of the middle sons of the family, Seyt, as he undertakes to tell the definitive tale of their existence. There are at least three main stories being told in this novel: the most apparent is that of Dore, the eldest brother of the First family and the only one to have been born on Earth, and his quest across the planet Home as told by his brother Seyt. Since Dore apparently never returns to tell his tale himself, it is up to Seyt to give us the details himself as produced from his own fertile imagination. This fact in itself should give some sense of what the reader is in for. The next level of the narrative is that which details the squabbles and internecine battles of the seemingly infinite brothers and sisters of the First family as they interrupt his narrative to give their opinions on Seyt’s skill (or lack thereof) and comments on whether or not his story is presenting a “correct” image of their brother for the political & religious interests of the family. Factions arise as the document being produced by Seyt takes on a greater and greater significance for the family as a tract meant to cement their political and religious position on Home and we begin to see their strange and convoluted mode of life through the sardonic eyes of Seyt. Finally are the sly references that Seyt makes to his parents, know only (and importantly) as Our Father and Our Mother. On the one hand they are presented as semi-divine beings, the first settlers from the planet Earth, who apparently hold some kind of political and religious sway over all of the other families on Home; on the other hand Seyt seems to have little real belief himself in the divinity of his parents and constantly harks back to their days on earth as an impoverished criminal and apparent whore forced to flee from debt and prosecution, much to the chagrin of the more orthodox members of his family.
  
  Our introduction to the First family is enough to tell us that there is something out of the ordinary about them and their self-image:
  

  She was Our Mother, so she cried. She used to sit out there, under that micha tree, all day as we worked cursing in her fields. She sat there during the freezing nights…She sat there before most of us were born; she sat there until she died. And all the time she shed her tears. She was Our Mother, so she cried.

  
  We then get a detailed description of their yard and the mismatched chairs that are scattered across it and seem to hold great meaning for the family. These chairs and the cargo of books are all that they have left from Earth and it is this importance that makes them suitable objects to be occasionally offered up for sacrifice to the River that runs close by their house and is deemed by the family to be the ultimate god of their planet. Seyt begins his tale proper by telling us of his eldest brother Dore who seems to be one of the few siblings for whom he holds any real affection. For the most part Dore is something of a hero in Seyt’s eyes and seems very different from his other brothers and sisters, primarily in his apparent lack of interest in the squabbles and jockeying for position that seem to encompass their lives. This squabbling for power and the delusions of grandeur perpetuated by the First family caused me to see them as somewhat akin to Gaiman’s Endless, or the gods of Greek myth. They certainly take every opportunity to cover themselves with the symbols of power and divinity, whether they actually have a real claim to them or not. Dore’s quest is initiated by his family under the guise of a search for his lost Father, though in reality that seems to be little more than an explanation of convenience given by Tere, the next eldest brother whose ideas prompted the quest and who, with Dore’s departure, now enjoys the role of titular head of the family.
  
  As the book progresses, and becomes both political and religious propaganda for the family, there are subtle changes in Seyt’s narrative and Dore the hero is sometimes seen rather as Dore the buffoon, falling from one ridiculous, and allegorical, scrape to the next. Is this due to a growing jealousy on Seyt’s part for the brother whom he is beginning to see as an absent rival, or is it simply the demands of his tale and his wish to deflate the egos of his brothers and sisters? It is not only our image of Dore that comes into question via Seyt’s words, however, and we start to wonder just who the First family really are. The majority of their contentions about their parents seem patently false, so is their contention true that they hold a place of primacy in their world? Perhaps they are little more than “…them that live in that crazy big house up to the end of the road…They’re crazy” as seems to be the position of their closest neighbours, living in their own delusional world of power and glory, fighting only amongst themselves.
  
  Some elements of the book reminded me of James Branch Cabell’s Poictesme novels, both in the sardonic humour present in Seyt’s narration of Dore’s putative adventures, and in the character of Glorian of the Knowledge, an enigmatic figure who appears whenever Dore gets into a jam he cannot escape on his own and the power of authorial fiat is needed and who reminded me somewhat of Cabell’s character Horvendile. The book is littered with references to other books and stories and it is sometimes difficult to know how one should take it. It really is obvious that this was a first novel, and one in which the author hoped to show off all of his skill and knowledge; perhaps, alas, a bit too much. At first I found elements of the book very intriguing, then everything shifted and I wanted to drop it like a hot potato, then I persevered and started seeing more things to like. All in all I was generally charmed by the story, especially Seyt’s voice and sardonic little insights, but while I’d say that this book was an intriguing experiment, it was a bit of a hodge-podge and I don’t know if I think it was ultimately a success. Definitely worth a try if you’re into experimental fiction or sci-fi’s New Wave era, but don’t expect a straightforward narrative. You’ll have to work to get answers from this one.
  
• 
  Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

  This book by the late Mr. Effinger could have been written by the late Gene Wolfe as a _jeu d'esprit_. It has many of the earmarks of Wolfe's best novels...
  
  On a distant planet, a Mother and a Father have settled down to raise a passel of kids - I mean an utterly unreasonable number - and, along the way, instituted a religion with themselves as deities. Father goes off and disappears. After a while, and not long before her own death, Mother sends Dore - the eldest son and only one who was born on Earth - to look for either Father, or the source of the River which plays a major part in their religion, or, ideally, both.
  
  It's been a long time and there has been no word of Dore. A younger son, Seyt, is tasked by the elders with writing a history of Dore's journey.
  
  This is the story of Syet writing Dore's story. Dore sets off and meets a wide variety of characters, including a Mysterious Companion, a Mad Doctor and his Monster, a Treacherous Baron, and more. Dore develops as the story progresses.
  
  And so does Seyt. The First household is a crazed hotbed of political and religious factions, in which the wrong words can get Seyt sent to the Pen, along with losing his name and being assigned a number. Seyt tries, as he writes, to please (or at least not to too-badly displease) all the factions at once. His life as he writes is intermingled with Dore's story, each rising and falling in a sort of pulsing double-helix of narrative.
  
  If you know your Wolfe, you'll find a lot of this famililar. Only ... this book was published in 1972, the same year as Wolfe's first serious book (_The Fifth Head of Cerberus_). Thus, that Wolfe had influenced Effinger's book is fairly unlikely, though it is quite possible that Effinger's book influenced Wolfe's later work. Sadly, it's too late to ask him whether he'd ever read it.
  
  What this book has that Wolfe's major work lacks, however, is bellylaughs. Wolfe used humor, and used it well, but it was a sly sort of humor that usually involved suddenly getting the joke several pages (or chapters, or even weeks) later when you realize what something back there actually meant. Many of Wolfe's jokes only appear on rereading; Effinger's jump out and buttonhole you.
  
  Recommended, and for two bucks on Kindle you really can't go wrong.
• 
  Laura Brower

  Pretty good book and the sort of thing that Goodreads is useful for - in finding things to read that would normally be completely overlooked. The description is very vivid and slightly comedic in places, but then at turns horrific; but always quite winsome and poetic.
• 
  Benjamin Ettinger

  Science fiction written by an English Lit major obsessed with Tristram Shandy... So it felt reading Effinger's virgin novella from the tail end of the now somewhat derided 'new wave' of the 1960s. What Entropy Means to Me (wonderful title) is a brief but still delightful cross-genre adventure that operates on many levels beyond its narrative, most notably serving an homage to the art of writing and its ability to influence the world beyond its own pages.
  
  Now this is my kind of sci-fi - ripe for interpretation, a little bonkers, a little baffling, literate without taking itself seriously, poking fun at its genre's conventions, and despite all that just coming across as plain fun as hell to read. I'll add brief to the virtues WEMTM, as my idea of science fiction is the novel of ideas that gets in and gets out, saying what it has to say and not belaboring the point like some epic novels of the genre do.
• 
  Joachim Boaz

  Full review:
  https://sciencefictionruminations.com...
  
  "Nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award (lost to Asimov’s disappointing The Gods Themselves)
  
  “She was Our Mother, so she cried. She used to sit out there, under that micha tree, all day as we worked cursing in her fields. She sat there during the freezing nights, and we pretended that we could see her through the windows in the house, by the light of the moons and the hard, fast stars. She sat there before most of us were born; she sat there until she died. And all the time she shed her tears. She was Our Mother, so she cried” (11)
  
  What Entropy Means to Me (1972) is one of the more satisfying products of the New Wave science fiction movement of the 60s and 70s that I’ve read. I place it in the pantheon of Malzberg’s Revelations (1972), Samuel Delany’s [...]"
• 
  Jess

  I bought this in a used bookstore recently, mostly because of the title and my long-lived interest in entropy. It seemed like it might be batshit but could either be brilliant or nonsense. It was the latter. I enjoyed some parts of it but really have no clue what it's all about, as it seems to be a crazed, multilayered allegory full of allusions that do not fit together or mean much to me.
• 
  Tam Bowles

  What in the world did I just read!?
  
  The writing style was good, even interesting, but the content led to nothing but bizarre, unanswered questions, none of which I find I actually care for an answer to. Total waste of time.
• 
  Riversue

  This is my least favorite Effinger so far. It has an experimental feel about it with a meta narrative that interrupts the flow of the surreal classic fantasy story. All in all a very weird little book.
• 
  Angela

  Strange, something of a slog, but thought-provoking.
• 
  Stephen Rowland

  3½
• 
  Sue Chant

  DNF @ 50%. A rambling mish-mash of folksey stories interspersed with pointless comments from a lost space colony. Confusing and dull.
• 
  Adam Meek

  Too weird for me, very New Wave, proto-slipstream.
• 
  Kerachel Wolfson

  Torn between a 2 and a 3 star. It was, without a doubt, one of the strangest things I have ever read in my life. It's confusing, vague, and highly disturbing if you actually stop to think through any of the myriad of points that at first glance seem random, ill thought out, incongruous, or impossible. And yet, I kept picking it back up throughout the day, and by half of the way through, I knew I had to read straight to the end. Did actually I like it? No, not really. But was it good? It really was.
• 
  Jody

  Enjoyably strange book - not sure I would recommend to others BUT if your looking for a sci fi book that is not written like usual - this one is worth a whirl. Almost like a serious hitchikers guide to the galaxy (but not nearly as good and not funny)
• 
  Michael Martin

  Augh, what a slog! I've read a lot of science fiction, including some that were way out there. But this one … I keep waiting for something, anything to be explained and give me a reason to keep reading. This one may soon end on my very small pile of books I just couldn't finish.
• 
  Maria

  Great title. Book is pretty good (especially since I got it for like 75 cents at a used book store).
• 
  Mike McDevitt

  This is the worst Nebula award nominee I ever read. If it's a joke I sure don't get it. In fact, I think this book hates me back.
• 
  Helen

  easily the weirdest book I've ever read, unsatisfying end, if it was an end, no indicaton of sequel
• 
  Bryn Hammond

  For those who like The Princess Bride? Too daft (and sexist); I gave up at 30%.
• 
  Thomas

  This romp through literature and mythology never quite engaged me. The narrative voice needs to be more interesting. I would like it told by the narrator of Eudora Welty'scWhy live at the PO".