review of
James Gunn's The Mind Master
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 15, 2015

There's definitely variety in Gunn's themes: This Fortress World ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6011288-this-fortress-world ) is different from Station in Space is different from The Listeners ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028305.The_Listeners ) is different from The Magicians ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3033767-the-magicians ).

However, The Mind Master is similar in some respects to The Joy Makers & also to Kampus ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2144066.Kampus ). I get the impression that Gunn, as a university professor, has had a somewhat pessimistic vision of the future based on what he perceives as the students' unchecked hedonism & lack of self-discipline for taking c/o serious business.

As the inside jacket blurb of my hard-cover edition of The Joy Makers explains it: "Imagine a world where you can have everything you want, or if you can't have it, you can be psychologically conditioned not to want it. Imagine a world so technologically advanced that happiness and contentment can be achieved without effort, a world where there is no sickness or hunger, no deprivation, no want no striving, no disappointment. Imagine that any experience can be yours and any fantasy or desire reconstructed by machines and fed directly into your cerebral cortex. Imagine all this, and you have the world of James Gunn's The Joy Makers, a nightmare world of indolence, of lost purposes, of the death of civilization."

The Joy Makers was originally published as separate stories in 1954 & 1955 & then published as a bk in 1961. The Mind Master was published in 1980. In it, we, again, have a society in wch constant pleasure & stimulation can be had w/ little or no personal effort. For the most part civilization has evolved to be on auto-pilot. The plot has evolved somewhat: chemical memory, a way for instant learning & for instant deep 'experiences' of secondhand authenticity is now the crux of the matter.

"It had started with chemical memory. Memory, it was discovered, was first encoded in complex protein molecules, later engraved in synaptic pathways. Chemical memory had changed society more than the Industrial Revolution. Schools disappeared. Only the perverse individual learned to read." - p 34

&, yes, thanks to this, civilization is in danger of collapse b/c the Mind Master minding the stores, so to speak, will die eventually & there's no-one to take his place. As I wrote in my review of Kampus:

"It's the dystopia, of course, that's the main subject & it functions, as literary dystopias usually do, as a critique of political/social trends of the time of writing. "Kampus" was published in 1977. Gunn envisions a world where militant student 'radicals' have 'won', where there're no longer prisons, where universities are walled-in playpens for 'leftist'-motivated bombings & kidnappings & 'free love'."

I can't say I completely disagree w/ Gunn, even tho I'm a bit of a hedonist myself, people who don't balance the pursuit of pleasure w/ some more pragmatic survival skills might die of liver ailments earlier than most, etc..

"Hence the dreamers. hence the beautiful bright children who had nothing to do with their time but pursue pleasure and when pleasure palled, sesnation beyond pleasure: guilt, humiliation, sin, degradation, decadence, sorrow, grief, pain. . . ." - p 34

Then again, I don't think that Gunn's dire warnings of a future world where people will be 'free' to wallow in such titillations is very likely to ever come. A much more likely fate is that fundamentalists will do their best to remove any hedonistic options in favor of slavery to people posing as
representatives of 'god'.

Nonetheless, in The Mind Master there's withdrawal for the poppets, pretty obviously inspired by the drug withdrawals of addicts contemporary to the era in wch the bk was written: "The fourth day she crawled to him and kissed his feet and begged him for one little cap. "I'll do anything," she said. "Just one little cap. You can pick it out. And then we'll be like we were before. I'll be anything you want me to be. I'll stay with you. I'll—"" (p 34)

The "Mnemonist", the guy who's eschewed the more common pleasures of the "poppets" (chemical memory pleasure seekers), is the human interface in the computer system that keeps it all running. The Mnemonist immediately evokes for me A. R. Luria's wonderful bk The Mind of the Mnemonist, a psychologist's account of a man w/ perfect recall. Sure enuf, Gunn references the bk specifically:

"the russian psychologist
alexander luria
described a man
whose memory seemed
to have no limit
a mnemonist whose mind
was so extraordinary
that luria wrote of him
in terms usually reserved
for the mentally oll
he could commit to memory
in a couple of minutes
a table of fifty numbers
which he could recall
in every minute detail
many years later
his greatest difficulty
was in learning
how to forget
the endless trivia
that cluttered his mind" - p 173

& earlier: "these days, with memories available at every console, there was so much to forget. Forgetting was an art. Men can drown in memories, and reality can become as elusive as a dream." (p 68)

Gunn's writing is a tad more experimental than usual in his chapters insofar as he interrupts the plot-driven paragraphs w/ 3 columns of the types of relevant info to the Mnemonist's tube-tied position. If I knew how to create columns on GoodReads (& I'm not sure I can anyway) I'd present sample columns in the bk's position. Instead, I'll present them in sequence:

Column 1:

"courage he said
and pointed
toward the land
this mounting wave
will roll us
homeward soon
in the afternoon
they came unto a land
in which it seemed
always afternoon"

Column 2:

"mcconnell continued
training planarians
at michican
he cut them
in half
and waited
for the pieces
to generate
into
whole worms"

Column 3:

"cultivator
421
is
destroying
plants
pull
it
in
for
overhaul" - p 8

The 1st column is from "The Lotos-Eaters" by Alfred Tennyson. But it's not all from "The Lotos Eaters":

Column 1:

"to die
to sleep
perchance to dream
ay there’s the rub
for in that sleep
of death
what dreams may come
when we have shuffled
off this mortal coil
must give us pause" - p 46

Perhaps most of you will recognize that as from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The Mnemonist isn't completely unique as a human willing to take on lonely but crucial responsibilities. There're also the Historian & the Volunteers. One of the Volunteers is a surgeon:

"But he was a surgeon in a time when no one was a surgeon anymore, when no one studied the old skills and arts. In this capsule culture maintained by self-repairing machines directed by omniscient computers, everyone did just what he or she wanted to do; people pursued pleasures in their own peculiar ways, and if something had to be done that the computers and their tools could not do, a volunteer would inject a capsule and the synthesized proteins would provide instant memory of how that action could be accomplished and of how the muscles and the nerve endings felt when they were doing it. That was the miracle of chemical learning." - p 67

That interesting premise is developed by Gunn to include: "which brought him a steadily increasing number of patients as new ailments arose among the poppets, ailments whose diagnosis and treatment were not programmed into the computers." (p 67)

Another non-poppet character is Sara: ""I was—am a synthesist," she said. "I don't create anything, but I put things together in new combinations.["] (p 82) I've previously encountered the idea of the synthesist in John Brunner's "The Fourth Power" story (1960) in Out of my Mind - from the Past, Present and Future & in his Stand on Zanzibar (1968) as well as in Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage (1968).

One of the most intriguing paths that the bk pursues is a dreaming of Homeric epic: ""That's good news," she says. "Achilles is a savage. He's as big as a bull and as swift as a deer, and he lives only to fight and kill. Besides, they say that Thetis, his divine mother, made him invulnerable when he was a baby."" (p 118) The one movie that I've seen that features the character of Achilles has him as slender rather than "as big as a bull". My superficial searches for a physical description of him as one or the other in The Iliad & in online discussions of it don't answer the question. The conditions of this dreaming are such that the dreamer becomes a 'God':

"I see Aeneas—son, they say, of Anchises and Aphrodite—defend the corpse of Pandarus from the giant Diomedes. I see Diomedes raise overhead a rock I think no man can lift, and I feel it shatter the hip joint of Aeneas. But he does not fall. He must not die. He must live, I sense, for another purpose, perhaps to save Ilium and me.

Aeneas is destined to survive and to save the House of Dardanus from extinction. The great Aeneas shall be king of Troy and shall be followed by his children's children in the time to come.

"I remove him from the battle as I had removed myself, leaving Diomedes to wonder what god has intervened. I will the hip healed and send a phantom Aeneas to fight upon the plain lest the Trojans be discouraged." - p 131

I recently noted in my review of Rudy Rucker's Postsingular that Rucker, too, explains 'gods' not as divine beings but in scientific terms that revive their interest-level for me:

"One thing I like about Rucker's work is the way he explains fanciful mythology, angels, eg, by using contemporary General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (or ideas from other scientific arenas) - even if he is playing fast & loose w/ them." - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/388646-upping-the-nante

All in all, there's alot to like in James Gunn's The Mind Master: the What-If? potentials are solidly explored & I felt stimulated to imagine some that weren't. ( )

My reactions to reading this fix-up novel in 2003.

This novel's original title was The Dreamers.

Like most of Gunn's novels, it is a fixup, here three stories. It also has, as it's scientific point of takeoff, an idea popular in 1970s sf: chemically coded memories which can be transferred between people. (To be fair, I did a quick Internet search and RNA is still thought to be involved in memory though there is mixed opinion, most of it against, the notion that RNA-coded memories can be transferred between planarians much less rats. Still, at the time Gunn was writing, his speculations, with real scientists quoted on the matter, were certainly legitimate.)

The first story has little or no changes that I detected since I read it as “Among the Beautiful Bright Children” in the Gunn collection Human Voices though this time I didn't think that its protagonist was writing under the influence of a capsule persona. The second story involves a doctor betrayed by a woman who leaves him. He bitterly enters a poppet world of dreaming vengeance against women in many historical forms. The third story involves one of those who creates the capsule entertainments much loved by the novel's poppets. He becomes ensnared when he tries to dream the Trojan War, and the plot seems inevitable no matter what he does.

This novel's theme of the corrosive powers of contentment and seeking that contentment in fantasies is closely related to Gunn's The Joy Makers. This novel also features a society (rather like that of E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" -- which must have been some influence on sf critic and historian Gunn), like that story, where people have largely retreated into self-contained apartments of solitary pleasure. Indeed, it is only in the adolescent phase that people group together to build their identity. The world of large urban centers with robotically and cybernetically managed fields and manufacturing centers surrounding them, where people rarely leave their city and mostly live in dream worlds is simply not as far down the path as the end of The Joy Makers where humanity exists as "fetal gnomes" in cubicles of bliss provided by "hedonics" technology.

Both novels question the value of happiness and come down, less strongly here, on some unhappiness to be necessary for man to engage with the universe and advance. Here people are lulled into living false lives recorded in RNA and proteins injected into their bodies. Gunn makes the wise (and, from a strategic sense, obvious) decision to describe the world through those somehow outside it.

The first story centers around an historian who doesn't, through most of the story, pop capsules of memories, though his work provides the grist for the dreamers work. (Indeed, Samuel, the eponymous character in the last section, "The Dreamer", meets "The Historian".). "The Volunteer" is a surgeon who is one of those who must perform a job, one he likes, that has not been recorded into a chemical form to be transferred to others. (The ability to chemically encode knowledge and experiences has revolutionized society by revolutionizing economics, education, and entertainment.). Samuel the Dreamer rarely "pops" himself. The narrative glue that welds through these three stories together is "The Mnemonist", a figure who is cybernetically linked to the city's automated administrative and control features. While not a dreamer, he is not exactly engaged in the real world. Rather he exists in a river of information which he controls for society's benefit, but it is the constant access to information (something of a precursor to some cyberpunk characters) that he enjoys. The novel's plot involves him finding a replacement since he is dying.

The seductive power of dreams is the novel's theme. The Historian, the Volunteer, and the Dreamer prove unable to resist the power of illusion. The Historian eventually succumbs, after being abandoned by his lover, to the lure of capsules. (He choses one built around a medieval figure.) The Volunteer, after he is rescued from his dreams of vengeance, again returns to it after finding out the woman who rescued him simply wants his surgical skills to revive an old lover in stasis, both people being part of a movement to deny the use of capsules and advance people the old way. The Dreamer succumbs to the lure of the Trojan War and his beloved Helen even though he finds the progression of events guided by history and the input of a spurned lover. The Mnemonist ultimately decides that, like those three, he has succumbed to dream and illusion. His is the illusion that his indispensability though he really just likes living in the flow of information.

Needless to say, another theme running through the book is the difficulties between a man and a woman. Each of the main stories features sexual and romantic love spurned or betrayed and the, always male, protagonist retreating to a world of illusion. With the Historian, his original wife left him and a newer lover just takes up with him as a novelty. When she leaves, he starts taking capsules. The Volunteer is embittered when his lover tells him she is entering the world of capsule dreams -- not because he is a bad person but because no human can compete with the fulfillment and satisfaction they offer. He takes vengeance on women in his permanent dream state. When Sara turns out to be using him to revive her old lover, he returns, with additional frigidity, to those dreams of vengeance (tainted with worship since one dream of adultery avenged is terminated by a manifestation of the Virgin Mary -- it’s a medieval dream). The Dreamer becomes fascinated by his own creation of Helen and, when he won’t leave her for a real world lover, she taints his dream with the inevitability of Helen’s “real” history.

An interesting novel with, as is often the case with Gunn, some passages of prose poetry. ( )

Excellent old-style Science Fiction. Very much enjoyed it. ( )