In the Country of the Blind

by Michael Flynn

In the nineteenth century, a small group of American idealists managed to actually build Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and use it to develop Cliology, mathematical models that could chart the likely course of the future. Soon they were working to alter history’s course as they thought best. By our own time, the Society has become the secret master of the world. But no secret can be kept forever, at least not without drastic measures. When her plans for some historic real estate lead developer and ex-reporter Sarah Beaumont to stumble across the Society’s existence, it’s just the first step into a baffling and deadly maze of conspiracies.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Alternate History, Thriller, Fantasy, Mystery, Speculative Fiction

549 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1987

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. Please see this page for the list of authors.

Michael Francis Flynn (born 1947) is an American statistician and science fiction author. Nearly all of Flynn's work falls under the category of hard science fiction, although his treatment of it can be unusual since he has applied the rigor of hard science fiction to "softer" sciences such as sociology in works such as In the Country of the Blind. Much of his short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Flynn was born in Easton, Pennsylvania. He earned a B.A. in Mathematics from LaSalle University and an M.S. in topology from Marquette University. He has been employed as an industrial quality engineer and statistician.

Library of Congress authorities: Flynn, Michael (Michael F.)

Reviews

[Jacqie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have really enjoyed some of Michael Flynn's later work, but this one sure didn't live up to the standards that his more experienced writing sets.

The idea is great- that history can be quantified and predicted, and even changed, through scientific analysis. I'm all about the social sciences being the subject of a hard science fiction novel. I was all ready to read about past history and present-day manipulation of history and alternate history.

But didn't get that. Instead, I got one of the more unbelievable characters I've read recently. She's a black woman, which is great for a main character, but other than physical description there's no indication as to her ethnicity whatsoever (except that she says "sucker" sometimes- shades of Shaft!). She can hack a computer, survive in the Colorado wilderness with nothing but the clothes on her back, predict property values, throw a knife, recite Denver history in detail, and do investigative journalism- this is by no means an exhaustive list of her accomplishments. She started out poor in Chicago, decided that she was never going to ask anyone for help, and became first a journalist, then a property developer through a means that's never explained (most journalists don't end up with enough cash on hand to buy multiple commercial properties before they're 30, in my experience). While exploring a property she wants to buy, she stumbles upon some 19th century era... computers, if you can call them that. Really cool idea, and I wanted more of this somewhat steampunky description of hand-lathed computers and old records of past secret society skullduggery.

Instead, we have our heroine survive an assassination attempt (weird overreaction to her discovery) and go on the run in a not-very-good action sequence.

Also, some of the worst dialogue I've ever read. The author ends up later with a much better grasp of psychology- these characters are tropes, not people. Bad guys who are sexual deviants, the whole over-the-top crazy bad guy stereotype in this book.

But I'm glad that editors took a chance om Michael Flynn after this book and let his writing skills develop. I might work through some more of his backlist, but I'm letting this one go.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed Michael Flynn's In the Country of the Blind. This is a thoughtful thriller in the "secret society" vein, specifically the societies which have used the scientific study of history to predict and occasionally alter the flow of history. So it's the book that The DaVinci Code wanted to be.

[Aside: would people please stop calling him "da Vinci"? That merely means "of Venice" and is in fact not a surname - his name is Leonardo. "Da Vinci" is only useful if you're trying to differentiate him from all the other Leonardos out there (The Ninja Turtle, for instance)].

Anyway, one of the things about Flynn's writing which I generally love is that his villians are both villianous and believable - they are doing something which is a serious problem, but they are not in fact villianous in their own eyes. In the Country of the Blind is no execption in this - the quality of the villians allows the protagonist Sarah to excel (it's always that way, isn't it? The better the villian, the better the potential for the hero...)

One of the neat things in the book is that an essay on the origins of Cliology, the scientific study of history, is included as an appendix. It's sufficiently far out that I did a few double takes while reading, but his notes and bibliography point toward absolute seriousness. One interesting tidbit - in analyzing overlapping cyclic trends in the US economy, he predicted (in 1990) a downward trend in the US economy beginning in ~2002 with a nadir sometime between 2006-2008. That's definitely something to make me go "hmmm."

This is an excellent book, and Flynn is well on his way to being one of my favorite authors.

[Alexandre · Rating 2 out of 5]

“In the country of the blind”, as the saying goes, “the one-eyed man is king” or so Michael Flynn hoped. Nevertheless, what starts as a high-level conspiracy novel ends up as a low-level police one.

The book starts provocative. Flynn’s writing is fluid and the main character is captivating: a highly intelligent and resourceful young black woman, Sarah. Later we are also informed her close associate is gay. However, these choices are very soon diminished by the victimhood approach adopted by the author. They are open to the suspicious of being a disingenuous artifice, a stratagem to enhance the credibility of the claims of free will suppression by a centenary cabala. As Sarah herself proclaims:

My whole life I fought so I wouldn’t be just another victim. And now I discover we’re all victims.

Her purpose became to finish “all the secrecy”, “all the callousness” of the self-appointed rulers of history. Intriguingly, the book finale couldn’t be farther from this stated objective.

The book progress suffers from other problems: an attempted murder fails as a consequence of mere luck; the main character comes across incriminating evidence at the same time and in the same city of a former colleague; and the plot remains open ended for too long, with new protagonists being added carelessly. Too many fortuities, not enough closures.

Apparently, the book is an attempt to develop the author’s ideas about psychohistory, the subject of an article he had published a couple of years before. Combining Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx, he proposes a reappraisal of the materialistic concept of history, based on three axioms:

1. Human societies are homeostatic systems. They are subject to general system laws, of which the laws of physical, biological, and cultural systems are localizations.
2. Human societies are biological populations. They are subject to ecological laws regarding production and reproduction, especially the production of food and other forms of energy.
3. The causes of cultural institutions are material, not mystical.

Flynn seems deeply convinced of the validity of these axioms. In effect, it could be said the starting point of his novel are the following “natural reinforcers”:

1. People need to eat and will generally opt for diets that provide more rather than fewer nutrients.
2. People are highly sexed and find reinforcing pleasure in heterosexual intercourse.
3. People need love and affection and will act to increase the love and affection that others give them.
4. Law of Least Effort: People cannot be totally inactive, but when confronted with a given task, they prefer to carry it out by expending less rather than more energy.

Not incidentally, according to the book, slavery ended “not for freedom or human dignity, but for economics and technological progress”. Nevertheless, translating them all into a sci-fi novel is quite an ambitious (and elusive) objective.

Isaac Asimov, for example, relied upon the concept of psychohistory in his masterpiece “Foundation”. However, by not dwelling too deeply into its operational details and manipulative capabilities, Asimov was far more convincing and much less mushy than Flynn.

In order to fulfill its stated objectives, the book needed a rationale that could provide very specific prescriptions on what would happen under different sets of circumstances. Only very strong wording could justify, for example, Lincoln’s assassination, like this one:

There will be permanent military occupation of the South, stifling of technological progress there, growing resentment among the whites, sporadic rioting, and racial pogroms, followed by repression and a new Rebellion in 1905 that will be overtly supported by at least two European Powers.

Unfortunately, the book never breaches the chasm between identifying general trends and determining strict paths of action. Furthermore, the author’s reliance on the concept of memes (or elementary ideas) seems misplaced, as they clearly suffer from survivor bias. It is easy to talk about ideas with actual long-term impact, but it is not so easy to systematize how they succeed.

J. K. Galbraith, in his very charming book “The Tenured Professor”, published by the time of the first publication of “In the Country of the Blind”, was much more successful in this endeavor. Paradoxically, for someone interested in modelling human behavior, Flynn is entirely oblivious to the enduring effort by economists of all stripes to do exactly the same, with varying degrees, but always limited, of success.

The end of the book is particularly unsatisfying. Characters die without contextualization or are left near death without further information. A kidnap that had become a central motif of the plot, replacing the conspiratorial tone, fizzles stupendously. Finally, instead of finishing “all the secrecy”, “all the callousness”, Sarah barely survives an attempted rape and another attempted murder. The attacks are gratuitous and her survival, once again, fortuitous.

The book also got old quickly. There are faxes and a “Madam Chairman”. Documents are searched by being read visually. The characters use eccentric methods to communicate privately. The comparison between the current wellbeing of both sides of the African diaspora and the reference to the presence of Jews in a cliology organization in pre-WWII Vienna would be seen less favorably nowadays. There is including a reference to “sleazy games” played by women.

At some point, Flynn mentions the Marxist historian and philosopher Georg Lukács – a revealing choice in itself, since the historian Hayden White, among many other contemporaneous scholars, would be a better fit. Well, according to Lukács, “you can always study science historically, but you cannot study history scientifically”. Flynn appeared to be on the verge of developing, as part of the story, an argument contradicting this point of view. However, it ends up as just one more unfulfilled promise.

There is no doubt the author eventually mastered his craft. “The Southern Strategy”, just to mention one single ulterior work, is truly a remarkable short story, with many subtle and not so subtle cross references between different timelines. “In the Country of the Blind” was just a stepping-stone on a by then still ongoing process.

As a final remark, I believe H. G. Wells’ “The Country of the Blind”, published in the beginning of the XX Century, is much better suited to the modern world: the one-eyed man in the country of the blind maybe, under the right circumstances, just a nuisance.

[Jennifer Petkus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comparing one book to another is a lazy way to review a book, but forgive me because there’s something about Michael Flynn’s writing that conjures up other writers. When I reviewed The Wreck of the River of Stars I found an umistakable touch of Jane Austen. And In the Country of the Blind, I can’t help but be reminded of Isaac Asimov, Philip K.Dick, Umberto Eco and Eric Frank Russell, to name just a few.


But don’t for a second think that I find In the Country of the Blind derivative. It’s great speculative fiction that makes you wonder where the fiction ends and reality begins; the kind of story that makes you Google every reference. Here’s the premise: In the first half of the 19th century a secret society in America created cliology, a form of mathematics that could describe the past and predict the future, very much like psychohistory, the science that Isaac Asimov created for his Foundation trilogy. Psychohistory and cliology maintain that while it is impossible to predict what one person might do, it’s possible to predict what large numbers of people can do. It’s not much different than pollsters predicting the outcome of an election, but cliology can predict events a hundred years in the future.

Of course, the mathematics of predicting the future are quite complex, but the early society was aided by the Analytical Engine, the calculating machine that inventor Charles Babbage described but never built. But they built Babbage’s computer and even named themselves the Babbage Society; and they weren’t content just predicting the future, they also wanted to shape it.

Sarah Beaumont is a former reporter turned real estate developer who stumbles across Babbage’s computers long forgotten in a Denver warehouse. She also finds scientific papers related to the society’s work. Unfortunately her investigations means she now knows too much and soon she’s dodging an assassin’s bullets in Civic Center park. Meanwhile other people with whom she’s confided are also ending up in the hospital or dead. Sarah finds a protector, however, in Red Malone, an operative who may or may not work for the Babbage Society. Not that Sarah thinks she needs protecting as she proves quite capable, maybe even a little too capable for credulity, and even saves Malone’s life.

It’s a lot of fun for me, a Denver citizen, to be reading a book set in the city I love and surrounding area. I especially enjoyed the shootout in the ruins of the Walker Mansion in Mount Falcon State Park. Sarah and Red have fled to Mount Falcon hoping to meet another operative who will take them to a safe house, but it’s a lousy place for a rendesvouz and I think Flynn chose it more for its picturesque qualities than its suitability as a meeting place.

Here I should mention that as much as I enjoyed the book, it does have some problems that are probably attributable to its publishing history. I think it’s Flynn’s first novel, originally published in the late 1980s in serialized form, again in 1990 as a paperback and as a hardcover in 2001, the edition I am reviewing. The technology of the 2001 edition seems positively creaky, with Sarah using a dial up modem to connect to the web (I had already been using DSL for three years in 2001), which makes sense when you consider the original novel probably referenced dial-up bulletin boards.

And the main character Sarah is far too intelligent and capable to be believed, being an accomplished pianist, computer programmer, ex journalist and knife thrower. For instance, I recognized the reference to Babbage and his calculating engines, but unlike Sarah I did not know off the top of my head that he’d been the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839.

But I’m willing to overlook Sarah’s accomplishments — hell, I envy them. I also don’t object — as some Amazon reviewers have — to the huge number of characters in the book. But I do object to the backpacking cat that accompanyies Sarah during the climb up Mount Falcon. It seems like something from one of Robert Heinlein’s juvenile books (damn, I just brought in another author), and as a cat owner I can’t imagine the terror of stuffing a cat in a backpack.

Quibbles aside, Flynn’s basic conjecture — that there’s a secret society that’s been shaping American history — makes for an entertaining story. Crackpots have been promoting this idea for years, of course, blaming the Masons, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission and the media elite for the mess we’re in. I could not help but think of Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier, where those controlling our destinies were invisible aliens. But Flynn’s Babbage Society seems like the real deal, using mathematics, its long existence and well placed followers to accomplish its goals.

But as in Umberto Eco’s Focault’s Pendulum, there are some real questions about the society’s effectiveness. Have the actions of the Babbage Society actually changed the future? Or are they just claiming for success for what would have happened anyway? And the Babbage Society are not the only players in this game, a twist that reminds me of countless Philip K. Dick stories where are several points in the story where EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG.

By the end the book is a jumble of factions that all claim either a knowledge or control of the future, but ultimately the story is about Sarah’s place in the universe and whom she calls family and what she calls home, and that makes this giant story something to which anyone can relate.

[Manu Castellanos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un gran clásico de la ciencia ficción que trata el tema de la psicohistoria desde un punto de vista tan original la más que la fundación de Isaac Asimov y aquí se llama Cliología.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny that Charles Babbage has come up in two books I read recently. This and The Witches of Chiswick (Robert Rankin). Very different books, but both deal with alternate historyies along the lines of "what if" Babbage's computer (which when built to plan a decade or so back really worked) had become popularized in Victorian England. Rankin's book is a bit on the light side (think Christopher Moore with a British flair). Still, this was a good read. Will pass along soon or wild release it.

[Deedee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Language: English
Note: The following is from the Preface of the Tor March-2003 paperback edition though it's assumed the same preface was used in Tor's August 2001 edition. The Preface text is noted here as it explains what's different about the 2001 edition.

In the Country of the Blind
Who can resist tampering with history?

Parts of the book appeared originally as a serial and a separate novelette. The redundancies this created have been removed, as have some non-value-added sections of less than immortal prose and the odd adverb or two. Futuristic references to "the national DataNet" have been amended to "the Internet." There are a few other changes of that sort from the first edition. Others, like the new-demolished viaduct in downtown Denver, have been left in place. There are limits to revisionist history.

The essay "An Introduction to Cliology" (originally "An Introduction to Psychohistory") was added at the request of readers at various SF conventions.

I have the 2001 copy of this novel and it is the one I'll be reading and reviewing.

[Tom Britz · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me way longer to read this novel than it deserved. Blame it on a combination of quite a few things. The holiday season is not always a happy time for everyone. Add to that the novel is classed as science fiction, but other than the fact that its basis is the "difference engine" that Charles Babbage tried to build, there was nothing science fictional about it. It could have been a historical thriller/spy novel. This was my second read of a Michael Flynn novel. The first was Eifelheim and that too was an excellent novel.
The story has it's beginnings in the mid 1800's. By using the Babbage machine, a secret attempts to change history or nudge it to a path the benefits them the most. Fast forward to today and the society that had its beginning in the Civil War period, is today a group of wealthy people that continue to nudge humanity along a predetermined path. Except that now it is no longer one secret society but a many-headed Hydra, all of which have tried to maintain their secrecy not only from the world but from each group. Michael Flynn is a writer worth reading.

[Marsha Valance · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the 19th century, a small group of American idealists managed to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. They used it to develop Cliology, a system of mathematical models that could chart the likely course of the future. Soon they were working to alter history's course as they thought best. By our own time, the Society has become the secret master of the world. But no secret can be kept forever, at least not without drastic measures.

[Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

How could I not be intrigued by a variant play on the classic Foundation? And this was a good read. But despite the heavy duty theory in the appendix and some interesting questions raised, most of the book was a fairly standard thriller, if a well written one with some well-met social sensitivity. Flynn's Eifelheim was far more original.

[Anatoly Maslennikov]

Удивительно унылая книга, как бы фантастическая, но написанная детективным языком. Многословная, не оставляющая ни крупицы смысла в подтексте. Всё в тексте, всё наружу.

Бросил на середине.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't finish. I was hoping for scifi and an interesting exploration of ideas, but this is pretty much just a thriller.

[Alex Beckers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas, but for the first 2/3ds of the book it feels more like a lecture than a novel. The plot picks up after that but is still held back by flat and/or gross characters.

[Mmonchi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este libro va de más a menos. Empieza muy bien con una investigación sobre unos hechos que apuntan a una conspiración para controlar la historia, basada en un par de coincidencias que se aceptan sin demasiados problemas. Los personajes están bien trabajados y la premisa es interesante. Pero... El libro tiene tres partes y cada una de ellas aumenta la complejidad. Es, salvando las distancias, como lo que va haciendo Asimov en sus libros sobre las Fundaciones: primero una Fundación, luego una Segunda Fundación, después otras organizaciones que están aún más escondidas hasta perder el espíritu original. Aquí el resultado es un lío de organizaciones secretas espiándose unas a otras y actuando sobre la historia hasta complicarlo todo excesivamente. Y es una pena porque la idea de partida era muy interesante.

[Mortalform · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ ...How do you trace the fault tree of something that never occurred? Have you ever tried to prove something from the absence of negative evidence? p 37

“Justified? Who’s justice? Is a cornered rat justified when it bite? If an organization perceives a threat, it tries to protect itself. It’s a natural law of living systems. It doesn’t matter one whit if the system is a rat, the Mafia, or the Boy Scouts.” p 70

“...We Publicize and reward the behavior we want. We don’t coerce it. But people aren’t stupid. If they think that a behavior benefits them, a predictable percentage of them will imitate it voluntarily. p106

At what point did the power to reward become the power to coerce? Manipulation was more subtle than force, but the results were much the same. And force, at least, had the one benefit of being brutally honest. p106

“What would you have done? Stood by, because the forecast might be wrong? Or taken action, because the forecast might be right? p102

“Ideas are the key,” Red said. “Elementary ideas- we call them memes. They are like viruses. People ‘catch’ them from each other through communication media.” 104

Maybe that was the trouble with high ideals. Get to high and ordinary people would look small and unimportant. P 110

“That’s no choice.”
“Yes it is. No one ever promised you that the choices would be pleasant.” 112

“I’ll answer your question now,” she said.
He glanced her way, puzzled. “What question?”
“About the boy and the bus. The answer is simple. Save the boy. Not for his sake. He may grow into the monster you described. And not for his victims’ sakes, either. But for my own sake. Do you understand that? You don’t hurt people for things they haven’t yet done. 127

If freedom means anything, it’s the freedom to be a damned fool. To do something irrational or even dangerous. To be stubborn and cussed and downright mule headed. To flip the bird at the inevitable fucking tide of history. 203

“I think you misapprehend the word fact, ” Vane said, finger wagging once more. “You think of it as some sort of category of ultimate truth, but that is not the case. Oscar Wilde once said that the English were always degrading truths into facts. Like so many artistic people, he had intuited something vital.
Jeremy shook his head. “I don’t see it. A fact is a fact.”
“No, Mr. Collingwood. A ‘fact’ is not a thing; it is the past tense of a verb. Factum est. A dynamic word. Facto, I make. I create. Fact was not used as a noun until the late middle ages; and when it was, it meant ‘something done’ like the French, fait of the Megyar tény . Our English word, feat is cognate. Even in English, fact retained that early meaning of ‘feat’ until the 1800s. “ 231

“There is no such thing as raw data. It is always cooked.”
Jeremy laughed involuntarily. “That’s a good line, Professor; but what does it mean?”
“It means there can be no facts without theory. Some notion of what sort of fact to look for in the first place, and some notion of what it might mean afterward. That is why, like Lukacs, I prefer the word event . It is neither dry, definite, nor static, but suggests life, flow and movement. ‘Event compares to Fact,’ Lukacs once wrote, ‘as Love does to Sex.’ Events are facts in motion. Events have momentum, where facts have only inertia. No fact exists in isolation. We cannot even think of a fact without associating it with others. 231

“Every attempt to reconstruct history is exactly that, a re construction, and there for a fiction.” P 232

“ ‘Every Brother must have someone he loves held hostage to the future.’ “
“Exactly. The rule isn’t about giving birth. It is about accepting responsibility and maintaining consistency of purpose... It’s negative feedback that makes responsibility self enforcing. Like requiring landlords to live in the buildings they rent, or manufactures to place their intake pipes downstream from there effluent pipes.” 263

“The span of the forecast and its precision also matter. The longer the cast, the less precise it becomes.

[Paul, · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book on the possibility and implications of a scientific history

We have seen that a scientific history may be possible. “Empiricists” like Hamblin have discovered the underlying lawfulness of social behavior. “Model builders” like Rashevsky and Renfrew have constructed mathematical facsimiles of cultural processes. “Ecologists” like Harris and Colinvaux have sketched plausible theories of material causality. Cliology is possible, but is it desirable?

In his book Looking at History through Mathematics, pioneer cliologist Nicholas Rashevsky showed how the mathematical techniques of the hard sciences could be applied (at least in principle) to such historical processes as village and class formation or the “kinematics of social behavior.” Transformations: Mathematical Approaches to Cultural Change, edited by archaeologist Colin Renfrew and mathematician Kenneth Cooke, gives many further examples, including the uses of topological catastrophe theory.

“Ideas are the key,” Red said. “Elementary ideas—we call them memes. They’re like viruses. People ‘catch’ them from each other through communication media. It’s a process very much like epidemics. I could write the equations for you, if you like.” “Memes.” Something went click. Some of the titles she had read in the Index. “You used to call them ideons …” “Yes. Like elementary particles. Protons, electrons … and ideons. The analogies were all physical back then. Later, when Darwin’s and Mendel’s works became better known, biological analogies seemed more appropriate.”

Llewellyn ignored the interruption. “Socialism is the apotheosis of capitalism—what I like to call the Managed Society. ‘Daddy Knows Best.’ If you want to see Lenin’s state in embryo, study Henry Ford’s company. His Sociological Department ‘inspectors’ could barge in unannounced on employees in their homes and question them on their marriages, their finances, their private lives. And Harry Bennett’s ‘outside squads’ were just minor-league Brownshirts.” “Henry Ford never had anyone executed,” Dennis protested. “Though Bennett’s goons did beat up and harass dissidents. And other employers during the class war did not shrink from killing union organizers. The difference between Ford and Lenin was more a matter of scale than anything else. Lenin organized his entire country into one vast Company Town, with all that implies. In plain language, the Soviet Union was the largest corporation on the planet. The Party members were the stockholders, and the Politburo was the Board of Directors. Ordinary citizens—employees—had no effective say in running the organization. Corporate headquarters made five-year plans that never worked. Internal criticism was not allowed. Everyone had to be a ‘team player,’ by which they meant ‘follow the boss’s orders’ rather than genuine teamwork. Troublemakers were exiled to Siberia or to meaningless jobs. Or terminated.” Dr. Llewellyn smiled humorlessly. “An interesting choice of words, that.”

[Gary Holt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic premise and fairly good execution.

The basic idea is similar to the starting point of Asimov's Foundation series: that a secret society has discovered how to compute what will happen in history. Except that it's not set in the far future, it's set in the recent past. The sort of thing that could be going on now.

What's particularly fascinating about it for me was:

(a) It's more realistic than Asimov's Foundation--there are better limits on what could and could not be done. Better explanation of why nobody but this secret society does it.

(b) The dynamics of the secret society are much more realistic. These are realistic people, with realistic disagreements. Some of the people are moral, some less so. (This is partly where conflict arises.)

(c) There are things in here that somebody like Asimov really *should* have thought of when he imagined a society that has figured out the math of history and how to predict it. I came away amazed: Flynn was exactly right, that is what *would* happen, but I (and apparently Asimov) never thought of it. Unfortunately I can't discuss these details without ruining the surprise, which would frankly damage the story.

The characters are so-so. Not bad. It's told from the viewpoint of someone who is discovering all this from the outside, and she's a fairly interesting character. Flynn does a really good job of letting the discovery unfold for you. The rest of the characters are ok. The fascinating part, for me, was the exploration of the idea: what she discovers.

If you've read this review so far, you probably want a more detailed comparison with the Foundation series. The Foundation series was interesting because it explored ideas of how history *ought* to work which are counterintuitive (e.g., the great general in the last days of the empire will never be allowed to succeed in an invasion, because of the dynamics of the empire; basically, why Belisarius was never allowed to succeed). This book has none of that. Rather than being about the dynamics of history, it's about the dynamics of the secret society that understands and predicts history. In the Foundation series (at least in the first part), you find that the characters for the most part did nothing at all; what happened was just inevitable, and what the characters did was futile from the start. (It was a minor triumph of Asimov to turn crushing, blind historical inevitability into an interesting story.) In this story, the characters are doing something: mostly, working against each other, exploring how they should use their knowledge.

Later on, Asimov's Foundation wandered off into other territory: first breaking his thesis that history could be predicted (the Mule), then into mind magic, ESP, etc. (the Second Foundation). (I don't know why, but almost all the hard science fiction guys eventually would up with mind magic.) This story has none of that.

[Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

More intellectual idea than story, but a very clever one. Engrossing bit of science fiction conjecture in the guise of a thriller.

[Walter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Predicting history is an old dream, which blossomed in the 19th century. Marx thought he had it all figured out - and those who came after him tried to fix past, present and future so that it would fit his projections. The heroine of this book, a black female named Sarah Beaumont, discovers by change the traces of a secret society, operating since the early 19th century who invented a science called "Cliology" and try to manipulate the development of history (for the common good, of course, but getting rich, unavoidably).
The scenario evokes Asimov's classic "Foundation" trilogy, the art of predicting the future to be practiced by a foundation, guarded in secret by a second one ... . Only this time it is today's earth, not the fringes of the galaxy, where all this happens.
Since there is no psychohistory a.k.a. cliology (or whatever you'd like to call it) the author's imagination had to come up with a few scenarios. All those people, trying to shape the future, who didn't succeed but as a consolation prize got rich by it. Well, it was a miracle, but after all this is a novel about magicians who lost control over their creation ... .
This book was written before "Firestar" and its sequels, where one can find the same leitmotif: trying to change the future so that Armageddon can be avoided. But in this book a coherent story-arc is lacking, and badly so.
Beside Sarah there are too many major characters, too many sub-plots and plotters. And it all ends with a shoot-out. In San Francisco. On the Coit Tower. Right.
So all in all the book rather disappoints. With better editing it could have been so much better. Considering that it is a slightly altered re-issue one wonders: would more radical rewriting have produced a great book? Lets do some cliology...

[Grady · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flynn uses Asimovian psychohistory (or, as Flynn's characters put it, 'cliology', or 'political metaeconomy') as the engine that drives a thriller in the style of Robert Ludlum. That is, the sympathetic protagonist stumbles into a conspiracy that costs her nearly everything and sends her on the run, justifying every bit of paranoia she's ever had. The plotting is fine, but doesn't leave much room to explore the more interesting questions about how cliology works or could applied. However, Flynn does introduce two interesting new premises: first, that any secret society established to apply cliology will tend to break into at least two competing factions after a roughly standard amount of time; and two, that most big new ideas, including cliology, tend to emerge in multiple independent places at the same time.

I read this at roughly the same time I read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. Both books feature an African-American woman as the protagonist, but of course Michael Flynn is a white male, so that aspect of Sarah Beaumont's character is written from the outside, in comparison to Butler's Lauren Olamina. Olamina speaks about oppression and violence with authenticity. In contrast, Beaumont remains a bit of a cypher - but then, the protagonists of most Ludlum thrillers are virtual cyphers, no matter their race; that's kind of a function of the genre. At any rate, it was nice in both books to root for a non-white-male protagonist.

[Steve Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

_Had elements of Steampunk that I liked. (No forced gaslight error dialogue... hooray!)
_Interesting for the use of memes and computer analysis to track and influence human trends (all that more relevant almost 3 decades later).
_Intricate plot that at times was gripping but on a few occasions got overly intricate and boring.

[D-day · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michael Flynn’s In The Country of the Blind posits an alternate history where, in the 1820s, Charles Babbage finishes constructing his difference engine in secret. In real life it was never competed, although existing drawings show that it would have worked if it had been finished. In the book a secret society uses this early computer to calculate and anticipate the course of history. Soon there comes the temptation to manipulate and alter the future course of human events via the science of Cliology (cf. Asimov’s Psychohistory of the Foundation Series). The story starts in the modern day with our heroine,Sarah, accidentally discovering the secret society.
The story starts great, who doesn’t love a good conspiracy story about shadowy cabals that rule the world. However the more we learn about the secret of who manipulates world events, the less interesting the story becomes, until the novel devolves into a run of the mill thriller, and not an especially good one either. The story peters out to a somewhat anti-climactic ending. It reminded me of the The Man who was Thursday in that everyone we meet turns out to be a member of yet another secret society. Still it’s an enjoyable story overall and the extra material in the appendix is interesting as well.

[Cam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early Flynn, edited a bit to get rid of some clunky terminology, but pretty good either way. Some innocents stumble on an actual conspiracy; people have been manipulating historical events secretly for over a century and are willing to kill to keep it a secret. Their latest scare is caused by an auto-didact former reporter cum-real estate developer when she and her architect start researching on of the original owners of a building they are remodeling. Their research coincides with other internal conflicts and rivalries and they are mistakenly accosted. Our heroine digs in and figures out there is even more going on and determines to expose everyone behind the scenes which really stirs up the hive. Turns out the science behind the manipulators was understood in many places, used, and then ignored when applied to each cabal's own development. Solution - no cabals, maybe. Flynn includes a good overview of historical trends, related statistics, and possible elements of what he call "cliology" for our real world. Not his greatest work (imho - "Eifelheim"), but you can tell your dealing with a smart author starting off on the right foot.

[Brian Maicke · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of an actiony thriller than science fiction, In the Country of the Blind details the story of a society that built a Babbage Engine and used it to calculate the course of human history. Think Foundation series but condensed to a single novel and set in a contemporary setting. There are a number of twists to keep the plot moving and quite a bit of action makes for a pretty fast read.

I had fun reading this one, but for my money would have preferred a bit more of the cliology (mathematical analysis of history/trends) aspect vs. the action/thriller parts that dominated towards the end. The book also ended somewhat abruptly so I didn't feel like I had closure at the end. Though I enjoyed In the Country of the Blind, I'd recommend Eifelheim over this book for people interested in the subject or in picking up something by Flynn.

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first time I've had to keep a piece of paper tucked in the book (that I eventually filled both sides of) to look up character names. I never had to do that even with Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, but in Flynn’s novel characters are briefly introduced, remain absent many pages, and then reappear in a different context with no hints to the reader as to where or even whether the character has previously appeared. Definitely not a book to listen to in the car, while unable to stop and refer to my character sheet.

Sad to say, but this is one book I wouldn’t mind seeing adapted by a screenwriter who isn't afraid to rip out large chunks and weave in plenty of new material, something I often object to. The fascinating premise is not well served by a helter-skelter narrative with a blizzard of disconnected short scenes. The fragments depicting the 19th century cliologists are particularly frustrating; I would have loved to see them at work.

[Karl Schaeffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting almost alternate history with a dash of action thriller thrown in. What happens if history and the future could be analyzed and forecast like a "hard" science (ie cliology); and the forecast be used for profit, or to influence history. That's the premise of this book. Much like Asimov's Foundation series, but set in current times. Flynn even has a treatise on statistical analysis of historical and social science trends as an appendix. I also enjoyed Flynn's description of modern corporation's as the closest incarnation of pure communism that there is. After all, Engels was a factory owner and there was a school of thought that the rationalization the industrial age as developed by F. Taylor and H. Ford in a factory setting could be applied to governments and the running of the world. Crazy, huh?

[Don Rea · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those works with an extremely promising premise that never quite gets lived up to. Flynn spends so much thought and energy working out the realistic implications of his premise - a secret society that is heir to a mathematical science of predictive history - that he sort of forgets to tell a story. Which is a real shame since some of his characters are fascinating, and a couple of scenes hinging on their interactions are so well told that one can't shake the feeling that a really great story is just around the corner. But we never quite get to that corner.

[Elizabeth Hunter · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an interesting exploration of the potential science of "cliology," the science of history. Flynn creates some fun characters, but spends too much time arguing about the ethics of meddling with the course of events and not enough developing them. The proliferation of secret societies is an interesting idea, but creates a great confusion of characters and goals. I think this would have been better either as a shorter, more focused book, or a series with scope to explore all the different groups from an internal perspective.

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Secret societies using Babbage Engines to predict and manipulate history are accidentally exposed, launching a war of spy-vs-spy, with a few intrepid folks caught in the middle. Sort of a cross between Asimov's Foundation series and a spy novel, with a long academic supplement at the end on the use of statistical methods for predicting historical trends.

A must read for the STS crowd. A weak conclusion, and the heroine's definitely in Mary Sue territory, but Flynn pulls off this blend of adventure and academia.

[Leons1701 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Giving three stars, not so much for stellar writing, because for the most part, it isn't, but for some interesting thoughts about history and cliology. The sort of predictive cliology that forms the foundation (heh) for the novel may well never be possible, but we can spot and sometimes successfully project larger trends.

I'd read this some years ago, it's interesting to note that the only things that stuck with me were the opening scene and a general sense of the conclusion. Didn't even recall a single character.