Die Träumer

by James E. Gunn

1st edition Methen 1982 paperback, vg++ In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Genres: Science Fiction, Ebooks

219 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1980

About the author

American science fiction author, editor, scholar, and anthologist. His work from the 1960s and 70s is considered his most significant fiction, and his Road to Science Fiction collections are considered his most important scholarly books. He won a Hugo Award for a non-fiction book in 1983 for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. He was named the 2007 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Gunn served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, after which he attended the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Science in Journalism in 1947 and a Masters of Arts in English in 1951. Gunn went on to become a faculty member of the University of Kansas, where he served as the university's director of public relations and as a professor of English, specializing in science fiction and fiction writing. He is now a professor emeritus and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which awards the annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award at the Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, every July.

He served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1971–72, was President of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82, and currently is Director of The Center for the Study of
Science Fiction. SFWA honored him as a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2007.

Gunn began his career as a science fiction author in 1948. He has had almost 100 stories published in magazines and anthologies and has authored 26 books and edited 10. Many of his stories and books have been reprinted around the world.

In 1996, Gunn wrote a novelization of the unproduced Star Trek episode "The Joy Machine" by Theodore Sturgeon.

His stories also have been adapted into radioplays and teleplays:
* NBC radio's X Minus One
* Desilu Playhouse's 1959 "Man in Orbit", based on Gunn's "The Cave of Night"
* ABC-TV's Movie of the Week "The Immortal" (1969) and an hour-long television series in 1970, based on Gunn's The Immortals
* An episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1989 and entitled "Psychodynamics of the Witchcraft" was based on James Gunn's 1953 story "Wherever You May Be".

Reviews

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

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/6... ) is different from Station in Space is different from The Listeners ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10... ) is different from The Magicians ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30... ).

However, The Mind Master is similar in some respects to The Joy Makers & also to Kampus ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21... ). 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/...

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.

[Bryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imagine if chemical memory were real - either stored in the RNA or in a protein coating overtop such molecules. When you wanted to learn a new skill, you'd just pop a memory pill copied from the chemical memory of an expert in that field.



A cynic might forecast that poppers would prefer memories obtained from dreams rather than memories from scientists, craftspeople, and artisans. This would lead to a dysfunctional society similar to those ravaged by drugs.

But the author admits in his preface that chemical memory is now completely discredited and no longer scientifically plausible. So these stories are just "what if" exercises, and a chance to experience some of James Gunn's more experimental writings.

The novel itself reads like a fixup, although as best as I can tell only one story had been published outside of this novel ("If I Forget Thee" appeared in 1978 and is included here as the chapter titled "The Volunteer").

But the fixup flavor permeates this book. You get episodic glimpses into the future where chemical memory has radically transformed human culture, and each episode is linked by a recurring segment of a narrative by the Mnemonist.

The book starts with the Mnemonist, and we soon realize that he's old and failing, and needs to find a replacement. But where? If everybody is popping memories, and worse, popping memories of dreams, then who's going to be clear-headed enough to take on the role of the Mnemonist? Somebody has to run things...

First episode - the Historian. Might he be the one? He's fascinated with data (not dreams) and perhaps he's a candidate. This story was the least satisfying to me, and was enough to make me consider setting the book aside. Based on this story, I would have given the book a lower score - perhaps just a single star.

Then back to the Mnemonist as he considers other candidates for his successor. (Each section of the Mnemonist narrative is written in nonstandard prose, but you quickly get used to Gunn's experimentation. There's a recipe involved - some exposition, some poetry, some historical and factual background on chemical memory research, and some error messages about the failing systems for which the Mnemonist is responsible.)

Second episode - the Volunteer. Maybe somebody who dedicates themselves to serving others might be a candidate for the Mnemonist's replacement. The volunteer in this case is a surgeon, who unfortunately is working through betrayal by a woman. Been hurt and imagined some disturbing revenge on your ex? It won't compare to this. Shocking at first, this story is by far the best in the book, and could be worth 3 stars on its own.

Once again the Mnemonist is back to bridge between stories, and by now the reader is used to the nonstandard narrative. The Mnemonist considers if a possible replacement might be one of the Dreamers themselves (not the poppers who immerse themselves in another's dream, but the author of the dream contained in the capsules).

Final episode - the Dreamer. Here we get an interesting account of Helen of Troy, with the full cast of characters (Paris, Achilles, Hector, Ajax, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Memnon, small Ajax, Priam, etc). This would be better enjoyed by somebody who's a fan of the Homeric saga, because the twist here is that the Dreamer starts out in control - he can direct things so that they're not quite like Homer's source material. Not being well-versed in this epic, I couldn't appreciate how the story (while at first divergent) slowly and inexorably became drawn back in line with Homer's recounting. Can the Dreamer control his dream? Or will the prophecies and fate dictate that Paris (and Troy) will fall and fail to continue possessing Helen?

And an epilogue by the Mnemonist (in the established style throughout this book) closes off the volume. Has the Mnemonist chosen a successor?

2 to 3 stars throughout, but likely averaging about 2.25 stars overall.

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a while to read this book. It took me a while to even WANT to read this book. The writing is a little peculiar and hard to follow at first. But it kind of reads the way a movie plays. There are many conversations happening at once, but it is a very interesting read. I say keep it on the night stand and on when you just need to focus on anything but what is going on in your own life, give this book a try.

[Tim Brosnan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such an interesting concept! Now if only Gunn hadn't allowed the last half of this short novel to become a made-for-boys bodice ripper framed as a short course in Greek mythology. Would that he had given us something other than cardboard characters for whose suffering we care not a whit.

[Haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really Interesting.