Reading the 20th Century discussion
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The Tin Men
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The Tin Men by Michael Frayn (April 2024)
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"The Tin Men is "in transit" to my library, so April would work for me as well, if you want to bump Tin Man up a month."
Fine by me but it might not be late April til I read it as I have a lot of books to read that month
I'll attend to it
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Are we putting the next Dominic Sandbrook as a buddy sometime, later in the year? I think there are two more in the series, one more in the Seventies and one in the Eighties.
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Just read it as and when you have a chance. I am not sure when I'll get to it yet
Here's to a speedy recovery after your op
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I’m looking forward to my second book by Michael Frayn
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Still waiting for my library ....
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Great news that you're underway too Susan
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I am drawn to novels set in the work place and set in academic institutions so this instantly predisposes me to view it favourably
The humour is subtle but as I start to differentiate the disparate characters it is getting more amusing
In short, I've got a good feeling about this one
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I enjoyed your review too
I am about halfway through and finding it amusing in an absurdist way. The section on self generating newspaper headlines had me smiling in recognition
The inter departmental rivalries and insecurities are well executed. It is interesting how much has changed, especially regarding technology, but also how much is still so familiar
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All hail the Miss Frams everywhere
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In 1969 I worked at IBM briefly. Keypunch was my job and it was the perfect mindless position for a young person who had no idea the direction she wanted to take in life. I left IBM but eventually returned to working with computers for all the functions of my corporate career. From authors Introduction to The Tin Men, 2014, when it was republished.
“There’s a picture on Wikipedia of an IBM 704 mainframe dated 1964. It occupies an entire room - four steel cabinets as tall and voluminous as commercial refrigerators, together with a steel desk suite as imposing as the control room of an aircraft-carrier. Amongst it all, easy to overlook surrounded by all that hardware, is a demure young woman in a pencil skirt who is presumably the operator. She seems as overawed as all the rest of us, and as unaware as IBM themselves that in forty or fifty years time the balance of power would have been reversed, and she would be carrying the same capacity and more tucked away unnoticed inside the smartphone in her shirt pocket.”
Perfect description of the workplace at IBM except that the operators were all men and the keypunch operators were all woman.
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Of course they were, Susan!
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"Are there similarities between Chiddingford and the Editor in the End of the Morning?"
Well spotted Susan, I hadn't thought about that but both share many of the same characteristics: inscrutability, having an aura of power and omniscience, elusiveness....
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A fun read. Not quite as good as the previous one though but some very funny sections
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Just to say the book is in hand. Time for me to to read it and join the discussion.
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Looking forward to your reaction Ben
Through Chapter 6. Poor Hugh Rowe. If only he had been born 40 years later he could have spent time changing the font, adjusting the font size and margins and perhaps fiddling with the spacing between paragraphs!
And yes, three cheers for Miss Fram!
So far, the humour is somewhat broader than Towards the End of the Morning and the characters less individual and less complex but it’s still making me smile. I do like the early attempts at AGI with the Samaritan program.
In our current era with the moral panic about Large Language Models, it's very funny to read Frayn's musings about whether prayers recited by humans or computers have more meaning, what do they mean anyway, and which is more sincere.He then continues on to AGI!
Clever man, this Mr Frayn.
Although I still much prefer Towards the End of the Morning.
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Absolutely. He has a great ear for satire and dialogue (satirical dialogue?) and for the absurdity of modern life, which oddly doesn’t seem dated even though written 60 years ago. I loved the computer/randomly generated flash card newspaper headlines (I’m told headlines were an early form of clickbait) and the panics about computers writing pornography, which is finally a sad reality.
The characters were a bit broad. The second novel shows large improvement.
Is anyone up for reading his Spies later this year?
Reading the 20th Century
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The Tin Men (1965)
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Michael Frayn
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The William Morris Institute of Automation Research is working hard to simplify our lives by programming computers to carry out life’s routine tasks. Whether it’s resolving ethical dilemmas, writing pornographic novels, saying prayers, or watching sports, these automation experts are developing machines to handle it all, enabling us to enjoy more free time. And when it’s announced that the Queen will be paying a royal visit and the Institute’s madcap bunch of researchers decide to program the computers to receive her, what could possibly go wrong?