A Carnival of Guff

Golem 100, by Alfred Bester. Simon and Schuster, 384 pp., $11.95.

One of Alfred Bester’s earlier novels, The Stars My Destination, which was published a quarter century ago in 1956, is considered by many science fiction fans to be the best book ever written in that genre. Its story is so fast-paced, its plot is so marvelously complex, its vision of human civilization struggling for survival and exploding with new technologies is so fascinating, its depiction of the monstrosities flourishing in an age tolerant of freaks is so bizarre, and its development of a society where teleportation is a common skill is so clever, that it is not surprising that each new Bester novel (and there have been only five) should be awaited with great anticipation.

Though more limited in its scope, Golem 100 almost equals the inventiveness of its justly famous predecessor. The new novel is set in the northeast corridor of the United States in the twenty-second century, in an area made up of overlapping mega-cities and held together by a sticky mass of uncontrolled and uncontrollable humanity. So over-populated is the Corridor, especially the teeming district call the Guff (which corresponds to what we now call greater New York City), that the State’s social service agencies have given up. While the police still apprehend murderers and thieves, the courts are entangled in caseload back-up of more than seventy years: judges rarely hear a case that originated in their lifetimes. But no social or political revolution created this non-functional state: the Guff is anarchistic by default. And it therefore resembles the popular misconception of all anarchism: wild, terroristic, and frequently criminal. Nevertheless, any fictional portrait of life without government is worth examination, and this one turns out to be fascinating. As Bester imagines it, anarchy by default is a kind of monstrous spectacle that everybody denounced and adored. Living in the Corridor, and particularly in the Guff of the Corridor, was like being desperately in lust with a freaked-out Hottentot Venus. You hated it but you couldn’t kick it.

Even the privileged class . . . who could afford to live protected lives in luxury Oases and, indeed, could afford to live anywhere they damn pleased, never dreamed of leaving the Guff. The jungle magicked you. It was alive, by God! Its dementia churned up exciting new vices, sins, crimes, outrages. You never knew when you might be suddenly dead, but you always knew you were superbly alive.

As exciting as life in the Guff may be, however, it certainly is not easy. And to add to the obvious difficulties, an overburdened nature con-spires with the criminal element to make the lives of the inhabitants even more dis-agreeable. Water, for example, is an expensive luxury (one society matron shocks her guests by displaying a block of ice as a centerpiece), and the overwhelming stench emitted by an enormous population of infrequent bathers living at very close quarters is eased only somewhat by liberal doses of a new necessity, per-fume.

But in all this chaos people do live, love, keep social engagements, and make scientific discoveries. There is even, among the rich, time to indulge in frivolous games. Which is where the story begins.

A “hive” of bored and very rich women meets weekly to entertain each other by attempting to conjure the devil. What they succeed in conjuring is not Satan, however, but a polymorphous monster called a Golem after “the original, legendary monster . . . shapeless and without a soul,” which has, in some of its manifestations, a hundred hands (thus Golem100). As the Golem ram-pages through the Guff, committing atrocities that horrify even the most jaded of its residents, three people set out on its trail: a scientist, Blaise Shima, whose richly remunerative specialty is creating new perfumes for the unwashed population; a black “psytech,” Gretchen Nunn, whose senses function in extraordinary ways, and the brilliant and very gentle Prefect of Police, Sub-adar Ind’dni. Their search leads them through a drug-induced exploration of the unconscious, and into a new evolutionary phase which will witness the transformation of the human animal. And all the while the reader is assaulted linguistically by Bester at his liveliest. There’s Op-Talk, for instance, the dialect of the Guff-low-lifers: So?dis?Candida? N. Dishere Souse Amourica? Nn. Zit Jewropey? Nnn. Wherjeez? Guff!Guff!Guff! Blessya. N’achoo, man. She’s his name. Guff. Dig?

Bester’s characters bom-bard the reader with languages, switching from Op-talk to twenty-second century English, computer binary, German, Yiddish and Latin, all of it rendered amazingly understandable by the context. Some of the dialogue is vaguely reminiscent of Charlie Chan (Bester once wrote scripts for the Charlie Chan radio series); other conversation is inter-woven with evocative Freudian inkblot pictures of the characters’ voyages through the id, musical scores of the hive’s Satanic hymns, and mathematical calculations, all of which illustrate the story as it progresses. The drawings are by Jack Gau-ghan, who also did the interior artwork for The Stars My Destination.

But the real beauty and importance of the book is in the weird, nearly anarchic Guff culture, one of whose many madnesses is Ops week, which resembles Mardi Gras in an insane asylum. Rich and poor alike dress like bums, and drink, dance and eat to great excess. The Hell’s Gate Dam is opened for bathing, and if the water is slightly radioactive, still, it’s a free wash. The twenty-second century equivalent of the Black Panthers uses the occasion to hold a KKK barbeque, during which a visiting and instantly queasy Shima is reas-sured by the celebrants that the humanoid figure rotating the the spit is actually a gorilla. The Equal Rights Maternity Hospital puts on a Right To Life Ballet, danced by twenty naked midgets all “mewling a fetal chorus.” Art museums, businesses, the rich and the poor, all throw junk from the past year out the highest windows they can find. Giant companies open their boardrooms to the public, and the directors, dressed in costumes, serve exotic foods to all and sundry.

In the Guff, of course, the other fifty-one weeks of the year are almost equally fantastic. The new mafia, for example, is the PLO, which took over the United Arab Republic just when the oil reserves finally ran out, and prudently switched to the opium business. In its self-imposed ghetto in the Guff, the PLO is very distrustful of strangers except for Israelis, whom they like a lot. Israel, you see, is the only country where drugs are still illegal, which means it is also the only country in which the PLO can enjoy a high market price for its opium. Another thing one might encounter in the Guff is one of the mixed media plays in which the audience participates by speaking parts into a computer which has cued them only moments before. No one, of course, knows exactly what the result will be until the finished product is aired.

Cultural diversity aside, Bester is not for the puritanical or faint-hearted. There is blood, gore, and rape to excess from the first pages to the last, and the ending is, naturally, a shocking surprise. But I cannot emphasize enough that the novels of Alfred Bester possess, besides their great value as entertainment, an even greater value as inspiration. Bester gives us an invaluable view of anarchy—a society with few controls, but with explosive power, excitement, and the possibility of immeasurable happiness. His culture of diversity allows for all that is within the human being: love and hate, good and evil, great cultural achievement and the worst of all degradation. His characters, whatever their moral standing, fight hard for as much as they can get from life. Their possibilities are limited only by their individual imaginations.

If Bester’s society is not completely free from prejudice, at least it does not impose its prejudices by force. Minorities are not melted down to homogeneity in some great pot; they take full part in a society that embraces differences. His woman characters, likewise, are tough and strong, with more completely rounded personalities than most

Victoria Varga is managing editor of LR.