16 July 2001

What Entropy Means to Me
George Alec Effinger
1972
188 pp (PB)

Recommendation: **1/2 out of 4 (Recommended, if you like this sort of thing. I'd give it ***, but the number of people I know who like this sort of thing is very small.)

Personal enjoyment: Thumbs Up.

One-sentence review: This is a very odd book.

Description/spoiler-free discussion:

Seyt is a member of a very strange, very large family which lives on the recently-settled planet Home. Actually, it's more of a cult than a family. The eldest son of the family, Dore, was sent out on a quest, supposedly to find the family's missing Father. He was never heard from again. Seyt was assigned the task of "chronicling" Dore's journey. Of course, since nobody knows anything about what actually happenned to Dore, Seyt has to make the whole thing up.

What Entropy Means to Me relates Seyt's story of Dore's adventures. However, Seyt is not a very good writer. Dore's adventures, as told by Seyt, are a heavy-handed symbol-laden allegory, but an allegory with no particular goal. It's like Seyt decided that a book of this sort should be an allegory, so he was going to make it as gosh-darn allegorical as possible. If that's not bad enough, Seyt takes great pains to explain every symbol, every allusion, and every tedious detail of the creative process to his readers. Mr. Effinger is to be congratulated: it takes a great writer to mimic bad writing so well.

That makes the book sound dreadful, and if that was all there was to it, it would be. However, What Entropy Means to Me is not really about Dore's adventures at all. It's about what happens to and around Seyt as a result of writing the story. Seyt's writing influences the family/cult politics, which in turn affect his writing. Both the politics (which get really ugly) and the writing influence Seyt. All of this is shown through Seyt's writing.

It's all quite masterfully done, and I recommend the book to folks who like SF of a more literary bent. I wouldn't recommend it universally, because it is really weird, and difficult to read. I have the feeling that I missed a good bit of what was there, because I haven't read all the right things. (This is not to say that one must have read the right things in order to appreciate the book. For example, you can enjoy Zelazny's Lord of Light without knowing anything about Hindu mythology, but you get more out of it if you do.)

Although there isn't much to spoil, the following comments and questions contain what some may consider spoilers for What Entropy Means To Me. Be warned.

• Since this book is mostly about the relationship between a writer and what he writes, it might be interesting to compare it to Brust's The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, which is about the relationship between a painter and his work. I haven't read the Brust recently enough to say more on that, though.
• I do understand that Dore's story as told by Seyt is a take-off on allegories such as The Pilgrim's Progress. After all, Seyt informs his readers of his intentions in excruciating detail. But I still feel like I missed a lot of references in the book. Anybody care to clue me in?
• For a book of less than 200 pages, which is not strongly founded on plot, there were quite a few plots running around in it. First there was the Tale of Dore, as told by Seyt. Second was the Tale of Seyt, as he tells Dore's tale. Both of these come to conclusions. But, for a while at the start, we also get the tale of Their Parents, and How They Came to Settle on Home. This plotline is dropped after a while, and the dropping is explained (Seyt is pressured by the authorities to not present Their Parents in such a secular light), but I'd have like to have seen more of it.
• Actually, this book reminds me of another Brust book: Agyar. Both books are written strongly from an unusual character's point of view. This is a neat technique, but it can be frustrating, since there are some things which are so obvious to the narrator that they don't explain it, but which leave the reader wondering. I think it works better in _Agyar_, since the gaps can be filled in by the reader's own knowledge of legends about (Spoiler for Agyar). In Entropy, the reader does not have that sort of background knowledge from other sources, so one is left guessing about such things as whether or not there is any truth in the family mythology (the Father's supposed complete control over the planet, the River as a (semi-)sentiant entity, the Mother's continued communication with the children, even though she was seemingly catatonic, etc), where all the kids came from, and so forth.
• "Glorian of the Knowledge." I understand that he's a recurring character in several of Effinger's books (as well as "Marueen Birmbaum in the MUD"). Is he just an all-purpose plot device, or do the other books develop his "character" further?

  This page Copyright P. Korda, 2001, 2002. kor2@midway.uchicago.edu