My Name is Legion by Roger Zelazny

[lightreads]

My Name Is Legion

2/5. In a computerized future where everyone is publicly databased (and by future I mean 2005), one of the programmers writes himself out and becomes a hired gun.

That deeply awkward thing where an author thinks he's writing an intriguing and philosophical work about a sexy, interestingly sad lone wolf … and he's actually writing about a mass-murdering terrorist.

Man, I have just been picking wrong with Zelazny lately. My one solace through this painful, wanky, fridgey slog was deconstructing Zelazny's notion of future. It's always fun reading old scifi whose "future" is our now; it's not about the ways they projected technology incorrectly, it's about the many things you can learn about a person by the social projections they make into the unknown. Like, in Zelazny's future, everyone is still a smoker, and more importantly, smoking is still sexy. Remember that? And more interestingly, the world is entirely digitized and largely transparent; our protagonist has some vague misgivings about this, but nowhere in this entire book does a single person ever make an argument based in privacy rights.

Any old hack can be all, "we'll have undersea domed cities in 50 years!" and make it plausible. It's the rare talent who can dislocate his sense of social place into the unknown. In Zelazny's defense, that was really not the project of the majority of his milieu. I'm being spoiled by rainbow SF, which has as a central premise de-centering social assumptions – what is attractive and what is not, what is polite and what is not, what is violence and what is not.

But still. Everybody smoked, and that's sexy.

Comments

[the_rck]

The main thing I remember about this book is the scene with the telephones (I think that's in this book, at least). When I was in college in the 1980s, some guy was going on and on about how brilliant and innovative a scene in a recent cyberpunk novel was that had ringing phones following the main character.

I remember nothing at all else about this book except that I didn't enjoy it.

[lightreads]

No, not this one. ...Well, not unless I zoned out completely and missed it, which is actually possible.

That does ring a bell, though. Maybe it's just the seventeen times we've seen that on TV.

[the_rck]

Right. I'm getting my Zelazny books mixed up-- It was Today We Choose Faces that had that scene.

[jadelennox]

I have to be really careful with rereading Zelazny, because his meh-list is so long, and even his stuff that I adore is, when I look long enough at it, about genius objectivist hero figures and the murdering hot chicks who dig them.

[lightreads]

Yup, that describes this book. Except for the murdering hot chick who digs him. There isn't one of those because there aren't any women in this book who don't get fridged. Oh, except for the disabled one, who is not a sexual object because ew gross, disabled.

I hesitate to reread one of my favorite Zelazny's now -- Doorways in the Sand I reread that sucker roughly fifty times as a pre-teen and I remember adoring it. But now I am worried.