- Spinrad, Norman.
Bug Jack Barron.
Golden, CO: ReAnimus Press, [1969] 2011.
ISBN 978-1-58567-585-2.
-
In his Berkeley Baby Bolshevik days Jack Barron dreamt
of power—power to change the world. Years later,
he has power, but of a very different kind. As
host of the weekly television show “Bug Jack Barron”,
he sits in the catbird seat, taking carefully screened calls
from those abused by impersonal organisations and putting those
in charge in the hot seat, live via vidphone, with no tape
delay. One hundred million people tune in to the show, so
whatever bugs the caller, bugs Jack Barron, and immediately
bugs America.
Jack's Berkeley crowd, veterans of the civil rights battles,
mostly consider him a sell-out, although they have sold out
in their own ways to the realities of power and politics.
But when Jack crosses swords with Benedict Howards, he is
faced with an adversary of an entirely different order of
magnitude than any he has previously encountered. Howards
is president of the Foundation for Human Immortality, which
operates centres which freeze the bodies of departed clients
and funds research into the technologies which will allow them
to be revived and achieve immortality. Only the well-heeled
need apply: a freezer contract requires one to deposit
US$500,000 (this is in 1969 gold dollars; in 2012 ObamaBucks,
the equivalent is in excess of three million). With
around a million people already frozen, Howards sits on
half a trillion dollars (three trillion today), and although
this money is nominally held in trust to be refunded to the
frozen after their revival, Howards is in fact free to use
the proceeds of investing it as he wishes. You can buy almost
anything with that kind of money, politicians most definitely
included.
Howards is pushing to have his foundation declared a regulated
monopoly, forcing competitors out of the market and placing
its governance under a committee appointed by the president
of the United States. Barron takes on Howards with a call
from a person claiming he was denied a freezer contract due
to his race, and sets up a confrontation with Howards in which
Barron has to decide whether his own integrity has a price and,
if so, what it is. As he digs into Howards' foundation, he
stumbles upon details which hint of secrets so shocking they
might overturn the political landscape in the U.S. But that
may only be the tip of the iceberg.
This is one of the iconic novels of “new wave”
science fiction from the late 1960s. It is written in
what was then called an “experimental”, stream
of consciousness style, with paragraphs like:
The undulating blue-green light writhing behind her like a forest
of tentacles the roar of the surf like the sigh of some great beached
and expiring sea animal, seemed to press her against the glass
reality-interface like a bubble being forced up by decay-gas pressure
from the depths of an oily green swamp pool. She felt the weight, the
pressure of the whole room pushing behind her as if the blind green
monsters that lurked in the most unknowable pits in the ass-end of
her mind were bubbling up from the depths and elbowing her
consciousness out of her own skull.
Back in the day, we'd read something like this and say,
“Oh, wow”. Today, many readers may
deem such prose stylings as quaint as those who
say “Oh, wow”.
This novel is a period piece. Reading it puts you back into the
mindset of the late 1960s, when few imagined that technologies already
in nascent form would destroy the power of one-to-many media
oligopolies, and it was wrong in almost all of its extrapolation of
the future. If you read it then (as I did) and thought it was
a masterpiece (as I did), it may be worth a second glance to see
how far we've come.
February 2013 