Mockymen [Hardcover]

Ian Watson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2003

This wonderfully weird tale uncovers the secrets of the 'mockymen', aliens who have inhabited drug-addled humans' bodies. A young British couple who make jigsaw puzzles are hired for an outlandish job in a park by an elderly Norwegian man. Toward the end of the Second World War, a blood sacrifice was carried out in this park by Nazis trying to create an occult cordon around Norway, and the ageing Norwegian hopes to access the power residing in the park to achieve reincarnation for himself. The Hardship Years intervene, when climate change, ecological collapse, and global economic crises derail human civilisation, but in 2010 salvation arrives in the shape of an alien expedition promising new technologies. As the aliens begin to inhabit the bodies of humans strung out on the drug Bliss, a young Blisshead named Jamie recalls his prior life as a Norwegian, and the aliens' true motives are revealed. This wild, absurd, and far-out tale reveals a keen intelligence at work and at play.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Watson (Great Escape) fuses occult horror with SF in this uneven mix of magic, philosophy, politics and science. Olaf Frisvold, a former Norwegian SS Officer, hires a jigsaw-puzzle-making couple to create a puzzle that commemorates the Nazi blood-sacrifice of Frisvold's sister during WWII in Vigeland Park, an eerie Norwegian sculpture garden. A subsequent ritual enables the odious Olaf to be reborn as Jamie into a world that by 2016 has been invaded by Mockymen, machine immortals "hoping to become free-ranging energy-beings, while lesser native species"-like earth's humans-"went extinct." Watson makes some astute observations about what it means to be human, but his inability to decide what sort of tale he's telling-a Lovecraftian nightmare, an I, Robot with Tibetan/Teutonic flare or a biting Orwellian satire-produces puzzle pieces that never quite fit.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Mockymen starts out innocently enough, with a pair of jigsaw-puzzle makers commissioned to make some complicated puzzles. The subject, a park in Oslo, and the buyer's requirement that they include nude photos of themselves posing with the park's sculpture are off-putting, but the price is right. Then they start having odd dreams of a ritual that took place during the Nazi occupation of Norway. Olav, their customer, was, it seems, involved in the ritual and wants to finish it, in the process reincarnating himself and, in a sense, giving himself immortality. Fifteen or so years later, the world is visited by aliens who, lacking bodies, use those of persons made comatose by the drug bliss. Jamie was supposed to be just another body for the so-called Mockymen, but now Olav has awakened, attracting the curiosity of subversive elements in the Combined Intelligence Service, who suspect that the Mockymen intend something more sinister than tourism. Full of adventures on other planets, alien takeovers, and conspiracy, this is clever and entertaining reading. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press; 1 edition (October 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930846215
• ISBN-13: 978-1930846210
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,331,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Familiar motifs, original storytelling, April 16, 2004

By 

Doug Mackey (Fairfield, IA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mockymen (Hardcover)

Watson's recent novel is on the surface a bit more conventional sf story than his classic novels such as THE EMBEDDING and MIRACLE VISITORS. However, it is great fun and encompasses some adventurous story telling, involving Nazi plots, zombified drugged-out "Blissheads," and a dangerous quest to save Earth from evil aliens. This is done in the context of the author's usual incisive social analysis and realistic characterizations. What kind of salvation would it be, as in this book, if we depended upon an extraterrestrial race to come in and solve all our global political and ecological problems for us?

4.0 out of 5 stars A horror story that morphs into a philosophical sf novel, February 7, 2011

By 

TChris (Tzer Island) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Mockymen (Hardcover)

A prolific writer in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, Ian Watson pushed the boundaries of science fiction while bringing literary style to the genre. Published in 2003, Mockymen is his most recent novel not written with a collaborator (his first sf novel, The Embedding, was published in 1973). Mockeymen is a brilliantly written story that deserves a wider audience.

Mockeymen is divided into two parts, past and present (with a glimpse of the future at the end). In the story that takes place in the (recent) past, Chrissy Clarke and Steve Bryant manufacture custom jigsaw puzzles. Knut Alver commissions them to take nude photographs of themselves embracing sculptures in Oslo's Vinegard Park at midnight and to create puzzles from those pictures. Soon after accomplishing that task, they begin having nightmares. They become convinced that Alver had been involved in a Norwegian atrocity during World War II. Tormented by her nightmares, Chrissy returns to Oslo to discover the sinister purpose behind the photographs. This part of the novel works nicely as a stand-alone horror story with a really, really creepy ending.

What begins as a tale of the supernatural morphs into a science fiction story in the second (and longer) part of the novel. Set in the present (although the novel's present is our near future), the story involves aliens who arrived on Earth just in time to save the human race from famine and chaos. In exchange for food factories and fusion reactors, the aliens have provided a drug called Bliss to which humans seeking escape from reality flock. A small percentage of Bliss users enter into a permanent coma, and their bodies are provided to the aliens (known as Mockeymen) who use them to conduct trade or engage in sightseeing. Anne Sharman works for an intelligence agency that monitors the activities of the Mockeymen. When she begins to suspect that the aliens have an unspoken and unwelcome motive for occupying human bodies, she encounters a Bliss user who seems to have made an impossible recovery from his coma (sans alien). That character links the past and present stories. Sharman goes on to have an adventure of the sort that only Watson could conceive.

Mockeymen, while a bit more conventional than some of Watson's earlier efforts, is so beautifully written that it should appeal not just to sf fans but to all open minded readers who enjoy a well told tale. Apart from delivering an entertaining story, the novel considers some interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between mind and body. True, the questions aren't new -- as the novel points out, they've been posed since Descartes -- but science fiction has the power to illuminate difficult questions in ways that other forms of literature cannot. Science fiction fans who are bored with sagas of interstellar war and "world building" novels should find Mockeymen an enjoyable departure from the norm. The sharp writing, the skillfully-concocted characters, and the offbeat story combine to make Mockeymen a worthwhile read. I would give it 4 1/2 stars if that option were available.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One woman's determination to find the shocking truth, November 15, 2003

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mockymen (Hardcover)

Mockymen is a science fiction saga by Ian Watson that stretches from the roots of Nazi atrocities to alien visitation in the year 2010, and which seems to promote cooperation between species on the surface -- yet has more sinister implications, such as the introduction of the drug Bliss (a chemical that renders a tiny percentage of its users stupefied zombies that the aliens can use as puppet bodies). It's one woman's determination to find the shocking truth behind the aliens that leads to an odyssey of murder and intrigue in this involving, original, and very highly recommended science fiction thriller.