Customer Reviews

Sykaos Papers

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This book is a political tract. E.P.Thompson was a Marxist historian but most famous in Britain as a leading campaigner against nuclear weapons. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament dated back to the 50's and ran out of steam gradually until the strategy of stationing nuclear-armed cruise missiles in England as a response to the Soviet SS20 abruptly revived it. Everything in the story is a mere lead-up to the heroine's account, viewed from the moon, of the nuclear big bang. The tone of the writing here is like nothing else in the book and made my blood run cold when I read it while sunning myself on a rooftop in Malta.

The rest of the book is -- well, what exactly? Thompson was no novelist, although the book is very enjoyable and in places very funny. Oi Paz must be the least intimidating alien invader there ever was. He gets stuck in a tree when he first tries to land, he speaks in a contralto voice until his testicles finally descend helped by the prosperous terrestrial conditions, he disapproves of the boozy ways of the academics until he discovers whisky, and a certain amount more of this sort of thing. I suppose you can find some social satire in it, but not a lot and not consistently. There is probably a bit of Gulliver in it all, but it reads more to me like a flight of fancy rather than anything with a consistent thread through it other than the growing menace of the nukes.

With the cold war and the Soviet Union now behind us Sykaos is worth reading 'lest we forget'. The filthy things are still with us, as we get periodic reminders supposing we need them. In his politics Thompson was neither pro-Soviet nor anti-American: the man who was both of those was England's most famous right-winger of the time, Brigadier Enoch Powell, another opponent of nuclear weapons in or for Britain but all from a different standpoint. The whole issue has rather dropped below the horizon in recent years. Now when there is little or no mileage in trying to pin communism on opponents of nuclear arms and when the status of NATO is getting increasingly problematical we might be collectively capable of some rational thinking about how we extricate ourselves from the mess we have got ourselves into. To say the least, we have been lucky so far and our luck can do without being pushed.

Despite the appearances this isn't a science fiction story. You'll find in it many question about our way of living, about what is considered rational, what is freedom and what is love. This story will change your mood, you'll feel dropped in it. You'll also learn how our world could be doomed.

Thank you very much, I was looking for this item and you were my last chance to get it, I'll enjoy it until last page, Norma.

Satire is really really really rilly rilly hard to get right. People whose name is not Vonnegut, Heller, etc. should not bother to try, thankyouverymuch.

Look, I understand what he was trying to go for, but it doesn't cut the mustard. Try Lem instead. Or try Canticle for Leibowitz... Sykaos is compared to that book sometimes and it is not a decent comparison-- Canticle is actually good, and Sykaos is very limp.

Sykaos papers is one of those science fiction books where an alien person with human-like aspects gets set down on earth and we observe our culture through his eyes. It's sort of like _Stranger in a Strange Land_, but Thompson lacks both Heinlein's skill and weird politics.

The book is cleverly written, and parts of it are genuinely entertaining. Thompson is far too clever by half with the names (Jane A. Crostic and A.N. Other) and ties in Oitar (where the alien Oi Paz comes from) a little too neatly with earth. Falls somewhere short of social satire but isn't escapist enough to be science fiction.