The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny
155 pages
Published 1966 (expanded version of a novella published 1964)
Read from May 17 to May 18
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I did not "get" this book. I can't tell if that should be blamed on the text or on my own muddled interpretive faculties. Goodness knows I've had trouble in the past interpreting events and meanings not explicitly spelled out by the author. But it's also possible that Zelazny, in his need to write an artsy-fartsy New Wave novel, packed with literary allusions and myths and poetry quoted out of context, built up a grand edifice to house something inane.
At first The Dream Master reads like a generic early New Wave book: Psychiatry is a hard science! The frontiers of the mind are explored, manipulated, and understood with an amazing technology -- a technology only a relative handful of special individuals are capable of wielding. There's a genetically modified talking dog for some reason! As it goes on, the book gets more tangled up and postmodern. Random scenes are interposed with the main storyline, nameless voices carrying on thematic monologues that only make sense -- if at all -- when it ties together at the very end. It could all be very interesting -- I do love me some postmodern genre fic, when it's done well -- but as far as I can make out, the point of it all is, shall we say, underwhelming. Underneath the literary tricks and nonlinear storytelling is what amounts to be the most basic and generic sci-fi motif of the mid-20th century: A technological existence has coddled and softened humanity. The neuroses of the modern human condition revolt against social welfare with the weapons of Jungian myth. It's an awful lot of buildup and artistic obfuscation to convey the same overall moral as Alpha Centauri—Or Die!
But hey, maybe there's a lot more to it that I just didn't apprehend.
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