A wild ride -- OOP '70s sci-fi that toes a number of strange lines. Algorithm is simultaneously a precursor to the cyberpunk movement soon to come, and a memorable imitation of Samuel Delany's style. That a Samuel R. Delaney (sic) quote adorns the cover is not exactly random praise: Jean Mark Gawron is primarily known as -- well, he's primarily known as an academic linguist, but in sci-fi circles, he's most familiar as the foremost expert on Delany's writing.

(I'm also assuming they were (and maybe still are) good friends.)

Algorithm could easily be mistaken for one of Delany's more experimental novels. It bends all the expectations in structure, language, plot, characters, and gender, just as you'd expect from Triton or Dhalgren. It's also challenging as hell to keep up with.

I legitimately don't know what the hell was happening for perhaps a third of the book, mostly due to characters' behaviors and actions receiving almost no surface explanation -- and often contradicting their own dialogue.

As far as I can tell -- the setup is the most challenging and abstruse part -- Algorithm is set in a distant future where Earth mostly exists as a capital of sleazy entertainment, a place where the most powerful -- and the heroes (& villains) of this novel -- are entertainers. After a paradigm shift in mathematics leads to history being predictable (hello, Foundation), our culture is nothing more than a hopeless fight against monotony.

In the case of Algorithm, 25 entertainers, known as Proets, turn a predicted assassination into a game for their audience. The Assassin themselves is a complete unknown: No one knows who they or their target will be. No one, for that matter, even fully knows if the Assassin is real or simply a metaphor for their own actions and missteps brought about by the prediction of the Assassin itself. The only understood part are that the 25 possible targets. Others, too -- the Juggler, Boz, the predicting computer (and, for a few moments, precursor to the Internet) Alphy -- insert themselves into the game to control or sway events to varying degrees. Violence is commonplace and, well, mostly boring, fitting into this monotonous world, although a few moments -- mostly two deaths told from the first person (hello, 2001) -- that absolutely broke me.

Despite how challenging Gawron's novel often is, I found it enthralling. I don't think I quite agree with Delany's cover blurb ('a breakneck chase through a luminous landscape') except for, perhaps, the final 20 pages, but there's a string of fascinating concepts and ahead-of-its-time moments that propelled me through the almost-academic plot: small inklings that show a greater respect for gender issues or predict half the cyberpunk tropes Neuromancer would soon give us, just with, you know, a heavy '70s flair.

I'm sure some of the details here are off -- as I said, it was often challenging to keep track of minor events or characters' behaviors. There are a *lot* of names, and most of them are only written peripherally. Characters sometimes die, and show up pages later as if nothing happened -- and I'm left scratching my head, wondering what I just missed.

Worth hunting down if you're interested in more experimental, post-modern sci-fi -- especially so if you're a fan of Chip Delany. I look forward to picking it up again some day, hoping to make more sense of the archaic aspects having already gone through it once before. ( )