GRAY MATTERS, A NOVEL.
By William Hjortsberg '62. New York: Simon andSchuster, 1971. 160 pp. $4.95.
Early in his novel one of Mr. Hjortsberg's characters reflects, "One man's karma is another man's dharma." Precisely so. After reading Gray Matters, indeed, one might add several variations on that theme. "One man's satire is another man's science fiction," for example. Or, "One man's fantasy is another man's horror."
For Mr. Hjorstberg's book resists easy labeling. A novel it certainly is; the subtitle says so. Moreover, it is a mendaciously satiric novel. And it is also a fantasy, an imaginative prevision of life in the 25th century.
But whatever else it may be, Gray Matter is clearly in the mainstream of contemporary science fiction. It demonstrates several of the assumptions shared by many writers of that genre in recent years: it is a fantasy of the future; it has no apparent didactic intent; but above all it is anti-utopian.
Whereas earlier science fiction writers peered into the future to prefigure Utopia, in the pOSt-Hiroshima years the futuristic "Ucope has been reversed, and contemporary authors foresee not the bliss of Utopia hut the horrors of dystopia.
To be sure, some of the more prescient older hands had pointed the way to nightmare visions of dystopia: Huxley, Orwell even Wells. But it required the wildly 'proliferating technology of our own mid-century, the threat of human annihilation, our casual and impersonal attitude toward human life, and the growing disenchantment with science characteristic of our own time to turn the imagination of the science fiction writer toward the probability of a future earthly hell
And what a gray, mechanical hell Mr Hiorstberg conjures up! The time is the 25th century. Men are no longer men in any meaningful human sense but only disembodied brains "living" and functioning each in its own isolated, liquid-filled cranial container stored row on row in a Central De- pository "Cerebromorphs," these beings are called. Each of them is able electronically to communicate with a remote, mysterious Central Control which monitors, directs, and records their every thought and impulse. The cerebromorphs are cared for by electronically controlled robots, and the whole operation is governed by a vast array of self-regenerating computers.
If a cerebromorph can, by diligent study, advance through several Levels of Awareness it may expect to reach 360 degrees of Understanding, presumably the mystical comprehension of the nature of reality and illusion. Then the brain is decanted and transferred to a new, genetically perfect body—also created by Central Control from gene banks stored in humanoid hatcheries and sent forth into the upper world. There the brain-cum-body lives out its sterile, unhuman "life" in a primitive agricultural society, a contemplative existence as devoid of joy as it is of pain, until death merges both body and brain into the All-in-One.
So runs in barest outline Mr. Hjorstberg's vision of dystopia. The vision is occasionally muddled; his Active données raise some questions that even his extraordinary inventive imagination cannot answer. And ultimately, it seems to me, the vision is inconclusive. Mr. Hjorstberg tells a good yarn; he writes with a taut, economical intensity that makes his prose a pleasure to read. But such virtues aside, at the end a question persists: What's the point, really? Or so it seemed to this reader.
As he said, "One man's karma is another man's dharma."
Mr. Ross is an English Professor, currentlyon leave, and a specialist in Victorian andearly 20th-century literature.
