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The Forever Machine
(They'd Rather by Right)

Mark Clifton & Frank Riley
Hugo 1955

I searched used book stores for more than two years before finding an old copy of this second Hugo winner. One book store owner in Austin, Texas told me it was so hard to find because it was "the worst book that's ever won the Hugo Award." The first (and last I could find but just heard about a Starblaze edition published in 1981) paperback printing was in 1958 ­ at least the publishing companies must agree with this opinion.

Surprising myself and completely counter to my expectations, The Forever Machine stands out as a wonderful, lost classic exemplifying most of the best and most rewarding aspects of the science fiction genre. It has the social critique and assumption-challenging arguments of Le Guin's The Dispossessed, appreciation for diversity and psychological courage forshadowing books like More Than Human, and the vision of meta-psychic evolution more fully depicted in Julian May's Intervention.

But beware sensitive, intellectual egos, rigid thinking true believers of all stripes! This book will insult you. And this may be closer to the real reason The Forever Machine is so hard to find.

The great Zen teacher, Suzuki Roshi, taught the importance of keeping a "beginner's mind" ­ an outlook and openness unnarrowed by attachment to concepts. This book acts this idea out in a futuristic but closed-minded society gripped by social "opinion control" manipulated by political "semantics twisters".

In the introduction to the leather-bound Easton edition, Barry Malzberg describes this as one of the books that is more fun to think about than to read. This does detract from the purely entertainment value but a great sense of humor keeps the enjoyment level up. It may have one of the highest ratios between challenging statements to number of pages for almost any novel, more than most social science text books in fact. Here are a few examples:

"...no man stands on the pedestal he pretends to occupy."

"Catch phrases had not yet been manufactured to supply the magnetic islands around which convictions could form."

"The secret of any psychotherapy is that the doctor should be less twisted than the patient. This is seldom possible. True, he may be twisted in some other way, but if he simply substitutes one twist for another, he has gained nothing."

"It's pretty human to smash the guy or the thing which tries to tell us something we don't want to hear."

"Man has a way of surviving physical destruction, but there was a large question of whether he could survive self-knowledge."

"A human being is seldom bothered with insufficient data; often the less he has, the more willing he is to give a firm opinion"

Cynical? Yes. A little short on suspense and entertainment? Yes. Worth reading? Definitely, yes.

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