The blog suffered a DDOS attack yesterday. (Distributed Denial Of Service – I knew the DOS part but not the distributed, which I looked up.)

Sorry for any inconvenience.

It seems robots were responsible and most them have now been blocked.

Fingers crossed for uninterrupted access.

Thanks again to Duncan for putting things to rights.

Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2007, 289 p. Originally published in 1980. Borrowed from a threatened library.

Mockingbird is set in the 25^th century in a dystopia wherein humans are kept docile by drugs, living with someone is a crime, Individuality and Privacy (definitely capitalised) valued above all else, no-one can read and no children are being born.

Robert Spofforth is an android of the highest specification; a Make Nine, powered by a controlled fusion battery, the only one of his kind to be created so as not to be able to kill itself as other Make Nines had done. And it (he?) wants to die. Its (his) viewpoint is rendered in the third person whereas those of Paul Bentley, a human who having taught himself how to read comes to Spofforth requesting a job as a reading tutor only to be refused, and Mary Lou Borne, whom Bentley has in turn taught to read, are in the form of first person journals. The ramifications of the interactions between these three are worked out over the course of the book as Spofforth sends Bentley to prison and takes Mary Lou to live with him (of necessity platonically.) Spofforth is, of course, almost more human than the humans in the book, certainly compared to the illiterate masses (who, though, appear only sketchily, apart from Bentley’s fellow prisoners and the religious sect he encounters after his escape.)

Mockingbird is part tragedy, part love story, part travelogue of this strange new world, a meditation on what it means to be human and how easily that could be thrown away, or drifted from. Its message of the importance to humanity of the capacity to read is perhaps even more timely now than when it was written.

Pedant’s corner:- The text was the USian one. Plus:- “oblivious of their presence” (oblivious to…) “standing there to the House of Reptiles” (in the House,) “pictures on one walk of the room (on one wall,) “felt of them with her fingers” (felt them.) “‘What become of her?’” (became, though it was in dialogue and could have been meant to be ungrammatical,) “but I do not think about the pain” (this was in a look back so “did not think”,) “except that It was wrapped” (it,) “‘I’d take ever damn one of them’” (every,) in Jesus’ name (Jesus’s,) “‘I had waked her’” (maybe not just an Alabama thing, then. But still; woken.)