The Computer Connection; Alfred Bester; 1975

Another Nebula finalist.  With some of these finalists from the 70's, you go in with some trepidation, because while the winners tend to be good, the field is not so deep.  But this was Bester, na?  I was ready to love the Computer Connection.

Let's say Bester's 20-year absence from novel writing was not kind.  NYT reviewer Gerald Jonas's conclusion that it "cannot possibly be as much fun" for the reader as it was for the writer is spot on, I think.  There seems to be a lackadaisical approach to the writing, plotting, and research behind the novel that undermines one's ability to believe in the story and ultimately makes me want to throttle the committee that made this a Nebula finalist.  It's been a couple of weeks since I finished, but these are the problems that still burn in my mind: 

• Let's introduce new languages and then not use them.  Bester introduces Black Spanglish as a "common tongue", and writes some of the dialogue in this way, but Our Hero "translates for his diary" whenever Bester is too lazy to write in Spang.  All I can think is: Did Faulkner take days off when he was tired of writing in the way his characters talked?  No, no he didn't.
• Compost is faster than you think.  Instead of burial or cremation, bodies are put into the Compost Heaps.  When someone dear to Our Hero dies and is sent to the Compost, Our Hero goes into an amnesiac fugue state for three months, goes to Ceres, goes to Saturn, and when he comes home, goes compost diving in the hopes of finding a body, or even a skull.  Nuh-uh.  It's gone, even without the interplanetary travel.  See, for example, table 1 on page 2 of Pennsylvania's handy guide to Dead Animal Composting.  The worst part about this is that the easy fix is for him to go compost diving immediately after coming out of the amnesiac fugue; he might have believably had some unrealistic hope of finding something at that point, especially since he's just barely started to deal with his grief.  After the interplanetary travel...
• Pluto is closer than you think.  Humanity is struggling to mount a manned flight to Pluto (it's the opening premise of how the Chief makes his great discovery), but they can take jaunts to Ceres and there are mining colonies in the rings of Saturn that have been there long enough to severely reduce the amount of material in the rings.  I just don't believe that this level of infrastructure exists in the solar system while Pluto, about four times as far away as Saturn, remains out of reach.  Again, there's an easy solution: pick something farther out than Pluto.  Make it an inter-solar voyage.

I'm still pretty sure the Demolished Man was really good, but it's been 11 years and I'm worried maybe it's like one of those childhood memories that's rosy with age, like my fondness for Carole and Paula in the Magic Garden.

Aw, who am I kidding?  The chuckle patch is still hilarious.