Issue #38
Last Update May 19, 2005
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Arts Cheap Complex Devices by Gerry Krownstein Works of literature that develop from an author's sense of playfulness are either delightful and intriguing or totally annoying, depending on the author's skill and wit. Cheap Complex Devices, by John Compton Sundman, is in fact delightful and intriguing.
The conceit upon which this short novel (or long novelette) is based is that a competition has been established for story-writing computer programs; that two novels were entered, one of which was lost, and that the surviving computer-written story (titled Bees, or The Floating Point Error) forms the basis of the book we are reading. A preface gives the history of the contest and some background on the programming effort required to create story-writing software.
Bees is by turns the humorous and pathetic musings of a badly damaged entity. Whether the entity is a borderline-psychotic human or a buggy program is for the reader to decide. There is no real plot, and what story-line movement there is twists and turns upon itself. Somehow we as readers are persuaded to care for this person. (The contest that supposedly spawned Bees is a variant on the Turing test in which a person asks questions of a computer in another room; if the questioner can't tell whether or not the answers are coming from a human being, the computer is deemed to be intelligent. In this case, if the reader can't tell whether or not the story being read was written by a human, the program is a person.)
The protagonist, whatever it is is, thinks himself by turns part of a group mind (a bee, in this case), a hardware designer forced to become a technical writer when his design for a floating point unit turns out to be buggy, and machine with unbalanced electrolytes. Philosophical disquisitions alternate with sexual fantasies and personal history, with periodic RESETs when thought careers completely out of control.
This book, though strange, is well worth reading. It is well written, amusing, poignant and thought provoking. It also has a lot to say about what it means to be human.
Cheap Complex Devices, by John Compton Sundman - Rosalita Associates, Tisbury MA. ISBN 1-929752-30-X
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