Although his previous output had for several decades been nothing short of prodigious, by the mid-'70s, sci-fi great Robert Silverberg was finally beginning to slow down. The author had released no fewer than 23 sci-fi novels during his initial, "pulpy" phase (1954 - '65), and a full 23 more from 1967 - '72, his second, more mature, more literate period. And following 1972's "Dying Inside"--whose central conceit of a telepath losing his powers has often been seen as corresponding to Silverberg's self-professed, supposed diminution of his own writing abilities (not that any reader would ever be aware of it)--for the first time in the author's career, there were no new sci-fi novels for several years. But as it turned out, Silverberg still had two more major works up his sleeve before calling it quits in 1976 (before he came roaring back with his Lord Valentine series, starting in 1980): "The Stochastic Man" (1975) and "Shadrach in the Furnace" (1976). A look at the 1975 work will surely make readers wonder why Silverberg ever thought of taking a break at all, as the book is as imaginative, beautifully written and mind expanding as any other in the author's canon. Nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the novel lost out, on both fronts, to Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War," yet remains an eminently entertaining and thought-provoking work, now almost 40 years later. The tale is told by Lew Nichols in the, uh, futuristic, cusp-of-the-millennia (December 2000) setting of a decayed and strife-ridden New York City, one that makes the urban rot of the mid-'70s seem like a Legoland. Nichols had enjoyed a very unusual occupation, doing stochastic projections for major clients. (I'll save you the trouble of looking it up: "Stochastic" simply means "involving chance or probability.") Using mathematical formulae ("Kolmogorov axioms, Ehrenhaft games, Markov chains, the Pascal triangle," etc.), Nichols is able to make better-than-educated guesses regarding future events. Married to a beautiful Indian woman and residing away from the urban violence in his protected Staten Island enclave, life is certainly good for Nichols. And that life becomes even more exciting when he meets NYC mayoral hopeful Paul Quinn at a party and joins his staff. With Nichols' assistance, Quinn wins the election in a landslide and then sets his eyes on the presidency. Meanwhile, Nichols' stochastic gifts soon begin to seem like weak tea indeed when he encounters a little old man named Martin Carvajal, who has the uncanny knack of being able to look into the future with perfect accuracy, and who claims that that future is unalterable.... While "The Stochastic Man" is as gripping and entertaining a sci-fi tale as any fan might hope for, its underlying message of mankind living in an inflexibly rigid, deterministic universe is one that many readers might feel uncomfortable with. Not since Cornell Woolrich's great 1945 thriller "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes," perhaps, has such a bleak vision been presented to us, and even Jon Davis, host of the Quasi-Official Robert Silverberg Web Site, mentions that he finds the novel a bit "unpleasant." The book is a fairly serious affair, and almost completely devoid of humor. What little humor there IS to be found is largely of the black variety, such as Silverberg's descriptions of the extreme violence that transpires during a typical NYC week (the Harlem forces use Syrian tanks to attack Spanish Harlem; the Puerto Ricans retaliate, with the aid of three Israeli colonels, by firebombing the Apollo!), and the fact that most of Quinn's staff is comprised of Armenians--Missakian, Ephrikian, Mardikian...everybody, it would seem, except a Kardashian! (And yes, it IS a tad difficult at first to keep these names straight.) Silverberg, as usual, peppers his tale with any number of imaginative touches; thus, the powdered calcium bone that people smoke to get high; the new, faddish Transit Creed religion that Nichols' wife becomes infatuated with and that leads to marital discord; Carvajal's diagrammatic explanation as to just how his divining abilities might work. Typical for the author in this, his liberated second phase, there are numerous erotic--and even borderline graphic--sex scenes in the book; Silverberg, after all, to make a living between 1959 and '67, had also written around 150 sex novels, with such marvelous titles as "The Bra Peddlers," "Lesbian Love," "Lust Cult," "Passion Peeper" and "Dial O-R-G-Y." As in his 1968 novel "The Masks of Time," the raucous events surrounding the end of the millennium figure prominently. And as in his hallucinatory 1971 novel of the far-distant future, "Son of Man," here, the Earth of a billion years hence is imagined by Nichols in one surreal sequence ("Mechanical birds, twittering like creaky gates, flutter overhead"). "The Stochastic Man," good as it is--and if I have been remiss in stressing this, let me say right here that this IS Silverberg very near the top of his game, and that modern sci-fi doesn't get too much better than that--is not a perfect novel, and its author makes a few errors here and there. Nichols' hair, for example, is said to be "light" at the opening and "dark" around 100 pages later. In addition, Silverberg's own stochastic powers were a bit off as regards a NYC terrorist attack; it wasn't the Statue of Liberty that was obliterated, but rather another downtown landmark! And there was no Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the year 2000, as it turned out; it was reorganized after 1979. But these are minor matters. Nichols and Carvajal are wonderful and likable characters, the story is a fascinating one, the political machinations are realistically intricate, and indeed the book overall is fairly unputdownable. For an author who felt that his writing powers were on the wane, this book stands as a stark denial. One does not need any stochastic abilities whatsoever to predict a reader's great satisfaction after turning the final page of this wonderfully inventive piece of work....
‘Lew Nichols is in the business of stochastic prediction. A mixture of sophisticated analysis and inspired guesswork, it is the nearest man can get to predicting the future. And Nichols is very good at it. His uncanny accuracy in guessing the future quickly makes him indispensable to Paul Quinn, the ambitious and charismatic mayor of New York whose sights are firmly set on the presidency.But there is nothing paranormal about stochastic prediction: Nichols can’t actually see the future. However, the strange and reclusive Martin Carvajal apparently can, and he offers to help Nichols to do so too. Nichols, caught up in his obsessive desire to help Quinn into the White House, can’t resist, even though he can clearly see the devastating impact that knowing in advance every act of his life has on Carvajal. For Carvajal has even seen his own death.A brilliant and thoughtful novel, entertaining and insightful, The Stochastic Man explores the double-edged weapon of total clairvoyant knowledge of the future in characteristically potent and clear-eyed prose.’Blurb from the 2001 Gollancz SF Collector’s edition.Looking twenty-five years ahead from the time of writing to the year 2000 – a year already linked in the public consciousness with prophecies and apocalypse – Silverberg is himself the stochastic man. Like his hero, Lew Nichols, he uses what data he possesses to extrapolate a likely Millennial scenario.Lew makes a good living at it, working hard to collate data and analyse it to establish how trends and possible events will affect each other and sells his forecast to various firms and individuals who consult him regarding business plans or investments.Lew has a penthouse apartment in a segregated area of New York, a trophy wife and a happy life until the day he is invited to work for Paul Quinn, a man keen to be the next Mayor of New York. With Lew’s help, Quinn is duly elected and has set his ambitious eye on the Presidency.Lew is happy to help. Quinn has no chance of even being nominated as a candidate for the next election, but after that there is a good chance of him making it into the White House.One day, the mysterious Martin Carvajal arrives to see Lew; an elderly man who has amassed a fortune from shrewd investments. Carvajal is also in the business of making predictions, although his precognition does not come from analysing data or trends. He sees it, in his head.Around the same time Lew’s wife, Sundara, gets involved with a cult group with peculiar beliefs.Carvajal believes in predestination. He feels he has no choice in what will happen to him. His life is foreordained. he has seen it already, even the moment of his own death, and is convinced there is nothing he can do to change anything. He came to see Lew because he’d already seen it happen and knew how the conversation would go.Sundara, in contrast, has begun to believe in randomness and chaos, leaving Lew having to deal with both viewpoints; Carvajal’s rigid order and Sundara’s chaos.Carvajal then agrees to teach Lew how to see, or rather, how to receive the visions of his future life.The consequences on his work are not good. Lew’s advice to the prospective president begins to get strangely eccentric and specific and he can give no reason why, for instance, Quinn should start interviewing new police-chiefs although Lew is insistent that the current police-chief will resign.Lew of course is fired, mainly because Quinn does not want to be associated with what the public might perceive as witchcraft. Subsequently, the unexpected rioting and violence during the Millennium celebrations – with which some of the police join in – make the police chief’s position untenable, and he is forced to resign.A chilling aspect of the book is that Quinn – from Lew’s visions of the future – will become what is tantamount to a fascist dictator. Lew’s response to this is apathetic to the point of amorality. His grasp of his visions are such that now he knows nothing can be changed. There is no point in his having a moral opinion on the issue.
What do You think about The Stochastic Man (2001)?
sto·chas·tic stəˈkastik/adjective: stochastic: randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.First published in 1975 and nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, The Stochastic Man is one of Silverberg’s darker novels.Lew Nichols is a predictor of future events, following trends and forecasting popular inclinations for a New York politician with national ambitions. He is then confronted with a mentor who can make more exact predictions.Similar to Stephen King’s 1979 The Dead Zone, there is an air of impending doom reminiscent of King or Richard Mathieson. This is also comparable to Robert Penn Warren’s All the King's Men and Messiah by Gore Vidal, with an atmosphere of heady and tense proclivity to power.Silverberg uses this setting as a vehicle to examine themes of free will determination, existential angst and acceptance of paranormal evidence.
—Lyn
The Stochastic Man was a story about a particular man’s political campaign, but I think its main intent was to address interesting ideas of concerning free will and determinism. I found the story to be much more interesting as it moved away from the day-to-day details of Paul Quinn’s political career and began to discuss the implications of the Transit belief system and Carvajal’s devastating supernatural clairvoyance. Aside from Lew and Carvajal, the characters weren’t particularly deeply developed, and most minor characters were primarily characterized by their ethnicity. Silverberg’s ‘future’ NYC may have little in common with actual turn-of-the-century NYC, but the location never felt much more than sketched out. I’m glad to have read The Stochastic Man, in the end, but I have a suspicion that this is not the best of Silverberg’s novels. Full TethyanBooks Review!
—Allie
Ambientato alla fine del ventesimo secolo, questo romanzo ha come protagonista Lew Nichols, un uomo che basa la propria attività lavorativa sulla capacità di prevedere il futuro basandosi su indagini probabilistiche ed un innato intuito.A sconvolgere la sua vita sono due avvenimenti principali: il desiderio di aiutare nella scalata al potere l’uomo politico Paul Quinn e l’incontro con Martin Carvajal, quest’ultimo non solo capace di intuire il futuro, ma di vederlo.Purtroppo la visione pessimistica riguardo al libero arbitrio, non motivata seriamente, unitamente al finale aperto, rovina la trama inizialmente interessante della storia.Il resto della recensione è presso http://snurl.com/uso48 .
—Giacomo Boccardo
