Walter Tevis is a classic of American literature, not published in Russian. You and I may know him exclusively from the film adaptations of his books: Scorsese's "The Color of Money" with Paul Newman and a young Tom Cruise and "The Man Who Fell to Earth" with David Bowie - all this is his handiwork.
Tevis himself, in addition to being fond of writing, worked as a teacher at Ohio University, and like all teachers complained that "today the students have gone the wrong way": according to the writer, the literacy of young people in the 70s was at such a low level that he would not be surprised if they soon forgot how to write and read at all, and only puffed their joints, hoping that everything would be solved and become by itself.
But unlike many of his colleagues, Walter Tevis not only gundel and complained, but turned his thoughts into an idea for a book, and that's how "Mockingbird" was born, which was dubbed the logical continuation of "Fahrenheit 451."
The earth is approximately 22-23 centuries old. Technology has long crossed the line with fiction, so robots have taken over all the worries, while people can only engage in self-improvement and creativity, especially since they are saved from anxiety and excitement by daily consumed pills - a mixture of a tranquilizer with contraceptives.
But the place of self-development was taken by total laziness mixed with unhealthy indifference: robots, without control of their activities from the outside, went out of order, collapse in cities, neither elevators nor vending machines work, let alone more complex systems.
And yes, people have long forgotten how to read and write, moreover, it is now a crime, because other people's thoughts, other people's worries, other people's feelings can negatively affect the psycho-emotional state of the individual. And here is one craftsman named Paul Bentley, who accidentally discovered old children's books on literacy and learned to read himself, and now wants to teach others...
In Mockingbird, there are three main characters - a man (Paul), a woman (Mary Lou) and an immortal robot of the ninth model - Spofford. As usual in all dystopias, our heroes are not like everyone else, but if Paul and Mary Lou are typical characters of this genre, hungry for new emotions and knowledge, ready to love, build a family, create a new world in which there will be something other than eternal relaxation or a totalitarian sect, then Spofford is a kind of Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Enclosed in the body of a dark-skinned sex symbol: the last robot on Earth of the ninth model was created with an exact copy of the human brain of a real person, and therefore, to his own regret, he already feels and knows too much, which makes him absolutely alone in this world, because he is separated from the people living there twice - by the way of birth and by mental activity.
Imagine what a mockery: to be different from everyone else, and even to be like this forever.
The success of a dystopia is quite simple to determine: what is written or shown either seems relevant at any given time, or not (for example, it looks anachronistic 10 years after release, or it is hard to believe even immediately after creation).
"Mockingbird" will soon be 40, for a relatively young subgenre, this is quite a big age, but in the 1980s, and now it is readily believed in what Tevis wrote. About the fact that people have been reading less for 30 years, about the fact that they write more illiterate - no less, and how many times and in what forms the issues of the family format, birth control and robotization of the modern world have not been raised, and most importantly, all this is being said, raised and discussed now, and therefore if I did not know when the novel was created, I would quite believe that its author was one of my contemporaries.
Unlike many genre brothers, Travis does not draw us the world of the future as something rigidly hierarchical, his "trick" is precisely that even the existing hierarchy has long been erased.
Trying to deal with negative emotions as little as possible, people have completely destroyed not only the institution of the family (well, how else, when you worry more about your loved ones than for yourself, you don't sleep at night when a child has a stomach ache, or you are depressed because of the death of a parent), but also society as a whole: immersion in yourself and personal space, the right to which in some cultures is defended to this day, as a priority, they simply suppressed the fact that a person is a social animal.
What is most interesting is that there is nothing terrible in trying to avoid negativity and stressful situations, nor in the desire to be alone with yourself from time to time, but "Mockingbird" turns them to the reader so sideways that you rejoice in the fact that you yourself can still keep a pet at home and be socially useful not only as a performer of simple functions.
Since "Mockingbird" puts at the forefront precisely the inability of people of the future to read and the absence of writing in their world, and therefore everything accompanying it, such as the alphabet and books, then hidden and explicit quotations, references to literary works and silent films that used the text to demonstrate what is happening to its characters, become an important part of it.
The consciousness of Paul Bentley responds in a bizarre way to American poetry: lines from the work of Thomas Eliot and Robert Frost are perceived somewhat differently by him, and therefore reinterpreted by the reader. In fact, who are the "hollow people" from Eliot's poem of the same name, which the hero reads? Those who have nothing inside, and it is logical that we are not talking about internal organs.
We are filled with our feelings, our emotions, our knowledge, our experience, and as soon as this is reduced to zero, only dust remains, and a mixture of blood, bones, meat and connective tissues - and this is exactly what the comrades around Paul and Mary Lou are, which is why the robot detector seems more alive than those who were born from the womb.
Even a movie devoid of speech becomes just a set of funny moving pictures, and its characters, when you can't understand them, turn into "hollow people".
341.004 SRY