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    Mockingbird
    Mockingbird
    Mockingbird
    Audiobook9 hours

    Mockingbird

    Written by Walter Tevis

    Narrated by Robert Fass and Nicole Poole

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In a world where the human population has suffered devastating losses, a handful of survivors cling to what passes for life in a post-apocalyptic, dying landscape. A world where humans wander, drugged and lulled by electronic bliss. A dying world of no children and no art, where reading is forbidden. And a strange love triangle: Spofforth, who runs the world, the most perfect machine ever created, whose only wish is to die; and Paul and Mary Lou, a man and a woman whose passion for each other is the only hope for the future of human beings on earth.



    An elegiac dystopia of mankind coming to terms with its own imminent extinction, Mockingbird was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 1, 2016
    ISBN9781515973720
    Mockingbird

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    Reviews for Mockingbird

    4/5

    298 ratings17 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Somehow feels like it was written a long time ago, mostly because of the strangely weird technology that seemed completely mishandled, sometimes too advanced (mind reading buses...) and otherwise not so much. The motivation of the main characters also felt a bit off at times.
    • 5/5
      This is the way the world ends
      This is the way the world ends
      This is the way the world ends
      Not with a bang but a whimper.       —T. S. Eliot (The Hollow Men)

      In a grim yet quiet future, humanity is slowly dying out as each individual sinks further into themselves and togetherness is seen as a shameful violation of privacy. One man stumbles across the ancient art of reading and finds his perspective shaken. One woman, who deliberately slipped through the cracks years ago, is going to destroy it entirely. Her intellect, his sensitivity, and the suicidal longings of an android unable to forget anything will determine the ultimate fate of the species.

      Readers should be advised there is a single, casual, racist use of "Indian" in this book in reference to the Indigenous peoples of North America.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      There was an interesting setup - a superintelligent android, the man who rediscovered reading, a woman who refused to take the mind-control drugs - but there wasn't the payoff in the end that I was hoping for. The long stretches of diary entries by Paul felt like filler in places, not really fitting in to the rest of the story in any way that led somewhere. I think you are supposed to admire the way he reinvents the emotions of love and compassion for himself, but too much of it comes of as kind of obtuse. Probably for its time the way love and sex were depicted in the book were provocative although it's hard to see them that way now. For a dystopian novel there was a lot less of the atmosphere of doom around our characters than most because of the general breakdown in systems that felt to me like it didn't gibe with the idea of a superintelligent being. Perhaps it was the suicidal tendencies that Spofford harbored that ended up being expressed in the world he was supposed to take care of.
    • 3/5
      I didn't think I'd ever heard of Tevis, but as it turns out, he wrote 'The Man Who Fell to Earth,' (and, less relevantly, 'The Color of Money.')
      I'm also surprised that I never came across this book before, because in many ways, it's right up my alley - and I feel like I would have been even more enthused about it shortly after it was published, than now.
      In theme, and some particulars, the book is very reminiscent of 'Brave New World.' Set in a future New York City, a reduced, obedient populace self-medicates and approaches life with apathy. Robots serve people's needs - but everything is decaying, breaking down, and there are no children.
      In this bleak world, we meet three people - Spofforth, a handsome black robot whose programming prevents him from carrying out his suicidal urges; and two humans whose relationship is complicated by Spofforth: Mary Lou, a rebel who's ceased taking the soma-like drugs provided to all people, and Bentley, a teacher - such as a teacher can be in a society which has largely forgotten what reading is. Bentley's discovery of reading, coinciding with his meeting Mary Lou, leads him to start questioning what's going on around him, and what's happening to humanity.
      Overall, I liked the book - some nice commentary on the nature of humanity, and, of course, anything pro-reading is something I can get behind! (Even if the concept of learning to read from decaying, subtitled 1920's celluloid films in the 25th century is a little bit ridiculous… sorry, the originals are not going to be playable by then, even with ideal storage conditions.) However, it does feel a little dated - several aspects of the book made me feel more like it could have been written in 1960 rather than 1980; especially the social fears referenced by Spofforth's physical description (African American) and how he interacts in the plot.
    • 5/5
      A simply amazing story. How have I never heard of this book before? It is a stunningly rendered character study set in the years 2466 and 2467. The last generation of humans is living out their final days in a drug-induced stupor while the robot-controlled world crumbles around them. Tevis imbues all three of his first-person narrators with wonderful depth. He even manages to flip things around at times to show Robert Spofforth, the last robot of his kind - and the individual basically running the world - as having more human qualities than the remaining humans around him.

      The character we spend the most time with, and that therefore exhibits the most growth, is Paul Bentley. Bentley is a male human who has somehow, against all odds, taught himself to read. And that is the linchpin upon which the fate of humanity rests. It's a cool riff on the power of reading or, "the touching of other men's minds", as it is put in the book.

      The third narrator is Mary Lou Boren, a human female who is a highly intelligent rebel living on the fringes of a dying society. When Paul and she meet, it is her smarts and insights that propel Paul's growing awareness in directions he had never considered. I do wish that Mary Lou had not then been relegated to a more subordinate role but, considering the other strengths of the book and that we spend the least amount of time in her head, that is a relatively small complaint.

      This is the last book I will be able to fit into my 2015 reading and it turns out to be one of the best of the year.

      Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Curious mix of known tropes from science and literary fiction. It goes into deeper reflections than a conventional post-apocalyptic story and transmits strongly the loneliness and sadness of the setting. The idea is good and the words are well chosen, but the plot evolves in irregular steps, with big jumps between long flat stretches.
    • 5/5
      Wow, just wow. Why has this work not come to my attention before? I can see now why it's in the Masterworks series.

      If you're looking for adventure or a fast-paced thriller - walk away now. This is a slow-burner with a gentle pace, but it'll keep you hooked. Set a couple of hundred years in the future, the world is on a downward spiral. No great catastrophe, or alien incursion - just a running-down of humanity. A couple of sparks still exist that might rekindle the flame - a near omniscient robot, and the one man left who can read. The slow unfolding of their stories is set out in a simple and measured way: the writing is very good indeed.

      I'm not going to elaborate further on the story, and you shouldn't read the blurb before diving in. Just read it.
    • 4/5
      A classic and justly famous dystopia, written in a deceptively simple fashion and quite moving (watching the two leads rediscover literacy and love was surprisingly gripping).
    • 3/5
      Mockingbird is a book about an android who is weary of life and can't kill himself and the human race who is killing itself and too drugged to be weary of life.

      It was in parts a beautiful book and a novel exploration of well-trodden themes.

      I had some issues with artistic choices that the author made which made me drop this from a 4 star to a 3 star book. First, the author sacrifices immersion in the world for plot. I know that there are good reasons for doing so and that his chosen "voice", that of journal entries, does not lend itself to the type of immersion that I would find satisfying. Additionally, I found some of the repetitions of bits of poetry to pull me out of the experience as well. It wasn't that they did not fit with the voice and story, it was just unsatisfying.
    • 3/5
      Perhaps I'm losing my taste for dystopias, at least the futuristic kind. Reading the gushing reviews all over the internet makes me feel almost as isolated from society as the inhabitants of Tevis's moribund 25th century USA.

      The big idea is that after the standard technological misadventures - WWIII, fallout, mass-death, global government - humankind has come to eschew all interaction and individual expression, with people retreating into their inner worlds while being fed, clothed and stupefied with fertility-inhibiting drugs by a decrepit robotocracy prone to malfunction and scarcely able to perpetuate itself. The chief symptom of this great turning-inward is that no-one can read anymore (nor does anyone want to), and so enter our hero, a middle-aged everyman Adam who manages to rediscover this long-suppressed art by viewing an old educational film hidden in a stash of pornos. This, and his happening upon a latter-day Eve who is the only undrugged, fertile woman left in the world, sparks a competently-plotted journey of discovery with a conclusion highly satisfying to all involved.

      A couple of bits I liked: the background phenomenon of people publicly immolating themselves in threes as the ennui gets too much for them. And the best thing in the book, an uplifting conversation with a bus which seems to have driven right out of a Douglas Adams story.

      So I suppose I'd have to recommend this strongly to anyone who likes this kind of thing. It's not a bad book. But there are three reasons I didn't enjoy it, and at least two of them must warrant depriving it of a star:

      Firstly and perhaps most unfairly, I found it a chore to read, because most of the book is written from the perspective of people with only a basic level of (emotional and actual) literacy. So the more successful Tevis is in demonstrating the constraints of his characters, the less room there is for any dynamism in the prose. I appreciate that most people prefer a plain style, but this isn't Hemingway... it's an immersion in the painful struggle of the characters to express things that we take for granted. I got the point fairly early on and by the end felt as weary as you'd expect after several hours in the company of people with very little emotional experience and limited capacity to express it.

      Second, I was pretty unconvinced by Tevis's choice of dystopia. Sure, we can always point at our modern connected media-infused over-medicated existences and say this book is prophetic, but you can find something prophetic about any SF novel. That's kind of the point, isn't it? I think where Tevis lost me was with his universal child brainwashing complexes and non-existent economy (free basics for all and no work). In general I find more plausible those scenarios born of entropy than those born of some sinister over-arching system.

      Finally I suspect part of the reason I'm not so moved as Everyone Else on the Internet is because this is very much a "triumph of the human spirit" novel. I can't stand triumphs of the human spirit. I also dislike the fetishisation of reading, and though I don't think "Mockingbird" goes that far, many of its cheerleaders do.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful, pure, sci-fi novel that had me hooked from start to finish. Imagine a world where laws are in place governing Privacy and Individualism which ultimately means talking and communicating with each other are crimes as are reading and cohabiting. People have no idea of the concept of words such as 'reading' 'books' or 'family' as they are fed a diet of drugs to nullify their existence in such a world. Human existence is also threatened and no children have been born for many years.

      Mockingbird centres around three main characters as they try and find their way of being within such a society. Spofforth, a Make Nine robot the most intelligent and advanced robot ever made but who, unfortunately, was also created with feelings and emotions. Bentley, a human, who is one of the few alive who has the ability to read and has an undeniable thirst for books and the need for love and finally, Mary Lou, a woman who manages to get through life without using 'sopors' the drugs that keep humankind obedient and with the ability to live in such an empty and loveless world.

      In one of her passages Mary Lou sums up the world:

      " Why don't we talk to one another? Why don't we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then - perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics, but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behaviour of their teen-age children...And they read, hearing voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said "I am human, I talk and listen and I read" ~ Why can no one read? What happened?"

      In Mockingbird Tevis has managed to create an extremely sad dystopia and there is a reason why this is amongst the Science Fiction Masterworks series. In my opinion, a masterpiece in futuristic writing.
    • 4/5
      A beautifully written dystopic novel. My only gripe is a personal one, as I tend to find these kinds of novels somewhat conservative and technophobic in outlook. The fear that technological advancements meant to make life easier will 'kill' something essential within the human spirit strikes me as a little atavistic. But maybe that's just me. This is a beautiful novel.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book! I still think about it every now and then and how amazing the author - to a certain degree - predicts our future. We are all connected to technology and allowing our lives to be taken over by "robots" ie cell phones, ipads, computers. Would this book become our reality if we aren't careful? Makes you think - that's for sure! The book was written in the 60's (I believe) and paints a picture of a far away future. No one can read, no one can write - and it is a crime to do either. The robots make the humans use drugs so we stay in a state of obedience. Sex is a meaningless act with anyone and there are no children or marriages. Everyone should read this book. I think it should be a requirement in high school or college.
    • 3/5
      Weird dreamy book. I read it originally in 1980 (or thereabouts) and it kept haunting me at odd moments, though memory definitely played tricks on me as I could see in the reread, there were parts I didn't recall at all, and parts I recalled as far more significant as they appear. But an exploration of the future and technology and giving people what they want, as opposed to what they need, is always worth reading. This book is definitely dated, but it pulls you in nonetheless. It's so sad, and you realize that without the ability to read and get information from elsewhere, you are totally the victim of your upbringing. I'm glad I found it again.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating idea, not executed as well as it could be, but it will stick with you.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting dystopian book that takes place around the 2400's. It's very interesting how the author chose to make different levels of robots, none of which were very intelligent. Usually, robot societies are overcome by the robots, but in this book, society is overcome by just one robot. A suicidal robot. Interesting read.
    • 5/5
      The Empire State Building stands as a tombstone to a dead civilization haunted by the literate thoughts of three dimly aware radicals.