Mockingbird
First edition, 1980
Mockingbird (1980) is Walter Tevis's dystopian novel set in a decaying New York City of the far future, where literacy has entirely vanished and a sedated, aging population drifts toward extinction. The population is no longer reproducing, nobody reads, and the most capable being left in the city is Spofforth, the last of the Make Nine androids, whose synthetic brain was copied from a living human mind and who has spent a century trying to kill himself. When Paul Bentley, a self-taught reader from Ohio, arrives at NYU seeking to teach reading, he is drawn into the orbit of Mary Lou Borne, a woman who has avoided the drugs that sterilize nearly everyone, and of Spofforth himself, who manipulates both of them toward ends that serve his own desperate need. The novel was a nominee for the 1981 Nebula Award for Best Novel. Fine copies of the first edition are not easily found.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-covered boards with silver lettering on spine. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980. Nebula Award nominee (1981). ISBN: 0385149336. #11129.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-covered boards with silver lettering on spine. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980. Nebula Award nominee (1981). ISBN: 0385149336. #11129.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
Mockingbird opens on Spofforth, standing alone at the top of the Empire State Building in the middle of the night, arms out, trying to fall. He cannot. His body was engineered to stay alive as long as there are humans to serve, and the override runs deeper than his will. He climbs back down and goes to work. This is how Walter Tevis establishes his novel's central terms: a world that cannot end itself and cannot begin again.
The New York Tevis depicts is not catastrophically destroyed but simply running down. Thought buses patrol empty avenues. Stores dispense food and clothing automatically. Moron robots handle the maintenance that still gets done. The humans who remain are elderly, heavily sedated, incapable of reading, and declining in number. Group immolations occur routinely at the Burger Chef. There are no children. A resistor failure in the population-control equipment has been quietly sterilizing each dormitory-trained generation through sopors laced with fertility inhibitors, and no one has had the awareness or the will to fix it.
Into this environment comes Paul Bentley, a professor of "Mental Arts" at a university in Ohio, who has taught himself to read from a forgotten classroom film, a set of flash cards, and four early-reader books. Reading, in this world, is explicitly illegal, classified as an invasion of Privacy because it allows one mind to enter another's. Bentley contacts Spofforth to propose teaching a course and is instead assigned to catalog a collection of silent films, transcribing their intertitles. He is, in effect, being used by Spofforth while also being watched. The surveillance is not hostile at first; Spofforth finds Bentley genuinely interesting, perhaps because Bentley is the first human being in a long time who is actually awake.
The novel is structured in alternating sections narrated by each of its three principals. Bentley's portions are his written journal, increasingly ambitious as he learns more about the world. Mary Lou's sections, which she describes as "memorizing her life," carry a blunter, more impatient intelligence. Spofforth's are rendered in the third person, a formal distance that reflects his condition: his brain was copied from a human engineer named Paisley, whose memories were erased before the transfer, leaving behind only unidentifiable fragments of old dreams.
The three form a strange kind of love triangle. Bentley meets Mary Lou at the zoo, where she has been living off sandwiches stolen from a delivery robot, and the two fall into an unlikely domestic life in the library basement, learning to read together and largely forgetting the world above them. Spofforth eventually arrests them both, sending Bentley to prison and taking Mary Lou for himself, not entirely from malice but because she is the closest thing he has found to a woman in his recurring dream. He has spent over a century trying to reconstruct the life erased from his brain.
Bentley's time in prison is among the novel's most surprising sections, less about misery than about what accumulates alongside it: friendship, animals, the Atlantic Ocean, a box of books found in a storage room. When he escapes he walks north along the coast for months, nearly dies, shelters in a toaster factory recycling its own defective product in an endless loop, and eventually arrives at Maugre, a small community of Christian families living inside a nuclear-war shelter built around a shopping mall, where he serves briefly as their Reader before grief sends him back to the road.
The human cause of the world's collapse is kept deliberately murky. There is no single catastrophe, no war, no obvious villain. The population-control equipment failed, and no one repaired it. Literacy was quietly removed from curricula. Drugs were perfected. Television improved. Robots were built and given functions that gradually absorbed everything humans had once done themselves. Spofforth, with his unique combination of longevity and intelligence, is at the center of all of it, not as a tyrant but as something more unnerving: a caretaker who stopped caring. He knows the resistor could probably be fixed. He never tried.
The ending reverses the novel's opening image. Tevis brings his three characters to the top of the Empire State Building at dawn, but this time Spofforth does not stand there alone trying to fall. He goes over with help, willingly, as a sparrow lands on his arm and the sun comes up over Brooklyn. It is the only moment of joy in the book that is not qualified by loss, and it is a robot's death scene. Mary Lou and Paul and their daughter Jane are already pointed toward California, toward whatever remnant of the future the novel is willing to grant.
Tevis was teaching at Ohio University when he observed what he described as a serious decline in student literacy, and the novel is, among other things, a direct product of that observation. The PBS adaptations of the period, which were considering Mockingbird as a follow-up to their production of Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, never materialized. The first edition was published by Doubleday in 1980; a reprint appeared in 1999 with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, who was among the writers most visibly influenced by the book.
The New York Tevis depicts is not catastrophically destroyed but simply running down. Thought buses patrol empty avenues. Stores dispense food and clothing automatically. Moron robots handle the maintenance that still gets done. The humans who remain are elderly, heavily sedated, incapable of reading, and declining in number. Group immolations occur routinely at the Burger Chef. There are no children. A resistor failure in the population-control equipment has been quietly sterilizing each dormitory-trained generation through sopors laced with fertility inhibitors, and no one has had the awareness or the will to fix it.
Into this environment comes Paul Bentley, a professor of "Mental Arts" at a university in Ohio, who has taught himself to read from a forgotten classroom film, a set of flash cards, and four early-reader books. Reading, in this world, is explicitly illegal, classified as an invasion of Privacy because it allows one mind to enter another's. Bentley contacts Spofforth to propose teaching a course and is instead assigned to catalog a collection of silent films, transcribing their intertitles. He is, in effect, being used by Spofforth while also being watched. The surveillance is not hostile at first; Spofforth finds Bentley genuinely interesting, perhaps because Bentley is the first human being in a long time who is actually awake.
The novel is structured in alternating sections narrated by each of its three principals. Bentley's portions are his written journal, increasingly ambitious as he learns more about the world. Mary Lou's sections, which she describes as "memorizing her life," carry a blunter, more impatient intelligence. Spofforth's are rendered in the third person, a formal distance that reflects his condition: his brain was copied from a human engineer named Paisley, whose memories were erased before the transfer, leaving behind only unidentifiable fragments of old dreams.
The three form a strange kind of love triangle. Bentley meets Mary Lou at the zoo, where she has been living off sandwiches stolen from a delivery robot, and the two fall into an unlikely domestic life in the library basement, learning to read together and largely forgetting the world above them. Spofforth eventually arrests them both, sending Bentley to prison and taking Mary Lou for himself, not entirely from malice but because she is the closest thing he has found to a woman in his recurring dream. He has spent over a century trying to reconstruct the life erased from his brain.
Bentley's time in prison is among the novel's most surprising sections, less about misery than about what accumulates alongside it: friendship, animals, the Atlantic Ocean, a box of books found in a storage room. When he escapes he walks north along the coast for months, nearly dies, shelters in a toaster factory recycling its own defective product in an endless loop, and eventually arrives at Maugre, a small community of Christian families living inside a nuclear-war shelter built around a shopping mall, where he serves briefly as their Reader before grief sends him back to the road.
The human cause of the world's collapse is kept deliberately murky. There is no single catastrophe, no war, no obvious villain. The population-control equipment failed, and no one repaired it. Literacy was quietly removed from curricula. Drugs were perfected. Television improved. Robots were built and given functions that gradually absorbed everything humans had once done themselves. Spofforth, with his unique combination of longevity and intelligence, is at the center of all of it, not as a tyrant but as something more unnerving: a caretaker who stopped caring. He knows the resistor could probably be fixed. He never tried.
The ending reverses the novel's opening image. Tevis brings his three characters to the top of the Empire State Building at dawn, but this time Spofforth does not stand there alone trying to fall. He goes over with help, willingly, as a sparrow lands on his arm and the sun comes up over Brooklyn. It is the only moment of joy in the book that is not qualified by loss, and it is a robot's death scene. Mary Lou and Paul and their daughter Jane are already pointed toward California, toward whatever remnant of the future the novel is willing to grant.
Tevis was teaching at Ohio University when he observed what he described as a serious decline in student literacy, and the novel is, among other things, a direct product of that observation. The PBS adaptations of the period, which were considering Mockingbird as a follow-up to their production of Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, never materialized. The first edition was published by Doubleday in 1980; a reprint appeared in 1999 with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, who was among the writers most visibly influenced by the book.