Golem100

Golem¹⁰⁰ is science fiction novel by American writer Alfred Bester. Currently out of print, it was published by Simon & Schuster in 1980. It was based on Bester's short story "The Four-Hour Fugue".

First edition
Cover artist: Rowena Morrill

Plot

The story is set in 2175 in "The Guff," an ugly and violent metropolis grown from the northeastern United States. Corporations run the government, cannibalism is common, and corruption is everywhere. One character, Droney Lafferty, turns out to be a "celebrated necrophiliac." A "hive" of eight bored wealthy women (who call themselves the "Bee-Women," with Regina the queen bee) thinks it would be fun to raise the Devil, so they begin dabbling in ancient satanic rituals — much of which Bester portrays through musical notation. Unaware that their rites are actually working, they do not summon Satan, but create a new, interdimensional demon: the Golem¹⁰⁰.

A beast of pure evil, it is raised again each time the group practices their ritual. Growing and expanding each time, it then embarks on a rampage of rape, torture and murder. The demon is tracked through the physical and spirit worlds by three unusual people. Blaise Shima is a famous chemist with an exceptional sense of smell, which makes him invaluable to his perfumery company. When he begins behaving oddly, taking midnight walks and losing chunks of his time to amnesia, the company brings in Gretchen Nunn, a blind woman who can "see" through the eyes of those around her, but can also can also see into parts of the spectrum beyond normal human ability. She is also an expert in psychodynamics. She keeps finding Shima adjacent to the crimes which are apparently extra-violent, extra-gory, or otherwise extra-special compared with the other violent, gory crimes of the novel. Shima eventually proves that his nose is drawn to the death-smell of the Golem¹⁰⁰.

A local police officer, Subadar Ind'dni, joins them to find out what is causing the spike in violence. Ind'dni, a high-caste Hindu philosopher, is skeptical but is eventually convinced. The investigators take "radioactive isotope" drugs to help them with their search for the Golem¹⁰⁰'s alternate-dimensional origin. The Golem¹⁰⁰ turns out to be a monster from the collective unconscious of the Bee-Women, who have raised a monster from their ids. Gretchen takes over from Regina the position of hive queen, and they mutilate and murder Shima. The power of the Golem¹⁰⁰ ultimately possesses Ind'dni and he becomes the Golem¹⁰¹.

Style

Bester's sense of playfulness begins with the title: its use of a superscript seems to elevate the monster's strength — not just more demonic, but more demonic to the 100th power! — much as it would a constant or variable in algebra. However, it is all of a piece with the mathematical equations used to describe the characters in the opening scene, and the musical notations in the Bee-Women's demon-raising rituals.

Similarly, the way that Bester uses non-alphanumeric features of the keyboard, or straggles dialogue at different angles across the page, appears in others of his stories, most notably in his first novel The Demolished Man, in which Mr. Atkins spells his name @tkins, and the sentences in a conversation among telepathic people is displayed as a lattice of rights, lefts, ups, downs, and diagonals. The Stars My Destination likewise brightens the text with spangles, asterisked (***) boxes, and colored phrases (green, red and indigo). In Golem¹⁰⁰, as the investigators delve into their pursuit of the killer, the text uses changing fonts and becomes intertwined with illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

Bester's dialogue has always featured the hipster slang of the 1940s and '50s — or neologisms which suggest it — but here he adds stream-of-consciousness narration, new to his oeuvre since his short story "Fondly Fahrenheit."

Critical response

Arthur D. Hlavaty, an editor of The New York Review of Science Fiction, wrote that Bester returned to writing science fiction "in the Seventies, only to give an unintentional example of his own theme of the unrecoverability of the past. His long-awaited novel, variously called The Indian Giver, Extro, and The Computer Connection, was a major disappointment—a confused farrago of old ideas and gimmicks. The next one, Golem100, was worse, nasty as well as incoherent. Bester seemed to be haranguing his audience about the general evil of humanity and—a theme that had been much more tangential before—the war of the sexes. Either he had now decided to give the message straight, or he felt that the Jack Gaughan illustrations—the best part of the book—provided enough dazzlement and enchantment by themselves. (Charles Platt informs me that Bester provided his own illos, but there were copyright problems. In any event, his talent had decayed to the point where he could no longer get his message across in mere words.)"

Kirkus Reviews wrote, "Outrageous, erratic, brilliant Bester is back — with a generous, ultimately unsatisfying mix of fantasy, occult, science-fiction, and psycho-babble... There is much to be admired in this fantasy — its satire and spontaneity — but somewhere along the line the high spirits congeal into massive self-indulgence and an attractively literate talent slips into doggerel. A juicy curiosity that only diehard golem-watchers will want to see through to the mangled finale."

China Miéville described it as "an extraordinary, troublesome, sometimes sadistic work that will shock you with its grotesquerie and sexual violence, but also, with a less uneasy tremor, with its disrespect for text. Several early pages are taken up by a musical score, but Chapter 13 is the revelation. It is structured by Jack Gaughan's full-page illustrations, around and through which words must find their way. The images are the engine, organizing what language there is, invoking awe and, on the last page, an irruption of sudden textless terror... [a] nastily visionary S.F. dystopia." David Langford called the book "truly dire."

References

• Golem100 title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database