Oh goodness. This 1955 Hugo winner nearly broke the Hugos. It was actually downright bad in parts, a catastrophic mess in others, and the handwavium was practically everywhere you looked, even in basic logic and common knowledge. I almost gave the novel a one star for all the clichés and the grab-bag of old SF tropes mixed together to create... a single clever idea that was subsequently beat into a fleshy pulp.

Oh my.

So why am I giving this three stars? Because I realized something fairly late into the novel that may or may not be actually there, but because I did see it, it managed to raise my enjoyment level by a crapload.

I discovered that I could read this novel as SATIRE. Is it true? Hell if I know. But between the doctorates of psychosomatic medicine, everyday Joe Psychic Supermen, UBERSUPER AIs that never have a speaking role despite being so brilliant even though they've discovered how to give 'dem normal folk immortality as well as MULTI-VARIABLE PHYSICS? OH MY GOD. That's AMAZING.

Ahem. Okay. Maybe I'm getting a tad carried away with my excitement. A little.

The characters were right out of 1930's stock scientist hero manuals, the old fat and stupid men and women who got to become supermen were a flipped sheet of paper, almost a perfect one-dimensional representation, and the way the novel flies through complicated ideas without stopping to smell the roses on any except one just made me wonder what the hell this novel was FOR.

Was it really about the admittedly cool premise behind the title? Well, we're meant to think so.

If you could have immortality, but the only way to have it is to be free of conviction, could you do it? If the knowledge of knowing you're right is the only reason you're growing old, fat, and stupid is the only reason you can't live young, happy, smart, and yes, full of fantastic psi powers, then could YOU give up your crappy worldview?

The answer, my dear satire readers, is NO. You probably couldn't. Very few people could, even if you put the UBER AMAZING AI in everyone's hands. See? The joke is on you!


This really could have been written much better. We probably didn't need more than 20% of the actual text to get this joke across nicely. I did have enough fun with it to give it pretty much a general passing grade, but seriously, so much of it was a slog. (That is, until I read it as a satire, and then it became my new [b:The Complete Roderick|968863|The Complete Roderick|John Sladek|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348419044s/968863.jpg|953760]).

Be forewarned! This is very much a 50's book with all that entails. I actually started groaning with the physical need for Asimov's early stilted dialogue and Heinlein's pedantic juveniles, and that's saying A LOT.

Whew! ( )

If you're going to read The Forever Machine a.k.a. They'd Rather Be Right, I highly recommend picking up the 1992 "Masters of Science Fiction" edition from Caroll & Graf. The original 1954 serial novel was actually a sequel to two short stories, "Crazy Joey" and "Hide! Hide! Witch!" by Mark Clifton & Alex Apostolides, and they're incorporated into the text here as Part I, "Crazy Joey" (though Apostolides is uncredited). The two provide somewhat helpful backstory, but more importantly, the original "Crazy Joey" is actually the best part of the book. Joey is a telepathic kid whose weirdnesses make him the object of hate of both his classmates and his father. His mother takes him to a psychiatrist, who figures out he's telepathic, but Joey picks this up and so begins downplaying his abilities, and there's a neat sort of cat-and-mouse game between Joey and the psychiatrist as Joey tries to not do what the psychiatrist wants him to do, and the psychiatrist tries to let mentally slip what Joey ought to do. It's kind of affecting, and kind of neat.

The rest of the book (the second half of Part I, which was originally "Hide! Hide! Witch!", and Part II, the original 1954 novel They'd Rather Be Right, called "'Bossy'" in this edition) is about how Joe's powers are used to construct a telepathic supercomputer at the behest of a totalitarian government. Joe and company dismantle the computer and go on the run; the computer is then reassembled and it grants a burnt-out old prostitute eternal youth. It's one of those books that goes on a bit, but when you think back you're not sure why, because surely the characters couldn't have just sat in a warehouse and talked about nothing for a hundred pages, yet clearly, somehow, they did. I feel like any description I can make of it doesn't do it justice, in that it's somehow more boring than it sounds. It's one of those sf books that seems to miss the interesting aspect of its novum; I like the idea that immortality requires one to abandon one's preconceptions of the universe, so there are some people who cannot become immortal because, well, they'd rather be right. So a billionaire industrialist can't become immortal, because he has a high level of certainty about how he thinks the world works, and cannot admit to being wrong about that. But the book doesn't really explore this idea; it just offers it to you and in the meantime you read about uninteresting people doing uninteresting things. So if you're going to read it, read this edition, but probably don't actually read it.

I note that this book shares with its predecessor as Hugo Award for Best Novel winner The Demolished Man an interest in the power of marketing. In both novels, marketing can do incredible things in the way it shapes public opinion. I guess this is a thing people were just becoming aware of in the 1950s, and thus 1950s sf was extrapolating it into the future. (A quick spot of Wikipedia research seems to indicate marketing really took off as a thing in the 1930s, so that makes sense.)

This is the very first novel that won Hugo, which is the number one science fiction & fantasy award. There are a lot of comments here on Goodreads that this is bad novel and that it shouldn’t be in the list, etc. I disagree.
This is a classical example of the golden age SF, pulps that had not a lot of science in them but great imagination. It’ll tingle your nostalgia nerve if you are after such kind of book, but if you prefer more modern SF it may seem weak.
The story concerns Joe Carter, the first human telepath. He is alone in the world and his desire is to find someone, anyone with whom he can be equal and free. And if there are no natural partners, he builds one, Bossy, an AI. Bossy is smart tool, able to do great marvels and find answers to any correct question. Of course such an AI is desired by anyone.
The story is very uneven, great parts are intermingled with very dull ones, so that its mark fluctuates from 5 stars to 2 and back again. Science is a kind of naïve hand-waving but dialogues and insights about human nature are pure gold.
( )

A computer of unassailable and unbiased logic can treat humans who are willing to let go of their preconceptions about the world. This means that immortality (the result of this treatment) appears to be disproportionately given to the downtrodden who question society. An interesting idea and social critique. ( )

Horrible. The authors should have been hit with rolled-up newspapers. Bad authors! ( )