Laith
This book was only 250 pages long, but I had to let it marinate a full week before even attempting a review. That is because this book is uncommonly difficult to read, I'd put it at a 7 or an 8, but of course I've never given a difficulty rating to a book before. The title is the biggest hint as to why; this book is about dreams, and as a result it is aptly structured as a dream would be. You know what I mean, maybe you're getting creamer at the supermarket only to open the fridge door and find yourself on Omaha beach, and it's D-Day. It's got to be a mark of insanity to seek out a book called "The Dream Master" and then complain that it was too dreamlike, but here we are.
Of course, dream "like" is the qualifier here, there is a narrative contained within the shifting jumble of ideas and imagery. Much like The Lathe of Heaven the story concerns a doctor, their patient, and a dream machine. We follow the Shaper, Charles Render, an acclaimed neuroparticipant therapist- a doctor who enters into the minds of others and builds dreamscapes within. This dream therapy is used to treat neuroses and obsessions, but the melding of minds is inherently dangerous, the shaper is ever at risk of losing hold of their own sanity. Render takes on Eileen Shallot as a patient, a neuroparticipant therapist herself, but congenitally blind and thus unable to construct visual dreams for her patients. Render's treatment aims to expose her to the full range of visual stimuli, simultaneously exposing her to sight and attempting to cure any underlying vision-related neuroses so that she may undertake her own shaper practice.
I'm only scratching the surface with the premise, everything else is up to interpretation. The narrative shifts between straightforward dialogue, mesmerizing dreamscapes, and seemingly disconnected vignettes and cutaways. There is one thread that cuts across it all, and that's the distinct Merlin and Nimue theming; English majors rejoice. For the bad students and the unfamiliar, I'm talking about Vivianne - The Lady of the Lake; the student of Merlin and the ultimate cause of his downfall. You've definitely seen this before, a bubbling tension between the wizened (typically male) master and his young (typically female) protégé that leads to betrayal and disaster for the master. It's an old story, but Zelazny does his best to obscure the connection with a fresh face of 60s SF cutting edge ideas and peppered in reference to Norse legend.
Before I move too far along, I just NEED to comment on the talking dogs. The Dream Machine is the big SF idea in this book, but Zelazny threw a lot more in here: self-driving cars, thermal-sight implants, and of course genetically engineered talking dogs. We all know what they were smoking in the 60s, but that doesn't explain the obsession with talking dogs-they're in almost everything I've read from this time period. In the Dream Master, we're introduced to Sigmund, Eileen Shallot's super-intelligent-talking-seeing-eye dog. His perspective is included in the narrative, and it really puts a pin the in "coolness" of intelligent talking dogs. Sigmund is aware that he's different, and Zelazny really drives home the isolation that intelligence imposes on him. There is a sequence from Sigmund's POV that was probably the stand-out passage in the book for me, as it adequately captures my horror and revulsion to the idea.
As interesting as this book was, I did not like it all that much. The ideas in here may have been groundbreaking or fresh in 1966, but to me, it was all old hat and needlessly confusing. Honestly, I was tempted to chalk this whole review up to "This is Inception V1" and keep it pushing. I was expecting a little more from such an acclaimed literary master, the prose in this book was particularly disappointing. I was expecting the language to be less clinical and much more poetic, especially as I began to pick up on the Arthurian themes. Allow me to admit at this late juncture that I did not understand the end of this novel until I sat down to write this out; as approriate as it is, the fact that I couldn't follow it should speak volumes to how dissolute and nonsensical the delivery gets by the end.
Of course, there are mitigating circumstances. This was originally a Novella that won the '65 Nebula but was padded out to novel length (poorly I might add) at the insistence of his publisher. Unfortunately enough for me, this was my first Zelazny, and I would not suggest this as an entry point to his work. Although I haven't read the novella, I'd suggest that anyone still interested in this book start with that; save yourselves some time and the headache.
P.S.: Zelazny's outline for the 1984 film Dreamscape is in part based on this work, that's about the total extent of this piece's cultural relevance.
This book was only 250 pages long, but I had to let it marinate a full week before even attempting a review. That is because this book is uncommonly difficult to read, I'd put it at a 7 or an 8, but of course I've never given a difficulty rating to a book before. The title is the biggest hint as to why; this book is about dreams, and as a result it is aptly structured as a dream would be. You know what I mean, maybe you're getting creamer at the supermarket only to open the fridge door and find yourself on Omaha beach, and it's D-Day. It's got to be a mark of insanity to seek out a book called "The Dream Master" and then complain that it was too dreamlike, but here we are.
Of course, dream "like" is the qualifier here, there is a narrative contained within the shifting jumble of ideas and imagery. Much like The Lathe of Heaven the story concerns a doctor, their patient, and a dream machine. We follow the Shaper, Charles Render, an acclaimed neuroparticipant therapist- a doctor who enters into the minds of others and builds dreamscapes within. This dream therapy is used to treat neuroses and obsessions, but the melding of minds is inherently dangerous, the shaper is ever at risk of losing hold of their own sanity. Render takes on Eileen Shallot as a patient, a neuroparticipant therapist herself, but congenitally blind and thus unable to construct visual dreams for her patients. Render's treatment aims to expose her to the full range of visual stimuli, simultaneously exposing her to sight and attempting to cure any underlying vision-related neuroses so that she may undertake her own shaper practice.
I'm only scratching the surface with the premise, everything else is up to interpretation. The narrative shifts between straightforward dialogue, mesmerizing dreamscapes, and seemingly disconnected vignettes and cutaways. There is one thread that cuts across it all, and that's the distinct Merlin and Nimue theming; English majors rejoice. For the bad students and the unfamiliar, I'm talking about Vivianne - The Lady of the Lake; the student of Merlin and the ultimate cause of his downfall. You've definitely seen this before, a bubbling tension between the wizened (typically male) master and his young (typically female) protégé that leads to betrayal and disaster for the master. It's an old story, but Zelazny does his best to obscure the connection with a fresh face of 60s SF cutting edge ideas and peppered in reference to Norse legend.
Before I move too far along, I just NEED to comment on the talking dogs. The Dream Machine is the big SF idea in this book, but Zelazny threw a lot more in here: self-driving cars, thermal-sight implants, and of course genetically engineered talking dogs. We all know what they were smoking in the 60s, but that doesn't explain the obsession with talking dogs-they're in almost everything I've read from this time period. In the Dream Master, we're introduced to Sigmund, Eileen Shallot's super-intelligent-talking-seeing-eye dog. His perspective is included in the narrative, and it really puts a pin the in "coolness" of intelligent talking dogs. Sigmund is aware that he's different, and Zelazny really drives home the isolation that intelligence imposes on him. There is a sequence from Sigmund's POV that was probably the stand-out passage in the book for me, as it adequately captures my horror and revulsion to the idea.
As interesting as this book was, I did not like it all that much. The ideas in here may have been groundbreaking or fresh in 1966, but to me, it was all old hat and needlessly confusing. Honestly, I was tempted to chalk this whole review up to "This is Inception V1" and keep it pushing. I was expecting a little more from such an acclaimed literary master, the prose in this book was particularly disappointing. I was expecting the language to be less clinical and much more poetic, especially as I began to pick up on the Arthurian themes. Allow me to admit at this late juncture that I did not understand the end of this novel until I sat down to write this out; as approriate as it is, the fact that I couldn't follow it should speak volumes to how dissolute and nonsensical the delivery gets by the end.
Of course, there are mitigating circumstances. This was originally a Novella that won the '65 Nebula but was padded out to novel length (poorly I might add) at the insistence of his publisher. Unfortunately enough for me, this was my first Zelazny, and I would not suggest this as an entry point to his work. Although I haven't read the novella, I'd suggest that anyone still interested in this book start with that; save yourselves some time and the headache.
P.S.: Zelazny's outline for the 1984 film Dreamscape is in part based on this work, that's about the total extent of this piece's cultural relevance.
