Book Review: The Final Encyclopedia by Gordon R Dickson

This is my first book by Gordon R Dickson, so I offer no judgments on him as an author. This is one of the last books of the Childe Cycle, a series that Dickson started early in his career and hadn't finished 30 years later.

The story involves Hal Mayne, a remarkable 16 year-old who was found as an orphan and raised by 3 tutors from very different societies. Dickson posits the homogeneity and mutual exclusivity of these societies as a given - the Dorsai are all good fighters, the Friendlies are all religious fanatics, the Exotics are all wimpy rich philosophers. The people on other inhabited planets are not really part of the story. There is a group of people called the Others that are gradually taking control of human societies, and Bleys Ahren's goal is to stop humanity's evolution so that he and the Others can control it. Hal's job, obviously, is to stop Bleys from his nefarious plot.

Hal is a very likable character. I did not like Eragon early on his journey. Hal is never petulant, though, and doesn't complain. He is extremely fortunate in that meets the exact people he has to meet to survive at every step of the way. By the end of the book, Hal is in his early 20s. This is just one part of an epic story - there is no final showdown at the end. That must be in the next book. Dickson lets Hal take some hard knocks, and he is not immediately well-liked. He comes through each right of passage pretty well, though.

This is a largely intellectual book - the ideas and societal flows are just as important to the plot as the life-and-death action sequences. There are large sections of bloviating - page after page of expository, reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged. The most important thing any character seems to do is give a 10-minute speech to a large audience. This will obviously motivate them to give up everything they have for the speaker's cause.

Despite the novel's obvious oversimplifications and bloviatingness, though, I found myself drawn to it time and again. I wasn't sad when it was over - but if it had continued I would have kept reading. Overall, a good book, a coherent book, and a book with characters we can like even though the minor characters are caricatures. It is also an interesting thought experiment on the future of humanity - this is a future that sounds somewhat plausible, and that is what makes it worth the effort.