Sam J. Lundwall

The first girl born in the 21st century is needed to promote Sweden's largest cosmetics company and to support a larger organization that operates in secrecy. A polluted future world dominated by crass commercialism. The main character struggles to make a living in the corrupt advertising profession.

A young Swedish SF author visits an SFWA convention in New York, meets a literary agent twice his age, and has a brief affair with her. The brief love affair, which takes up most of the book, is slightly touching but doesn't interest me much. The depiction of the science fiction authors does much more for me. This part is presumably a roman à clef; my guess is that Harvey's real name is Harry Harrison (lives in Ireland, fluent in Danish) and that the publisher Walt Wyn draws much from show more Donald A Wollheim.

There are also some problems with chronology in this novel. Janet loves the late Jacques Brel; she says that the narrator looks like him, and that's part of why she was attracted to him in the first place. However, if this book takes place in the 1970s, it must be in 1979 as Brel died in October 1978. If Janet is 48, she can't have tried to get a glimpse of Brel in Clichy when she was 18: for one thing, at the time Jacques was still an unknown 20-year-old working at his father's cardboard factory in his native Brussels (he was always very clear that he was Belgian, not French) and moreover had not even started singing yet. So either Lundwall's research is not up to scratch, or we're dealing with an alternate world, which would make this book SF... show less

I read this a precursor to the SFWA European Hall of Fame collection and the Apex Book of World SF. I recognized only a few of the authors in the collection: Ion Hobana, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Bob Shaw, and Robert Sheckley. The collection is far-ranging, truly being a "world collection." I found the "Legend of the Paper Spaceship" by Tetsu Yano the most lyrical story, although it follows a predictable model (town outcast is something more). I found Karl Michael Armer's story "BCO show more Equipment" - a robot story ingeniously told through the company's advertisements - to clearly show a male, middle-class target audience for the product. I enjoyed the Hobana and Strugatsky stories, which were both mystery cross-overs. I thought Peter Lengyel's "Rising Sun" a strange, disturbing tale of not only colonialism but also First World vs. Third World. Sridhar Rao's story is fun time-reversal story. show less

The satirical futurism was prescient (although not funny), and there were a ton of real world examples of cultural ridiculousness that I enjoyed learning about.

There was, however, no story to speak of, no characters of note, and nothing that made this more interesting than a wiki about how dumb things are and how dumb things could get would be.

Plus there was weird anti-Norwat stuff that must only make sense to Swedes.