The Computer Connection, by Alfred Bester
Stoned SF lunacy from the 70's
(Review posted 28 Feb 2004 04:01:18)

There are these immortals, see, except they're not really immortal, they're just very tough and they don't need to breathe but they can die if like their heads are cut off or they get this cross between leprosy and cancer, and they become immortals by coming really really close to terrifying death but being saved at the last second, and they've been around for a long time and now it's the wild and wooly future where everyone speaks a cross between Spanish and English except for a few scholars who still speak XXth Century, and these native Americans who got rich by keeping the secret to Ugly Poppies and selling it back to the white folks and now they have the best university in the world, and one of the immortals has a time machine but it can't really do anything useful, and on the way back from a mining camp out on one of Jupiter's moons this strange alien being hitches a ride on the space ship but never really figures in the plot, and when these three astronauts are cyrogenically frozen and shot into space and come back they turn out to have regressed to embryos that rapidy grow up into hermaphroditic creatures that can sense electric fields and that take over the neural link with Sequoia Guess and thereby save the world.

And that's not all!

This is a book to read while stoned; or in any case you'll feel stoned once you emerge from it. It's silly, it careens, it swoops from plot to plot with little regard for consistency or logic, and it's great fun. The characters are memorable, and the action has that strange feverish dream-logic that you don't (usually) notice is absurd until you've come up for air. Even though it's only like 180 pages long, it has many significant elements that I didn't touch in the breathless paragraph above (I didn't mention the first-person protagonist at all, for example). It's dense and stoned and silly, and certainly worth reading. A gem from the seventies.