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I bought "The Müller-Fokker Effect" because it appears on a list that claims to be a list of Iain (M.) Banks' favorite books. I can well believe that this is one of Banks' favorite books, but it'd have to be one of those "I love this book because it always reminds me of that summer in Venice when I first read it" favorite books.
The cover says "an outrageously comic novel". It also says "like A Clockwork Orange and Slaughterhouse Five". From which one could rightly conclude that it's (a) a comic novel, and (b) pretty confusing. The back of the book talks about the idea of recording someone's personality on "computer tapes". This does happen in the book, but (like pretty much everything else that happens in the book) it's just a minor plot element, and not very connected to anything else that happens.
The other plot elements aren't particularly SFy. There's this Hugh Hefner figure who's secretly a virgin, there's this woman who becomes a sort of Betty Crocker sex symbol (oh, yeah, she's briefly cyrogenically frozen, and that's sort of SF), there's an army unit that's trained to wear women's clothes and attack backwards, there's a big race (and so forth) riot in Washington D.C., and there're about a dozen other things, but the author has no interest in fitting them together into any whole.
Which is fine as far as it goes. It's sort of a long slightly comical dream with a few memorable (or almost memorable) scenes and ideas in it (heh, I seem to have been reading those a lot lately). Probably not a story that will resonate down the ages, but hey it made Iain Banks' favorite list.
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