The Unreasoning Mask by Philip José Farmer

The Unrea­son­ing Mask by Philip José Farmer is yet anoth­er first edi­tion hard­cov­er I picked up for 50 cents. I’d been impressed with his book To Your Scat­tered Bod­ies Go, so when I stum­bled across some­thing else by him, and for such a good price, I picked it up. It was alright. I think Mr. Farmer does a much bet­ter job with char­ac­ter­i­za­tion instead of tale­spin­ning. Spoil­ers past the jump.

This is a slight­ly mys­ti­cal space tale where near-immor­tal Norn-like beings and a cre­at­ed uni­ver­sal sim­u­lacrum are each try­ing to con­trol the uni­verse. It just so hap­pens that the uni­verse, or mul­ti­ple uni­vers­es are akin to cells in a body of some­thing a bit like God. The anal­o­gy is that sen­tient beings are like an infec­tion to this some­thing a bit like God. So this creepy anti­body thing goes around destroy­ing sen­tient life on all plan­ets. Sort of like a white blood cell.

The thing is, the some­thing a bit like God is just an infant, and has already died and been reborn twice and it needs the par­a­sitic sen­tient races to teach it and fos­ter it and let it grow up. So instead of unwit­ting­ly destroy­ing cells in the body by using advanced tech­nol­o­gy, the Norns that fig­ure it out know they have to destroy the white blood cell thing.

What­ev­er.

The main char­ac­ter is what makes the book inter­est­ing. He is a moral­ly upright Ara­bic for­mer Mus­lim that has some sort of empti­ness with­in him that makes him seem dis­tract­ed. He is always search­ing for some­thing, even he does not know. He seems to prize his inde­pen­dence, but he is poked and prod­ded and herd­ed about through the whole book by the uni­ver­sal sim­u­lacrum thinger and the Norns. He sort of resents this but ends up doing what he will nonethe­less. Since he is the cap­tain of a ship he is respon­si­ble for about 400 crewmem­bers, which makes his often self­ish deci­sions gnaw at him. In the end though, his self­ish­ness eas­i­ly becomes self­less­ness since he has been serv­ing a high­er cause all this time.

The book was­n’t fan­tas­tic, but it was enjoy­able and a quick read.