The Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg

Every once in a while I like to read one of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction and this time it was Robert Silverberg’s turn.  He always provides a good ol’ fashioned science fiction yarn, and doesn’t forget to add the science. He’s always good at playing the what-if question and then constructing a story around it, often including some intriguing concepts to ponder along the way.

The story here is about a man named Lew Nichols who uses stochastic methods to accurately predict outcomes and probabilities.  He is so good at it that he is recruited by a team of people dedicated to electing the next mayor of New York, with the ultimate goal of getting their charismatic man all the way to the White House.  Lew soon learns of another man who is even better at predicting events though…a man who is 100% accurate because he can “see” the future.

Silverberg uses the concept of alternate realities and parallel universes in a pretty cool way in this novel.  His what-if scenario is, “what if our timeline brushed up against a parallel universe’s timeline so we could “see” what’s happening over there?  Only that other timeline is flowing in the reverse direction…”  So when we see into that other life we are seeing what is still to come in our own lives. A lot of questions arise in Lew’s mind, including the inevitable questions of time paradox and what happens when one witnesses their own death, but Silverberg handles them deftly.  Ultimately, he explores the idea of prediction leading to predestination vs. any sort of free will to change our own paths.  Intriguing concepts to be sure.

This novel was written and published in the early 1970’s and the plot takes place in the late 1990’s.  But just as Silverberg doesn’t forget about the science, he also doesn’t forget about the story and the characters, a problem that seems to routinely crop up in many science fiction novels I’ve read from that era.  Curiously, for a novel about accurate predictions of the future, his own view of what life would be like in the late 1990’s was way off.  It’s easy to look back from our vantage point now and smirk but much of what Silverberg postulated is similar from book to book and in common with other science fiction authors from that time.

This book was nominated for a number of awards including the Nebula, Campbell, Hugo, and Locus SF awards.  I enjoyed it and look forward to reading a few more Silverberg novels that I already have on my shelf.