Xorander

by Christine Brooke-Rose

Binding Unknown

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Novels, British Literature, 20th Century, Science Fiction Fantasy

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. Born in Geneva and educated at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London, she taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988 and lived for many years in the south of France.

She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and briefly to Claude Brooke. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Such (1966).

She was also known as a translator from French, in particular of works by Robbe-Grillet.

NYT obituary.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christine Brooke-Rose is better known, if at all, for her experimental fictions: an entire novel avoiding the use of the verb "to be", a novel that apparently switches and rethinks itself between five languages, various forays into dense referentiality. Which is not to say that this isn't also an experimental novel in many ways, but it's also a brisk, entertaining cold-war fable about precocious twins who find an alien computer. CBR's interests in language play out here through a flurry of programming language and computer transcripts embedded in the text, allowing much side-observation of semantics and how communication and understanding are possible at all. And in the general format -- the twins are dictating their story in tandem, often interrupting or clarifying eachother, even exposing the mechanics of their own narrative, so the story often breaks up into meta-discussion of how stories are told, how "true" stories may still require embellishment, plus various jokes, lapses into their own odd vernacular or even bits of other languages they're learning, etc. All of this would be interesting but perhaps eventually uncompelling if CBR hadn't fixed it all to a quickly twisting narrative hook that soon expands to include discussion of the all nuclear problems of the 80s (waste, arms, global politics). I wonder how the 80s sci-fi readership who picked up Ace mass-markets like this reacted to it?

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Cheepnis. But not because Christine Brooke-Rose is writing cheep stuff but because science fiction is always better when read in cheep mass-market paperbacks like this one from Avon. And it is still available for one Usofa penny (plus shipping, which does seem to be outrageous at US$3.99).

Two freebies ::

One :: Xorandor should be included in the syllabus of every one of those popular (and perhaps by now cliche’d) Philosophy and Science Fiction courses. It would be only just. You know how frequently cheep philosophy-esque stuff shows up in sci-fi. Brooke-Rose will always do it better ; and she even knows a thing or two about the philosophy of language.

Two :: There are a number of theses to be developed by placing side-by-side Xorandor and those twin novels from John Barth, Sabbatical and Tidewater Tales. Naturally, between the two are the similar interests in asking about how stories get told ; displaying those mechanics of the narrative. But there is also that thing about the twins, and the not-so-frequent choice of the first-person plural narrator(s). Let’s just say that all three novels were written at the same time and side-step that irritating question about ‘influence’ (writing under the influence of stories is always a bit questionable, is it not?)

[George]

"...If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand we'd be so simple we couldn't."

It started off strong but became fairly tiresome about halfway through. It’s told by a set of twins who are as digressive and unorganized in their storytelling as Saleem Sinai of Midnight’s Children. They also incorporate a lot of slang and some wordplay, much of it informed by computer code language. These elements were the most enjoyable to me but even they got old after a while. The plot involves a sentient rock that’s actually an organic computer on a level of intelligence that far surpasses human beings. It procreates and one of its offspring threatens to blow itself up unless its demands are met. These things eat radiation and thus are not exactly strangers to decayed or splitting atoms and could even have practical applications. There are cold war implications here as well, but they don’t feel quite earnest, if that’s the right word. Aside from the sluggishness of the plot, it ended up being a lot more provincial than I anticipated, taking place in the same location pretty much throughout the entirety of the novel.

I liked The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle better, featuring as it does a theoretically possible apocalyptic scenario in which a sentient cloud blots the sun to eat the energy. The only way to survive is to communicate with the cloud and tell it to move. It’s nowhere near as literary as Xorander, written as it is by an astronomer, but the implications of intelligent life that isn’t based on DNA, for instance, stayed with me. However, I read it almost a decade ago so I could think differently of it now.

I will definitely give Brooke-Rose’s experimental fiction a chance.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

More thoughts later, but is there a genre in which CB-R can't write an amazing novel?

I though Textermination was the shit, but I liked this even more. Brooke-Rose deftly reminds us that we need our myths to live. And since they are so requisite, so vital, let's go ahead and call them what they are. Lies.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is by far the most accessible of the Brook-Rose novels I've read to date. On the face of it a science fiction tale of an alien intelligence discovered by teenage twins in Cornwall.

But it's all an excuse for the author to have some fun with language once more. In this case computer programming languages. As the book was written in the late 80s the languages involved are similar to FORTRAN and Cobol rather than more modern, object-oriented languages like Java or Python.

All good fun, even if some of the philosophical discussions went a bit over my head

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

S1 COMMAND > Nate wrote a perfectly brill review ENDLINE
S2 COMMENT > Simple lazy links do not suffice ENDLINE
s3 RECOMMENT > Your opinion was I not soliciting thank you goodbye ENDBOX

[Ben Winch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually think I enjoyed this more than Textermination . I liked the subtlety. Which is to say that while parts of it (the talking-rock computer, the “hexadex” slang, the excursions into programming language) weren’t subtle at all, in the background, almost as a matter of course, it did something I’ve rarely seen done so quietly: it interrogated itself. These two young egghead twins, see, tell the story in tandem, interrupting and disputing, and asking themselves always how best they can do what they must do, i.e. tell the story. And it’s a beautiful thing, because real-seeming, or as real as the story, a fantasy, requires it to be. Realer, given how easy it would have been for Christine Brooke-Rose to get away without it. Also I greatly appreciate Brooke-Rose’s attention to narrative detail—that is, the detail of how the narrative gets told, of how it becomes. The conversational tone, the conscientious citing and quoting of sources, later on the diarist’s approach; only in the very last scene does she slip, I think, with one of the twins venturing out alone and describing to a recording device much more than he could or would realistically describe. The scene itself is great though, bizarre; it sticks in the mind. The rock computer as messiah, the angry-then-fawning mob. A cartoon, a structural exercise, an experiment in voice, Xorandor reads to me like the work of a writer with nothing to lose, and who doesn’t much care if she “wins” either. Yes, there’s a touch of Riddley Walker, of Clockwork Orange. But while Xorandor’s linguistic experimentation is less bold than either it’s author’s grasp of story is greater. It’s flawed, a little silly, inevitably dated. But it’s unique and brilliant too, and makes me more curious than did Textermination to hunt down its author’s other titles.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

(My spoilers don't spoil much.)

This short novel features a young (boy/girl) set of twins, deeply interested in computers and science, who meet an intelligent robot/alien/rock. The robot feeds off radiation (from nuclear waste; the book is from 1986, and is very interested in the anti-nukes movement, but not in a heavy-handed way). Eventually, the world is endangered, and it's up to the kids to save it.

The most attractive thing about this book for me was the ways it found to include strange (or unusually formed) language. The twins have their twinspeak, which includes lots of bad puns; there are poor (misspelled) computer transcriptions and overliteral interpretations of English; there are remixes of classic texts; the kids are sent to Germany for a while, which breeds language confusions/conflation; etc.

But the novel is also interested in the nature of AI, in nuclear weapons, and in growing up (and in particular in how we often conceive of the nature of truth in our early teen years); it also touches upon gender politics (of the twins, she's interested in emotion/philosophy/literature, he's more hardcore science, though both are competent at both), and there's a gay couple who are described as being gay without anything particularly being important about that. A smart, swift, and enjoyable example of linguistic sci-fi.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my introduction to Christine Brooke-Rose. I’ve been aware of her for a few years now but it wasn’t until I came across this in the Science Fiction section for $3.50 that I decided to read one of her books. Her only SF work, this 1986 published work certainly feels like a Science Fiction book of the time while also being something completely unique.

The premise for this book is about as 1980s as it goes. Two twin sibling whizkids find a sentient rock that communicates in computing language. They befriend it, soon their father who works at the local power plant finds it and from there the meddling hands of adult government agencies get involved. It feels very in line with many SF stories that arose after the success of E.T. (1982).

It is found out that this rock, that they name Xorandor, consumes uranium, which interests governments across the globe in this late cold war period. The story explores many of the social and philosophical questions of humanity at this pivotal moment of civilization.

The real value of this book is Brooke-Rose’s writing style. The two twins are the narrators of this story, telling it after the fact in a very metafictional way. There is also a great deal of computer language text explored here when it comes to communicating with Xorandor. Brooke-Rose looks to draw comparisons with human languages and computer languages throughout this book. While very of the time of the 1980s, it still holds up as an interesting concept. Brooke-Rose offers a great deal of knowledge on subjects such as computer science, geology, and sociology which definitely puts the Science in Science Fiction.

I will say that I felt like the book lost some of its momentum in the middle and a lot of the concepts here either get explored in too much or not enough detail. Just over 200 pages, this book is a very standard length for Science Fiction but the concepts here either feel deeply focused in on, dragging out the pacing, or referenced only, leading to wanting more. Overall, I found this to be quite a unique work of Science Fiction. I’m not typically a fan of this period but I did enjoy this. I will be looking to read more from Christine Brooke-Rose, particularly her more literary work.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhere between 4 and 5 stars but given the higher due to the wonderful chutzpah of the whole thing.

[David]

The ever-playful Brooke-Rose continues with a teen coming-of-age novel about a pair of pre-pubescent twins who discover a Martian supercomputer. Rock. Or is it? Nuclear terrorism (voiced almost exclusively through diction from Macbeth) is disarmed. Or is it? Narrative theory is discussed in computer programming code. And there is the whole question of how to get back to where we never were to begin with. All the usual Brooke-Rose concerns!

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abundant experimental flourishes - dual (meta)narrators, a pair of precocious twins arguing about how to tell the story; segments written in computer pseudocode; invented slang; bits of German; references to Kripke and Aristotle - enliven this cold-war sci-fi parable, about a super-intelligent computer that feeds on nuclear waste. Not exactly my kind of thing, but well done nonetheless.

[Bart Van Overmeire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like weird books, so this was a nice find in the library's archive.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

An inventive and likable cautionary moral meta-fable. It is "about" nuclear peril as much as it is "about" thought, perception, language, memory, narrative, form, and culture. How she weaves these heady reflections through the precocious banter of children is most admirable. A melange of scifi, phy-phi (that's physics and philosophy), and Bildungsroman that is all her own.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

TOUGH. I love Christine Brooke-Rose's mind - 'Go when you see the Green Man walking' is a brilliant collection of short stories for its concepts, so I was excited to read one of her long-form novels. Whilst it is original and memorable, and displays incredible intelligence on chemistry and global politics, it does get a little wearing for what feels like a story much shorter than its word count.

I feel like the narrative choice of having twins Jip and Zab dictate it -in tandem - in an accessible form of coding language is an interesting one, and much like A Clockwork Orange it clicks pretty easily once you're locked in to the basics. My main issue is that Jip and Zab are almost indistinguishable as character voices - it never mattered in the slightest which one was talking, and there felt like no real need to have two voices bickering throughout the text. Granted they communicated authentically as teenage kids would on a project like they had undertaken, but it, again, got a little wearing very quickly.

The overall idea of a computer life form of indeterminate age (we soon learn that Xorandor is potentially an unreliable narrator despite access to great spans of human knowledge, much like Jip and Zab frequently offering hearsay versions of events despite having numerous recordings and transcripts) offering a solution to great geopolitical problems - the ability to disable nuclear warheads, specifically - and world leaders turning said solution down because of the 'need for a deterrent' and shipping Xorandor away to ensure he CANNOT act is incredibly astute. It's a glimpse at Cold War politics done incredibly well. The biblical analogies at the later end of the book felt a little out of left field - I think maybe just one step over-planned on Brooke-Rose's part - but I see what she was trying to do.

It's the sort of novel that begs for a lot of note-taking throughout to keep track of who said what and when, because Jip and Zab throw things out in strange orders by dint of them reconstructing events in post, and a deeper understanding of the timeline does help make sense of the closing chapters. It DOES go rather technical on the chemistry at points, and by the time we get to various world summits and emergency meetings it's hell on earth trying to keep track of who's who, and who knows what, and who's bluffing who... it's incredibly well thought-out when it comes to global political response, but it's a lot for a casual reader.

Oh, and be prepared for passages of Macbeth as reinterpreted through defunct coding language. Unless you have a very familiar grasp on Macbeth, that's a rough section.

Overall, impressive, but requires a lot of focus. I still think Brooke-Rose is a forgotten literary great, but this one isn't easy going.

P.S. the line "But softwarily we are observed" will always raise a wry smile from me.

[Frank Ashe · Rating 2 out of 5]

This tries way too hard.

[Mattie Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ll start by saying that this is a modernist text which on the whole I have quite strong feelings about, but I do appreciate the originality given the genre of sci-fi. It was incomprehensible at the start (which I’m assuming is the point; showing the difficulty of picking up a whole new language/showing how radically opposite computer language is to our human language). I found the meta narration style to be unique as well, especially in how determined they were to keep it objective and avoid anything of the romantic/literary; that sort of challenged my desire as a reader to enjoy said elements of the romantic/literary. There’s obviously the allegorical aspect of the cold war; with the implication of the inevitable decision to send the rocks away reinforcing that the pursuit of power and the ability to wield it (even if it results in mass destruction) will triumph over the potential to have everyone equally powerless). I think my suspension of disbelief was a little pushed given that the children were twelve and a half and I was expected to believe they knew Shakespeare/complex scientific or computing theories but that’s beside the point the book was making as a whole. I also enjoyed the ridiculousness of it: reading about a tiny stone that named itself lady Macbeth and threatened to blow up really does cause me to realise that writers can create weird and wacky things sometimes (and maybe we shouldn’t take it too seriously). I’m not sure I would read Brooke-Rose again (at least not for enjoyment), but I think what she did was certainly different so credit where its due.

[Flannery · Rating 4 out of 5]

the first half of this is a bit of a slog but once it gets going it’s really likable. talking rock computers play acting as shakespeare characters, political espionage, very cheeky wordplay, and really inventive narrative structure (as other reviewers have mentioned it does the john barth sabbatical dual first person thing —which i adore as sabbatical is probably my all time favorite book— but it also has frequent digressions into telling the story through this pseudo-assembly code language, screenplay formatting, etc…) and it does all that while still maintaining this kitschy-easy-to-read-pulp-sci-fi-pastiche tone. i went into this expecting it to be a little more difficult since i’ve heard much about how dense her other writing can be, but it was just fun. Vonnegut fans will like this book a lot. I can’t wait to read some of her experimental stuff!!

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review here.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 - her weakest work since Middlemen. Still not bad but it lacks her usual punch.