Synthajoy

by D.G. Compton

Edward Cadence was a brilliant man, and a dedicated scientist. He had invented Sensitape, a means of recording the thoughts and emotions of great musicians, religious figures, etc. so that others could experience at first-hand just what it was like to play a magnificent concerto, or to slip peacefully toward an untroubled death with the sure expectation that Heaven lies waiting. And he had added Sexitape, whereby people whose sex lives weren't completely satisfying could experience everything that the most compatible couple in the world felt together.

For all this he was given the Nobel Prize, became enormously wealthy and famous.

But finally he set to work on the ultimate application of his experiments: Synthajoy. And when the enormity of this dehumanising process became clear, he was murdered.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, 20th Century

200 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 1, 1968

About the author

David Guy Compton has published science fiction as D.G. Compton. He has also published crime novels as Guy Compton and Gothic fiction as Frances Lynch.

Reviews

[Vicki Cline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an unusual sci-fi book because it doesn't have any space ships or civilizations on other planets. It takes place in the near future (from the perspective of 1968, when it was published), which could almost be our present. A brilliant psychologist and an equally brilliant engineer have discovered a way to tape people's mental states, which can be played back by anyone. You might want to experience how a conductor feels leading a Beethoven symphony, or how a really responsive woman feels during sex. The story is told by the psychologist's wife, who is "in treatment" after being found guilty of killing her husband. Her treatment consists of daily doses of a "guilt" tape. She's only conscious for a few hours a day and we learn about her life, and eventually whether she is guilty.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this when I was a teen, in 1970 or 71, and it's stuck with me for over 40 years, so I re-read it again. It's a brilliant, cold book.

The story is calculatedly precise, workmanlike, and efficient. I know that Compton merely wrote it to generate some cash, but the austere precision in this novel so perfectly matches the content—the scientific subjugation of memory and emotion—that it in the process it becomes literature.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compton was such a good writer, far better than most science fiction novelists. This is another genre novel that approaches serious literature, complex and thought-provoking.

[iambehindu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review contains light spoilers.

What happens to the world when the soul dies?

Synthajoy follows Thea Clarence as she reflects on her life and circumstances that have brought her to Kingston, a modern facility for the “rehabilitation” of criminals. Thea is receiving treatment following the death of her husband, Edward Clarence. Edward, alongside the technician Tony Stench, is the inventor of a revolutionary new technology called “Synthitape”. Synthitape is first conceived as a way of inducing artificial experiences for an individual who does not have the ability to experience them firsthand. Synthitape can allow you to enter the mind of a great composer, to feel their relationship to music, or if someone is dying with an angst and distress about their life, they could simply wear Synthitape and experience a death recorded by someone who was fulfilled during their last moments.

When we arrive in this presumably not so far future London, there is a prevalent condition known as UDW or “Uncompensated Death Wish” that is killing off enough people to be of statistical concern. UDW is just an unwillingness to go on living, it does not have to be from a spiritual pain where the individual cannot find meaning in the world, but it may be the very dichotomy of the inner and outer life at an imbalance, which leaves a person staring at a void, where the meaning of anything is not easily defined or felt. This is a diagnosis pregnant with warning from the rapid changes of the 20th century and the technological acceleration of the 21st century.

Alongside the help of Tony Stench, Edward is able to release Synthitape for medical use. From Synthitape comes Sexitape, where an individual or a couple can artificially induce a meaningful sexual experience they might be incapable of having, for any number of reasons. It’s important to note that all Synthitape material is collected from the mind of donors who are willing to have their experiences emotionally cataloged. For Sexitape, the actual experience of a married couple having good sex was ingested into Stench’s buffers which can then catalog the emotions associated with the experiences through brain activity and other what would be present day theoretical technologies. There is one isolated incident in the novel where Edward seeks the experience of musical creation from a composer. The composer demands that his relationship with music is his own, it’s his soul, and is not to be intimately shared. It has been said that our differences make us all the same, and the unique gift of loving music, and being loved by music, is a gift to share with the world through creation, not through a saturation of the very thing that makes it meaningful. Synthitape vows to destroy that. The meaningful will degenerate to unmeaning, as we tantalize the unremarkable with the experiences of those more fortunate.

Alongside the development of Synthitape, we dance through the memory of Thea Clarence, and follow her path to the breaking point as her marriage to Edward, a man of high ambition and little concern for anything else, begins to cause irreparable emotional damage. We witness the death of life while she is still alive. Compton outlines her psychology and experiences in a completely honest and convincing tone, letting us get to the heart of the matter, and not feeling shortchanged by a hasty character development. Compton shows, he rarely tells.

Synthajoy is a novel of warning to a world that has stopped caring. Our social ambitions are vapid and uninteresting. Society does not make the whole of the man, and the conditions of our mutual arrest have caused a plague of atomization. In this plague of unmeaning, there is an opening for treating the symptom, not curing the disease, and here is Edward’s Synthajoy, an artificially induced ecstasy, an agglutination of significant experiences pumped into the lonely mind, so for that one brief period of time, you can be something other than the self that you already don’t understand. Ultimately, we don’t see the creation of Synthajoy in the novel, but Compton does leave a bleak opening to the idea that the train will only accelerate. The parallels to our own time are hardly worth mentioning as they are glaringly obvious. Everything that is artificially meaningful is an ephemerality void of beauty. A landscape of trends, desires, and content, all glaring before you under the neon banner of Culture, and the bulbs are blinking with impending death.

As Alfred Whitehead noted in "Science and the Modern World: "It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” One would like to believe that humanity is landscape of vales and troughs that gradually propels upwards, Compton may not be so optimistic.

[Joel J. Molder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Synthajoy reads like a psychological-thriller. Imagine Shutter Island, lightly garnished with a science fiction device that manipulates emotions. This machine can record others’ emotions and play them back on a consumer- and medical-level. This includes peace, sex, and even death.

The majority of the focus is the unreliable narrator—Thea Cadence—as she is treated after the death of her husband. The court has found her guilty of fifth degree murder, but it’s never clear if she actually did the crime or not.

Interspaced through fragmented sections, Thea tells the founding of the machine Sensitape, her dissolving marriage, her cynicism about the machine, and her later infidelity.

It’s a great story, if not a little too bleak and distressing for my taste. Slowly and surely you see Thea’s mind begin to fray. Her thoughts are broken, fractured literally on the page. It makes for a unique, high-literary reading experience. It’s incredibly dense and well-written as the narrator jumps around the important events that kicked off this world-changing machine. It’s a book to chew on and wrestle with.

That said, this isn’t my favorite kind of story. It feels like the inception of a cyberpunk world—maybe the beginning of Mercerism from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick.

Regardless I’d categorize this as proto-cyberpunk, but I feel it could’ve been easier to digest. Although as I write that, I wonder . . . perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps it’s supposed to guide you through the process and experience of what this technology does to the mind—when emotions are amplified and forced upon a person.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rare SF novel from the late-60's that's not dated, about the synthesizing of feelings and its effects. Intelligently, non-chronologically told. Impressive.

[YT BarelyHuman77]

Here's my video review of Synthajoy :) https://youtu.be/tDaXweRJP2o

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sci-fi premise: a brilliant doctor and a brilliant engineer (who form a love triangle involving the doctor's wife) have developed a device which allows people to experience the recorded emotions of others. You can, for instance, experience what it's like to be a master musician in performance. They originally intend this as a medical treatment (depressive or suicidal patients, for example); but the commercial possibilities soon become evident, particularly once they record people having fantastic sex.

The sci-fi elements are somewhat window dressing, though. The novel is really an unreliable-narrator psychological drama focusing on the doctor's wife, Thea. As the book begins, she is in a mental institution where- heavily drugged most of the time- she's being treated with her husband's own invention; after being convicted of murdering him. The rest of the book flips back and forth between her memories of everything leading up to her husband's death, and her brief periods of lucidity in the hospital. She may not have committed the murder; some of her memories may be fantasies induced by her treatment; the doctor and nurse treating her may not be following the court's instructions for her treatment, and may have ulterior motives. Or maybe not.

Even when well-constructed (which this book is), "unreliable narrator" stories can be irritating and off-putting when they leave readers with no clear answers at the end. That's the chief problem with this book; that and the fact that it starts out rather slowly. It eventually engrossed me; I'd recommend it, but not to readers who get frustrated by unresolved ambiguity.

[Ralph Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though short, Synthajoy by D. G. Compton deserves a bit of credit for having a female character the creator of something that changed society. Although this book was published in the 1960s, the idea of virtual reality has existed during this time; in which this book is about.

Ever feel you’re not smart like your peers? The woman on your Instagram feed is “beauty with brains” kind of girl? Well, with Synthajoy, you can experience what it's like to be perfect: great appearance with great intelligence, and with great talents. Though we don’t have that kind of simulation yet in our real world, but in the world of this book, people are liking it. They can be whoever they want.

The downside of this? People won’t have the sense of gratitude with what they already have. A healthy body, a sane mind, decent life; anything that is worth to be grateful of. It’s more or less like when you watch reality TV shows where they give the rich a snoop on their lives and people can admire their lifestyle and try to be like them.

The story could’ve gone better but it lost its point throughout the book.

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"I had not heard of the relatively unknown British sci-fi writer David G. Compton until I read a fantastic review by Ian Sales of Compton’s most famous novel, The Unsleeping Eye (1971) (his review and blog here). In my normal circuitous fashion, I decided to read a lesser-known work of Compton’s first, Synthajoy (1968). And, I was not disappointed, in the slightest…

Synthajoy combines [...]"

[Alex Byrne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolutely terrible writing style. A disjointed mess with nothing thought provoking whatsoever. If cutting off your sentences in the middle is considered artistic writing, please shoot me.

[Rena Sherwood · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, that was a disappointment. I hate books that don't have a proper ending. How Synthajoy ends is anyone's guess.

The male writer also had no clue about how women feel about love and sex. He writes first person from a frigid woman's point of view. He seems to think women are either Madonnas or whores. Oh, how boring. He writes in a choppy style, which is jarring and often hard to follow. Still, it was easy enough to see his Madonna-whore thing.

The book was written in the late 1960s, and supposedly this book is set in England of the 1990s. That the 1990s looks exactly like the 1960s, only without rock and roll or paisley, is almost embarrassing. One character even says, "You know I don't like color television." Ouch.

This is very lazy science fiction. Same old tropes, throw in some kink, new technology will kill us all, blah, blah, blah. Skip it and read Theodore Sturgeon or Isaac Asimov, instead.

[Jim Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recording tape seemed such a miracle in the 1960’s that many SF novels of that period relied on its use in their stories. Of course computer chips and The Cloud have made taping obsolete, so their use in Synthajoy (1968) is distracting. Better had Compton written this as a straight psychological thriller since he has a good plot and well-developed characters. In the novel, Mrs. Cadence finds herself in an institution where she is being re-programmed using her husband’s invention (Sensitape) to make her feel contrition for killing him. Sensitape records emotions, feelings, and experiences to help cure people of their mental problems. However, it soon becomes a commercial commidity which can be misused and profited from. Compton flashes from Cadence’s current state as they attempt to “cure” her and back to her memories of the past and her relationship with a man who is amoral, unemotional, driven, and completely selfish. It’s a good morality tale; it's just a shame about the tape.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really sci-fi; though a kind of virtual reality serves as the motivating force of the book, this is almost entirely an exploration of a woman's deteriorating relationship with her husband (creator of Sensitape, said quasi-VR tech). Not bad, writing is good, but ultimately there's not much here to enjoy.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this back when it came out. I was 13. I didn't understand it at all. It is quite good, quite brilliant, and quite unusual for its time. Perhaps even for now. In many ways far more "mature" than most SF of that period. Highly recommended.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm usually not a huge fan of experimental writing but this kept my attention to the end and the author had a few tricks up their shoulder. I did like The Unsleeping Eye novel better but this was a dark, and at times frightening, look at what could happen.

[Ruskoley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a perfect book for people who like psychological-study, first-person, near-future stories. It is a "science fiction" novel only because the technology in the novel does not exist yet. The technology, however is not stereotypical stuff like ray guns and transporters. So, even that reduces the "sf" in this novel. And the writing style and storyline are definitely for the advanced reader... not for the juvenile or rookie.

It was a difficult novel for me to read because the focus is on human-experience as opposed to technology or science. Personal, human-experience narratives always lose me. The first half of the book was ridiculously boring and tedious - to me. The narrator is a female who tells her story in non-linear fashion, while she is a undergoing psychiatric treatment at Kingston. She is sedated for all but a few hours of the day during which her narrative is a hodge-podge of memories and focused thought. This makes the whole thing seem very realistic. She is a smart (I mean the word in the older sense, not merely as a synonym of intelligent) woman who was a professional nurse. She is written as an insightful, witty, and savvy character.

However, most of this novel is about the narrator's personal experience and marital relationship. I would have rather seen the big picture of the effect of the technology on society as a whole, as opposed to the effects of the technology on a micro level. The book is exceedingly well-written. The narrator/narration is real and not forced. A novel for a certain type of reader......

[Scott Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A woman is convicted of the murder of her husband and is sentenced, ironically, to a psychological treatment that she helped develop with her husband. The novel is told through the woman's stream of consciousness narration, which is muddled by the treatment she is receiving. I wanted to like this book more than I did. The lead character is way too passive to be interesting and the entire affair is dry as a bone. An easier book to admire than to actually enjoy.

[Marko]

I have the german edition: Synthetische Freuden