n the near future, where America has been taken over by organized crime, vices are not only permitted but encouraged, petty corruption is a way of life, and the greatest threat to the established order is the remnants of the Government, now a bunch of offshore fifth columnists determined to bring the benevolent "Syndic" to its knees.
Charles Orsino is a lowly bagman for the Falcaro family, learning the business from the ground up. He has enough Falcaro blood that room has to made for him, not enough for it to be a great deal of room. A popular fixture at the local police precinct, he is nevertheless sufficiently important to the organization to merit his very own assassination attempt, an event his Uncle Frank soon links to the subversive Government. Determined to avenge his family's honor, Orsino agrees to be brainwashed and provided with a false past and identity that will enable him to infiltrate the Government and track the conspiracy to its source.
Reinvented as alcoholic Max Wyman, Orsino is soon recruited by the Government, loaded aboard a submarine and hauled to the United States Navy's secret base in a now nearly depopulated Ireland. There he renews his acquaintance with Lee Falcaro, the beautiful psychological researcher who provided him with his false past. There he also finds himself fleeing into the island's interior, where he is captured by savages and freed by a young psychic girl named Martha. Now improbably a man of action, Orsino must enlist Martha's help, rescue Lee, get back to Syndic Territory and save the society he loves ... even though the book he's in doesn't have nearly enough pages for him to accomplish even a fraction of that.
A germ of an idea mutates too many times
Cyril Kornbluth was a veteran whose promising career as a science fiction writer was cut tragically short when the effects of the stress he brought back from the war cut him down in his mid-30s, with a potential lifetime of work still ahead of him. Though best remembered today as a frequent collaborator of Frederik Pohl's (their best novel together, The Space Merchants, remains a genuine classic), he was also a witty, inventive and prolific short fiction writer.
With all that said, it would be nice to call his most substantial solo work, The Syndic, equally indispensable. Alas, it isn't. The novel hasn't aged at all well in the 50 years since its original publication, but the dated elements are just the smallest part of the problem. In point of fact, the book seems the product of an author who could not maintain the book's brilliant opening idea at the required length, and who kept tossing in arcane plot developments just to keep
the narrative going until he ran out of pages.
The concept of a society organized around the precepts of organized crime is a good one, and Kornbluth mines it with sufficient wit for several chapters until he tosses his protagonist Orsino into an undercover operation that takes him and the readers away from that society for most of the book. The adventures in Ireland are standard hero-on-the-run fare, complete with extraneous elements like cute psychic native girls. Lee's long ruminations on the science of psychology read like more page filler, and the derring-do, while competent enough, and energized by a few inspired bits, is not even remotely as special as the central conceit Orsino left behind in North America. By the time he returns, with Lee in tow, and battles his way back to Uncle Frank's side, the book has lost almost all of its precious momentum, and emerges as a tremendous lost opportunity ... especially since Uncle Frank's reaction to the intelligence they provide comes down to a long, eloquent, and hugely apathetic "So what?"
Oddly enough, it happens to be a terrific "So what?" It's the best passage in the book, and a worthy candidate for the top hundred closing soliloquies in science-fiction history. It amounts to a dandy lecture on the double-edged blessings of human progress, and it's gorgeous. As narrative, however, it's nothing but "So what?" Readers who have followed Orsino on his great circular journey might be tempted to say the same.
