Ian Watson
Mockymen

With this novel, Ian Watson (1943) ventures into a challenging field. This is not so much because "Mockymen" ("The Year of the Dominators," 2003) treads on the always treacherous ground of the esoteric side of thought and the hallucinatory and deviant idealized Nazi vision, but because in what could then be defined as a decidedly peculiar spy story, the philosophical implications as well as the inevitable ethical and moral ones are evidently difficult to handle, especially within a relatively substantial novel (about 250 pages) where the sci-fi component is certainly not sidelined but rather is presented as a central and significant argument.

The protagonist of the story is a British secret service agent named Anna Sherman. We are in 2015: after the crisis that hit the entire world in the previous decade, humanity is experiencing an apparent period of rebirth by collaborating with an alien species that has struck a deal wherein, in exchange for new technologies, they would be allowed to establish their own productive settlements. The aliens are called "Mockymen." Their peculiar characteristic indeed lies in not possessing a real physical body: consequently, to survive and progress their species, they have had to adapt. Their adaptation system on Earth (but adapted on other planets as well) essentially involves inhabiting a human body ("Manikin") stripped of all its psychic components after excessive use of a drug ("Bliss") specifically introduced by the aliens themselves, who have a view of society wherein only the strongest, through domination, are destined to survive. A particular case, however, that of Jamie Olson, a "manikin" who awakened autonomously and with the claim - apparently proven and based on evident evidence... - of being the reincarnation of a Norwegian SS officer, takes us back to the introduction of the novel and simultaneously becomes the "key" through which Earth will realize what the aliens' real plans are (considering Jamie Olson himself a subject of fundamental interest), radically changing the cards on the table and the "rules of the game," thus becoming the main element to consider in every implication concerning a certainly challenging reading of this novel beyond its purely narrative content.

It should be specified that the novel actually begins in Norway and more precisely in Oslo at the mysterious Vigeland Park. We are in 1997 when the mysterious Knut Alver, or rather Olaf Frisvold, will (apparently) revive the Nazi dream of immortality within a series of historical implications that specifically reconstruct the events in Norway during World War II and its connection both with Nazi Germany and with England, as well as the revival of elements of Eastern thought, which, as known, was the subject of speculation and costly research by the SS, who ultimately seemed to have even tired Adolf Hitler himself. That this kind of dark ritual might then have some implication with the forms of adaptation of an alien species that at this point we could definitely define as invasive is at least unsuspected, and yet here Ian Watson indeed attempts the impossible, deploying a novel certainly challenging for its philosophical and speculative content (competently argued within the story) and somehow heavy to read, not so much for the language but rather for a certain slowness in the narration that, to the detriment of curiosity itself, ends up discouraging the reader. This forces me to a not particularly positive personal evaluation, yet it does not detract from the merits of the author who, undoubtedly on other occasions, has proven to be more brilliant.