Tom OBedlam

The world has become overcrowded, polluted, violent and increasingly difficult to distinguish from a badly managed psychiatric institution. Into this troubled future wanders Tom, a ragged visionary who hears voices, sees distant planets and insists that other worlds are calling to humanity. Since civilisation has already collapsed into chaos, the authorities naturally conclude that Tom is the problem.

Tom is a modern incarnation of the old “Tom o’ Bedlam”: a mad wanderer travelling from place to place with his visions, fragments of prophecy and inconvenient observations about the supposedly sane people around him. He claims to see glorious alien landscapes, cities beneath unfamiliar suns and beings offering humanity some form of release. His descriptions are vivid, persistent and impossible to verify, which earns him less a delegation from the scientific establishment than a secure room and professional supervision.

This is the early twenty-second century, and America has survived the future without deriving much benefit from it. Environmental destruction, social upheaval and accumulated human stupidity have produced a fragmented society of fortified communities, desperate wanderers, cults, gangs and institutions attempting to preserve order with whatever medication remains available. Technology still exists, but optimism has been discontinued.

Tom’s visions might be psychosis, telepathy, prophecy or genuine contact with something beyond Earth. Robert Silverberg carefully leaves all the unpleasant possibilities on the table. If Tom is merely mad, then he is a vulnerable man being carried along by a broken mind. If he is sane, then humanity’s first ambassador to the stars is a homeless psychiatric patient whom almost everyone ignores. Neither option reflects especially well upon the species.

Around him, doctors, fellow patients and frightened survivors try to decide what his experiences mean. Some want to cure him, some want to study him and others begin to share the disturbing sense that his visions may be more than private hallucinations. What starts as one man’s impossible glimpse of other worlds gradually becomes harder to contain. Sanity, after all, is largely a matter of numbers: one person seeing an alien city is delusional, while several million doing it simultaneously may require a government statement.

Silverberg uses the machinery of science fiction to explore madness, faith, social collapse and the enduring human desire to escape somewhere—anywhere—that has not yet been comprehensively ruined. The novel asks whether salvation would be recognised if it arrived through the wrong person, wearing dirty clothes and speaking in sentences that made the psychiatrists reach for their notebooks.

There are no gleaming starships carrying humanity confidently into a bright interstellar age. Earth is not approaching the universe as a bold, united civilisation; it is limping towards it while arguing with itself and misplacing the paperwork. Any cosmic transformation will have to begin among the damaged, the displaced and the officially unwell, which may not be such a ridiculous place to start.

This 1987 Futura paperback is in Good condition: previously read, respectably preserved and still firmly located in this reality. It has experienced the ordinary wear of a second-hand book but shows no evidence of receiving telepathic broadcasts from distant planets. If it begins describing cities beneath nine suns, Crappy Old Books accepts no responsibility.

Ideal for admirers of speculative fiction that mixes apocalypse, psychology and cosmic mystery; readers who suspect normality may be overrated; and anyone who enjoys stories in which the apparent lunatic could be the only person paying proper attention.

From Crappy Old Books, where we too occasionally hear voices from other worlds, although they usually turn out to be the radio left on in the stockroom.

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