Book description
Ernest Weinraub, Ernst Weinraub, Ernst Weintraub - three slightly
different versions of the same name, the same man. Each incarnation of
Weintraub/Weinraub inhabits a slightly different version of our world:
Ernest Weinraub lives in a maddeningly overcrowded New York, a hellish
near-future world where sanity and life are imperiled by a nightmare of
pollution, overpopulation and manic power games played by the six
despotic men who rule Earth; Ernst Weinraub is a poet and an
intellectual who lives in a decadent world in which America has never
been colonized, Europe and Asia are crumbling, and Africa has only one
populated city, a world where drink, drugs and sex reduce human being to
little more than animals and a man feels himself being sucked under with
all the others; Ernst Weintraub, an idealistic revolutionary, lives in a
world in which the Allies lost the First World War to
"Jermany" and people are forced into a terror-ridden
underground existence as tyranny rides roughshod over man and
civilization. The single factor uniting these startlingly different
worlds is Weinraub/Weintraub. But even he is molded and distorted, it
would appear, by the various environments and societies, and his
problems seem entirely different in each of the three worlds. Yet, as
the book progresses, both he and the reader learn that neither time nor
place matters - every person must sooner or later make certain basic
decisions. RELATIVES is a novel about personality and about duty,
chiefly one's duty to the state. The Weinraub/Weintraub variations are
carefully orchestrated so that each tells the same story while
presenting vastly varying reasons for a single outcome. Once having
experienced these three powerful visions of an individual's interaction
with society, one is compelled to consider, and reconsider, the
foundations of moral and social responsibility. George Alec Effinger
was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1947. He attended Yale University, where
an organic chemistry course disabused him of the notion of becoming a
doctor. He had the opportunity to meet many of his SF idols thanks to
his first wife, who was Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm's babysitter. With
their encouragement, he began writing science fiction in 1970. He
published at least 20 novels and 6 collections of short fiction
including WHEN GRAVITY FAILS and THE EXILE KISS. As well, he also wrote
and published two crime novels, FELICIA and SHADOW MONEY. With his
Budayeen novels, Effinger helped to found the Cyberpunk genre. He was a
Hugo and Nebula award winner and a favorite amongst fellow SF writers.
