Mallworld
Somtow Sucharitkul
284 pages
published in 1981

I was in the mood for some light science fiction and curious about this writer, now better known as S. P. Somtow. Mallworld is one of his earliest novels, I'd picked it up some time earlier in a secondhand bookshop.

The solar system has been cut off from the rest of the universe slightly beyond the orbit of Saturn by an impeneterable forcefield, after which it was shunted into a pocket universe. All done for our own good by the mighty and ancient Selespridar. But no matter, there's still Mallworld, the mall to end all malls. Everything is on sale there, from babies at Storkways to your own death at the Way Out Suicide Parlors.

That's the setting, the story itself is a fixup of seven short stories, all dealing in one way or another with Mallworld and the Selespridar. The linking device is that a high ranking Selespridar is doing a telepathic review of seven typical human beings to determine whether or not we're ripe to be let lose in the galaxy. I had some problems with the bridging fragments between the stories, as it's written as one side of a dialogue, which always sounds unnatural to me. The stories itself are better, though they tend to repeat themselves a lot. Every time the basic setup is repeated and you get another potted explenation of Mallworld and the Selespridar.

All in all this is a nice collection of light, entertaining stories. It's however not the most riotously funny book the universe has seen since the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Some of the details are nice, like the way in which ancient(= 20th century) Earth history is mangled.