Golem in the Gears by Piers Anthony, review by jimroberts

#1, jimroberts: ""My review of Golem in the Gears has turned out rather long, but if any of you can get through it and comment I'll be grateful. (Don't be put off by British spelling.)

Xanth is a magical land: there are creatures such as dragons and centaurs, and every human, as well as some part-human and humanoid creatures, has a more or (mostly) less useful magical talent. Puns abound: much of the magic is based on puns. Beyond the borders of Xanth lies drear Mundania, where magic does not work. Golem in the Gears is the ninth book in the Xanth series and the shortest story so far, which makes it a reasonable place for a first look into the series: it stands alone pretty well, especially with the help of the Lexicography of Xanth with which the book is padded out.

Grundy the Golem has been a minor character in several previous books. He was originally an inanimate Universal Translation Device, but after he developed some human-like sympathy for other creatures, he was magically transformed into a doll-sized man, retaining, of course, the ability to communicate with any living thing. In this book, he advances to major character. Most of the adventure is nothing very special, but Anthony works in some interesting ideas.

What it's about
Grundy has become very dissatisfied with his life as a tiny person among normal humans. Sure, they sometimes take him along on adventures because of his usefulness as a translator, but he doesn't feel respected, so he wants to go on a quest to prove his worth. He determines on finding Princess Ivy's pet dragon, which disappeared at the end of Crewel Lye. So, like every protagonist in Xanth so far, he goes for advice to Magician Humphrey and, as usual, Humphrey's advice doesn't seem much use: Grundy should ride the Monster under the Bed to the Ivory Tower. It turns out that Ivy, like many girls, lives in nightly fear of the monster which will grab her ankles, given a chance. However, Ivy is growing up and Snortimer, her monster, fears that she will soon lose her belief and fear, whereupon he will fade away, so he consents to carry Grundy, provided that Grundy expands his quest to include finding romance for Snortimer. They pick up various helpers for parts of the journey, and after about a third of the story they find the Ivory Tower.

There, however, they find neither the missing dragon nor romance for Snortimer. Rather, the evil Sea Hag is bringing up the beautiful Rapunzel in almost complete isolation from the influence of the outside world. During his journey Grundy has been told about the Sea Hag and her talent of extending her life by taking over control of a new body every time her current one dies: she retains her basic personality, but is limited by the skills and knowledge of her new victim, and she needs some compliance for the takeover. She has therefore adopted the habit of investing some years of each lifetime in grooming a carrier for the next one, and she uses the tower to maintain tight control over her planned victim's education. So, although Ivory Tower usually refers to academia and its supposed lack of contact with reality, the analogy here is more to forms of education which stifle a child's curiosity and attempt to shield it from knowledge of which the educators disapprove. Rapunzel does not know the name Sea Hag: she calls her guardian Mother Sweetness and has been taught to regard her as the exemplar of virtue and kindness.

Like her fairy-tale namesake, Rapunzel has magically long hair which provides the only way to reach the high window which is the only entrance to the tower. Grundy manages to persuade her to let him and Snortimer climb her hair. It turns out that because her ancestry involves an act of miscegenation described in Crewel Lye, she can make herself the size that a Grundy-type golem girl would be. This rapidly begins to establish a bond between them, but to persuade her to leave involves overcoming her indoctrination, and Grundy realises that any crude attempt would only discredit him in her eyes.

The Hag arrives and flies into a murderous rage against Grundy, but, as she cynically observes, "I'll get her straightened around after I'm rid of you. She always listens to my side, when there's nothing else." He manages to end this confrontation with the Hag trapped in the tower and Rapunzel, Snortimer and him outside, but as their adventure proceeds (and they do find the dragon and a place where Snortimer can be happy), Rapunzel remains for a long time plagued by doubts whether she is right to leave Mother Sweetness.

Games played in the book
Golem in the Gears was published in 1985. In the early 1980's there was quite a bit of popular interest in the game (iterated) prisoner's dilemma as a very simple model of some aspects of morality (for example, an article in Scientific American in May 1983, see Metamagical Themas), and Piers Anthony uses this game as an important element in the resolution of the story. Leading up to this, he uses a couple of other games as plot elements. This was also the first book Anthony wrote using a computer, so he introduces a computer character to Xanth.

The first game to be used is the quite well-known Lines and Boxes (Wikipedia page). To gain access to Humphrey's castle, Grundy must win best of three small games involving nine dots/four boxes in which he must take first move. Unlike prisoner's dilemma, this is a constant-sum game in which "the more there is of mine, the less there is of yours", so not a good model for social interaction, but something can be made of it. In the first round, Grundy takes the naive never-give-your-opponent-a-chance-if-you-can-help-it approach, which leads to him losing all four boxes. Worried by this, in the next round Grundy makes the, to him, counterintuitive move of offering his opponent a box before his choice is forced. The opponent takes the box, but thereby gives Grundy the other three. In the vital third round, Grundy makes the offer, but his opponent declines it. Grundy takes it himself, then inevitably the other three as well. Moral: even in a situation inimical to co-operation, a degree of co-operation can make the difference between success and failure.

During the trip to the Ivory Tower, Grundy and his companions take shelter in a cave. "Before them stood a metallic box with a series of buttons at the front and a pane of glass at the top." This is the amoral Com-Pewter, who will feature in several more books. Victims who enter the cave become participants in something like a text-only computer game, such as were common at the time, but with the Xanthian magical enhancement that reality in the cave changes as Com-Pewter directs, as well as being described on the screen: also, Pewter understands voice input. Grundy's party needs to find a way to trick Pewter into leaving them a usable exit.

Towards the end of the book, the Hag gets control of the ruler of a tribe of elves, who capture Grundy and Rapunzel. The elves refuse to kill Grundy outright, but do agree to a contest which the Hag in elf form can expect to win. This degenerates into massive cheating on both sides and both contestants are plunged into a funnel which the elves believe leads to oblivion in the Void region of Xanth. However, although this may have been the case in the past, it now leads to the cave occupied by the Demon Xanth, the source of magic for the land of Xanth. To escape from this, Grundy persuades the Demon that he can learn something useful from the iterated prisoner's dilemma, so the Demon sets up a contest between two copies each of Grundy and the Hag.

In this game, the players independently choose one of two options, which Grundy calls Nasty and Nice. This pair of choices then determines the payoffs for each player. In the game as set up by Grundy and the Demon, the payoffs are:

• if one player chose Nasty and the other one Nice, the Nasty one gets the maximum payoff, 5, while the Nice one gets zero
• if both chose Nice, each gets an intermediate payoff, 3
• if both chose Nasty, each gets a lower intermediate payoff, 1.

A Hag can reason that choosing Nasty must be best, for she will at least equal her opponent's payoff, 1 to 1, but could come out well ahead, 5 to 0: on the other hand, Nice can at best equal the opponent's payoff, but can do much worse. Grundy, however, knows that in computerised contests organised in Mundania (by Robert Axelrod), a simple strategy called Tit-for-tat did best against a wide mix of other strategies. On its first encounter with another player, a Tit-for-tatter chooses Nice, then on subsequent encounters it echoes the other's previous choice. The consistently Nasty Hags take a good early lead because of their meetings with the initially Nice Grundies, but from then on score only 1 on every encounter, while each Grundy also scores 1 on meeting a Hag, but 3 on meeting the other Grundy. Thus after a few rounds, the Grundies pull ahead.

Concluding remarks
Some parts I thought should have been cut, or, preferably, replaced by something better. For instance, I find the field of bulls and bears, which appears for the first time in this book, always merely irritating. The chapter where Grundy and some of his companions are exploring underground passages whose ceilings keep collapsing is just a bit of set-up for the next book, and not interesting.

Anybody who has liked some other Xanth novel will probably like this. Anybody who wants to give Xanth a try could do worse than start with this relatively short and reasonably self-contained one.

Holy crap! it is long!

1st para 1st sentence

creatures, have has a more or (mostly) less

This is more like a dissertation on the book. After reading the review I feel that I've read the book. Personally I think you could kill the entire 'Games played in the book' section, as well as the last para in the 'What's its about' section as well.

otherwise reads pretty good.

#2, readafew

Opinions differ on the has/have thing. I've started a thread about it in Pedants' corner. I was tending towards what thorold has proposed: reword the sentence to avoid the problem.

My review may well tell you that you don't want to read the book, which is fair enough, most people won't and shouldn't want to read it. If I cut it down as you suggest, I'm saying that it's a not very good story and that the book is short but would have been better even shorter. It's the fact that Anthony contrives to relate his Xanth books to social and political questions that makes them more interesting than ho-hum magical adventures with puns. It's hardly spoilery for a book of this type to tell you that it all comes out well, and apart from that I've betrayed hardly any story. How does Grundy get out of the tower? How does he get out of the Everglades? How does he escape from Com Pewter? Where is the lost dragon? What makes a bed monster happy? Who knows the Hag's history?

I agree with readafew. The review is just too thorough. While I agree that you didn't spoil the story, there was too much synopsis for me to read through if the review makes the book sound promising.

I would suggest ending the What it's about section at ...Grundy expands his quest to include finding romance for Snortimer. That seems to be enough to whet a potential reader's appetite without over-explaining the plot.

I don't think the Games played in the book section needs to be cut. I found it interesting. But it could stand to be shortened. I would keep the first paragraph, but cut the rest and incorporate some of the second paragraph from post #3 explaining that Anthony uses social and political questions to add depth to his story.

hmmm.

As a review of the book, I think it probably is too long. And as in #4, you can probably just use the paragraghs from your post #3 to explain it. It does seem ripe for a review discussions post though as these sorts of topics can become interesting.

Taking one thing at a time, because I'm a slow thinker, I have an amended first sentence, which also has the advantage of being two words shorter:

Xanth is a magical land: there are creatures such as dragons and centaurs, and every human has a more or (mostly) less useful magical talent, as do some part-human and humanoid creatures.

OK? The anaphoric pro-verb "do" doesn't agree in number with its antecedent "has", but I don't think it has to.

I think that reads better.

I've cut a lot out, but linked to it. That seems a reasonable solution. As reading_fox suggested, I've added a slightly modified sentence from #3 to explain why I think the book is better than I make it sound, and also slightly modified the end. It's now posted here.

I'll also follow the suggestion to start a thread in Review Discussions.

Thank you all for your help.

I like it.