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eBook Category: Science Fiction Hugo Award Nominee, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Nominee, Nebula Award(R) Nominee
eBook Description: In a not-too-distant future, the assassination of an all-powerful New York City Mayor has plunged the five boroughs back into a dangerous cesspool of crime, drugs, and prostitution. Professional prognosticator Lew Nichols joins the campaign team of a fast-rising politico running for the city's top office, and is introduced to a man who privately admits to being able to view glimpses of the future. Lew becomes obsessed with capturing the man's gift and putting it to use for his candidate, but struggles to accept the strict terms he arranges with his mentor ... and the unforgiving predetermination of the future.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: The Stochastic Man, 1975
Fictionwise Release Date: June 2001

64 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.5 MB], eReader (PDB) [233 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [236 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [212 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [330 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [269 KB], hiebook (KML) [612 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [400 KB], iSilo (PDB) [196 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [242 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [329 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [321 KB]
Words: 68191
Reading time: 194-272 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
ISBN: 1-930936-74-5

1

We are born by accident into a purely random universe. Our lives are determined by entirely fortuitous combinations of genes. Whatever happens happens by chance. The concepts of cause and effect are fallacies. Them are only seeming causes leading to apparent effects. Since nothing truly follows from anything else, we swim each day through seas of chaos, and nothing is predictable, not even the events of the very next instant.

Do you believe that?

If you do, I pity you, because yours must be a bleak and terrifying and comfortless life.

I think I once believed something very much like that, when I was about seventeen and the world seemed hostile and incomprehensible. I think I once believed that the universe is a gigantic dice game, without purpose or pattern, into which we foolish mortals interpose the comforting notion of causality for the sake of supporting our precarious, fragile sanity. I think I once felt that in this random, capricious cosmos we're lucky to survive from hour to hour, let alone from year to year, because at any moment, without warning or reason, the sun might go nova or the world turn into a great blob of petroleum jelly. Faith and good works are insufficient, indeed irrelevant; anything might befall anyone at any time; therefore live for the moment and take no heed of tomorrow, for it takes no heed of you.

A mighty cynical-sounding philosophy, and mighty adolescent-sounding, too. Adolescent cynicism is mainly a defense against fear. As I grew older I suppose I found the world less frightening, and I became less cynical. I regained some of the innocence of childhood and accepted, as any child accepts, the concept of causality. Push the baby and the baby falls down. Cause and effect. Let the begonia go a week without water and the begonia starts to shrivel. Cause and effect. Kick the football hard and it sails through the air. Cause and effect, cause and effect. The universe, I conceded, may be without purpose, but certainly not without pattern. Thus I took my first steps on the road that led me to my career and thence into politics and from there to the teachings of the all-seeing Martin Carvajal, that dark and tortured man who now rests in the peace he dreaded. It was Carvajal who brought me to the place in space and time I occupy on this day.

Copyright © 1975 by Robert Silverberg