Rumor (okay, other reviews on Goodreads) has it that this is the worst book ever to win the Hugo. I don't know if that's true-yet. I do know that this is not a good book from any kind of literary perspective, and one that buries its occasional good ideas under tedious essays.

The story begins with Joey, an 8 year old boy in a working class family who is a telepath. Unique in the world, a basic extrapolation of 1950s America, he discovers a sympathetic university psychiatrist who tells him to conceal his gift from the world. The plot then skips forward 14 years, with Joey as a college senior working in the lab of Dr. Billings, the great psychosomaticist, some sort of combination of behavioral therapist and neuroscientist. Dr. Billings is given a government grant to develop an automatic pilot for automobile and airplane that will avoid collisions. Billings decides the request is actually for a general purpose AI capable of moral reasoning, and with the help of Joey to coordinate an interdisciplinary research team, achieves the first genuine breakthrough in decades. The AI, named "Bossy" for its resemblance to a cow, prompts a public outcry, and Joey and Billings and another member of the research team are forced to go into hiding in San Francisco. They perfect Bossy in a warehouse owned by an Mable, an old retired prostitute, use the completed Bossy to psychosomatically rejuvenate Mable, opening a path to immortality. They then seek shelter with Kennedy, the last independent industrial titan, and then re-use a public outcry about the potential of immortality to get Bossy approved by the government and sold as a mass-market consumer device.

So yeah, as you can see, the plot has grand ideas, but does almost nothing to link them together. There are some really interesting ideas about the relationship between science and society, innovation being crushed by government dominance, the exigencies of the Cold War turning American into a totalitarian dictatorship more-or-less identical to the USSR, the next stage in human evolution and its relationship to artificial intelligence. The problem is that instead of demonstrating these ideas in plot, the story pauses for a character to have a long internal monologue. There's something here for say, a literary critic tracing the genealogy of certain Big Ideas in science-fiction, but this book isn't just old, it's positively musty--and not in a way that inspires any kind of nostalgia or imagination.