Mockingbird (Tevis novel)

The novel begins hundreds of years in the future in Manhattan, where most of the buildings have been razed and its population, as with the world's, is largely depleted. The surviving people are illiterate, and are drugged with pills that makes them supine and infertile. That has caused human life on the planet to gradually decline to the point of near-extinction. The surviving humans are survived by android robots, of which Spofforth is the most powerful and sophisticated. No humans have been born in many years and there are no children. Sucide by immolation is rampant, as people have nothing to live for.

Over the years Spofforth has held many important positions, including head of the entire auto industry, which no longer exists, and mayor of St. Lous. He is now the "dean of faculties" of New York University,

As the novel begins, Spoffoth climbs to the top of the Empire State Building to attempt suicide. The attempt is unsuccessful as Spofforth is wired to prohibit suicide. He has been doing this every year for many years, as he yearns to die.

Spofforth brings a teacher, Paul Bentley, to New York. Bentley has taught himself to read after a Rosetta Stone–like discovery of a film with words matching those in a children's primer. Spofforth begins to dislike Bentley and the knowledge he has from reading. Bentley says he could teach others to read, but Spofforth says that is illegal and instead gives him a job of decoding the written titles in ancient silent films.

At the Bronx Zoo, where the animals are robots, Bentley meets Mary Lou. He explains the concept of reading to her, and the two embark on a path toward literacy. Spofforth responds by sending Bentley to prison for the crime of reading and takes Mary Lou as an unwilling housemate. Mary Lou is pregnant with Bentley's child. She learns from Spofforth that he has engineered the demise of the human race because he cannot be allowed to die as long as he can serve humans.

Bentley escapes from the prison, spends some time in a Christian community, and makes his way to New York. There he finds Mary Lou and her baby. She tells Paul that Spofforth has agreed to end the drug-induced depopulation. They climb the Empire State Building together and help Spofforth to commit suicide.

Anne McCaffrey commented, "I've read other novels extrapolating the dangers of computerization, but Mockingbird stings me, the writer, the hardest. The notion, the possibility, that people might indeed lose the ability, and worse, the desire to read, is made acutely probable."

When a new edition was published in 1999, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, Pat Holt stated that, "The book often feels like a combination 1984 and Brave New World, with a dash of the movie Escape from New York thrown in."[1]

Reviewing the 1999 edition, James Sallis declared that "Mockingbird collapses the whole of mankind's perverse, self-destructive, indomitable history, cruelty and kindness alike, into its black-humor narrative of a robot's death wish."[2]

On April 20, 2022, it was announced that Alma Har'el will direct a film adaptation of the book for Searchlight Pictures.[3]

• Don Swaim interviews Walter Tevis (1983-84)