Golem in the Gears by Piers Anthony

The indented parts at the beginning and end are the main review.

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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. 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. 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 often Anthony contrives to relate his Xanth books to social, political or philosphical questions, makes them more interesting than simple magical adventures with puns. In this case, he considers the difficulty of overcoming childhood indoctrination ("Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man") and the social value of co-operation.

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. So saving Rapunzel becomes another part of Grundy's quest.

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.

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 (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_and_Boxes">Wikipedia page). To gain access to Humphrey's castle, Grundy must win best of three small games involving nine dots/four boxes with him taking 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.

Some parts of the book could 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. However, anybody who has liked some other Xanth novel will probably like this, and anybody who wants to give Xanth a try could do worse than start with this relatively short and reasonably self-contained one.