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‘Stochastic Man’ by Robert Silverberg is set in the dizzying future world of New York at the dawn of the third millennium. Long-haul flights now take place by rocketship, powdered bone is the social drug of choice among the middle-class, and group marriage is commonplace. But all of this is icing and has little to do with the plot.

Lew Nichols is the foremost expert in stochastics. Based on information available in the present, he predicts the future, with some accuracy. He meets a man named Paul Quinn who wants to be the next President and agrees to help him. He also meets Martin Carvajal, who can see the future more directly. Carvajal means to teach Nichols to see too.

Nichols meets Quinn at a party, and has this to say about his political charm:

On one level he was simply feeding back everything he had been told about me, and making an impressive performance of it, but on another level he was communicating his amusement at the outrageous excessiveness of his own con job, as though inwardly winking and telling me, I've got to pile it on, Lew, that's the way I'm supposed to play this dumb game. Also he seemed to be picking up and reflecting the fact that I, too, was both amused and awed by his skill. He was good. He was frighteningly good.

In a way, this describes writing as well. Often I have heard it said that a writer should have no style at all, shouldn't use whimsical turns of phrase or flowery, shouldn't do anything that distracts from the message he is trying to convey. Despite this, some of the greatest writers are known not just for what they say but how they say it. Henry James is the classical example; Wodehouse and Saki are others. Silverberg is similar in this book. There isn't really much plot at all — only a short story's worth — but he fills up the space enjoyably with deft descriptions of parties, the demographic make-up of nineties New York, the narrator's reflections on his situation, and the occasional gratuitous sex scene, without ever becoming slow or stodgy.

Unlike most Cassandra-related works, ‘Stochastic Man’ touches only lightly on the issue of what happens if you try to change the future. Carvajal tried it once, he reports, but the result convinced him never to try again, so he lives his life as if reciting a script, making no decisions, acting never through will but because he has already seen every moment of his life. This provides an interesting contrast to a religion that crops up: the “Transit creed”.

Transit is supposed to be Buddhism as re-imagined by California, and Silverberg's description is very plausibly Californian, though less plausibly Buddhist. Its credo includes the cycle of rebirth. To avoid rebirth and attain the next state of existence, the adherent must renounce all ego attachment. The other half of the credo is in accepting change: everything is in continual flux, there is no cause and effect, no pattern, no predictability. To ensure detachment from the idea of a fixed personality or fixed habits, the adherent must cultivate unpredictability.

Naturally, Nichols resists this philosophy, as he finds it incompatible with his idea of a predictable future described by the laws of probability. But as he gets further into Carvajal's world of unthinking acceptance of the future as he has seen it, the reader gets to see just how much his behaviour comes to match that of the Transit acolyte. Just as the latter might rearrange all their furniture or fly to India apparently on a whim, so the former might draw on a tablecloth or give all his money away simply because he has seen it happen. Though heading in opposite directions, they both reach the same end-point, rejecting cause and effect.

It seems that this beautiful concordance is the book's raison d'être, so it was quite unsurprising that the surface plot is a bit of a let-down. It doesn't have the neat sense of coming full-circle that the topic mandates, but fizzles out into what is to the reader an uncertain future.