Inside Job

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

I have a goal of eventually reading all of the major SFF award winners, including novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories, so that???s why I picked up Connie Willis???s Inside Job when I saw that it was available on audio. Inside Job won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 2006. Just a couple of months ago, by the way, Connie Willis received the SFWA Grand Master Award (January 2012).

Inside Job is a story about Rob, a professional debunker of pseudoscience, and his new partner Kildy Ross, a beautiful and famous actress. They attend s??ances and visit faith healers, psychics, and palm readers, always figuring out how these hucksters are cheating the gullible and publishing their findings in their magazine, The Jaundiced Eye.

Mostly it???s the same thing over and over: an earpiece, hidden wires, a confederate in the right place. Their latest case, however, is the toughest one ever. When they attend a seminar by the new psychic in town, Ariaura Keller, she begins channeling the spirit of H.L. Mencken, the famous skeptic who reported on the Scopes Trial and famously said, ???Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.???

Rob and Kildy are determined to discover how Ariaura is channeling Mencken. But, more puzzling, why would a psychic who makes money tricking her audience be regaling them with monologues by H.L. Mencken? The resulting investigation is exciting, suspenseful, full of delicious logical quandaries, and often very funny.

Eventually the reader wonders if there???s such a thing as being too skeptical. At some point, you have to have faith in something or someone. What kind of relationship would you have with your loved ones, for example, if you kept demanding irrevocable proof when they said they loved you?

Inside Job was a quick read and a fun and educational story with likable characters and a delightfully silly plot. I listened to Audible Frontiers??? version which was narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris, who I liked very much. The audio version is 2?? hours long and costs about $7 at Audible.com. Or you can read the full text of Inside Job for free at Asimov???s.

A short story about a professional “skeptic” who gets into a “conundrum” of trying to prove that a spirit entity is real while at the same time proving that the person channeling said entity is a fraud. Oh, and there's a love story in there about a beautiful woman having a crush on the protagonist. It's a bit cliché, but it's really more of a plot device for the story.

I found it to be a quick read, rather enjoyable at first, but then I started getting the impression that this was the author trying to put forth the “correct” worldview. I looked up H. L. Mencken, who was protrayed as the hero of the protagonist, and yikes, the portrayal of Mencken as a “champion” of skeptics in the story is very biased, coveniently omitting the darker side of the commentaries and criticisms.

So while I found the story to be ok and a little insightful into the minds of the instinctually skeptical, it also felt like the main characters were little more than mouthpieces to ridicule certain worldviews. Of course, some would see it as simple characterisation, but if so, it was overly done and somewhat distasteful.