Incensepunk Review: Saint Vidicon to the Rescue

If Douglas Adams wrote hagiography

Christopher Stasheff’s fix-up novel Saint Vidicon to the Rescue is an unusual but welcome addition to the incensepunk bookshelf. For one, it’s humorous, which we have already broached ourselves, but does set it apart among the other books we’ve seen so far. Another element is time. We generally think of incensepunk as futuristic, but St. Vidicon is mostly present-day (spoiler alert: it does get a bit timey-wimey!). That said, there’s one line that finally convinced me that this book 100% belongs on the shelf:

He had never before seen a rosary made from computer chips and strung on a strand of fiber-optic cable. The cross that dangled from it was made from four burned-out capacitors.

Saint Vidicon to the Rescue by Christopher Stasheff

The book tells the story of a computer repair contractor named Tony as he is called by the spirit of St. Vidicon of Cathode into adventures to aid petitioners. The deceased priest, while canonized, must journey into Hell to defeat his nemeses such as the Imp of the Perverse, the Gremlin, and Janus, the Spirit of Illogic. Apparently, he cannot come into his full saintly powers until he completes his quest, and so he has conscripted Tony to supernaturally solve tech issues across time when the name of St. Vidicon is invoked. The b-plot follows Tony as he meets and falls in love with Susan, a fellow tech worker he meets when first encountering Vidicon.

Let’s start with the negatives. The biggest issue with this novel comes from its history. It wasn’t originally intended to be a novel. Saint Vidicon of Cathode’s story began in another novel - The Warlock Unlocked, the third in Stasheff’s Gramarye series in 1982. From there, the good saint became a bit of a sensation among IT workers, and Stasheff himself kept returning to the idea as well, publishing occasional short stories on his website featuring the patron saint of tech. Eventually, he collected these stories into a standalone novel and added a bit of meta-narrative to thread them all together. Unfortunately, the thread is easy to see and the pacing suffers from lack of any cohesive arc, leaving the book feeling jittery and patchwork.

Fortunately, however, the prose itself is good enough to carry the book through the lulls. The humorous voice is reminiscent of Sir Terry Pratchett, with the narrator, despite not appearing in the plot, becoming a sort of character by right. Sometimes during the narrative of the titular saint’s post-mortem spiritual journey, it slides into a King James-esque satire, and other times we get gems like this:

“Yeah, sounds like we’ve both run afoul of Finagle.”

Gadget’s turn to frown. “As in ‘Finagle’s Variable Constant’?”

Any engineer knew that the Constant (also known as the Fudge Factor) was the number you added to or subtracted from the answer you worked out, to make it equal the answer in the back of the book.

The other biggest strength of St.Vidicon is its charm. It’s a book that clearly grew out of a love for the character, and it’s not trying to put anyone through the ringer. There’s personal conflict, but there’s not turmoil, and it shows that Stasheff is rooting for the happy ending as much as the readers are.

Equally adoring as with the characters does the book treat the Catholic faith of Tony and Vidicon. It’s not apologetics in disguise (in fact, there are probably a few theological issues with the saint’s afterlife), but it embraces the church as a lived experience.

Some of the petitioners of St. Vidicon are Catholics, calling out to the patron of tech problems, while others are merely frustrated IT workers, invoking any name that might help their situation.

For his part, Tony seems to be more of a “cultural Catholic”, at least at the start of the book. He never mentions Mass or other church matters. But when Vidicon admonishes him about the teachings of the church on premarital sex, Tony (hesitantly) acquiesces. He’s not a paragon of virtue, at the beginning of the book or the end, but he is a good guy and his faith grows from his experience.

For all its flaws, Saint Vidicon to the Rescue remains a very enjoyable read. From it’s laugh-out-loud humor to the clever wordplay to the endearing characters, it is definitely worth a read for fans of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, or who want a light sci-fi read that won’t try to challenge the church.