The Check Is in the Mail and Other Tall Tales Book

Definitely not the cup of kangaroo for everyone, but for those of us in the mid-1970s who were trying to play our Beatles LPs backwards in order to hear the hidden messages, and who enjoyed arguing all sides of what the light-show sequences of 2001 were subliminally teaching us, Effinger's What Entropy Means to Me was a bizarre and beloved bit of New Wave nonsense that we spent fun hours attempting to parse the theme and message and moral of at to, you know? Effinger infused quite a bit more humor into this book than any of his subsequent ones. It reminds me more of a Gene Wolfe flight-of-fancy than anything, but Wolfe was never this amusing. I'm not sure even Effinger ever knew exactly quite what entropy meant to him or where he was going with it, but we all enjoyed the ride... or, what a long strange trip it was. It was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1973, but lost to Asimov's The Gods Themselves.