The Intuitionist

Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist. New York City: Doubleday, 1999. See Internet Speculative Fiction Database for translations.[1]

Locus review cited on ISFDb page linked above has The Intuitionist a "Literary fantasy novel of politics and race, with deadpan satirical elements. A black female Elevator Inspector who can Intuit mechanical problems is caught in a conspiracy over plans for the perfect, world-changing elevator."

Alternatively, a variety of noir novel set in a "skewed world": an alternative "hard-boiled, pre-civil-rights New York of cigarette girls, automats and men in fedoras," where, the emphatically modern "elevators are the dominant symbol of the times," in the formulation of Gary Krist in a respectful review in The New York Times, at least on the web. Krist notes that the female hero of the novel is "something of a pariah among old-school elevator men, not just because of her race and sex," Black and female, "but because she is an Intuitionist, a member of a new breed of inspectors who do their job by sensing an elevator's psychic vibrations rather than examining the actual machinery. Although Intuitionists are controversial, they are rapidly gaining legitimacy -- not least because their accuracy rate is 10 percent higher than that of the more traditional Empiricists."[2]

And in a brief mention in "Apocalypse in the Mainstream 101," T. S. Miller asserts the novel "bears a strong family resemblance to steam- punk" (SFRA Review #301 [Summer 2012]: p. 35).[3]

We will stress that Intuitionist vs. Empiricist conflict and the idea that an elevator might have what a serious reviewer calls "psychic vibrations," and additionally suggest comparison and contrast with the idea of "verticality" in the culture based on and in huge buildings in Robert Silverberg's The World Inside.

RDE, finishing, 15Jun21