The novel “Mockingbird” by Walter Tevis was published for the first time in 1980.

In the 25th century the android Robert Spofforth is the dean of the New York University but in fact controls the entire city, in sharp decline, because human beings are stuffed with drugs and machines fail without anybody fixing them. He wants to die but that’s against his programming and only his encounter with an out of the ordinary human being gives him hope.

Paul Bentley is a university professor, for what a work essentially useless is worth. By chance, he finds a way to learn to read and that opens a new world and humanity’s past. The meeting with Mary Lou Borne, a woman who doesn’t want to use drugs, brings a further change in his life but the two of them go against the rules and have to deal with Spofforth.