Seth MacFarlane’s Novella Sympathy For The Devil Is A Smartly Creative Yet Poignant Extension Of Season Three And Is A Must Read

Photo courtesy of Goodreads

We are going for a ride.

In Sympathy For The Devil readers are taken back to the birth of an ethical conundrum that follows a man from infancy to adulthood that will eventually reach out to the very stars themselves. It starts off in NYC, 1914 at a luxurious hotel where everyone is just going about their daily routines when a well-dressed woman rushes into the foyer in fear of something unseen by onlookers, carrying an infant and demanding the clerk behind the desk take the child but couldn’t or wouldn’t say why. After much protest, the bewildered clerk takes the child from the young woman who tearfully tells the child she will come back for him and then rushes out of the lobby through the door and down the streets of NYC. Not wanting to care for the child but also not willing to leave him at an orphanage the hotel’s clerk, with the aid of a few discrete employees, is made privy to the news that a wealthy German couple, the Vogels, who are regulars at their place of employment, have recently lost their young child to typhoid and might just be willing to care for this new bundle of sleepy joy. The information proved correct and before you could say hey no paperwork needed the loving couple took in the infant promising to love, support, and protect him.

Otto Vogel grew up in Berlin around the same time as the rise of nazism was beginning to overtake the country’s political and social-economical beliefs. Germany struggled greatly under the weight of financial debt from WWI but that was nothing compared to the loss of German pride, confidence, and dignity to the jaws of defeat. The indignation grew into a movement that eventually encaptured a young Otto Vogel who joined the SS and found himself a home, one that gave him prominence, identity, and prestige in his hometown and abroad and replaced his shamefully weak family. Otto even meets his future wife, the unbelievably perfect Annalisa. Otto became the ideal example of devotion to the Reich and its plan of global conquest until Hitler’s little darling got a promotion he was not ready for.

When Otto was assigned to manage a concentration camp, he was in heaven. He got to publically torture and kill without restraint Jewish laborers he thought were weak, disgusting, and useless (meaning all of them) until he received word from Heinrich Himmler that in ten days two representatives from the International Red Cross were going to drop by for a visit and report any and all human rights violations they saw which meant the camp had a lot of work that needed to be done to cover up the atrocities. Prior to the labor camp visit, the IRC representatives Ed Mercer and Kelly Grayson, stopped by Otto’s home to introduce themselves and things went well. Annalisa and Alger, the Vogel’s young son, were pleasant, and the visit went off without a hitch. At the camp, however, things fall to pieces literally and figuratively. Ed and Kelly know everything they are looking at and are superficially experiencing is a simulation. Everything except Otto. Otto is real, his real name is Adam, and his world is about to fall apart. The program is paused and then ended by Ed and Kelly, leaving Adam frightened, confused, and naked except for a white robe Kelly gave him before the sim ended. Once the simulation was ended the next step was getting the increasingly agitated man aboard the Orville and away from the laboratory he’s been living in for 30 years to hopefully decompress and de-program him and that went as well as you can expect.

Adam, as an infant, lived with his parents, Leonard and Pamela, who were scientists illegally working on a type of limitless energy source, the kind of work that had to be done without any governing body’s knowledge or permission. So, on and in an outlying planet, they continued their work but also constructed a ridiculously smart environmental simulator that they used for fun and work. Unfortunately, the Krill caught wind of their work and raided their lab, stealing the research data, kidnapping the scientists, and imprisoning them on Krill. Before they were kidnapped, Leonard and Pam took Adam down to the simulator and left him in there so he would be safe and cared for by the program until they returned, but they never did, so Adam has lived his entire life in a simulation that was actively creating the world he was living in, based on his responses to environmental stimulus and that led his eventual participation in the Nazi party and all the atrocities they (and he) committed. So the moral quandary was, now that Adam is aboard the Orville and reunited with his parents who were just freed from their Krill prison, should he be charged with crimes against humanity for the killings he help commit or did himself, even though it was all a simulation? He thought it was real, he enjoyed participating in them, and he relished torturing Jewish people in and outside of the labor camps. Again, it was all a simulation but he genuinely thought he was doing it. How do you handle that in the 25th century?

Adam is eventually de-programmed by a Union Psychiatric Team and goes on to lead a normal life but the question still hangs with us as does most of this work.

Sympathy is a brilliant story that pulls at our emotional, moral, and philosophical anchors while laying out an incredible scenario that keeps readers engaged and gets us to ask ourselves what and why do we believe what we believe.

Sympathy For The Devil is available on Audible through Amazon right here, Goodread right here, and pretty much anywhere you can purchase digital and audiobooks. I highly recommend going with the audiobook narrated by Bruce Boxleitner especially if your german is as rusty as mine.