Memory Bank by Wallace West

I was drawn to this morsel of pulpy science fiction at the Source, a Minneapolis-area game and comics store (where JM got a great deal on an out-of-print classic over the Thanksgiving weekend - but I digress). What attracted my attention was the blurb on the back:

The custodian of the Bank and ruler of the Centauran council was the most beautiful woman of the Centauran world, thousand-year-old Marian.

Yes, folks, she's a librarian.

The Memory Bank operates on the premise that if it holds humans' memories for them, their emptier brains can live forever - it's experience and knowledge that causes aging. Marian looks after the collection, described vaguely as a huge computer running a "film-and-dot" memory system.

Only there's no index. It's impossible to find valuable thoughts, like the military strategies that would save the human race from certain destrution by telepathic aliens, amid the torrent of stream-of-consciousness blather. (I wonder if West read Bush's "As we may think," written about six years earlier.)

Need I say the writing is awful enough to be fun? Enough to have been blogged by John & Belle: Ask not for whom the admiral cooed. Marian's written as a total ice queen; she's obsessed with indexing the Bank, she won't deign to have a drink with the boys, and yet she's jealous of Our Hero's psychic barbarian girlfriend. She fades into the background after being rescued from some alien-possessed kidnappers, and the book closes with the hero and his girl making out.

Hope I didn't spoil it for anyone.