The Cosmic Puppets: Cosmic game in Virginia town

The Cosmic Puppets
Philip K. Dick
1957

It begins in all innocence with some children molding clay into various shapes and a little boy named Peter watching them.

Ted and Peg Barton are traveling through Virginia on vacation. Ted wants to visit his home town of Millgate, which he hasn't seen in 18 years; they get there and he realizes that it isn't the same town in which he grew up. I'm not referring to the normal strangeness that comes over once familiar sites with the passage of time, either. In typical Dick fashion, an alien strangeness descends into an otherwise normal world and the world of appearances is revealed to be not quite what it seems.

Barton's face was waxen. 'I've never seen this town before,' he muttered huskily, almost inaudibly. 'It's completely different.' He turned to his wife, bewildered and scared. 'This isn't the Millgate I remember. This isn't the town I grew up in!' (p. 10)

The streets have different names. The landmarks are all gone, having been replaced with completely different houses, storefronts, etc. The house in which he grew up is gone and the street name is different. It is as if his entire past has been erased. The biggest shock comes when Barton visits the office of the local newspaper and reads about his own death at the age of 9:

The second child [to die of scarlet fever] was Ted Barton. He hadn't moved out of Millgate on 9 October 1935. He had died of scarlet fever. But it wasn't possible! He was alive. Sitting here in his Packard beside his grimy, perspiring wife. (p. 17)

Barton justly wonders who he is and where his store of memories have come from since Millgate is apparently not the town he remembered it to be. He begins to suspect that someone, or something, is behind this manipulation. As to who this someone may be, he has no idea.

We return to Peter Trilling, the little boy from the very beginning, and learn that he too is not what he seems. Somehow this small child has the power, like the juvenile Jesus in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, to bring clay to life. As soon as the reader is given this glimpse into something going on in Millgate, Ted Barton pulls up outside Peter's house; it turns out that his mother runs the town boarding house, where Ted plans to stay while he investigates the world turning upside down. Peter begins a conversation with Barton and inadvertently discloses his knowledge of the strangeness surrounding the town:

'How did you get through?' he demanded. 'Most people don't get through. There must be a reason.'

'Through?' Barton was puzzled. 'Through what?'

'Through the barrier.' Suddenly the boy withdrew; his eyes filmed over. Barton realizes the boy had let something slip, something he hadn't meant to tell. (p. 24)

Then Peter reveals an absolute humdinger. The town of Millgate, completely surrounded as it is by mountains is also encircled by two vast figures, each one of which overhangs and controls half of the bowl-like valley. Later in the novel Peter hands Barton "what looked like a cheap, nickel-plated magnifying glass" and instructs him to look to the haze overhanging the mountains; the scene resolves itself and Barton is able to see one of the two cosmic figures:

He had figured it out wrong. He had expected him to be part of the scene. He was the scene. He was the whole far side of the world, the edge of the valley, the mountains, the sky, everything. The whole distant rim of the universe swept up in a massive column, a cosmic tower of being, which gained shape and substance as he focused the filter-lens.

It was a man alright. His feet were planted on the floor of the valley; the valley became his feet at the farthest edge. His legs were the mountains--or the mountains were his legs; Barton couldn't tell which. Two columns, spread apart, wide and solid. Firmly planted and balanced. His body was the mass of blue-gray haze, or what he had thought was haze. Where the mountains joined the sky, the immense torso of the man came into being.

He had his arms out over the valley. Poised above it, above the distant half. His hands were held above it in an opaque curtain, which Barton had mistaken for a layer of dust and haze. The massive figure was bent slightly forward. As if leaning intently over his part, his half of the valley. He was gazing down; his face was obscured. He didn't move. He was utterly motionless.

Motionless, but he was alive. Not a stone image; a frozen statue. He was alive, but he was outside of time. There was no change, no motion for him. He was eternal. The averted head was the most striking part of him. It seemed to glow, a clearly radiant orb, pulsing with light and brilliance.

His head was the sun.

Likewise, Peter and Ted are sitting in the shadow of the other cosmic figure:

The figure rose around him. He couldn't exactly see it; he could sense it vaguely and no more. It flowed up on all sides of him. From the rocks, the fields, the tumbled heaps of shrubs and vines. This one, also, formed itself from the valley and mountains, the sky and haze. But it didn't glow. He couldn't see its head, its final dimensions. A cold chill moved through him. He had a distinct, sharp intuition. This one didn't culminate in the bright orb of the sun. This one culminated in something else.

In darkness?

Although Ted is loath to admit it (and who can blame him?), he has stumbled upon the secret of his missing hometown. Soon after he left it, this sleepy little Virginia mountain town became ground zero for the eternal struggle, first described by the Persian prophet Zoroaster, between Ohrmazd and Ahriman, the cosmic forces of order and chaos, of creation and decay. So of course, he tries to get the hell out of Dodge, only to discover that the road out of town has been rendered impassable, blocked by a jack-knifed logging truck.

He returns to town and meets up with the only other person left in Millgate who can see these looming figures and who remembers what life was like before they arrived--the town drunk, William Christopher. He reveals to Barton that soon after Barton's family left town, the Change came upon Millgate literally overnight. All of his fellow residents disappeared (they actually became these strangely luminous beings called Wanderers who nightly flit from one home to the next) and were replaced by a town full of strangers. No wonder Christopher, who was sober before the Change, has become the town drunk; it is his only means of staying sane.

Finally, after Barton and Christopher discover that they can literally "remember" the original town back into existence, and then ally with the Wanderers to do just that, all hell breaks lose. The little boy Peter is revealed to be none other than Ahriman himself, while Ohrmazd is the town doctor, Dr. Meade, who imposed forgetfulness on himself as one of the conditions of his contest with Ahriman. Once the charade has been exposed, the two forces expand their conflict out into the universe at large and the town of Millgate returns to normal. When we see Barton for the last time, he is leaving Millgate for a new life, his wife Peg having left him somewhere along the way.

Reading through this novel again, I was reminded of the places where I had read the story the first time. Images of the interior of BART trains and of my first apartment in the Richmond Annex came rushing into my mind unbidden; I'm guessing that I first read this book around a decade ago, soon after I had moved to California. At the time, the novel felt a little flat, but this time I really appreciated the nuances of the story. I also recognized this novel's relationship to Dick's later works dealing with various themes like maya and gnosis; these ideas obviously informed his writing long before his strange experiences of 2-3-74 brought them from his imagination into his waking life.

The Giza Power Plant: Perplexing puzzle of the pyramid power plant

The Giza Power Plant
Christopher Dunn
Bear & Co., 1998


I was reading something online about the Earth's "hum" when I came across this fascinating article by engineer and "pyramidiot" Robert Bauval . In it he explains that the Great Pyramid was constructed in such a way that it might have translated this frequency into something suitable for human listening; in other words, the pyramid may have been designed to "sing," making it the world's first multimedia monolith. I was so amazed at this revelation that I fired the e-mail off to my good friend, Rev. José M. Tirado, who shares my fascination for both ancient wonders and contrarians. Within minutes his reply indicated that I needed to read a book called The Giza Power Plant.

Although certain that the local library would not have a copy of this oddball book, I was taken aback when the online catalog pointed me right to it and indicated that it was available to request and check out locally. I placed my request, and once the book arrived at the library, I figured out why they were able to get a copy. It turns out that author Christopher Dunn lives in Danville, which is about 45 miles from here, and so the public library owned a copy. My attitude toward coincidences is that they all are meaningful, and so the proximity of the author cemented my desire to read this book.

Dunn begins with a pretty interesting question, one rooted in his decades of experience in manufacturing: why is the Great Pyramid of Cheops so precise in its construction? He explains at some length that the precision found in the measurements of the pyramid, including the surveying and alignment of the base, with variances of less than a hundredth of an inch over a length of hundreds of feet, is beyond the level of precision expected of contemporary construction. As an aerospace machinist with over 30 years of practical experience, Dunn cannot simply brush aside this question; he makes it clear that for the folks like him, those responsible for translating the ideas of engineers into physical artifacts, the standard theory about the purposes and construction of the Great Pyramid just don't hold water.

He also asserts that there is abundant evidence of the use of machine tools at Giza and he shows quite a few images that seem to support his contention. Thin parallel grooves in shaped stone look like the marks left by a power drill. Intersecting curved surfaces in stone bowls indicate the use of lathe-like machine tools, and not easily blunted copper implements and scouring compounds. Dunn marshals some pretty intriguing evidence in his chapter on the use of machine tools in ancient Egypt and discusses the positive responses he's gotten from machinists, engineers, and others involved in hands-on manufacturing. This chapter was probably the most compelling in the book, because it does seem to me, a total layman, that he's on to something.

However, while his ideas on machine tooling in ancient Egypt are pretty intriguing, I found his overall hypothesis--that the Great Pyramid was a vast machine intended to produce power through resonance with Earth's "hum"--a lot less convincing, though no less fascinating. In brief, he asserts that the pyramid was a power plant that converted the Earth's hum into a source of clean, renewable energy. He doesn't just make this up out of whole cloth either; on the contrary, he provides a lot of circumstantial evidence that does seem to indicate the inadequacy of the current explanation of the pyramid as a tomb. The granite-lined "King's Chamber" with its overlying vaults and entry-way is seen as a sort of "sound box" whose abundant quartz crystals resonate and amplify the humming earth below. The "Queen's Chamber" was a reaction chamber providing a source of hydrogen as a medium for the accumulated energy; Dunn notes the presence of various salt encrustations and a foul smell in this chamber that would be consistent with the presence of acid-base reactions. He even explains the mysterious shafts running up through the pyramid at an angle (a design feature inexplicable to modern manufacturers, since constructing the shafts on the horizontal would have been much, much easier); one shaft acted as wave guide to collect microwaves from space, focused them through granite lens that has been mistaken for a sarcophagus, and sent them out the other shaft as high-powered output.

It's a fascinating idea but it is not without its problems. Where are machine tools used in the construction, for example? I've seen museum cases filled top to bottom with Bronze Age implements but not one ancient Egyptian Black and Decker power drill. Where is evidence of the power usage (apart from the hypothetical power tools)? How was the power transmitted? (On one page, Dunn shows a bizarre "eye of Horus"-like satellite reflecting the beamed power back down to Earth, but thankfully doesn't really try to explain that.) Why did the human race completely lose its memory of this level of advancement?

This was a very interesting book which was incredibly well written (particularly since its writer is from Danville; in his defense, he is English by birth) and very fun to read. Dunn is an articulate voice for the seldom heard perspectives of those "on the ground" in the worlds of machining and manufacturing, and he raises some valuable and not easily dismissed questions about our knowledge of the ancient past.

Blackberries in the Dream House: Living, loving poetically

Blackberries in the Dream House
Diane Frank
1st World Library, 2003


One of the contributors to my ever-growing "to read" list (ok... pile; ok, ok... piles) is author/astrologer/rock star/pronoiac Rob Brezsny. Every Wednesday, he sends out an e-mail with horoscopes, inspirational quotes, selections from his books, and recommended readings ("Other Pronoia Resources"). In early March, I received the latest weekly Free Will Astrology e-mail (the webpage version is here) in which he recommended this novel. The entire recommendation took the form of this question: "What would happen to us if we were to undertake the discipline of turning our life entirely and self-consciously, into a poem?"

Blackberries in the Dream House is the Pulitzer-nominated tale of Yukiko, a geisha in 19th century Kyoto, whose life is breathed into being in exquisite, epigram-like chapters whose poetry is tangible. Although this work is Frank's debut novel, its author has been a practicing poet for some time and her loving attention to language is evident in each page, paragraph, sentence, and word. This is not a novel that I would have picked up off the shelf and read on my own; in fact, I'm not even sure where in a library or bookstore this would be shelved. Accordingly I am so grateful that it was recommended in the e-mail, that I ordered it through the library, and that I actually checked it out when it arrived. (By the time I picked it up at the library, I had begun my PKD project, and so I didn't even remember having placed the order for the book. In fact, the cover image is so unlike that of any book I'd "normally" read that at first I thought the book held for me by mistake.)

I am no poet, and so any ham-fisted attempts on my part to encapsulate the novel in terms of the characters and plot will, almost by definition, fail miserably in conveying the beauty and power of this book---I'm reminded of Thelonius Monk's comment on how writing about music is like dancing about architecture. So it is with a sheet metal worker's son trying to capture hallelujah poetry in ho-hum prose.

In brief, this is a love story and a tale of spiritual transformation, although that says very little in our world of debased "love" and commodified "spirituality." As mentioned above, Yukiko is a geisha trained in the arts of entertainment, culture, companionship, and physical love. She has her heart broken by her first real lover, Eitaro, when he leaves her to marry a woman his parents have chosen for him. After this, she becomes involved with Kenji, a young monk from the nearby Zen monastery, and it is Kenji who sets her on the path to self-discovery. After she begins to retreat within herself, she is sent to work and meditate with the local Buddhist nuns, where she discovers a profound sense of freedom and joy within the silence; she also realizes that the nunnery is not her home and the monastic vocation is not her calling, and so after healing her broken heart, she returns to her life as a geisha, where she is very in-demand due to her singular wildness and creativity. The tale twists to a close as she and Kenji consummate their love for one another in the midst of a seismic upheaval.

This was a delightful read and one that somehow filled my spirit with a sense of awe and playfulness, responses to the world that truly belong together but that so rarely co-habitate successfully. Thanks to Rob for the recommendation.

Eye in the Sky: Mind manifested

Eye in the Sky
Philip K. Dick
1957

In Dick's first three published novels he brings characters to life within alternate worlds of his imagining; in this, his fourth, he brings these worlds to life within his characters. This was also the first of his novels I have read in the course of my "PKD Project" that I would rate really highly in terms of how fun it was to read and how well it seemed to hang together. (The first three were all what I call "solid"--as opposed to "great" or even "good"--books. When I'm grading, saying your writing is "solid" is a tip-off that you're probably going to get a "B" on that particular essay.)

At 4:00 PM on October 2, 1959, a proton beam deflector at the Belmont Bevatron malfunctioned, releasing its charge---a six billion volt beam of energy---and incinerating an observation platform overlooking the giant device. The eight people who had been standing on the collapsed platform drop to the floor and into an alternate reality.

In a flashback, we are introduced to Mr. Jack Hamilton, the novel's primary protagonist and a senior research scientist working on the Belmont Bevatron. He is called into a meeting with Colonel T.E. Edwards, one of the top brass of the company, where he is given an ultimatum: leave his wife, who has been classified as a security risk due to her flirtations with left-liberal politics, or leave his position at the Bevatron. Wisely, he chooses the latter course of action. After breaking the news to his wife, the two of them make their way to the Bevatron for its inaugural test; there they encounter a motley group of visitors whose number includes an elderly soldier, a middle-aged mother and her son, a severe woman in a rough-woven suit, and their "Negro" guide. The last member of the group is Charley McFeyffe, the company cop responsible for turning Mrs. Hamilton in as a Communist and who is, inexplicably, a friend of the Hamiltons. Of course, these eight are those caught in the path of the errant particle beam, which is when the fun starts...

Hamilton awakens to find himself in an alternate universe, one that he shares with the other seven "participants" in this accidental experiment. At first, though, no one knows that they are in an alternate reality. He and his wife suspect that something is amiss based on vague intuitions, but they discount these by ascribing them to shock resulting from the accident. Strange little details begin to appear---Jack swears and is then stung by a bee, a shower of locusts descends from nowhere to plague Hamilton, prayer is revealed to be immediately efficacious---and it dawns on the Hamiltons that something is indeed not right with the world in which they have found themselves. Everyone around them is devoutly religious and almost single-mindedly focused on the Second Báb, "the One True Gate to blessed salvation," and the laws of physics operate on a medieval, geocentric basis.

The values that made up [Hamilton's] world, the moral veritites that had underlined his existence as long as he could remember, had passed away; in their place was a crude, tribal vengeange against the outsider, an archaic system that had come from--where? (p. 66)

As it turns out, the world has arisen from the mind of the old soldier, who was the first to awaken after the incident with the Bevatron. Somehow the accident has caused his solipsistic fantasies to become reality for himself and the other seven on the collapsed platform.

"All eight of us dropped into the proton beam of the Bevatron. During the interval there was only one consciousness, one frame of reference, for the eight of us. Silvester [the old soldier] never lost consciousness... Physically, we are stretched out on the floor of the Bevatron. But mentally, we're here. The free energy of the beam turned Silvester's personal world into a public universe. We're subject to the logic of a religious crank, an old man who picked up a screwball cult in Chicago in the 'thirties. We're in his universe, where all his ignorant and pious superstitions function. We're in the man's head." (p. 105)

Having discovered their predicament, they go from the frying pan into the fire when Silvester is knocked unconscious. As the geocentric cosmos fades, it is replaced not by reality but by the next delusional inner landscape, this time belonging to the prudish Mrs. Pritchet. Sexual organs disappear, leaving everyone with the smooth, neuter bodies of Barbie and Ken dolls. Hamilton's laboratory has changed its focus from scientific research to bringing culture to the masses, one of Pritchet's Victorian obsessions. Luckily, Mrs. Pritchet's prudishness is easily manipulated, so much so that the rest of the party manages to talk her into "abolishing" every single aspect of reality :

The world's layer of atmosphere swept out of existence. His lungs totally empty, Hamilton descended into a crashing blur of death. As the universe ebbed away, he saw the inert form of Edith Pritchet roll over in a reflexive spasm: her consciousness and personality had fled. (p. 172)

Only to be replaced, of course, by the next consciousness in line, that of paranoid psychotic Joan Reiss. Because of her delusions of conspiracy and persecution, every aspect of her reality is out to get everybody. The house they are in becomes a living thing intent on devouring them all; Hamilton's cat is turned inside out while still alive, because Ms. Reiss doesn't like cats; and, because she sees the rest of her party as aliens intent on claiming her life, that's what several of them become, sealing her fate and ending her reign of delusion.

The world that arises to fill the void is characterized by a definite "Communist sensibility" in which a shoddy parody of American life, complete with slogans and cutout soldiers, unfolds. Of course, Hamilton is faced with a big question: is this his wife's world? Does this mean that she really is a Communist and a threat to national security?

I won't tell you how the book ends, but suffice it to say that the final resolution is not a let-down.

This has been the best PKD novel I have read thus far in my project. The pacing, plot, and characters are all relatively well developed without sacrificing any of the ideas the Dick fan comes to expect. In fact, this novel is so packed with ideas---involving religion, politics, consciousness, and reality itself---that it demands re-reading just to begin to get them sorted out.

And since the book was such a fun read, that doesn't sound like a bad idea.

The Man Who Japed: Humor as sedition

The Man Who Japed
Philip K. Dick
1956

I had never encountered the word "jape" before reading Dick's third published novel, although I did use it once in a game of Scrabble. (Most likely I'd subconsciously picked it up during the many times I've scanned the PKD section in bookstores.) Turns out that it is an archaic English verb that is defined thusly:

• v.intr., To joke or quip.
• v.tr., To make sport of.

The title is an appropriate one, since this is the first of Dick's novels to highlight his puckish sense of humor. In typical Dick fashion, levity is put to the service of weightier matters; the prankish plot brilliantly establishes that having a sense of humor can be downright seditious.

Allen Purcell, the man from the title, is "the forward-looking young president of the newest and most creative of the Research Agencies," a man whose career trajectory as a Moral Reclamation (Morec) propagandist belies his deep-seated antipathy to the entire endeavor. So strong is this antipathy that he gets drunk one night with some friends in the sterile wasteland of Hokkaido and on the way home japes a statue of Major Streiter, the beloved founder of Morec---by removing its head. After which he blacks out.

The novel begins the morning after this episode with Purcell "losing" his bedroom, as the automated furnishings in his one-room apartment rearrange themselves like clockwork. As Purcell goes about his day, the reader gets glimpses of this brave new post-apocalyptic world. The apartment overlooks the -- blessed -- Morec spire and the surrounding Park environs, complete with the 124-year-old statue of Streiter. We learn about the Morec phenomenon of the weekly block meetings, "the interminable interchange, the stuffy presence of his neighbors packed together in one room. And the whir of the juveniles as they surrendered their tapes to the Committee representatives" (p. 9). These "juveniles" (presumably named after the propensity of prudes to blame "the children" for their attempts at censorship) are "earwig-like sleuths," small camera-enabled robots whose regular invasions of privacy form the backbone of the humorless, puritanical snitch-culture that is Moral Reclamation. Another central tenet is the notion of "the domino method," in which it is assumed that all residents of a given block automatically believe the same thing:

The domino method operates on the assumption that people believe what their group believesm no more and no less. One unique individual would foul it up. One man who originated his own idea, instead of getting it from his block domino. (p. 20)

This new world was obviously not engineered with the best interests of the individual in mind; once again we find an everyman protagonist, not a larger than life hero, but a regular guy who is fed up with the repressive culture in which he finds himself.

As Purcell vaguely recalls his japing of the statue, he dreads being found out; however, instead of being discovered and pilloried he is invited to become the director of Telemedia, the central organ of Morec propaganda. Meanwhile, his block community has called him before the weekly meeting, which he loathes. We get to see this vile operation in action, as anonymous members of the community publicly interrogate and humiliate various block members for their infractions: sexual intercourse, rudeness, uttering morally objectionable words, etc.

In a whirlwind of events, Purcell is effectively kidnapped and taken to Other World, an offworld colony for those who can't cope with the world of Morec. There it is discovered that Purcell has some sort of defect on his brain scans---a sense of humor.

And a sense of humor doesn't fit in with Morec. Or with us. You're not a 'mutant'; you're just a balanced human being...The japery, everything you've done. You're just trying to re-establish a balance in an unbalanced world. And it's something you can't even admit to yourself. On the top you believe in Morec. Underneath there's that blob, that irreducible core, that grins and laughs and plays pranks....

Yes, your ethics are very high. But they're not the ethics of this society. The block meetings--you loath them. The faceless accusers. The juveniles--the busybody prying. This senseless struggle for leases. The anxiety. The tension and strain... And the overtones of guilt and suspicion. Everything becomes--tainted. The fear of contamination; fear of committing an indecent act. Sex is morbid; people hounded for natural acts. This whole structure is like a giant torture chamber, with everybody staring at one another, trying to find fault, trying to break one another down. Witchhunts and star chambers. Dread and censorship, Mr. Bluenose banning books. Children kept from hearing evil. Morec was invented by sick minds, and it creates more sick minds. (pp. 119-120)

Eventually his business rivals and a disgruntled ex-employee conspire to bring Purcell down. This they do by tailing him with juveniles and accusing him of extra-marital relations with the woman responsible for his kidnapping. After being caught "in the act" of giving this woman a peck on the cheek, Purcell weathers the ensuing shitstorm in the only way a living, thinking human being can---by not taking it too seriously. With his job as Director of Telemedia facing immediate cancellation, Purcell uses his last remaining bits of influence to create a huge media event revolving around the mysterious postwar policy of "active assimilation." This policy, invented completely out of whole cloth by Purcell and his creative team, insinuates that Major Streiter and his other Moral Reclaimers actually ate those with whom they disagreed as a means of obtaining nutrients while also maintaining population and social controls. Though the powers that be pull the plug on the faux panel discussion of "active assimilation" in the middle of the broadcast, the damage is done. As we leave Purcell, he is standing with his wife waiting for the coming Cohorts of Major Streiter, the brownshirt enforcers of Morec, and proudly announcing to all passersby that he is the man who japed the statue. All in all a well told, inspiring story about the radical nature of laughter.

I couldn't help but notice lots of frightening similarities between the world of Morec and the righteous nonsense Americans accept as a substitute for culture in the early 21st century. The leering need on behalf of the assembled people at block meetings to hear all the titillating details of every infraction is all too familiar in this age of "Humiliation Television." Ubiquitous spying technology in the form of "juveniles" echoes the current brouhaha over the President's illegal wiretapping of US citizens and the increasing omnipresence of security cameras throughout the UK. And of course, the entire Morec media environment, with its emphasis on hyperconformity, is far too similar to the televisual hive-mind I encounter at every water cooler; it's almost as if Dick saw what the cultural straitjacket of 1950s America would evolve into, given enough time. Luckily his message about resistance to this repression rings equally true; an entire body of social criticism owes its existence to stand-up comics like Lenny Bruce and his heirs.

Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke, right?

The World Jones Made: The problems with precognition

The World Jones Made
Philip K. Dick
1956


Our glimpse into the world Jones made begins in media res, as the reader enters the womblike Refuge, sees the little mutant people who live within, meets the novel's protagonist Cussick, and first hears about the titular Jones. Through a flashback, Cussick is introduced as a Fedgov agent; the world has apparently survived a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust and the surviving shards of various civilizations have come together under the aegis of a federal planetary government, with cultural relativism as its "non-ideology."

It is in this world, on April 4, 1995, that we meet Floyd Jones, a sad psychic working in a carnival with the gift of seeing how the world will be exactly one year ahead. After he makes his predictions to Cussick and they begin to come true, he is arrested and then released. Nothing comes of it for a few months until one day Cussick sees that Jones has become an ordained minister who is drawing large crowds, something that is immediately unsettling in the post-apocalyptic, post-ideological world of the late 20th century. Jones is a demagogue.

Dick gives us an eerie insight into the mind and life of Floyd Jones, who has been living every moment of his life twice, once in the "future" and then once again one year later in the "present." These moments include the very haunting images of Jones experiences in the womb and approaching the grave, having already experienced both thresholds.

For almost seventeen years his dual existence had been purposeless. It had been a burden, a great dead weight. Even the idea of utilizing it was lacking. He saw it as a cross, nothing more. Life was painful; his was twice painful. What good was it to know that the misery of next year was unavoidable? (p. 53)

This tortured existence is central to Dick's ambivalence about supposed "gifts" like precognition. As well, Jones' knack for seeing the future also presents a direct challenge to the probabilistic world of the Fedgov, because of its implications about free will and predestination, error and certitude:

For Jones, there was no guessing, no error, and no false knowledge. He knew; he had absolute certainty. (p. 57-8)

In typical PKD fashion (I don't know what it was with him, women, and betrayal) Cussick discovers that his new Danish wife, Nina, has secretly been involved with the Jones cult for several months, all while he himself has been a primary investigator of Jones and his people. Jones' people have begun to attack and burn the "drifters"--gigantic amoeboid alien creatures whose viscous (and apparently harmless) bodies have begun to drop occasionally into earth's atmosphere from space; his movement of Jones Boys agitated to end the tyrannical reign of relativism and its cadre of thought police (whose number, of course, included Cussick) and called for dedicated efforts toward making space migration a reality. After a universal referendum, Jones is appointed "Supreme Commander" to deal with the "crisis" of the alien blobs.

That was the chilling sight: the lines of tired people, worn out from a long hard day of work, willing to stand patiently in line. Not the enthusiastic faces of the dedicated followers, but the drab, ordinary citizens desiring to abolish their legal governments, wishing to end a government of law and to create in its place an authority of absolute will: the unqualified whim of an individual person. (104-5)

This is where the womblike Refuge and the miniature mutants enter the picture. Cussick learns that they are so helpless outside their sanctuary environment not through a defect but because they are perfectly built for Venus. The idea was that the project would go on for a while longer until the mutants were actually sent to Venus, but the "election" of Jones has forced Fedgov's hand and the mutants are sent to Venus. In a tender scene, the mutants first step out into the Venusian environment only to feel perfectly at home for the very first time.

Jones and his mobs continue to burn and destroy the drifters, until, too late it is discovered that they are gametes, one half of a reproductive structure that extends between planets. The parent creatures, "immensely complicated plant-like beings, so remote and advanced that we'll never have anything more than a dim picture of them" (p. 158), respond to this wanton destruction by quarantining the Earth and its immediate vicinity:

"They're going to seal us off. A ring will presently be set up around us. We'll have Earth, the Sol System, the stars we've already reached. And that's all. Beyond that--" Jones snapped his fingers. "The warships will simply disappear." (p. 159)

What had happened was that Jones in the future had died soon after all these events had transpired, and so his dual-vision was split between the present and absolute darkness. In other words, he had no idea what the human race had been up against, and so had bluffed. And lost.

He had no certain knowledge of what was to become of society because he would not be around to see it. Very shortly, he would die. He had been contemplating it for almost a year; it could be ignored temporarily, but always it returned, each time more terrible and imminent.

After death, his brain and body would erode. And that was the hideous part: not the sudden instant of torment that would come in the moment of execution. That, he could bear. But not the slow, gradual disintegration.

A spark of identity would linger in the brain for months. A dim flicker of consciousness would persist: that was his future memory; that as what the wave showed him. Darkness, the emptiness of death. And, hanging in the void, the still-living personality.

Deterioration would begin at the uppermost levels. First, the highest faculties, the most cognizant, the most alert processes, would fade. An hour after the death the personality would be animal. A week after, it would be stripped to a vegetable layer. The personality would devolve back the way it had come; as it has struggled up through the billions of years, so it would go back, step by step, from man to ape to early primate to lizard to frog to fish to crustacean to trilobite to protozoon. And after that: to mineral extinction, to merciful end. But it would take time.

(Philip Dick's speculation into the breakdown of consciousness here is just one of the sorts of gems that line his works.) Cussick comes to meet with Jones in response to this crisis, a gun battle ensues, and Jones steps into the fatal bullet like he knew it was coming. (Duh.)

So Jones dies, apparently along with humanity's dreams of conquering the known universe, yet he leaves behind him a new global legacy:

"He knew when to make his entrance and his exit. We thought we were going to be stuck with Jones for another six months...instead, we're stuck with Jones, the legend of Jones, forever."

He didn't need Jones' talent to see it. The new religion. The crucified god, slain for the glory of man. Certain to reappear, someday; a death not in vain.. Temples, myths, sacred texts. Relativism wasn't coming back in, not in this world. Not after this.

Cussick and Nina make their way to Venus, along with their new baby, to make a life with the Venusians until things back on the world Jones made return to a semblance of normality.

This was a fun read which raised quite a few interesting philosophical speculations and also provided some insight into the quasi-spiritual roots of demagoguery, a phenomenon discussed at some length elsewhere by Morris Berman.

Solar Lottery: PKD's first novel

Solar Lottery
Philip K. Dick
1955

I'd had a copy of Dick's sublime Divine Invasion on one of my "to read" piles for a while, so when I instead read Counter-Clock World by pulling it off the shelf literally at random, I thought to myself that maybe it was time for a systematic study of the work of Philip K. Dick. That's right. A project.

So I went online and printed out what looked like a pretty thorough bibliography. The first on the list, published in 1955, was Solar Lottery, the book here being discussed. I had a mass market copy which I had read in college; I knew I had done this because I remembered the image on the cover, not because I had any recall of the book itself, which I did not. Instead of reading the yellowing pages of the fifteen-year-old mass market, I passed it on via the Books to Prisoners project and finally visited the new Champaign Library. (It is gorgeous, by the way. From the outside the architecture is interesting enough, but it is the interior, with its intriguing use of materials, space, light and shadow, which is so striking.)

So here's the plot: It is the year 2203 and a man named Ted Bentley has just lost his job working in the Hill system, apparently a feudal corporatocracy. He moves to Batavia (which, strangely, had I not seen a documentary on Krakatoa just previous to beginning this book would not have heard of or known was the contemporary city of Jakarta) in order to take a personal oath of fealty to one Reese Verrick, the Quizmaster. Or at least, he was the Quizmaster before the start of the novel. When the reader first meets him, he has been replaced a a result of a twitch in "the bottle," and has been replaced by Leon Cartwright who is, scandalously, a "Prestonite." For one thing this means that he still wears outdated double-breasted suits and for another drives an "ancient '82 Cheverolet." He is also an "unk" or "unclassified," an outcaste from the ubiquitous Classification System that assigns human beings worth based on their intellectual (i.e., abstract and theoretical) strengths.

We learn that in the past economic production had outstripped consumption, and so quizzes and lotteries were designed whose express purpose was the unloading of all this surplus stuff. Eventually stuff was supplanted by the random assignation of of power and prestige, through the use of a complex game rooted in the quantum indeterminacy of an atom's decay. This complex game is what they refer to as "the bottle." Through the implementation of game theory or Minimax across the entire human culture, humanity lost faith in natural law, cause and effect, and reliance on pure probability became the norm. Other details of Dick's vision of s 2203 that stood out include women going bare-breated in public as a matter of course and Christianity's status as a sort of fringe remnant. Against this backdrop is set the messianic quest of one John Preston, an astronomer turned "unk," whose discovery of a legendary 10th planet called "Flame Disc" started the Prestonite movement, of which the new Quizmaster is a member.

A Challenge Convention is held, the purpose of which is to elect an assassin as a corrective for the excesses of "the bottle." Reese Verrick, the old Quizmaster, is not quite ready to give up power based on the whim of an atomic nucleus. Using the same science that brought the nutritious mutant alga called Protine to the masses, Verrick has had his perfect assassin genetically engineered. The game includes the rule that whomever assassinates the Quizmaster becomes the Quizmaster, unless the assassin is under a personal oath of fealty to another, as the assassin, Keith Pellig, is to Reese Verrick. This is why Verrick personally offers $1,000,000 in gold to the assassin responsible for the death of Cartwright. No need leaving everything up to chance, after all, even when the world is left entirely up to chance.

Here's where Bentley comes back into the story. He discovers (through a terrifying prank played on him by one of his associates) just what Pellig truly is--an empty shell through which a team of controllers operates. Bentley is one of these controllers, switching into and out of control of Pellig randomly to thwart any attempt at a coherent strategy on the part of the "teeps" (telepaths) who defend the Quizmaster.

"You see...Pellig is Heisenberg's random particle. The teeps can trace his path; directly to Cartwright. But not his velocity. Where Keith Pellig will be along that path at a given moment nobody knows." (p. 79)

This is used to interesting effect in the story. For example, we see Pellig, with one controller in charge, being quite nice to a young woman on a train, only to change instantly and without warning into a completely different person as a new controller clicks into place. We also see the effects of that click on Bentley:

"While he was reflecting, the mechanism switched. Silently, instantly, he was back at the Farben labs.

It was a shock. He closed his eyes and hung on tight to the circular metal band that enclosed his body, a combination support and focus." (p. 106)

We also see the effects that it has on the teeps assigned to protect the Quizmaster. Each teep monitoring Pellig is driven insane whenever a controller switch takes place during their watch. While their eyes tell them that Pellig is standing directly in front of them, their telepathic minds tell them that Pellig's consciousness has simply evaporated, and most simply crack under this sort of dissonant assault.

Pellig isn't your run of the mill genetically engineered multiple-consciousness-housing assassin, either. He also turns out to be an interplanetary rocket designed to pursue Cartright all the way to the moon. Bentley, who is operating Pellig at the time of his transformation to spaceship, discovers that the switch into and out of Pellig is not random but is instead under the direction of Moore the associate behind the aforementioned practical joke. You see Pellig isn't just your run of the mill genetically engineered multiple-consciousness-housing spaceship assassin, either--he is also a bomb designed to kill Cartwright at the same time that it switches Bentley into the operator slot, taking out two birds with one android.

Bentley breaks his oath of fealty when he discovers the plot to send him to his death unwittingly (something that can only be done with unk serfs) and runs to Cartwright for protection. The rest of the novel involves the legal proceedings between Verrick, Bentley, and Cartwright over the breaches in fealty; the final resolution of the question of who is to be Quizmaster; and the haunting final message of Preston to those seeking Flame Disc.

It was definitely a weird book. The story and subplots don't ever really gel, a quality I've noted in many of Dick's novels which stands in stark contrast to the precision and directness of many of his short stories. Right out of the gate, though, many of Dick's perennial themes can be seen--free will and determinism, simulation and simulacra, the ubiquity and centrality of advertising and spectacle, totalitarianism in all its guises, and the quest for transcendence. There is also, as someone pointed out on Amazon, the fact that the protagonist in this novel, unlike those in most of the novels of his contemporaries, are regular folks. They aren't the raygun toting Duck Dogers types or Starship Troopers but bureaucratic functionaries, middle managers, and down on their luck cultural creatives.

My chronological reading of all PKD's SF novels is off to a good start and will only be sidetracked by my classroom readings and all the other books in my "to read" piles, not to mention all the books on our shelves and at our local libraries. What could possibly happen to derail this project?

One down, 35 or so to go!

Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities: Do androids dream of mechanical oddities?

Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick, edited by Patricia S. Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984

Warrick and Greenberg did a masterful job collecting these stories. They focus on Dick's ideas while also showing his gifts as a coherent short story writer (much more so than as a novelist). They also provide brief, yet illuminating, essays that situate each story in the context of PKD's personal life, literary output, mental state, the state of affairs in American politics, etc. This is a model anthology and a book my wife recommends I keep.

Here are my thumbnail synopses of most of the stories in this collection:

• "The Little Movement," 1952 --- Dick's first tale involving a robot presages Toy Story, albeit with a much darker tone. Toy soldiers are plotting something insidious against Adults by controlling Children; the soldiers understand them to be two entirely different species. Their machinations are thwarted by other toys, although whether for good or ill purposes is left unclear. Less like SF, more like a Twilight Zone teleplay.
  

• "The Defenders," 1953 --- A more hopeful predecessor to the novel Penultimate Truth, in which an 8-year war has been raging on the surface of the planet, carried on by robots while humanity toils in safety of the underground bunkers. A human contingent investigates the surface and discovers that the war has actually not been going on, and that the world is intead a verdant garden that the robots have been stewarding. The robots, it seems, have realized the illogical nature of war and are preserving the earth until humanity is mature enough to emerge to the surface.

• "The Preserving Machine," 1953 --- An inventor creates a machine to "preserve" music by somehow rendering it into the form of a living animal-like creature. One of the creatures is allowed to "evolve" through prolonged exposure to the world and it becomes feral. When it is translated back into music, the music is absolutely alien and strange. The inventor concludes that everything evolves. The story explore themes of evolution (particularly the idea of evolving ideas--prefiguring the notion of memes), chaos, and preservation as translation.
  

• "Second Variety," 1953 --- After being driven off-world to the Moon by the early attacks of the USSR, the US/UN government begins creating robots ("churning sphere[s] of blades and metal") to ambush and slaughter Soviet soldiers, which they do with chilling efficiency. The story begins when Major Joseph Hendricks is called to meet with some of the surviving Russians. Along the way, he meets a small, apparently traumatized boy named David who clutches his teddy bear while saying little. He discovers, thanks to the intervention of a handful of remaining Soviet soldiers, that "David" is a lethal robot, one of three varieties believed to exist. ("David" is a type III robot. The type I is designed to resemble a wounded soldier. No one has yet encountered a type II robot.) During the night, one of the Soviet soldiers kills the other, claiming that he believed him to be the second variety of robot. Major Hendricks, the surviving soldier (Klaus), and Tasso, a prostitute who had been with the Soviets when their fellows soldiers were wiped out by robots, decide to trek back to the US bunker, only to find it overrun with scores of "Davids" and "wounded soldiers." During the ensuing melee, Klaus is revealed to be a type II robot. A gravely injured Major Hendricks, hoping to escape to the Moon Base, leads Tasso to a hidden rocket, only to find that it is a one-person vehicle. Tasso convinces him to let her fly to the Moon Base, the secret location of which he reveals to her, in order to send back a rescue mission. It is only after she leaves that Hendricks considers that there might be more than three varieties of killer robot...
  

• "Imposter," 1953 --- It isn't bad enough that PKD imagined a world where an observer couldn't distinguish between a robot and a human; what's worse is this well imagined story in which the observer and the robot in question are one and the same. The protagonist expects a normal day at work only to discover that he is suspected of being an android replica of himself---a replica containing a U-bomb, intended to be used by the alien Outworlders in their war against the human race---and therefore destined for immediate termination.
  

• "Sales Pitch," 1954 --- A nightmare scenario of everyday life in the future. After an extraterrestrial commute at 60,000,000 mph during which individually tailored advertisements are beamed directly into commuters' brains, the protagonist finds himself held hostage in his own home by a giant robot selling itself and not taking "no" for an answer. This astute story left me in stitches and also in awe of Dick's insights into the ubiquity of commercial dross and the inability of the average Joe to escape it.
  

• "The Last of the Masters," 1954 --- In a post-nuclear war future, members of the Anarchist League wander the world and maintain a sort of anti-government in which no one is allowed to amass power over others. It turns out that one of the war robots, machines programmed to maintain military-industrial civilization at all costs, escaped destruction at the hands of the AL. A few AL members, in cahoots with the robot's own people, kill the robot and prevent a military invasion of the surrounding territories. But there's always tomorrow.
  

• "Service Call," 1955 --- What is a swibble? That's the question on the reader's mind throughout this delightful story about a repair person who comes to the wrong address.
  

• "Autofac," 1955 --- Life will find a way. Automated factories (the titular "autofacs") have virtually become life forms, cranking out weaponry for us in fighting one another as proxies in a long-lost war. Humanity has survived, but the autofacs insist on producing everything, as per their programming. In the process they completely monopolize all the planet's natural resources, preventing humanity from reasserting its prerogative to global primacy. People try to sabotage the autofacs, but the simple, elegant directives guiding these autofacs drive them to evolve.

• "To Serve the Master," 1956 --- This story, published in 1956 and never reprinted before appearing in this anthology, complements the earlier story "The Last of the Masters." Applequist (you have to love those PKD character names) is wandering through a ravine when he comes across the wrecked remains of a dying robot. It calls out to him. Over the next week, he visits with and helps to repair the robot, in return for which the he learns the history of the robot-human war; his efforts to obtain information about the war from his own locked-down human society avail nothing and so he believes everything the robot tells him. Much to his chagrin.
  

• "Electric Ant," 1969 --- Waking up after crashing his flying-car, Garson Poole discovers that he has lost not only his hand, but even more shockingly his very humanity. He is not a human being but is instead an "electric ant," an android whose subjective experience derives from a player piano-like roll of tape spooling through his thoracic cavity. In a fairly transparent reference to the culture of psychedelia prevalent at the time, Dick has Poole experiment with the tape and note the effects of these experiments on his perceptions of the world. Finally, Poole cuts the tape; the effects were catastrophic, and chillingly so. Dick himself had this to say about the story:

  "Again the theme: How much of what we call 'reality' is actually out there or rather within our own head? The ending of this story has always frightened me ... the image of the rushing wind, the sound of emptiness. As if the character hears the final fate of the world itself."

• "The Exit Door Leads In," 1979 --- Although I don't know it for sure, I suspect that this story came out of Dick's friendship with Paul Williams, author of the biography Only Apparently Real. That's because it was written--on the request of the editors, no less--for Rolling Stone College Papers, a short-lived spin-off publication of Rolling Stone, for whom Williams wrote on PKD. In this story, Bob Bibleman--again, what a name!--faces a dilemma: should he reveal classified information and in so doing save millions of lives, or follow the rules set by the authorities and return the information to them. He makes the "right" decision and returns the information, only to find that it has been a test that he has failed. He is expelled because he falls prey to conformity too easily and does what authority tells him rather than what he knows to be right. A pretty transparent parable about free will and moral agency in an authoritarian context.

Resurrection on the cheap

Counter-Clock World
Philip K. Dick
Vintage Books, 2002 (First published 1967)

"His most theologically probing" story is set in 1998. Time has been running backwards since the Earth entered the "Hobart Phase," an unexplained temporal inversion that only seems to affect the Earth (e.g., time on the moon flows forward normally). Because of this reversal of the direction of time, those who died before the world entered the Hobart Phase (a.k.a. the "old-born") are returning from the grave. One protagonist, Sebastian Hermes, runs a vitarium, one of the facilities where the newly resurrected are restored to life and sold to the highest bidder, as per W.U.S. law. A mild psychic, Hermes intuits that the resurrection of the Anarch Peak, a radical religious leader who died in the 70s, is imminent. This resurrection starts a chain of events in motion. Three forces vie for possession of the Anarch---the Library (a mysterious paramilitary organization whose purpose is maintaining public safety through "eradication of dangerous, disturbing written material"), the Udi religion (a psychedelic, consciousness-raising religion founded by Peak and now lead by Ray Roberts, whom we initially see as crazy and evil, but whom then turns out to be on Peak's side), and "Rome" (presumably the Catholic Church). The convoluted storyline ostensibly revolves around the resurrected Peak (and the potential danger of his revelations about postmortem existence) but rapidly goes off onto tangents about the protagonist's love for his ever-younger wife, her affair with Officer Tinbane (another protagonist), Hermes' affair with the daughter of the head of the library, and the true meaning of life after death (which all old-born experience, but only the Anarch is spiritually clear enough to recall with clarity). After the Library finally captures the Anarch, Hermes is "hired" by an alliance of Rome and the Uditi to rescue the Anarch; instead, Hermes uses the weapons his unlikely allies have given him to rescue his wife from the same enemies. Allusions to the race riots of the mid- to late-1960s and intimations of the Black Power movement appear throughout the novel. As the convoluted storyline comes to an end, the protagonist hears a slough of voices in the graveyard calling out to be reborn, and goes about his work digging them up. In typical Dick fashion, the sanest response to an increasingly crazy world seems to be to put one foot in front of the other.

Counter-Clock World is, like most PKD novels I've read, pure hallucinatory pulp. Another metaphor that came to mind while reading was that of a literary amphetamine. I couldn't help but suspect that the page-turning fervor with which I approached the book emulated the speed-driven fury with which he typed it. Maybe Dick took his time with this novel, but it certainly doesn't feel that way; instead, it's as if the ideas in this novel leaped fully formed like Athena from his brow directly to the page, inconsistencies and all.

People don't really read Dick for his plotting and character development, though. Instead, we read because we want to steep in the bottomless well of his intellect and imagination. This novel is filled to the brim with ideas that greater writers would have put to better effect, if only those better writers had been blessed with Dick's vision. Dick presents us with a new religion, Udi, which, like Timothy Leary's League of Spiritual Discovery, uses psychedelics to experience new forms of group consciousness. We have the aforementioned Hobart Phase, which finds its primary use as a narrative device. As with much of Dick's fiction, this novel presents us with an alternate vision of our contemporary world; in this case, the US has split into three different countries as a consequences of the secession of the Free Negro Municipality (FNM, the Udi nation lead by Ray Roberts). While the specifics aren't ever detailed, it seems that the Midwest (at least Kansas City) is part of the FNM, while California comprises part of the W.U.S. (Western US?). For those who like reading Dick for his wilder speculations on philosophical and religious, you won't be disappointed with this novel. He deals with resurrection and immortality, deception, hiddenness, apophatic theology, God as negation (the "pulsing black presence"), the emptiness before life and after death, and how we learn love best through its absence.

Finally, it must be noted that Dick's greatest genius was perhaps his attention to the mundane details of these fictive universes. In this world where time runs backward, people say "Goodbye" to begin a conversation and "Hello" to end it. Sexual intercourse is engaged in at the end of a pregnancy, so that the fetus' life-force can become a part of a man and a woman. Metabolic processes aren't described in detail, but enough oblique references are made that the reader can understand just how weird things have become: people "disgorge" food bite by bite and tend to do so in private, they imbibe sogum (which, while never explicitly described as such, is hinted to be a form of reverse defecation), and they use the words "mouth" instead of "ass" (e.g., to be a "horse's mouth") and "food" instead of "shit" (e.g., "foodhead," "foodlist," "food!" "feood"). In this crazy backwards word, men even put on whiskers in the morning in lieu of shaving!

Another flawed must-read by one of the greatest minds, if not writers, in science fiction.

Creepy, eerily modern masterpieces of short 19th century horror

Can Such Things Be? Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
Ambrose Bierce
Citadel Press, 1990 (Originally published 1893)

[H]e can and will be read with interest in an age which is getting ready to renounce compromise, kindness, and Christianity. (p.9)

This is as much of Clifton Fadiman's introduction as anyone needs to read. After Fadiman (the embodiment of 1940s patrician intellectual snobbery) slights Bierce for his lack of a formal education, he then dismisses most of his journalistic work as "writing badly, doubtless writing too much." He opines that Bierce's writing is only considered interesting because of Bierce's legend and describes Bierce's nihilism as "brutal and simple as a blow, and by the same token not too convincing" and, "if taken in overdoses, a trifle tedious." Bierce's prose is "old-fashioned," "flawed with the bad taste of the period," and melodramatic.

Fadiman's extensive criticisms may or may not be true about the larger part of Bierce's oeuvre (I have, for example, seen Bierce described online as "ponderous Victorian melodrama"), but they definitely do not apply to the unsettling stories in this volume. Bierce's meticulous grammar (meticulous from the perspective of my relatively grammatically-impoverished ass, at least) and sentences (so typical of 19th-century American prose) chock full of prepositional phrases took me a story or two until I got into the rhythm of his language and storytelling. Once I did, though, each story read better than the one before. I find it hard to believe that he was mocked during his life by many critics for his rough writing, poor grammar, and lack of an education. If only today's university students could write this well.

Many of the stories struck me as strikingly contemporary, perhaps because irony is so central to his writing. As well, Bierce loves to mix the comic (the absurd?) and the horrific in a way that doesn't come through in other classic horror writers like Poe or Lovecraft. One commentator has noted that his "style and journalistic background gave his stories of war and strange disappearances such an uneasy realism that many mistook them for being true." That this realism is often tempered with a Dickian uncertainty about what is real and what illusory is perhaps why many of these stories are ahead of their time while also being of a piece with it.

The fact is, that of your own sanity you have no evidence that's any better than some lunatic who thinks he's Ulysses S. Grant or Jesus H. Christ. I certainly have no evidence of mine. For all I know you don't exist. Everything around me may be fictions of my disordered imagination. - Ambrose Bierce

This fusion of realism and radical skepticism has earned him the almost-postmodern accolade of "the master of magical cynicism," and this mastery is definitely on display in many, if not all, of Bierce's work in this collection.

• "One Summer Night" -- A scant story, merely a page and a half, about a man apparently buried alive, revived by grave diggers, and killed by the black spadesman. Chilling in its ruthless efficiency.
  

• "The Moonlit Road" -- Prefiguring Kurosawa's Rashomon, B,ierce tells the story of a murdered wife and her ghost from three different perspectives (son, husband/killer, wife/ghost).

• "A Tough Tussle" -- In this account of the horrors of war and the veil between lucidity and lunacy, a Union officer ends up sitting next to a Confederate corpse. When shots are fired, the two end up in a tussle from which neither emerges alive.

• "A Jug of Sirup" -- A morality play about how to behave in a store run, even after he's been buried, by a model citizen.
  

• "Staley Fleming's Hallucination" -- In which a man is killed by a hallucinatory dog, the phantom of the dog of the man whom he murdered.
  

• "A Resumed Identity" -- Think The Sixth Sense, or perhaps a less overwrought version of Lovecraft's "The Outsider," except that it was written in the late 1800s. The ghost discovers his lamentable status much to his sorrow.

• "A Baby Tramp" -- A genuinely heartbreaking story about an orphaned toddler who makes his way across the country to die on his mother's grave. Where was "Bitter Bierce" in this story, unless he was bitter against a God and Natural Order that would permit such horrors?
  

• "The Damned Thing" -- Was he killed by a mountain lion? Or was it something stranger? Shades of HP Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space."
  

• "The Stranger" -- A classic ghost story with a genuinely hair-rising ending.

Magical cynicism indeed. Lots of pointed satire and yet also such spooky stories. Another phrase I like that describes the voice which runs through these collected stories is "courageous despair" (most explicitly expressed in "The Baby Tramp.")

There are voices from the Past that can help us in our travail, and eloquent among them is that of the courageous despair of Ambrose Bierce. Behind all the bitterness and the thunderous nay-saying, one can detect a profound interest in, and fascination with, the human adventure. One of the surest signs of this is the vigour and precision of Bierce's language; he could not have created such excellences out of despair, no matter how vividly that despair served as his subject, for the language of despair is silence. There is a secret joyousness in such hatred, and it's a part of what appeals to me in all that I've read of Ambrose Bierce. -- Jack Matthews

I like that. The publishers should use that as this book's introduction in the next edition.

"Most haunted" maybe, but by dull ghosts

The Most Haunted House in England (Time-Life Collector's Library of the Unknown)
Harry Price
Longmans, Green and Co., 1940 (Time-Life Books Reprint)

After watching The World's Scariest Ghosts Caught on Tape one Friday eveninga few weeks ago, my interest in "true ghost stories" was peaked and so I scared up this volume.

Harry Price's The Most Haunted House in England is the book about a classic haunted house, Borley Rectory, which is a staple of many of the ghost and supernatural books I read when I was younger. It is well-written in that competent British school boy fashion, with impeccable grammar, restrained wit, and conservative style.

Price explains how he was invited to explore Borley Rectory, which was built in 1863 by the Rev. Henry Bull and which had allegedly been visited by the ghost of a nun and by a spectral coach drawn by two headless men. Price details the history of the village of Borley and the tales of the haunted rectory; the legend of a nun who was buried alive at the site that would become the rectory for her illicit liaison with a monk; and spooky stories from various sources---those who lived in the house, their guests, and those invited specifically for the task of research into the hauntings.

Sadly, for its status as a classic in the genre of supernatural literature, the book is not really scary. Almost all of the activities described were of the nature of a poltergeist (or Poltergeister, as Price would have it) in the form of mysterious sounds, teleportation of small objects, movement of small objects, and, over a period of several years, the writing of messages and small marks on the walls of the house. There was surprisingly little about the spectral coach and ghostly nun, particularly seeing how these alleged phenomena were what drew Price to the house initially.

The book serves as a documentary history of the alleged haunting, and the author leaves it up to the reader to decide as to the veracity of the stories of Borley Rectory in light of all the documentary "evidence" presented. Many contemporary critics feel that Price and one of the couples who lived in the house (those to whom the mysterious messages were addressed) established this entire story as a hoax. It wouldn't surprise me.

In short, this is a high-quality reprint of a classic, if unconvincing and not very scary, early 20th century monograph on ghosts. The Time-Life Collector's Library of the Unknown is a classy series for those who are interested in the literature of the unexplained, even if only in fun, and this volume is no exception.

Superb title, uneven stories

How to Save the World
Charles Sheffield, editor
Tor Books, 1995

We have no friendly advisor looking over our shoulder. We will have to make do with the next best thing: humans who are close observers of the actions of our species, but who are not directly involved in trying to run the affairs of humanity.

This of course is exactly what writers are and have been through recorded history.... Even among writers, I argue that the writers of science fiction form a special sub-group. They tend to be interested in global problems, in the impact of science and technology, and in the long-term future of humanity. They are observers of events at the largest scale. (pp. 12-13)

This then is a collection of these observations, examining themes as far ranging as the failure of public education in the US to the breakthrough in space exploration to the cure for patriarchy to an ugly dilemma inherent in the feminist rhetoric of "reproductive choice." For those of us who (often) feel motivated to save the world, this book provides an entertaining meditation on the shadow side of the utopian and of the unknowable consequences of our wholly benevolent intentions.

Sheffield writes, "Some of the stories in this book may offend. I certainly hope so." (p. 14). None of the stories offended this reader, but disappointingly most didn't make much of an impression either way. The unevenness of the stories was a definite let-down, particularly considering the devastatingly understated (or, as Sheffield puts it, "unduly modest") title. After all, what self-respecting Christian anarchist bodhisattva utopian would pass up the manual on how to save the world?

So here are some thoughts on the stories that impressed a little SF wisdom on me, providing visions of possible futures and of some pitfalls that might face us along the way. They also all rocked as stories.

• "Zap Thy Neighbor" by James P. Hogan. I'd read this one almost a decade ago in an anthology of Hogan's stories and science writing called Rockets, Redheads, and Revolution, and enjoyed rereading it. Hogan has envisioned a world in which everyone has a listing in a big directory, and that anyone with a grudge or grievance, if she can find two willing accomplices, can "call your number." It's a simple system with a twist that ensures that it really works as promised---in creating a more civil society.
  

• "Choice" by Lawrence Watt-Evans. In college anthropology I was first introduced to the dilemma faced by many feminists in Asia (and other locales) regarding abortion. It is, in short, that the rhetoric of "reproductive choice" that has dominated liberal discourse on the issue for almost two generations (i.e., that a woman's choice to terminate a pregnancy is absolute and absolutely hers) stands in uncomfortable company with third-world cultural realities which lead most women with free access to contemporary reproductive technologies to abort only female fetuses. Watt-Evans presents a "culturally pure" (read: third world) society, presumably in the Middle East, where poverty, disease, overpopulation, etc. have been become things of the past. How? By allowing women to make their free choices, aborting females and keeping males until the ratio of men to women is over 10 to 1. This, as we see in the story, poses its own interesting problems.
  

• "The Meetings of the Secret World Masters" by Geoffrey A. Landis. This story reminded me of the film The Last Supper except that instead of serving individuals poisoned meals, a handful of scientists genetically engineer myriad changes to the human race. A pretty chilling story about way too much power being in the wrong hands--or in any hands.
  

• "The Invasion of Space" by James Kirkwood. Reminisces about the crucial "Big Bang" moment in deep space exploration and how it was a poet (and an inadvertent martyr), and not a scientist, who was needed to get humanity's mythological juices flowing in the direction of outer space. Because without that, you can only get so far off the earth.
  

• "Buyer's Remorse" by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg. Why is this story here? I absolutely hated, hated, hated, hated this story. Completely pretentious short story told in the form of letters to an advice columnist about life in the far future and the columnist's responses. Confusing and didn't say much to me, which means I probably need to re-read it a couple of times until I finally get it. (That or simply forget about it).
  

• "My Soul to Keep" by Jerry Oltion. In the near-future US, religion is seen as a dangerous, infectious neurological disorder and so free exercise of said infection is therefore no longer enshrined in the US Constitution. When the Pope is injured while on a clandestine trip to the US, and the contagion is released, all hell (ahem) breaks lose. One scientist begins to regain her faith, and so her fellows protect her from the illness. For her own benefit, of course.

The Lord of the Rings: A masterpiece of myth-making

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Houghton Mifflin, 1994

I first received The Lord of the Rings as part of a boxed set, complete with The Hobbit, for Christmas in 1985. I also received a boxed set of the first four Dune books. I was 13 and in 8th grade.

Like many 13-year olds, I loved The Hobbit but I thought The Lord of the Rings was simply awful. For one thing, the plot was not immediately obvious to me. (Keep in mind that at the time my enjoyment reading primarily comprised Doctor Who novelizations and Choose Your Own Adventure books.) Instead of the short chapters of plot and dialogue to which I was accustomed, Tolkien provided page after page of exposition, describing the local color and history with any "action" provided almost as an afterthought. And then there is what may have been the biggest problem of all with The Lord of the Rings, the scores of strangely named characters and places, some of whom are central to the story and others of whom are purely peripheral and which is which is unclear. I mean, sheesh, who names their two main villains Sauron and Saruman, names that differ by only one syllable?

It should be here noted that while I loved reading at age 13, I was also not the best reader. Memories of reading what I managed to of the trilogy consist mainly of reading a single page over and over and over again just to follow the main thread of the story. Somehow I managed to finish The Fellowship of the Ring and made it a few dozen pages into The Two Towers before I threw up my hands and abandoned Tolkien to the realm of "authors I think are overrated." I still have a vague recollection of giving a a pretty worthless presentation on the first book in front of Mrs. Fox's English class, the same class I was in when the Challenger exploded. (I also have an even vaguer memory of reviewing some disposable piece of genre SF called Dushau, but that's another story.) In short, I never thought I would ever read this book again, and considered all those folks who worshiped Tolkien to be little short of fools.

Fast-forward sixteen years. It's Christmas time in Champaign, and I'm attending The Two Towers with my coworkers, mainly because the bosses gave us cinema tickets for the holidays. As the movie begins to unfold, I remember those few dozen pages that I read at 13, and I slowly begin the journey of reappraising Tolkien. While I agree with those who urge reading the book as well as simply seeing the movie, I think that in this case I could not have done the former if I had not done the latter. Peter Jackson's trilogy allowed me to familiarize myself with the overall story arch (something that was hard for me to do from within the perspective of the novel, at least at first) and also helped me to handle the enormous cast of strangely named characters. (Finally Saruman and Sauron were decidedly distinct characters in my mind's eye, and the logic behind their naming, based as it is on Tolkien's invented languages, became more apparent.) So in fall of 2007 I finally decided to give the damned book another chance, mooched the one-volume "trilogy" (apparently Tolkien always considered it one big novel) through BookMooch, chose it over the New Testament for 2008's "big book" (sorry Mom), and devoured it in January, 2008.

In short, I loved it, particularly the exposition and the bizarre names for characters and places. Strange, huh, how the passage of time will do that to one's sensibilities? The very features of the novel that I found off-putting in 1985, I found absolutely ingenious in 2008. The names and locations in The Lord of the Rings all figure into a much-vaster cosmology and narrative history, and this becomes more apparent when the reader peruses the voluminous appendices. All the details that seemed arbitrary and distracting from "the action" were in fact anything but arbitrary, deriving as they did from a comprehensive mythology (of a world that did not exist until Tolkien wrote it into existence!). Take for example the appendix on the "translation" of the text explaining why Tolkien chose English words like "elf" and "dwarf" and "halfling" to "translate" the "original" Elvish words. Apart from the implication that there is really an original manuscript written in Elvish, this appendix also implies that the "elves" in this story aren't really elves, the "dwarves" aren't really dwarves, etc., but that these are the closest analogs that the translator could find in fantastic literature.

That these 1,000+ pages, with all their hyper-detailed exposition, are merely the tip of the iceberg of Tolkien's invented world, makes the novel all the more amazing. This really is a masterpiece of storytelling and myth-making. I can understand now why so many people love this book. I think I'm now one of them.