Egyptian Motherlode by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman, Tachyon Press 2025
This book is a series of acid trips taken during a series of concerts by a series of people who are all connected, who perform in the same concerts, trip together, make music together, and follow the same strung-out Prophet toward enlightenment and transformation. The trips accelerate and are, increasingly, undivided by moments of lucidity. You have to enjoy the ride or walk away: no middle ground.
I feel that the ideal reader for this book isn’t me. You should maybe be a white male fan of Black music from 30s jazz through Black funk of the early 70s. It would help to have dropped acid.
These are very compelling acid trips.
Anyone who was there should visit this book and measure their own trips against them.
A Far Better Thing by H.G. Parry, Tor Books 2025
I swallowed this more or less at a gulp. Great writing, terrific single viewpoint, compelling story. The ending was more or less ruined for me by the title and story line derived from Dickens’ classic novel set in England and France at the cusp of the French Revolution. By the time I’d figured out that the hero’s name was Sidney Carton, I had decided to shrug and try to enjoy the ride. It was a darned good ride. I’ve been pretty much spoiled by stories a) about women and b) that end well for the protagonist. I usually feel too damned old to stick with something else just because it’s good writing. But I stuck with this … because it’s good writing.
The author’s concern is to chart the minute steps by which the antihero, Sidney Carton, evolves from despairing human wreckage to willing human sacrifice in an environment where everyone is bent on generational vengeance. Carton is the human child stolen away by fairies to grow up imprisoned and then return to this world to serve the fairies in abhorrent ways; Charles Darnay is the fairy changeling who took Carton’s birthplace in this world, has lived his charmed life, and in the end faces the guillotine. A heck of a high concept, exquisitely executed.
One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson, Tachyon Press 2025
This I also swallowed at a sitting. It’s about women, it ends well, and it is science fiction, I guess, if stories about multiverses created by immense computers and about the computerized copies of humans who live in them are science fiction. I could imagine framing all that in occult terms, but the story here comes out as strictly science fiction.
One Level Down set me off on a long train of thought about the difference between science fiction’s exploration of multiverse artifacts and the people who prefer to live in them, and the primordial soup of universes, or planes, as medieval and Victorian occult thinkers referred to them.
A major difference between these two sorts of universes is that the science fictional multiverses are man-made and man-managed for the profit of corporate interests and are, to all intents and purposes, “all in your head.” In Thompson’s story, the characters have chosen to feel pain but to be forever young and healthy, to feel hunger and practice agriculture but not to require food. Travel between multiverses is a matter of technology, a process discovered by humans in the late 20th Century whose discovery implies that our own universe, which we have taken for reality, whatever that is, is also constructed, artificial, mutable in many heretofore impossible ways, and far from singular.
The scientia of the medievals had a divine Designer who was not (in theory) focused on profit. Manifested by all nature, scientia was a seamless amalgam of all branches of human knowledge, interconnectedness, awareness, virtue, and love. Note the addition of moral components. The Victorians added a denser, secular overlay of Jewish mysticism, which focused on the exploitation of the five senses and their replication at higher and higher planes of energy, emotion, thought, and spirituality for the benefit of travelers between universes, or planes of creation. The Victorians and medievals alike required the traveler to attain mental clarity, sharp focus, firmness of purpose, and purity of intention before attempting travel between universes.
The primordial soup at its highest level, in Jewish mysticism, is a chaotic jumble of all forms, patterns, shapes, particles, waves; there is no time. Time is constructed as soon as we have bodies which have needs that expect effect to follow cause, and senses that irrevocably slice our perception into narrow layers of vibration: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. The soup is everything everywhere all at once, nor do we ever leave it. Even if we can become aware of all the soup, we perceive it, that is, organize it, in layers that correspond to our senses. The rest is outside our reality. That’s the point of having bodies. From the perspective of that soup, our bodies are a thought experiment in dissecting the soup into bits that will fit on a slide under a microscope.
Thompson’s heroine Ella has been physically arrested at five years old, but mentally she is 58. Her father, who signed the original contract with the corporation that owns the planet and the universe in which everyone around her lives, is a batshit megalomaniac. She likes some of the other people in their frontier community, but she wants out. As she learns about the version of herself who predated her – Daddy’s real daughter, who died at five when the colonists first arrived on this colony – and the fates of Daddy’s first and second wives, Ella discovers how fine are the splits between dead real Ella, herself (real Ella’s virtual copy), an Ella who escapes the colony and Daddy’s oppressive parenting, and an Ella who is re-downloaded as an offering to Daddy so that he’ll soften his tyranny over the other colonists and allow their virtual bodies to become pregnant with their own virtual children.
What is real? If we can create virtual copies of real people, then it follows that we also are on some level simulations, working out vast thought experiments to benefit the curiosity of unthinkable powers.
Thompson doesn’t go so far as to postulate those unthinkable powers. She leaves us somewhere in the middle, facing the choices we make, the ants on the ground, when given the options presented by manufactured lives in manufactured universes: to do away with disease but keep pain, to live forever but be subject to deletion by system operators at higher levels, to live in a universe that’s a war game, or where the rivers flow with chocolate, or where we could do away with death and want, only we don’t.
This is not where the science fiction of my youth would leave the reader. Those heroes would get into a teeny spaceship and, like Spock firing himself through that immense vaginal doorway to the point of origin, wrest the secrets of everything from the beyond. That stuff frankly bores me.
Thompson keeps the reader here, where we make the smaller choices that lead us down ever-bifurcating trousers of time. And like a good medieval scientist, she keeps our eye on the moral component.
