The Secret Sun is kind of like the Internet Island of Misfit Toys. It's for all the people who can't pretend they haven't peeked under the reality curtain once or twice. It's for people who don't fit into all of the thought-replacement modalities out there.Indeed, a lot of people on the group have said they felt like they didn't fit in anywhere until they read this blog or joined the group. I have a feeling there are a lot of people lurking out there who feel the way I and the others do who stay in the shadows.
Maybe there are a lot of people in other circles or other groups who feel out of place there. People who are part of the "Excluded Middle," the free thinkers who don't subscribe to the false dichotomies prescribed by lazy editors and television producers.
When I was a kid the hippie subculture had created an interesting space for people who loved sci-fi and comics but were also interested in extreme possibilities and the frontiers of consciousness. Mainstream fandom tends to a sour, skeptical pose these days, which is mostly a reaction to the religious reich's poisoning of American society over the past 30 years.
Rebuilding that space is very much a top priority for me with The Secret Sun.
The best and most resonant sci-fi is also the most mystical-- and that includes Star Trek, Roddenberry's insincere protestations aside.
As we've seen nearly all of the top sci-fi franchises are up to their Spock-ears in ancient astronaut theory, entheogenology and other, similar thought crimes. None of this has anything to do with religion as the term is understood, since it functions to displace religion and replace it with something more intimate and subversive.
More useful, as well.
The other issue I want to address is how our stories are going to evolve away from an increasingly limiting and compromised mass media, and move towards targeted media. The economics of movie-making are leaving less and less room for stories that challenge the audience or question the assumptions of mainstream society.
What that will do by necessity is move away from the hyper-literalism and computer graphics and move towards modes in which the audience needs to do more of the work: books, comics, maybe even radio theater.
There is SF because the human brain craves sensory and intellectual stimulation before anything else, and the eccentric view provides unlimited stimulation, the eccentric view and the invented world.
It is written because the human mind naturally creates, and in creating the world of an SF story the ultimate in human imagination is brought into use; thus SF is an ultimate product of and for the human mind. The function of SF psychologically is to cut the reader loose from the actual world that he inhabits; it deconstructs time, space, reality.
Those who read it probably have difficulty adjusting to their world, for whatever reason; they may be ahead of it in terms of their perceptions and concepts or they may simply be neurotic, or they may have an abundance of imagination. Basically, they enjoy abstract thought. Also, they have a sense of the magic of science: science viewed not as utilitarian but as explorative. -- Philip K. Dick
"Taken as a whole, the field of science fiction today is where most of the most interesting thought about human society can be found. At a time when many academics have become almost willfully obscure, political science is increasingly dominated by arcane and uninspiring theories and in which a fog of political correctness makes some forms of (badly needed) debate and exploration off limits, science fiction has stepped forward to fill the gap.
The biggest single task facing the United States today is the unleashing of our social imagination. We are locked into twentieth century institutions and twentieth century habits of mind. -- Walter Russel Mead
Saul-Paul Sirag, Vice-President of Jack Sarfatti's Physics/Consciousness Research Group, has his own weird tales to tell. Once, while involved in the Uri Geller investigation, Sirag took LSD to see if in that altered consciousness he could perceive the alleged extraterrestrial behind Geller. What Sirag saw was the head of a hawk, which astonished him, since Geller had never described the entity as a hawk.
Six months later, this image appeared on the January 1974 cover of Sirag's favorite sci-fi magazine, Analog, illustrating a story called "The Horus Errand" (Synchronicity #1). A year later, Dr. Andrija Puharich, not knowing of Sirag's experience, claimed that Geller's extraterrestrial ally had often appeared to him as a hawk, which he nicknamed "Horus" (Synchronicity #2).
Later, Sirag discovered that the face on the Analog cover was that of Ray Stanford, a Texas psychic, who also claimed mysterious experiences with Geller and a hawk (Synchronicity #3). Oddest of all, Kelly Freas, the artist who had drawn the cover, had never met Stanford and was not using his face consciously.-- Excerpted from Tekgnostics, original story recounted in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger
"I feel that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art & writing are merely forms of entertainment...they're not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being, that can change a society.
They are seen as simple 'entertainment', things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we are waiting to die. It is NOT the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience want; if the audience knew what they needed, they wouldn't be the audience, they would be artists. It is the job of the artists to give the audience what they need." -- ALAN MOORE
