On the afternoon of Saturday July 14th, Andrew H. Krane grabs a beer from the fridge, puts the Giants game on the TV, and goes over to his bookshelves for some light afternoon reading. He pauses on an old favorite short story collection, almost pulls it off the shelf, and then for some reason suddenly shivers and tips it back with his fingertip.
On Tuesday, July 17th, Andrew H. Krane feels the writing bug bite for the first time since the events of the St. Francis and the warning from Dr. Redgrave that his writing will not be published without explicit SANDMAN say-so. Certainly, Krane reasons, he can't be faulted for looking at a few old works-in-progress from before Westercon and maybe tidying a few things up. Not for publication, mind you, but to see if he still has "the stuff." This manuscript, somewhere in the netherworld between novella and novel length, dates from '71. It's about a canny cop and a psycho killer in a game of cat and mouse. Taking inspiration from the then-new Columbo series on TV, this book started off with seeing how the killer did his (first) murder. Not a whodunnit, but a why-and-howdunnit. The book starts off with the killer, who we find out later is himself an ex-cop, visiting a friendly rug merchant in Palo Alto. The two talk amiably about Hindu art and religion, the merchant's childhood in Delhi, and various other topics when, as the shop empties of its other customer, the ex-cop brutally murders the rug merchant, taking out his heart and eyes, and offering them to the sun so that it might "slay the imposter moon." Over the course of the book it's revealed that the killer believes the moon is fake, a "hollow shell inhabited by a trillion insect aliens dedicated to overthrowing the human race," and that sacrifices of blood and hearts, that "most solar of human organs," will defeat the moon-insects and blot the moon out from the sky. He sends taunting notes to the newspapers (remember this was the era of Zodiac and Dirty Harry's "Scorpio Killer"), to the Bay Area police and the thinly-disguised merger of the schlubby Detective Columbo and the harder-core Taschi/Bullitt/Callahan continuum. Some primitive psychological profiling occurs—paranoid schizophrenia being the operant diagnosis—and so on. The thing is as the killer takes more victims, it becomes less clear that the insect aliens are a delusion as the killer starts to see more and more visions of the moon, sometimes even traveling there astrally to look at the honeycomb warrens of the aliens. In one memorable scene, the killer journeys to the site of the Apollo 11 landing at the Sea of Tranquility and sees underneath to the swarming hive beneath.
The main problem was that Krane just couldn't find an ending. One option was to have the cops catch and kill him, pretty standard denouement. The other was to reveal that the schizophrenic hallucinations were true, and that during an eclipse the moon would crack open and reveal trillions of alien cicadas ready to devour all the earth's biomass.
The second book is really more of just a series of plot sketches for the fourth (now cancelled... or indefinitely postponed for SANDMAN censorship?) book in the Atlantis Risen series, written well before the events of Westercon. Krane was hoping to dig deeper into the MARPA side of things, with the brief reveals of how MARPA undercover agents work in hostile territory in Hail, Atlantis! (Krane briefly glances at the cover of the UK version of the book as he goes to the shelf to get his notes; what garbage, he thinks, there are barely any UFOs or robed cultists in it!) tantalizing Krane to write more and more. The internal politics of MARPA and Dulce Base loomed large in this plot outline; Krane decided that you've got devoted Cold Warriors like Eliade, you've got libertines interested in Atlantean magic like Sebastian Stone, and you've got a third group... a group that had taken predictive precognitive magic and psi seriously and looked at the long-term prospects for America holding out against Atlantean hegemony and found those prospects... wanting. It was clear in the next 50 years no matter what weapons MARPA brought to bear, no matter how many enemy agents or tactics or magical spells they re-wove into American thaumaturgy, that by the year 2020 or so, Americans would be begging to be ruled by the Atlanteans. The American lifestyle of consumerism and military adventurism and mind-control-through-media, said these men of MARPA, was simply unsustainable in the long term. Likewise, any mitigation methods would simply delay the date by a couple of decades. This faction's perverse reaction to this news was to propose that MARPA get behind a controversial plan: to accelerate the decay of American society, to turn all the identified factors in decline—extractive consumer capitalism, social decay and distrust, overall physical and spiritual misery—up as much as possible to force a choice. Much like the "first strikers" in our timeline who believed that America could survive and thrive after a "limited nuclear conflict" with the Soviets, these MARPA men thought making an America ready to shatter under societal and cultural and magical pressures would create a new, better America, a spartan nation able to reclaim its real legacy from Atlantean subversion and create a new ruling class, made coincidentally by these men of MARPA and their corporate allies, to rule over the ashes like feudal lords. Andrew honestly found the entire plot compelling but very, very depressing, and shelved it.
Rob
Archie has a question for Andrew, if he didn't already answer it when they talked last week: in his manuscript, what's Sebastian Stone's relationship to the accelerationist faction in MARPA? Is Stone against them, with them, or playing his own game? Actually, Archie will just ask Andrew for a copy of his manuscript if he hasn't already. That was part of our deal with Andrew, but Archie also says (sincerely) that he just wants to read it. (Archie's less keen on reading the serial killer / moon insect one, but we should get a copy just in case.) The real motive here is that Archie wants to know how Stone and by extension Stoney is likely to feel about a possible shadow faction within SANDMAN. I want to have an Intelligence Analysis conversation with Stoney about how to investigate / work against them if they exist, but not if Stone(y) is part of them.
Michael
I think before he sends you a copy of the manuscript, Krane can tell you on the phone: Sebastian Stone is his typical arch cynical self about the accelerationist faction in MARPA (fun fact: the accelerationists call themselves Project OZYMANDIAS after the Shelley poem; lots of talk in the book that the OZYMANDIAS Secret Masters have an affinity for the Ruinenwert "ruin value" theories of Albert Speer, etc., extending it from mere architecture to societies as a whole). Stone, whatever his faults and sins, loves America, loves being part of the international espiocrat jet set, believes in Progress (specifically the Progress that comes with America marrying magic with technology) and in Book 4 recruits and heads a special counterintelligence unit called Operation URIZEN, after the Blakean Zoa, of course—full of a bunch of MARPA misfits and oddballs who want no part in the U.S. becoming a romantic ruin full of Hard Men in order to resist Atlantis—to flush them out. It's clear in the novel also that the core of traditional MARPA (as exemplified by Secretary of Magic Mircea Eliade) also somewhat distrusts Stone, as they often think he's too quick to use Atlantean methods of mind control/mind-meld to keep America societally in one piece, etc. But ultimately Stone and URIZEN are on MARPA's side. At least in the three-quarters of Book 4 that Krane had lightly sketched out before Westercon.
There is more than a little hint that some of the OZYMANDIAS folks are involved in, like, quasi-Hitlerite esotericism or at the very least Evola-esque neo-primitivism. The few actual members of OZYMANDIAS who appear in this version of the novel are all embedded like ticks in industries adjacent to MARPA's governmental magical-technological research remit, making themselves rich off of new thaumaturgical methods of manufacturing, product marketing, and general capitalist activity. It's clear from Stone's investigation in the latter third of the book that using magic in such a profligate, tainted-by-mass-production way is gradually making Americans sick and insane.
Which, of course, is just what they want.
On the hot afternoon of Sunday, July 29, Andrew Krane finds himself sweltering in his walk-up in Berkeley. He heads to his bookshelf, picks out a copy of his own 1966 book, The Arm From The Screen, a McLuhan-influenced look at a near-future America ruled by television networks and the outrageous ways they try to keep their audiences. Lately Andrew has been going back through his own old books—once Viv had teased him for being such a "fan" of his own work, but Andrew had only said in response, well, that's how I plan to get better. Once I read a passage I cringe at, I know to never do that again. But lately this reflection on his work hasn't felt self-critical. It's felt like... preparation, somehow. Like you were dreaming and dreading a test back at school. Andrew still has dreams like that, where the test finally comes to his desk after weeks of study and dread and it's a different language: weird Sanskrit-like characters, or cuneiform. Krane goes down to the Caffé Med and gets himself an Italian soda—local favorites Torani make a great peach syrup. With his cup full of ice, seltzer, and syrup Krane makes his way to a shady spot in a nearby park, idly stirring his soda while he sits down under a tree and cracks Arm open about 2/3rds of the way through the book for the excerpt he found himself thinking about this morning. It's the point where the sitcom writers we've been following all book as our point-of-view characters explaining how future TV works to keep the population entertained and subdued, gets into explaining how the Masters of the network are part of the conspiracy at the heart of the government in the anodynely named federal "Department of American Culture, Mental Hygiene, and Entertainment." Here an old sitcom hand from the 1960s, whose name is Jonny Forty-One, internally rambles as the times change around him in the 1980s.
The writers' room at the studio had been like this the past few months: a disaster. Half-empty bottles of synthetic mead (the bees had all disappeared in the mid-seventys), pungent unfinished cartons of Indonesian take-out (since the end of the Indonesia War in seventy-nine war refugees had turned downtown Burbank into the Southland's Little Jakarta), remote clickers for the twelve bubble-television decks set into the writers' room's plush ultravelvet walls. It looks like the bachelor apartment of a drunk middle-aged loser on the make in here, Jonny Forty-One thought to himself, knowing this described him to a T. Jonny had changed his surname during the big student uprisings of 1967. Youth gangs from the ghettos rising up with help from the white college students on campus had shed their family names, taking on a badge of their "trust no one over 30" youth: for the rest of their lives, their last name would proclaim their age. Nobody thought about how stupid we'd feel in a dozen or so years when these names would advertise to everyone that we're a bunch of aging corporation men with delusions of hep-ness, Jonny thought, smiling and wincing in equal measure.
Krane flips forward a few pages. This book unconsciously betrayed that first inkling of Krane's self-awareness of being in his late 30s and suddenly not understanding what the hell the kids were talking about anymore. A little embarrassing to recall, but Krane continued:
With that Producer Ryerson threw down two dog eared French folios, those type of books with the jagged cut pages, like they'd been dug out of an Existentialist undergrad's satch'. "Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry and André Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme. Get to reading, you drudges. Your 101 course begins today. This is the direction we're taking Just The Man of the House in Season 10. Surrealism. Decadent symbolism. Mind-bending visual sequences that defy logic and just leap out of the bubble on those poor stupes' walls at home. "But where are the laughs?" a young idealist named Matty said, a recent graduate from Berkeley's honors Comedy Studies program. "Where are the setups. Where are the gags?" this 21-year-old still using the language of Uncle Miltie and Carl Reiner from teevee's bee-and-W days. Ryerson, like the mean old boss in a sixtys sitcom: "A gag? A gag?? My good fellow, we are no longer dealing in a commodity as crude and unsophisticated as gags. We are dealing in making the audience feel clever even as we spoon-feed them meaningless, nihilistic pabulum. You and your 'rades rode through the seventys on the backs of a "theater of cruelty," yes?" Jonny remembered it well. The comedy of the seventys went full Grand Guignol, with sitcoms presenting their "setups" as scenarios where the characters found themselves in imminent personal physical danger and their "punch lines" as walk-on characters getting splattered bloodily right next to the sitcom stars, who would inevitably get blood, guts and brains all over themselves. "Well welcome to the eightys. Where the joke is there is no joke. We're all far too jaded to utter anything as broad as a guffaw. A polite, ironic, self-satisfied titter will sell the products just as well. And wait till you see the ads. They'll be ever so much more meaningless...more surreal than the shows by far!" Not even Ryerson knew that at the comedy studios of the 11 other major networks, similar conversations were going on in the writer's rooms of all the sitcom productions, with senior producers all bringing "notes from network brass." Ryerson and his counterparts also didn't know that the 12 networks themselves and their holding companies were nothing more than legal fictions, concocted by the DACMHE over the past dozen years to enable the executive branch and its many secret sponsors at the highest level of Global Control. The paranoids' rumors said "They" were ancient immortal alchemists, or corporate thoughtforms given flesh, or aliens with a taste for human flesh. But the truth of their motivation was ultimately immaterial. All that mattered was that the Masters of Television had found the way to enslave the human brain: the surreal and unexpected visuals and situations of the past dozen years of television, combined with the extreme economic and social pressure everyone was under out there in the scary savage world of 1982 America, would make every Nielsen-fearing American citizen into a bubble-watching, obediently-consuming, lobotomized slave.