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who can break out of the pattern, no one will notice you. And indeed they all continue "interacting" with the empty space you are programmed to occupy exactly as if you were there. The "all" does not include a small number of evil breakouts who are exploiting the situation and hunting down everyone else who has broken out of the automatic interplay. Eerie effects come from manipulation of the automaton normals, from retreating into the automatic patterns. |
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It's a scary story, and should one stand back and think about it, it suggests something about the writer (about a grim Chicago downtown business-and-bar world). But everything is done to lead the reader away from that issue, and the author has no place in the story. The title is "You're All Alone," not "I'm All Alone" or "We're All Alone." |
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On the other hand, The Big Time employs the same notion of breakout for the few whom the Snakes and Spiders can recruit. They do not break out of themselves, however, and Illy eventually suggests that the recruiter is really the demon-daemon Art. Here we have not the simple paranoiac punch but the gay, giddy, multileveled fabric of high art, of the "everybody and nobody," in which the Place, dancing with drama and history, is also revealed as the mind of Fritz Leiber and his Art (like "I" and "Borges"). |
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Gather, Darkness! is one of the first (perhaps the) classical novels of a future, post-World War Three world dominated by an authoritarian, medieval church hierarchy whose inner circle employs a secret scientific technology to keep a superstitious public and lower priesthood under control. The action is dramatic and colorful, the technology cunning and charming, the plot stunningly well constructed. One idea that gives the work its classical balance is the logic of a revolution against such a hierarchy of white magic. The revolutionaries will play satanists, a hierarchy of black magic which will dismay, frighten, or win over people who are accustomed to thinking in magical, not scientific ways. (The French historian, Jules Michelet, saw medieval satanism as the only available expression for the antifeudal revolution. If the church hierarchy says that God wants wealth and power to go to the temporal and religious lords, who is on the side of the poor peasants? Who is their spiritual resource?) |
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But (. . .) when we get to A Specter Is Haunting Texas (1968), we have a more multileveled, more comic and realistic story of a post-World War Three future. Scully, actor from Circumluna, is dragged into the Hispanic revolution against hormone-hiked, conquering Texans, who identify the LBJ and (no doubt) a certain war. And Scully knows that history is seldom |
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