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| Jon Waskan |
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| Paul H. Smith |
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Here's my theory about this book: The author sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for extraordinary literary talent. But he also had to agree to write like a person afflicted with a diseased mind. Finally, his satanic bargain allowed for a generous portion of humor, as long at that humor was black as pitch.
Not only are these short stories remarkably well-written, but the entire collection is packaged or couched in a meta-premise that is unrelentingly hilarious -- the premise is that the author is a certain fictional fellow by the name of V.V. Swigferd Gloume, a sort of British version of H.P. Lovecraft.
Like the real Lovecraft, the fictional Swiggy Gloume lives a dreary, dismal existence of self-absorbed alienation, bizarre neurotic fears, loathing of others, loathing in general and loneliness. He is obsessed with monsters, death, slimes and filth. His plight is a chronic inability to get his work consistently published in mainstream periodicals -- only to achieve notoriety after his death.
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| William Rosencrans |
Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
All NEW: KEN'S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING
ARTIFICIAL ABSOLUTES is a book with a fairly intricate, well-developed story line buried under a gigantic mountain of cliché plot gimmicks that renders what might have been a decent book into a dreary mass of almost insufferable blandness.
The work often also devolves into mawkish dialogue so drippy with smarmy goo, it's on par with a weepy love ballad written by, say, the Jonas Brothers, for tweenie fan girls.
To prove that I am not delusional or just being a mean reviewer, I will invite the reader to join me now by logging onto a favorite search engine and look up something like, "The 10 most common cliché movies scenes" -- because many appear in this book.
The first cliché is one we all know and you probably won't even have to Google it (although please feel free to do) is that the best way to escape from the cops, or the bad guys, or anyone chasing you with guns is to squeeze into the ventilation duct work of a large building.
Time and again, movie heroes (and criminals) cleverly slip away from their pursuers by getting into the duct vents because they know that the clueless authorities or bad guys will be 100% perplexed and always fooled by this never-before-thought-of escape plan.
Artificial Absolutes includes this scene -- and for good measure, it also presents the first cousin of the Great Air Duct Escape Plan -- the dreaded -- Escape Through the Opening at the Top of a Stalled Elevator Car Plan -- and an oh-so-hackneyed climb up the cables of the elevator shaft to baffle one's pursuers.
The next cliché plot gimmick that fills dozens of pages of this book is the:
"The bad guys can shoot at you all they want and they can never hit you, but the good guy can shoot back and score a hit on the bad guy almost at will."
We have all seen it hundreds of times -- Bruce Willis, Sly Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris -- they run around bristling with machine guns while being pursued by dozens of other guys with even more machine guns -- but no one can hit the good guy! Yet, the hero can score a dead-middle-of-the-torso-shot while jumping, rolling and firing.
In Artificial Absolutes we are inflicted with page after page of the same. The first such scene features a sophisticated, high tech robot which chases our heroine Jane "Pony" Colt through the hallways of a building -- the robot shoots and shoots and shoots but it can't hit the broadside of a barn!
The conveniently inept robo-killer suffers dozens of near misses -- right next to her shoulder! a real grazer just missing her head! a blast that splinters the door frame she just runs through! -- it's not the least bit exciting because we all know the scene -- we've seen it hundreds of times in movies.
One would think that a super-advanced robot constructed in an advanced society that has mastered interstellar space travel would include some kind of sophisticated target acquisition and tracking hardware to easily laser down it's prey -- like our drones can do today. But not in this book.
Even when "Pony" and her brother, Devin Colt, are being chased by a squad of heavily armed, battle-trained starship troopers, all they have to is run, dodge, zig-zag -- and they become completely unhittable targets! Robotic drones flying through the air at the same time can't nail them either!
And yet, whenever Devin Colt chooses to whirl, shoot wildly from the hip while on the run with a borrowed gun -- he can expertly knock the weapons right out of the hands of the bumbling, can't-hit-nothin' interstellar marines! And do it again and again!
Suffice it to say: Heroes who can run through a torrential hail of bullets without getting hit, while at the same time being able to shoot anyone they want -- is among the used and abused of movie clichés -- and the fact it has been transferred to the pages of a book does not make it any less of a hack.
For good measure, and to really slather it on, the book includes what has become one of the most universally used, overused and annoying visual gimmicks of all time -- it's ye olde:
"The hero blows something up, but turns his back and walks away not bothering to look at the massive fireball erupting being him."
Here's the scene right from the book at location 5561 on my Kindle:
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| MARY FAN |
Speaking of moth-eaten plots, the very central plot element, the heart of Artificial Absolutes, is an worn-to-baldness retread premise that has already been explored by hundreds if not thousands of other science fiction writers, beginning in the 1920s.
SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!
Just a few months ago I was wading through the free pulp science fiction of Project Gutenberg and selected to read the 1961, MEMORY OF MARS by Raymond F. Jones. In it, the hero falls in love with his childhood sweetheart. They meet in the third grade. They have a long courtship through high school, they fall madly in love and they get married. Later -- GAK! -- he finds out she was never real in the first place! She's a robot!
In Artificial Absolutes, Devin Colt meets a beautiful woman, they date, the fall in love and he asks her to marry her. Later -- GAK! -- he finds out she was never real in the first place, She's a robot!
His sister, you know "Pony Colt," meets a handsome young man (boy). He rubs her the wrong way at first because he is a simplistic religious gasbag, yet they keep seeing each other, they go through some stuff together, they fall in love, she has finally found her soul-mate. Later -- GAK!-- she finds out he was never real in the first place! He's a robot!
It just keeps happening!
But even by 1961, falling in love with lifelike robots was already far from original -- dozens of others had already written a spin on the same plot element. In the mid-1960s Philip K. Dick practically built a career around stories in which perfect replicants of human beings pose questions of what is real and what is not real, and whether a robot can possess true consciousness or not have true consciousness.
END SPOILER ALERT!
Certainly, these are standard saws of science fiction, so we can't take points away from author MARY FAN for trotting out this threadbare SF rag doll one more time -- it's a fan favorite after all -- but we certainly can't give extra credit for originality either.
There are many other elements of hackneyed plot devices and cliché gimmicks, but I simply can't get them all (er ... cough, cough ... Travan Float is a thin re-imagining of Mos Eisley of Star Wars ... ) without making for too lengthy a review, and I want to make a final comment:
Young writers today -- those of Generation X, Generation Y and Millennial extraction -- have all been raised in on TV and movies like no generations before. They have also been embedded in the online world since they were babies. They have endured total immersion in on-the-screen fictional scenarios.
Thus, what I am seeing from one young writer after another today (I read more than 100 books per year) are plots and scenes in books that are soaked in movie and television clichés. Even the minor characters are not original creations -- very often plucked right out of a TV or a movie.
For example, in this book Commander Jihan Vega would seem to be almost an exact duplicate of ADMIRAL HELENA CAIN of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. Again, I challenge the reader to find a scene featuring Admiral Helena Cain on `Battlestar' and compare her to Commander Jihan Vega of this book -- they are near Kinkos of the same fictional person -- different in name only.
Sure, in a sense, most books are at least somewhat derivative of other works and leverage broad themes, archetypes and conventions of their genre, but Artificial Absolutes takes the copy-and-paste lifting of other standardized memes to such an extreme degree, the result is a literary work of Absolute Artificiality.
Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
All NEW: KEN'S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING
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After getting blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq, civilian contract worker NATALIE SUDMAN "blinked" and found herself in another reality. It was a strange place indeed. Sudman discovered herself standing center stage in what she struggles to describe as perhaps a vast stadium filled with thousands of beings -- but who or what kind of beings?
Souls? Personalities? Entities? Spirits? People?
None of the terms seemed quite adequate or accurate. Sudman realized that she was having a near death experience (NDE) after suffering severe trauma to her body. But this event didn't have any of the classic attributes popularly associated with the NDE.
There was no tunnel of light, no greeting on "the other side" by dead relatives, no experience of a spirit detaching and flying away from her physical body. She just "blinked" and she was there. Once arrived, she felt instantly at home and did not want to go back.
She also became immediately aware of her first function in the afterlife: She acted as a kind of cosmic computer cache with the purpose of "downloading" all of her "stored" information to the waiting gathering of souls -- who absorbed the information "with gratitude."
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| NATALIE SUDMAN |
This is not airy fairy New Agey fare but more of a thinking man's (in this case, a thinking woman's) report on the afterlife. Sudman is at once a serious, sober observer of the extraordinary situation she encountered, but also an often funny and charming writer with something entirely different to say.
This is a book about the ultimate issues of all reality -- What is life? Who are we? What are we? What is the meaning of life? What does it mean to be a conscious human being? Why are we here? -- and Sudman has a truly remarkable ability to delve into these weighty questions while never talking down to us, and at the same time, challenging us to expand our way of thinking.
This is a slim volume at just over 100 pages, but it has the effect of reading a book of 200 or 300 pages. Each paragraph seems impregnated with richer meaning, as if there is information coming at you from the spaces in between the words and sentences. If you read it twice, don't be surprised is if you get as much more even more out of it the second time around.
It's perhaps important to note that Sudman was not a New Age type or any sort of formal spiritual seeker before she was encountered a roadside bomb on Nov. 24, 2007. She was an archaeologist by profession, and then had transitioned to working as a project engineer for a civilian contractor in the Basrah South Region Office in Iraq. She was managing the building of a health care center at Khor Az Aubair at the time of the incident that transformed her life.
She comes to the NDE subject as an outsider with a fresh perspective, and so perhaps without the baggage of those who spend their lives immersed in mystical esoterica -- and yet, many can expect to have their old and calcified belief systems rattled by what Sudman suggests here.
Open-minded skeptics only need apply.
Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
All NEW: KEN'S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING
Lyman C. Draper was a driven historian who was determined that certain events of American history should never be forgotten. The result of his lifetime's work are a number of fascinating manuscripts like this one, Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1789-90.
This account records the experiences of Maj. Samuel S. Forman who was a member of a large party that traveled the length of the Ohio River in crudely constructed barges. Included with the party were more than 100 black slaves.
Born in 1765, Forman was a young man in his early twenties at the time of his Ohio River adventure. His company navigated to the Mississippi where they sailed south to establish a plantation in Natchez. Natchez is located in the present-day state of Mississippi, which was still a holding of Spain at the time. Spain would relinquish the territory about a year later.
The source of the Ohio River is in Pennsylvania and flows westward through West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana before flowing into the Mississippi in Illinois.
At the time of Forman's journey in 1789, the territories along the river were home to a marvelously rich collection of native American peoples, forts and the various scattered outposts of Europeans settlers. It was wild and dangerous country loaded abundant wildlife and colorful characters.
For the history buff this rare manuscript is a treasure, not just for its overall narrative, but for those incidental historic asides which jump out at you like nuggets washed from a stream. For example:
* We learn that the first First Lady, Martha Washington, was a chunky woman. Major Forman was lucky to be near at hand at the the second inauguration of George Washington and he notes that Mrs. Washington looked "pretty fleshy."
* The city of Cincinnati owes it establishment to a love infatuation. A certain Ensign Francis Luce was charged with establishing a block house at a site called North Bend, but he caught site of a "beautiful black-eyed lady" who was the wife of a settler. The husband found it necessary to move from North Bend to remove his wife from the strenuous advances of Ensign Luce -- and the location they moved to became Cincinnati.
Reading this evinces a tremendous sense of sadness for me. That's because today the Ohio is the most polluted river in America. It was once a vital artery of life for the Native Americans. The river was the lifeblood of their rich and imaginative culture, as well as a source-mother for abundant wildlife.
The journey of Samuel Forman was the beginning of another kind of bleak journey -- toward the devastation of the native population, and the toxic environmental degradation of what was once one of the most life-giving bodies of water in the world.
Not anymore.
Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
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This short manual introducing the concept of lucid dreaming to a new audience is well written in a clear and "lucid" style. It delivers a broad overview on how to lucid dream, while also thoroughly grounding the reader in a framework based on the Hindu tradition of Vedanta.
That's no small accomplishment considering that this is just 60-some pages, but the author handles the task well. As a person who has been exploring lucid dreaming for some 30 years, I can find little fault with the approach taken here.
However, let me say that I don't think lucid dreaming must necessarily be considered from the perspective of Vedanta only -- if you want, you can achieve the lucid dream state, practice it and gain its insights without the baggage of any religious or philosophical system, including Vedanta.
This is not to imply that Vedanta is "baggage" in a negative way; I think anyone who chooses to immerse themselves in this ancient tradition would only benefit from doing so, and find great personal growth.
But take, for example, the purely secular and scientific approaches to lucid dreaming, such as that exemplified by the work of the psychophysiologist STEPHEN LABERGE PH.D. It was LaBerge who reintroduced the concept of lucid dreaming to a modern audience with his books LUCID DREAMING and EXPLORIING THE WORLD OF LUCID DREAMING.
LaBerge made lucid dreaming palatable to a western, rational-materialistic audience by scientifically proving the reality of the lucid dream state with innovative and repeatable experiments using EEG readouts and monitoring the eye movements of REM sleep -- it established beyond a reasonable doubt that the fundamentals of what ancient adepts of Vedanta had been telling us for untold centuries is accurate.
The point is, millions of people learned to lucid dream and gain all of its benefits with LaBerge's purely secular approach -- on the other hand, adopting the methods grounded in Vedanta as explained in this short manual by SAMIRA NURIYEVA will be of equal benefit, and perhaps in many ways, will lead to an even richer understanding of what is implied by lucid dreaming.
So this brief, well-written introduction to lucid dreaming gets my best recommendation.
Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
All NEW: KEN'S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING
In that book he made an ordinary slice of life seem extraordinary. So I was curious to see how this writer would handle a topic that's extraordinary to begin with-- time travel. I was not disappointed.
There's some intriguing stories here that I'm sure even those who already eagerly follow time travel have never heard about before. For example, there's a story about a man from a small town in the American Midwest who is astonished when he is spontaneously transported back to ancient Alexandria.
Perhaps even more fascinating is the complex, true story of a Victorian-era conspiracy-like plot by a famous British architect and a brilliant inventor living on the edge of poverty. This unlikely duo teams up to place a series of "teleportation devices" throughout a number of locations in London -- which may have ended up transporting a mysterious wealthy widow and her spinster daughters through time!
Yes, a couple of the stories presented here will strain the credulity of even the most open-minded New Ager, but there's also plenty of "red meat" for the dyed-in-the-wool skeptic -- such as the ambitious attempts of respected American physicist Dr. Ronald Mallett to build a real time machine based on the known scientific principles of quantum physics.
This book is called "More" True Time Travel Stories because it follows up a previous short book, TRUE TIME TRAVEL STORIES.
A fun and fascinating read from front to back. Find the book here: TIME TRAVEL
Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
All NEW: KEN'S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING
If you’re a hard core rational-materialistic skeptic and you have accepted Carl Sagan as your personal savior you need not apply to THE CONVOLUTED UNIVERSE.
Author and hypnotherapist DOLORES CANNON doesn't just throw out the scientific method playbook, she sends it through a paper shredder. That includes methods of hypnotism that wouldn't remotely be considered legitimate by anyone in the mainstream psychological community.
But no matter! All is well!
Cannon herself makes no bones about her methodology and where her works stands in the greater context. She’s unfettered and free-wheeling, traveling the New Age universe as light as a butterfly flitting from one astonishing flower to the next.
Her method is to put her subjects into what she calls a “somnambulistic trance.” This allows her direct access to the subconscious -- but even here Cannon parts ways with standard definitions. She says the kind of “subconscious” she is dealing with is not the same at that defined my modern psychology.
The result is direct communication with extraterrestrials, energy beings, spirit guides, astral entities of amazing variety -- including the spirits of former residents of the the vanished super civilization of Atlantis.
If you are thinking by now that I am a typical skeptic who is hostile to Cannon’s brand of unbounded flights of fantastic New Age revelation -- you would be wrong.
I see no harm in being an open minded skeptic and taking the work of Ms. Cannon at face value. After all, she lays all her cards on the table. She’s not trying to hoodwink anyone. She’s sincere. She’s just doing what she’s doing -- she’s putting it all out there for the reader to decide what they want to believe -- or not.
Her amazing 50 years of unstoppable, dedicated work at putting people into trance and recording their transcripts has produced reams of information. Cannon displays not an iota of selectivity for the type or quality of the information she records, choosing instead to dump everything into the pages of her massive books. The Convoluted Universe clocks in at well over 500 pages and is just the first in a series of several, but also builds on at least a half-dozen earlier works.
The problem with this all-in approach is that a lot of the information often tilts toward the 100% absurd, no matter how open-minded we choose to be. For example:
* The Loch Ness monster is real! It’s a vegetarian that lays its eggs in the mud, and it lives in a cave deep beneath the lake!
* Bigfoot is real, too! It likes to snack on butterflies and uses it’s powers of ESP to avoid contact with human beings!
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| Dolores Cannon |
But wait a minute -- I will now say with complete absence of mockery or sarcasm -- that I find a lot of the material here compelling. After all, even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut.
That is, some of Cannon’s hypnotized subjects are far more credible than others. Some of them channel esoteric information that smacks of legitimacy -- such as the subjects who insistently contend that human beings are confused about the nature of physical reality.
The general belief is that first comes a biological lump called a brain, and from that springs consciousness. But the nonphysical entities Cannon’s subjects channel say just the opposite it true: That consciousness comes first and the brain is a receiving device that captures and interprets the information -- but then biases and distortions creep into our interpretation of reality because of phony belief systems, phony fears and our phony ego-infected human personalities.
I think that’s right. Even the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said: “Consciousness precedes being.” That’s not only the case, but it's the situation to a much greater degree than any of us might imagine. To this end, some of Cannon’s subjects offer remarkably insightful metaphors that help us see ourselves as beings of nonphysical consciousness or beings, of pure energy-intelligence, rather than biologically programmed meat machines.
If we accept the premise that Consciousness -- Consciousness with a Big C -- does not originate from physical biological matter, then we have to consider that at least some of the information produced by Cannon has value. I think it does.
Don’t worry. You don’t have to believe everything you read. No one’s putting a gun to your head. Go ahead and give the book a read. Be a skeptic, but an open-minded skeptic. And always remember what the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane said:
“The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
We don’t have to make any pretense that LIFE ERUPTED is anything more the a light romantic comedy with a central premise pulled straight out of a daytime soap opera. Author MARY STANIK concedes as much when she puts these words into the mouth of her character, Jenn Bergquist, near the end of the book:
“It is all too unreal. It’s like a soap opera, or some sappy movie … this is all too crazy.”
That’s pretty much sums it up. Life Erupted is a not just Chick Lit Lite, it’s Chick Lit Ultra-Lite.
Even the main character is borrowed right off the ol’ tube. Again, the author makes no bones about this, saying her heroine was inspired by Mary Richards of the MARY TYLER MOORE show. I have always thought that Mary Richards was a wafer-thin reincarnation of Marlo Thomas as Ann Marie in THAT GIRL. And now we see that the transmigration of the soul is possible because TV characters can be reborn onto the printed page.
Like Mary Richards, Jenn Berquist lives in Minneapolis and works in the media business. She she also sports the same hairstyle of that slightly earlier TV queen, Ann Marie. Both have that 1960s funky bouffant flip with blunt bangs held up by killer eyelashes.
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| Mary Stanik |
Thus, if you’re looking for a fluffy-feel-good fun read about a woman who wants to “have it all” and who’s going to “make it after all” -- then buy the book and enjoy.
Okay, now let’s have a discussion:
The great American writer JOYCE CAROL OATES suggested that all American women are obsessed by food and all American men are obsessed by money. Life Erupted is Exhibit A for this notion
The actual main character of Life Erupted is not Jenn Bergquist -- but food -- and to an astonishing degree.
Food is lovingly described, food is dwelled upon, food is a central aspect of the most important scenes. Even that which is tangentially related to food looms large in the background of the narrative, such as restaurants, menus, styles of food, traditions of food, kitchens and eating utensils. (I'm not making this up: In one scene a woman actually "holds onto her fork" for emotional support).
What’s truly remarkable is that in the central “plot payoff” scene of the book -- wherein the main character is receiving a stunning life-altering revelation -- the event takes a back seat to a stack of pancakes dripping with maple syrup, and not just any maple syrup, but maple syrup imported from Canada.
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| That Girl |
The exciting trip to Iceland to chase erupting volcanoes recedes into the background as an examination of Icelandic cuisine ensues -- the famous salted cod is discussed, as is other ocean fair, wines, juices, drinks, desserts and side dishes. Says Jenn Bergquist:
“I actually did eat a fair amount of fish. You were totally right, you have not eaten salmon or cod until you have eaten the Icelandic variety. But not so much with the vegetables, they are pretty expensive there and so we didn’t have many, save for a few $15 side salads.”
Fifteen bucks for a side salad! Certainly that would necessarily limit one to “a few.”
Now let’s leave food behind to discuss this books other major underlying them -- the latent but raging Electra Complex of Jenn Bergquist.
You have probably heard about Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, but from Neo-Freudian psychology with get the Electra complex. It was proposed by the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. An Electra Complex is a daughter’s psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father.
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| Mary Tyler Moore |
At the same time, the only person who has a lot of exciting sex in this book is -- you guessed it -- Jenn's aging father, the stoic and heavily repressed Olaf Bergquist.
In true Electra fashion, Jenn expends considerable psychic energy coming to grips with the burgeoning sex life of her father.
As for Jenn herself, she seems to have adopted that old maxim: If you can’t have sex, have chocolate -- or pancakes, or lobster-stuffed ravioli, or salted cod, or muffins, or spicy pasta in marinara sauce, or angel food cake with blueberries, or Belgian chocolate dessert -- or the “large slices of crusty, very tasty bread” -- purchased for her by yet another father figure, her surrogate grandfather.
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| Electra |
Olaf Bergquist glumly looks across the table at the object of his sexual desire, the sizzling-sexy Caroline, only too observe that she:
“ … goes silent so as to scarf down a huge and steaming chocolate pudding cake ...”
Then Olaf asks Caroline if she ever had a chance to meet Jenn’s dying mother, but he sees the dismal sight of Caroline:
“ … carefully scraping chocolate from her plate, looking genuinely unhappy that there was nothing left of her dessert … “
The only thing our plucky heroine Jenn gets, by the way, is a cold date in frigid Iceland with a gay man.
In light of all this, it would seem that the obsession with food throughout the narrative serves as a kind of displacement for the frustrated sexual desire of Jenn Bergquist -- which might lead us to the conclusion that the seething, exploding volcanoes of Iceland serve as the ultimate metaphor of a desire for explosive, orgasmic sexual fulfillment -- never realized, except when projected onto the father.
So, you know ... well, this is a pretty interesting book when you think about it.
Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
I was trying to think of the last time I had as much fun as I did while reading TIMELOCK by R.G. Knighton, and then it hit me: The year was 1987.
I was at the movies with a friend. The film we were seeing was EVIL DEAD II, Sam Raimi's campy-but-ingenious blood and gore classic. Evil Dead II is outrageously goofy but devilishly clever. It became an instant laugh-and-shock-a-minute classic. I still consider it to be among my personal "best movies of all time."
Devilishly clever, nutty, bloody, gory, funny and fun would well describe TIMELOCK, which is actually a set of two novels.
The first book involves a group of twenty-something college students attending a second-tier, but upper crust British university. They began to dabble in occult practices and stumble into a way to open a portal into another time and dimension. Trouble ensues when malevolent spirits leap through the portal and attach themselves to the students.
Each student is now "infected" with evil forces from the distant past. A variety of nutty hijinks ensue. What's worse, one of the evil spirits is that of an extremely powerful witch with the wacky name of "Toomak." She has the power to bring about he return of the Antichrist -- Satan would be unchained resulting in the destruction of everything that is good, decent and holy forever.
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| R.G. Knighton |
What really makes this a first rate novel is the author's superior ability to create interesting characters -- they are ordinary human beings with all the normal strengths and weaknesses of people we find in the real world.
Each character's motivations are shaped by their circumstances and background -- which the author inserts into the narrative with marvelous finesse and ease.
R.G. Knighton is a rare writer -- I believe he is a natural talent. He commands a razor-edged wit and a wonderful sense of sardonic irony. His ability to place ordinary people into extraordinary situations is what gives this book a breezy kind of power that doesn't pretend to be anything but sheer entertainment.
The humor of Timelock is dripping with cynicism. Yes, this is dark humor, but pleasant; it's like a premium dark chocolate with a tad of bitterness but ultimately sweet.
Timelock gets my highest recommendation and will easily make my Top 10 List of best books I've read in 2013.
Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer and has been successfully freelance writing for the past 25 years. He taught writing at the University of North Dakota. Ken in the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
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About once a year among the more than 100 books I read per year there is always one that vividly stands out to receive “Ken’s Crash and Burn Award.” This is for books which start out with extreme promise, but then veer disastrously off course, never to recover.
In the case of PHERICK MORTON: A LIFE AND BEYOND, author PETER MESSMORE was cruising toward a rave review through the first third of the book, but then the narrative gets utterly lost, and the reader is confronted with one downright absurdity after another.
The author does a terrific job of creating unique, believable and nuanced characters who are instantly interesting. He embeds them in themes that promise to be rich in possibilities -- the conflict of fundamentalist religious beliefs confronting the world of hard rational science devoid of spirit -- in this case, super-advanced robotics.
To add even more flavor we have a background clash of a tough-as-nails international union boss striving to organize “the working class” set against the lofty world of corporate and scientific elites.
But then it all devolves into a miasma of soporific detail. The author attempts to leverage what is essentially a biography of a fictional character to drive the narrative, which is no substitute for an actual plot. There is an attempt to keep us interested by killing off a major character every 40 pages, or so, and the author adds a couple of soap-opera-like twists, but it all falls flat.
There is scene after scene that ends up having no bearing on the ultimately vague conclusion the author has in store.
For example, we get niggling and inexplicable diversions wherein the character obsesses about a marketing logo for his robotics company. There is a pointless detailing the kind of domestic cleaning robots he plans to build (you know, like the Roomba, which has already been around for more than 10 years, though this is the year 2030). Then there is the agonizing description of the fancy, pretentious house Pherick is building; the details of this clog the narrative like so much flotsam washed up to lay dead on the page.
Pherick Morton himself is a creepy character in many ways. For example, he is obsessed with genetic purity. There is a scene where he and his wife are consulting with a genetic specialist in their quest to birth a perfect child via a surrogate mother. It's like something out of a ghoulish eugenics training manual.
It would be kind to describe Pherick as a morally ambiguous character. An unkind reviewer might peg him as a self-absorbed ego maniac who easily rationalizes his use of illicitly-gained wealth -- as in when Pherick’s father supplies him with smuggled blood diamonds, some of which Pherick promptly fashions into a necklace to hang at the throat of his beloved wife. He also has one cut to serve as her engagement ring.
Blood diamonds are called so because they fund weapons procurement for brutal war lords in Africa. The results is the violent deaths of countless innocent people, including women and children. They are often obtained via child slave labor -- since Pherick is supposed to be a genius, he should know this -- he knows how his father obtained the booty -- yet he chooses to use these diamonds as his ultimate symbol of love.
He also trades illicit diamonds to pay for his brother’s brain surgery -- rather than paying medical bills the way the rest of us do -- through hard work, our own resources, or with a legitimate appeal to society. But not Pherick. He rationalizes by promising to give an amount equal to his dirty gains to charity at some later time -- you know, after all his own needs and material goals have been taken care of first.
Pherick’s conception of spirituality is fantastically bland.
Even though he receives visitations from no one less that Jesus himself while meditating in a cave in Israel, these visions do little to alter his ambitions to make gobs of money -- he buys houses, cars and the sundry material creature comforts the “real Jesus” would have found anathema.
Toward the end of the book, Pherick has earned a half-billion dollars, enabling him to retire in luxurious ease. Thus he is able to focus on his spiritual quest. He endeavors to formulate an enlightened philosophy -- but what we are eventually presented with is a warmed over interpretation of Gnosticism which anyone could glean from Wikipedia.
Pherick also establishes what is portrayed as a cutting-edge, new kind of religion free of dogma and hierarchical structure, which has nothing on the Unitarian Universalist model (and many others) that have already been around for centuries.
Most of the action is set in the future about 20 years hence, but the author has no feel for creating a world that feels any different from our own. Except for the occasional appearance of a smartphone, the action here could just as easily take place in the 1950s as the year 2030.
The final scene depicts Pherick in the afterlife, a realm depicted in a way that is amazingly mundane, clumsy and absurd. It's ridiculous, including a part where Pherick meets his old dead professor. This man reports he has been having sit-down meetings with Yeshua. (While alive, the professor had always maintained "Yeshua" was the true "Jesus.”)
The professor tells Pherick lamely: “(Yeshua) has interacted with professors before -- but not many.”
Say what? The great Yeshua is fussy about which guy with tenure and Ph.D he’ll talk to? Hmmmm. Doesn't seem to be too much of an equal opportunity Savior of All Mankind. Maybe Yeshua favors the rabble from lower society, you know, like undergraduate English majors? I don’t know, but I digress.
There are many other problems with this book as well, not the least of which is the peculiar woody way dialogue is handled -- the characters speak to each other like robots -- but I think you all get the gist of my view by now.
Your reviewer, Ken Korczak, is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
The author of TAL has opted for a bit of melodrama, perhaps to spice things up initially and pique the curiosity of readers. To this end the book is mysteriously published as “Anonymous” and it’s billed as a “conversation with an alien.” But what we have here is a straightforward and lucid conversation of quantum physics theory, presented in classic dialectic form.
Only at the end does the author identify this book as a work of “pure fiction.” The fictional element is extremely slight -- it’s used only to set a stage for an average guy to encounter another individual of extreme intelligence. The two sit down for a conversation in which the alien relates his insights into the implications of the quantum mechanical universe.
“TAL” claims to be an alien being who was somehow stranded on our earth 100,000 years ago. He has spent his time observing the human species. He is eager to illuminate his friend about the details, meanings and implications of the quantum model.
He does a marvelous job. If you have read other books intended for a mainstream audience explaining quantum mechanics, this will be a worthy addition to your collection. It will enhance your understanding of an always slippery topic. If you’re like me, a person who has long been fascinated quantum models of the universe, this book will give you yet another way to approach concepts that are thorny and vexing.
That’s because much of what is implied by quantum mechanics is so challenging to the way we psychologically model our physical world. Despite all of our progress in physics, most of us are still grounded in a Newtonian world in terms of our daily view. We are comfortable with rather simple cause and effect, a linear notion of time, and common sense laws of motion, mass, location and dimension. Even though most people acknowledge relativity, uncertainty and the like, they still don't "think like Einstein"; most people still "think like Newton."
Many of us have read about the double slit experiment which shows the seeming dual nature of a particle. A particle appears to act like both a singular “hard” object as well as a “wave”. Even if we can grasp the implications of the double slit experiment intellectually, it still confounds us psychologically. This author gives us yet another look at the issue. It helps to periodically return to the double slit results and think about it from new angles.
One of the ways our friend TAL makes Many-Worlds easier to swallow is by couching it in terms of the infinite. By grasping the mega-beyond-enormity of what infinity truly is, we can at least “feel comfortable” that Many-Worlds has "room" to exist and expand without limit forever.
There’s lots more, too. For example, the author does a wonderful job of shedding light on the Schrödinger probability equations. I also really like the way we are invited to reexamine the way we think about dimensions of existence, and how we perceive our relationship with time.
Perhaps best of all is a clever thought experiment which shows vividly the limits of a reductionist approach to science in terms of explaining what we can or cannot experience. For example, even if you develop the perfect mathematical equation to capture the essence of a lobster dinner, and have the best semantic description of the meal based on the reviews of others -- you'll still never truly “know” what that lobster tastes like until you actually bite into it and experience it directly with your own consciousness.
So this is a delightful read which illuminates and explains. No matter how well you think you understand quantum theory, I suspect you will gain at least a few insights, and increase your level of comfort with the implications of quantum theory. TAL will help you push your understanding to a deeper level.
Your reviewer, Ken Korczak, is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA
The immediate challenge in reading a book on metaphysics is judging the authenticity of the information. That's a difficult task, but there are certain clues and road maps that can help us out.
One of the best ways is to compare new books to those powerful works that have withstood the test of time. I'm thinking of spiritual classics such as "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahansa Yogananda, "Zen Mind, Beginners Mind," by Shunryu Suzuki, "The Awakening of Intelligence" by Jiddu Krishnamurti "The Spectrum of Consciousness," by Ken Wilber and more recently, "How the World Can Be The Way It Is," by Steve Hagen - to name just a few.
So how does THE SECRET OF METAPHYSICAL SCIENCE by DR. ANDREA SCARSI hold up in this esteemed company? Well, for me, it comes off as "transcendent literature lite." While this is by no means a terrible book, it comes nowhere near the level of the masterful titles I list above.
I'm satisfied that Dr. Scarsi is an authentic individual and that his claims of numerous and spectacular experiences of enlightenment are genuine. But achieving "cosmic consciousness" does not automatically translate to "stellar author."
This book reads more like a New Age instruction manual. It's often bland and plodding. The consciousness-shattering event of achieving Ultimate Realization has been rendered mundane in these 90 pages.
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| Andrea Scarsi |
Even though The Secret of Metaphysical Science is also a short manuscript, Dr. Scarsi pads it in the end with brief reviews of some of his favorite books which cover a variety of related topics, such as Reiki, wisdom gleaned via extraterrestrial alien contact, and the typical gewgaw about "attracting wealth." Very unfortunately, Dr. Scarsi endorses THE SOURCE FIELD INVESTIGATIONS by David Wilcock, a vastly inferior work featuring endless pages of the most muddled quantum claptrap on the market today.
Even so - I give The Secret of Metaphysical Science a mild endorsement because the information is thorough, complete and nominally accurate, if uneven across the length of document. For those less familiar with the topic or who are approaching it for the first time, this book is not a bad place to start in finding clues and guideposts for that Ultimate Journey.
Your reviewer, Ken Korczak, is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: THE MAN IN THE NOTHING CHAMBER
