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Amazon
Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN-10: 0595222161
Type: Fiction
Pages: 114
Copyright: Jan 1 1984
Children of the Mind describes a society where thought is rationed, the imagination considered a disease, and dreaming a subversive activity.
Also includes as a bonus, the WIND TURBINE STUDIES Collage Narrative.
I wrote Children of the Mind some twenty years ago during the early 1980s. The ‘extended metafiction’ recounts the tale of a society in which thought is rationed, where the imagination is considered a disease,and dreaming is considered a subversive activity. Persons suspected of dreaming are summarily ‘nebulized’by the Grave Registration. The “Children of the Mind” of the title are a shadowy group that insists on thinking freely. In this brief novella I experimented with what would now be considered a ‘multimedia-like’ technique, where the narrative would undergo radical, and unexpected, shifts from words to images and back to words. And this was way back in the dark ages, before the World Wide Web, before words were viewed merely as ‘content’ for the worldwide entertainment machine, before ‘hypertext,’ home pages, and HTML. At the time it was ‘experimental fiction’. Children of the Mind was inspired by a short note in The New York Times that appeared during the height of the Solidarity Movement in Poland in the early 1980s, which in retrospect can be viewed as a significant catalyst in the subsequent downfall of the Communist empire. The Times’ article briefly mentioned the manner in which a spontaneous shrine had appeared to commemorate and to mark the scene of some brutally repressive event. In a stealth and silent procession, the citizens brought flowers, lighted candles, and offered various other tokens of devotion, respect, and honor to the spot.
Apparently, this infuriated the authorities, for they had the shrine disassembled and removed the following morning. The next evening, the citizens rebuilt the shrine and that, too, was dismantled and subsequently removed. This scenario played out in varying degrees of success for an extended period of time. I thought that act, action, series of repetitive acts, that passive aggression, that subtle defiance—ever so eloquently summed up much of Post-Modern life. The indefatigable human spirit railing against the machine, conformity, or, perhaps, the human condition. In the novella, the task became to think through the tale and to construct an entire society (or world) in which the above would be an all-too-ordinary happenstance.
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