Sometimes, one finds oneself stumbling around the web in a fugue-like state. Sometimes, that stumble can be most productive.
In my most recent stumble, I came upon a gem from 2005, an online version of a novel by writer John Damien Sundman called "The Pains". Now, some would try to fit this into the simple box of "Dystopian Science Fiction" and in a way, they would be tickling the early boundries of accuracy. It's setting is dystopian, in a manner that would have pleased and delighted a Phillip K. Dick. It has the cyberpunkoidal leanings and markers of a William Gibson. But to place this in such narrow strictures and classifications would be unfair. First off, John Damien Sundman is a goddamned good writer and hanging one's hat on such narrow classifications would be grossly unfair to him and his subject matter. Said classifications are only waypoints, random genetic markers for the journey he takes the reader upon.
“Well,” Norman began, tentatively. He had not prepared a talk. He had jumbled thoughts, but no coherent theory. He knew he was going to embarrass himself, but he had no choice.
“I believe,” he said, “that The Pains have something to do with a soul about to go bad, a world about to go bad. But I believe that it is not a direct mapping, for the world is not deterministic. There is no cause and effect. It is chaotic, and only appears to be deterministic. Everything is information. Chaos percolates information from scale to scale, from microscopic to macroscopic, from macroscopic to galactic, from galactic to cosmic. This is the belief of the Santa Soga school.”
“School?” said one of the judges who had been silent until now. “School in Santa Soga? Is this not your school, St. Reinhold, your one true school?”
“Sir, I mean school of thought; a way of thinking about chaos. Like the Copenhagen School of Quantum mechanics. It has to do with unexpectedness. Surprise.”
“Surprise, surprise,” Mr. Lux heard one of the judges mutter.
Perhaps not the best example of what you are going to find there, but hey, reading is about the whole experience from soup to nuts, not just one carrot shred on the the literary crudite' course's plate.
How this got by me is no surprise: This is from 2005 and my life is spent head down in the cockpit, pushing pixels and chanting weird incantations and performing burnt offerings to boxes filled with flat black squares and rectangles full of The Magic Blue Smoke. Eating a meal is sometimes a triumph in integration within larger society for me. In a way, I am my own Norman Lux.
But that said, I HEARTILY suggest that the gentle reader hie and fie him or herself to the below link and set to reading. If you are of the mind and means, flip the author a few bob for his travails and labors as well. He's earned it in spades. "The Pains" is just goddamned good stuff, and if you love to read good writing by someone who knows his craft as much as I love such an experience, then "The Pains" will be a great use of a cold winter's night and a couple of fingers of an adult beverage.
The Pains