By Mike Gray
Voyage of the Mind Carriers — By Gary Wolf — iUniverse — 2011 — Philosophical science fiction novel — Trade paperback: xv + map + 189 pages — ISBN: 978-1-4620-0433-1.
Gary Wolf doesn’t write conventional fiction, and more so for his science fiction. He may occasionally use a common SF trope, but you can bet he’ll put his own unique spin on it. You almost never know where his stories will go.
Wolf’s science fiction trenchantly explores the same territory that many “crime fiction” and SF authors only rarely and tangentially venture into with their works: the contested battleground of culture, the professed — and often hypocritical — acceptance of certain norms, and the cognitive dissonances that result from these clashes. In short, Gary Wolf could be unique in specializing in what might be termed “cultural science fiction.”
In Voyage of the Mind Carriers, the main character is a police detective (who once spent some time in a sanitarium) trying to solve a murder (and another one later on) while dealing with his adolescent daughter’s teen angst; he’s fallen in love with one of his best suspects; and he’s come to seriously doubt his own place in society, because people he respects — ones in a position to know — are telling him that he’s not really from around here — that he is, in reality, from another world entirely, a place that he sometimes visits in his fitful dreams. Meanwhile, all of this is taking place four hundred centuries ago. — And I haven’t even gotten to the Omnificent Cerebrum and the Bioprimalists.
Is all of this unconventional enough for you? It was for me.
Highly recommended.
You can buy Voyage of the Mind Carriers here. Gary’s massively entertaining weblog, Awol Civilization, is here.
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From the cover:
An ancient scroll unearthed in Sicily contains an epic tale about an advanced civilization that existed tens of thousands of years before the common era. This hyper-cerebral culture, in which people are called mind carriers, produced works of art, literature, and philosophy that have yet to be surpassed.
The mind carriers are instructed by tradition that the entire universe is actually a brain of cosmic dimensions—otherwise known as the Omnificent Cerebrum. The visible world is but a cell within it; a multitude of additional cells, populated by other races of mind carriers, fill the remaining gray matter. In order to ensure that the Omnificent Cerebrum functions harmoniously, society must strive continually to create works of genius in arts and letters.
Not everyone, however, is satisfied with this state of affairs. A new movement, Bioprimalism, challenges the pre-eminence of logic and reason. The Bioprimalists instead proclaim the dominance of raw feelings, animal instincts, and the natural environment.
The ensuing strife threatens the cohesion of the Omnificent Cerebrum. Who will carry the day—the partisans of intellect or those who revere Mother Earth above all else?
Contents:
Chapter I: The Inspector
Chapter II: The Courtesan
Chapter III: The Monkey
Chapter IV: What Is a Dream?
Chapter V: The Mission Unveiled
Chapter VI: Identity Crisis
Chapter VII: Mother Earth
Chapter VIII: The Turning of the Tide
Chapter IX: A Distant Memory
Chapter X: The Whirlpool
Chapter XI: The Scientist
Chapter XII: The Painting
Chapter XIII: The Chase
Chapter XIV: A Fully-Deployed Intellect