Andrew’s Unfinished Manuscripts
Michael
On Tuesday, July 17th, Andrew H. Krane feels the writing bug bite for the first time since the events of the St. Francis and the warning from Dr. Redgrave that his writing will not be published without explicit SANDMAN say-so. Certainly, Krane reasons, he can't be faulted for looking at a few old works-in-progress from before Westercon and maybe tidying a few things up. Not for publication, mind you, but to see if he still has "the stuff." This manuscript, somewhere in the netherworld between novella and novel length, dates from '71. It's about a canny cop and a psycho killer in a game of cat and mouse. Taking inspiration from the then-new Columbo series on TV, this book started off with seeing how the killer did his (first) murder. Not a whodunnit, but a why-and-howdunnit. The book starts off with the killer, who we find out later is himself an ex-cop, visiting a friendly rug merchant in Palo Alto. The two talk amiably about Hindu art and religion, the merchant's childhood in Delhi, and various other topics when, as the shop empties of its other customer, the ex-cop brutally murders the rug merchant, taking out his heart and eyes, and offering them to the sun so that it might "slay the imposter moon." Over the course of the book it's revealed that the killer believes the moon is fake, a "hollow shell inhabited by a trillion insect aliens dedicated to overthrowing the human race," and that sacrifices of blood and hearts, that "most solar of human organs," will defeat the moon-insects and blot the moon out from the sky. He sends taunting notes to the newspapers (remember this was the era of Zodiac and Dirty Harry's "Scorpio Killer"), to the Bay Area police and the thinly-disguised merger of the schlubby Detective Columbo and the harder-core Taschi/Bullitt/Callahan continuum. Some primitive psychological profiling occurs—paranoid schizophrenia being the operant diagnosis—and so on. The thing is as the killer takes more victims, it becomes less clear that the insect aliens are a delusion as the killer starts to see more and more visions of the moon, sometimes even traveling there astrally to look at the honeycomb warrens of the aliens. In one memorable scene, the killer journeys to the site of the Apollo 11 landing at the Sea of Tranquility and sees underneath to the swarming hive beneath.
The main problem was that Krane just couldn't find an ending. One option was to have the cops catch and kill him, pretty standard denouement. The other was to reveal that the schizophrenic hallucinations were true, and that during an eclipse the moon would crack open and reveal trillions of alien cicadas ready to devour all the earth's biomass.
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The second book is really more of just a series of plot sketches for the fourth (now cancelled... or indefinitely postponed for SANDMAN censorship?) book in the Atlantis Risen series, written well before the events of Westercon. Krane was hoping to dig deeper into the MARPA side of things, with the brief reveals of how MARPA undercover agents work in hostile territory in Hail, Atlantis! (Krane briefly glances at the cover of the UK version of the book as he goes to the shelf to get his notes; what garbage, he thinks, there are barely any UFOs or robed cultists in it!) tantalizing Krane to write more and more. The internal politics of MARPA and Dulce Base loomed large in this plot outline; Krane decided that you've got devoted Cold Warriors like Eliade, you've got libertines interested in Atlantean magic like Sebastian Stone, and you've got a third group... a group that had taken predictive precognitive magic and psi seriously and looked at the long-term prospects for America holding out against Atlantean hegemony and found those prospects... wanting. It was clear in the next 50 years no matter what weapons MARPA brought to bear, no matter how many enemy agents or tactics or magical spells they re-wove into American thaumaturgy, that by the year 2020 or so, Americans would be begging to be ruled by the Atlanteans. The American lifestyle of consumerism and military adventurism and mind-control-through-media, said these men of MARPA, was simply unsustainable in the long term. Likewise, any mitigation methods would simply delay the date by a couple of decades. This faction's perverse reaction to this news was to propose that MARPA get behind a controversial plan: to accelerate the decay of American society, to turn all the identified factors in decline—extractive consumer capitalism, social decay and distrust, overall physical and spiritual misery—up as much as possible to force a choice. Much like the "first strikers" in our timeline who believed that America could survive and thrive after a "limited nuclear conflict" with the Soviets, these MARPA men thought making an America ready to shatter under societal and cultural and magical pressures would create a new, better America, a spartan nation able to reclaim its real legacy from Atlantean subversion and create a new ruling class, made coincidentally by these men of MARPA and their corporate allies, to rule over the ashes like feudal lords. Andrew honestly found the entire plot compelling but very, very depressing, and shelved it.
Rob
Archie has a question for Andrew, if he didn't already answer it when they talked last week: in his manuscript, what's Sebastian Stone's relationship to the accelerationist faction in MARPA? Is Stone against them, with them, or playing his own game? Actually, Archie will just ask Andrew for a copy of his manuscript if he hasn't already. That was part of our deal with Andrew, but Archie also says (sincerely) that he just wants to read it. (Archie's less keen on reading the serial killer / moon insect one, but we should get a copy just in case.) The real motive here is that Archie wants to know how Stone and by extension Stoney is likely to feel about a possible shadow faction within SANDMAN. I want to have an Intelligence Analysis conversation with Stoney about how to investigate / work against them if they exist, but not if Stone(y) is part of them.
Michael
I think before he sends you a copy of the manuscript, Krane can tell you on the phone: Sebastian Stone is his typical arch cynical self about the accelerationist faction in MARPA (fun fact: the accelerationists call themselves Project OZYMANDIAS after the Shelley poem; lots of talk in the book that the OZYMANDIAS Secret Masters have an affinity for the Ruinenwert "ruin value" theories of Albert Speer, etc., extending it from mere architecture to societies as a whole). Stone, whatever his faults and sins, loves America, loves being part of the international espiocrat jet set, believes in Progress (specifically the Progress that comes with America marrying magic with technology) and in Book 4 recruits and heads a special counterintelligence unit called Operation URIZEN, after the Blakean Zoa, of course—full of a bunch of MARPA misfits and oddballs who want no part in the U.S. becoming a romantic ruin full of Hard Men in order to resist Atlantis—to flush them out. It's clear in the novel also that the core of traditional MARPA (as exemplified by Secretary of Magic Mircea Eliade) also somewhat distrusts Stone, as they often think he's too quick to use Atlantean methods of mind control/mind-meld to keep America societally in one piece, etc. But ultimately Stone and URIZEN are on MARPA's side. At least in the three-quarters of Book 4 that Krane had lightly sketched out before Westercon.
There is more than a little hint that some of the OZYMANDIAS folks are involved in, like, quasi-Hitlerite esotericism or at the very least Evola-esque neo-primitivism. The few actual members of OZYMANDIAS who appear in this version of the novel are all embedded like ticks in industries adjacent to MARPA's governmental magical-technological research remit, making themselves rich off of new thaumaturgical methods of manufacturing, product marketing, and general capitalist activity. It's clear from Stone's investigation in the latter third of the book that using magic in such a profligate, tainted-by-mass-production way is gradually making Americans sick and insane.
Which, of course, is just what they want.