Saturday, June 11, 2016

The Author Responds

May 17, 2016

Dear Kirkus:

It appears that the reviewer is a person who falls into the second category, "the absolute skeptic," as outlined on page viii of my Introduction. As such, I question whether he or she has read the entire work. One has to read the work through until the end, not only to figure out where it is going and the points and meaning it makes, but, more importantly perhaps, to know where it's been. This work uses a common literary device to take the reader back in time to explain or "fill out" actions that at first appear to the reader as puzzling, inexplicable or mysterious.

Tags such as "New Age philosophy" and "conspiracy theorist" reflect the reviewer's own biased, editorial judgments, that ultimately morph into condemnation:

"readers who aren’t “true believers” will likely find this rambling combination of space opera and conspiracy theory unengaging."

Once I have been tagged as a "New Age conspiracy theorist," the following, otherwise accurate, observation conveys the intended, subtextual taint:

"Citations and footnotes sprinkled throughout the text indicate that this book is located within a nexus of conspiratorial research"

While it is true that 23 Skiddoo asks a lot of its readers -- the subject matter is unorthodox and its inter-weaving plot lines are somewhat complex -- this reviewer appears to have gotten overcome by the effort it requires.

"So many different characters juggle so many different plotlines, often with inscrutable motives, that it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s going on."

The words "paranoia," "inscrutable," "unengaging," and "diatribes" are used repeatedly in this review. In other words, this reviewer is both the author's and the main character's worst nightmare, representing as he or she does, the exact wrong type of person to have reviewed this work. The result is a complete inability to plumb its ontological depths, and a failure to connect up motivations or to apprehend its overarching meanings (culled as they are from characters' "philosophies and beliefs," and the multi-layered symbols and metaphor and the dream-like landscapes that permeate this thought bomb sci-fi thriller.) For example, the reviewer mentions that Mr. Moth, the ghost writer in the attic, is addicted to "Little Debbie Snack Cakes" -- Sos "sees" these in his attic. Further on in the story, Sos's wife, Ki-Rook, instead "sees" chewed up cardboard and animal droppings up in the attic. So the reviewer latches onto only one layer of something that changes according to the eye of the beholder -- an apt metaphor for this reviewer's own limitations perhaps?

Kirkus may indeed have a variety of reader/reviewers out there, but given the "not-so-subtle viciousness" of this review, I wonder how many Kirkus reviewers have the where-with-all to comprehend and appreciate subversive, metapolitical works of this sort.

One of the purposes of the book, as I mention in the final paragraph of my Introduction, is to paint a vivid portrait of researchers such as Sos; to stand in his shoes by use of a "heuristic technique of immersion in the context" of such "overwhelm" and "tail-chasing" commonly encountered when the "dissociated self" attempts to "come to grips with the machinations of control systems." And so I tried to prepare the reader for what was to come, but this preparative signpost was ignored or otherwise apparently lost on the reviewer.

Though I am disappointed, this sort of thing was not totally unexpected. Minion gatekeepers of reality (as more fully described in the very first paragraph of my Introduction) tend to be hard on cultural mutants.

Yours truly,

Wyman Wicket

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