Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

In 1987, I was a small, yet sizeable, group of young men that were drawn to David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System .  I'd devoured Pynchon's V. and The Crying of Lot 49 , and really was drawn to frenetic, post modernism but still didn't have the requisite skill to tackle Gravity's Rainbow .   So when a friend of mine recommended Wallace's Broom I read it, loved it, added him to a short list of author's I'd keep track of.   What that meant was that I'd buy Girl With Curious Hair , read a bit of it; buy Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and give up on the first and devour the second.   And then I sort of lost track.  As usual with books I love, I loaned out Broom and never got it back (along with Jonathan Franzen's TheTwenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion:  A Novel ) and just moved on. So it was on getting ready for a road trip and having some sort of "Free Download" that I downloaded the audio...

To call Norman Spinrad's He Walked Among Us Science Fiction is really stretching the genre.  True, Spinrad is one of the elder statesmen of SciFi, but this work is more important than sadly the genre would allow. At times a critique on our media obsessed culture, the book deftly follows the trajectory of a comic (Ralf), claiming to be from the future 500 years from now as he rises to become a small time cable television star modified and cultivated by his agent, "Texas Jimmy" Balaban, science fiction author, Dexter Lampkin, and new age networker, Amanda Robin.   The book also acts as a critique of the SciFi/Comic Con convention business where hoards of loyal fans dress up as their favorite character from StarTrek, World of Warcraft, etc. and parade in hotel conference rooms hooking up, drinking, and talking all the while thinking that this is all somehow making a difference when they are really only being manipulated by the publishing industry for financial gain. In ...