From: randy (cryofan@mylinuxisp.com)
Date: Tue Apr 22 2003 - 00:24:37 MDT
On Tue, 22 Apr 2003 12:41:38 +1000, you wrote:
>
>>> Well, I don't know about Shea or Robert A Wilson (though I know Wilson is
>>> supposed to have cryonics sympathies), but Castenda is strictly a bogus
>>> mysticist. I read about all his books when I was much younger, but I
>>> cannot even imagine finding any of his ideas reasonable today.
>
>Quite so.
>
Casteneda was, I think, an example of a "novelist" (or philosopher, or
whatever you wanna call him) whose ideas were a potpourri of emerging
memes, which he harvested, molded into just the right format, and
served them up at just the right time to the general public. And got
rich off of it.
Another writer who came along about 20 years or so later and did much
the same thing was Whiteley Streiber. He harvested all those UFO
memes floating around ot there and molded them into just the right
framework of quasi-fictional, quasi-autobiographical pseudo-religion,
which he served up in the bookstores. And got rich, too.
Of course, Streiber was the superior craftsman, by far.
I don't keep up with fiction anymore, but I imagine there are a few
writers out there right now trying to come up with the next
collective-pop-consciouness pseudo-religion. Look for elements of
genetic engineering (of course, Strieber already tapped that vein a
bit, and was he ever prescient on that score).
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