ALL THINGS UNDER AND OVER THE SUN AND STARS

In Blair’s SF novel set around the 42nd century, the cult members of a human-settled planet launch a war of universal annihilation.

The author starts his time-leaping, dimension-folding epic “a few hundred years into the fourth millennium of the common era.” New Gwalintu, a human colony, claims supremacy over everything in the universe, with a faith based in part on archaeological evidence an advanced alien civilization once thrived on the planet. Organizing themselves into a dictatorship via the use of brain implants, the people of New Gwalintu wage war against all other civilizations, pursuing a mission of conquest and extinction. Behind the plentiful nuclear arsenal of New Gwalintu is a shadowy religious cult whose mental powers threaten to sunder the entire universe, which would leave the consciousness of New Gwalintu as the only entity left. The best minds on Earth counterattack in a “War Beyond Human Comprehension,” but they find that reality itself has become frayed. Some Earth heroes wind up in alternate universes; Ezra Kalkin, one defender, materializes on a parallel Earth where his own planet is the subject of a popular SF tale, and watching philosophical dissertations is a major pastime. Kalkin headlines the Alpha Conference, where he offers deep thoughts alongside a popular pair of shamans/comedians, which could prove crucial in the war effort. A team of hitmen await to assassinate Kalkin, but even they hang on his every wise word. The narrative then shifts to a team of 55th-century space explorers on a habitable planet, discovering an incredible pyramid covered with Dan Brown–esque symbols representing Earth culture, math/science and religion. An alien “Great Reverberating Voice” greets the amazed humans, ultimately transforming them into other beings to do good works. A final episode happens in 3534 on another variant Earth, involving an amazing prisoner from the dawn of time.

Readers who are expecting closure to the New Gwalintu plot thread will be disappointed. In prologues and epilogues, Blair acknowledges a wide spectrum of intriguing influences, ranging from classic SF author Arthur C. Clarke to director Alfred Hitchcock, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, actor Bette Davis, chess master Garry Kasparov, and even pop singer and actor Olivia Newton-John (whose first motion picture, 1970’s Toomorrow is an SF rock musical). However, this imaginative and ambitious work of fiction most readily brings to mind Count Jan Potocki’s mythic and famously unfinished The Saragossa Manuscript (1810), which codified a recursive, fabulist-fantasy genre narrative in which bizarre stories lead to even more stories—seemingly making no sense but all interconnected nonetheless. Such is the case in this novel, which offers readers an absurdist odyssey that also recalls James Joyce, Spike Milligan, Tom Robbins, and Kurt Vonnegut, by turns, with its puns, conspiracies, Eastern mysticism, transcriptions of sitcom and old-timey radio scripts, and its surprising reverence for religion. At the heart of this storm of concepts is what appears to be a loving homage to literary creativity and imagination itself.

A quizzical, nonlinear journey through complicated SF plotlines involving philosophy and epistemology.