THE DIMETRODONS, THE DORIANS, AND THE MODERN WORLD

Blair’s absurdist novella explores space and time from prehistory to the modern day.

The story opens at a cocktail party in Texas in 1999—one that’s full of paleontologists. Their conversation eventually moves to the “sail-backed, four-legged animals” of millions of years ago. One of the attendees posits that such creatures evolved their large sails as “biological telepathy amplifiers”; they may have enabled a form of communication like “Eleventh Generation wireless biotech.” The narrative then shifts to “274,578 millennia and three weeks before The Tunguska Event.” Sail-backed creatures are, in fact, communicating telepathically; as it turns out, they also have different religions that feature divergent interpretations of consciousness. Soon, the book shifts to a message from the author, who expresses a wish to thank various people, including champion chess player Garry Kasparov and a man named Oden Griffin with whom the author “shared a dining experience” at a Burger King. Such wild swerves in time, setting, and content continue as the story goes on. They feature “blueprints” brought to Earth by aliens and an ancient “Dorian-Mycenaean-Teutonic extravaganza,” which is, in fact, an orgy that proves dangerous to its participants. In 2019, a Martian microbe slips through “a shortcut in the fabric of space-time to go directly from Mars to Earth”: the origin of Covid-19, at least in some universes. Also, in one version of reality, Gary Gilmore—a convicted murderer in the real world—becomes the 40th president of the United States. In an epilogue, the author explains oddities from his own experience, including a college football game that seems to have been played twice.

If this all sounds confusing, that’s because it is. Even the seemingly ordinary atmosphere of the cocktail party in the opening chapter has its share of bizarre turns, with characters referred to only as “the buster” or “caddie.” Readers quickly know to pay very close attention—and to abandon all expectations for what might come next, since that could be “a realm of space-time transcending a very exact location in the timelines of being exactly here or there.” The dialogue includes lines such as “Sometimes when I walk on land and sometimes when I fly in the sky I remember them more vividly than when I swim in the sea.” Still, despite the daunting atmosphere, the work has real heart amid all the verbosity; at one point, for instance, the text presents the last two living dimetrodons, who can feel “emanations from what would prove to be the beginning of the end for trillions of quadrillions of the Earth’s inhabitants”—an unexpectedly touching image. Many descriptions, such as a reference to humans as “major mixtures of compassion, passion, dispassion, wisdom, folly, hatred, apathy, love, agitation, and equanimity” have a certain poetry to them. Humans, in these pages, are “like nothing the planet has ever seen before,” even though “the very notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ are sometimes-illusory parts of a cosmic labyrinth of epic proportions.” There’s a lot to dig through, but such gems can be found.

An imaginative but jumbled journey through the mysteries of earthly existence.