Gosh (mail-merge your name here), I sure hope you listen to this briefing before you plow ahead with the mission, because I can’t guarantee victory otherwise.
This is not some sensationalist, pseudo-journalistic affair like the kind you’d see from certain major publishers—publishers we could name, if we wanted our legs broken. What’s really going on here is something else entirely.
The mission is to use the so-called concept of magical realism to produce an electronic, interactive, cyberspace PulpFilm™—with my friends and associates (specifically, whoever happened to end up in my photo scrapbook) co-starring in a series of fantasy roles.
My first idea had nothing whatsoever to do with aliens, J. Edgar Hoover, JFK, or any of that. I simply wanted to see my friends star together in a film. Having seen many photomontage films—La Jetée being unarguably the best—I knew the idea could also be realized in my own bibliophilic specialty: illustrated books.
What had once been incunabula has now become a photo-illustrated work spanning fifty years, expressed in a five-week, 350,000-plus-word binge. That count does not include the assignment of nearly 3,000 photographs to relevant locations within the PulpFilm™—a structure that kept mutating as the chapters expanded.
I want that noted in writing.
That’s why I’m asking for more than standard author’s royalties.
I want residuals.
Each actor or actress—starting with my two leads—was selected as a character in the PulpFilm™ because they represent someone in my personal reality-simulation: that spatial-temporal traversal I call my life and times. And because, conveniently, I happen to have photos of them in my files.
All facts presented are either real or commonly perceived as real, and have appeared in at least one reference work. For example, the “fact” that all moon landings were actually conducted at NBC’s Burbank studios. Or the “fact” that UFO test flights occur at a super-secret installation called Area 51 on Groom Dry Lake near Las Vegas, Nevada—when everybody knows those experiments are really conducted at an even more secret government facility just northeast of the supposedly nonexistent town of Goldstone, California.
Doggone it. There I go again.
Well, the facts are all there, in classic Charles Fortean fashion—except that you can’t bank on the conclusions drawn from those facts any more than you can expect two ministers to teach the same lesson from a single verse of scripture.
I’m a painter, sculptor, musician, filmmaker, and science fiction and fantasy writer by trade, and the second-generation editor of the ancient and venerable Galaxy Magazine, founded by Horace L. Gold, its first editor.
While it’s true that I may—or may not—have had some connection with U.S. military intelligence and certain unnameable government agencies, you can be sure that nothing included here even vaguely resembles anything an enemy of the United States would want to obtain.
For one thing, everything I know is at least thirty years out of date. And in electronics—as any home-entertainment aficionado knows—one week is enough to make anything obsolete. If that’s true in the consumer market, it goes double in spades for the military, which had a combat computer as far back as the Civil War, a full hundred years before certain computer companies “borrowed” the plans from secret government mountain retreats.
Darn it. See? There I go again.
It’s bound to happen now and then—one of those mental quirks that makes you write funny things even if they get you in trouble. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the past five weeks, ever since I decided to take the phrase “make something of your life” literally.
Everybody has a scrapbook. I’m a photographer. So I figured I probably had something usable in the 22,000-plus photos I’ve taken since 1948, when I got my first Brownie Box camera—followed by a succession of ever-more expensive boxes—until I ended up with the Mamiyaflex twin-lens reflex, the real workhorse behind this electronic PulpFilm™, despite wild 9mm SpyCam claims to the contrary.
I want to state this clearly: all characters in this journalistic PulpFilm™ are innocent of any charges you, we, or even they themselves might bring against them—or me—or both.
Everyone actually named—except public figures, who take their own chances—is intended as a good guy, strictly as a character representing an icon or symbol in my own mind, expressing itself as my historical past in pictures.
The idea of using photos came from an English professor who, as a child, had been at the Battle of Shiloh and posed for several Civil War photographers, including Matthew Brady. By golly, he had the pictures to prove it.
How did I know it was really him? It could have been. Or it could just as easily have been someone else—his father, his mother, an older sibling, or a photograph he found at a garage sale in the 1920s.
As you’ll discover while viewing this Original Home Release of SlimeWars™, contained within these covers, I’m Telepathic As Heck—the equivalent of a black belt in telepathy—and I already know you’re wondering what prompted this excursion into global felony conspiracies, alien abductions, abortion-clinic murders, unfightable wildfires, drug wars, educational collapse, and the lost certainty of the Cold War… not to mention the Beatles reunion.
It’s all too depressing from the human point of view.
And then it occurred to me: from the perspective of a successor species, none of the total annihilation of life on Earth would be tragic—or even fatal.
Cockroaches, ants, and rats will probably survive anything we throw at ourselves. After that? Perhaps slime mold. A super-opportunistic organism that can feed on almost nothing, form itself into virtually any shape, wander off in search of nutrients, then hunker down and go semi-dormant while it feeds.
I sincerely hope no one is offended by the material here—though I know that’s impossible. When I started this manuscript, I tried to evaluate the difference between the country I grew up in and the one my children and grandchildren inhabit today.
What I came up with is this:
We’ve lost our sense of fair play, honesty, and humor.
This essay is an attempt—perhaps a futile one—to restore some of that, if there’s still time before we slide into total civil disobedience or worse. Nobody agrees to play by the rules anymore.
The whole point is to remember that this is an exercise in filmmaking. It’s a work of fiction. You’re expected to push back against it with the full force of your convictions until something gives—ideally into a playfully paranoid, non-obsessive suspension of disbelief.
It could have happened that way. I was often close enough to see. And I don’t have the answers. Neither do my friends who were there.
Please don’t send me proof of any of the things I’ve written here. There isn’t a single “fact” or piece of “evidence” mentioned that hasn’t already been published somewhere. And although I happen to actually be a SlimeMold™ from the 37th century, and all of this is literally true—so help me, Great Mother SlimeMold™—there are, of course, no such things as UFOs.
A special thanks to my lifelong friend Bob Sheckley, without whom this book could never have been written, and to whom it is dedicated.
Live long and prosper,
General E.J. “Nunan” Gold
Chief of Staff, SlimeMold™ Ops Group 3211
North California Expeditionary Force
High Sierra Front
A.D. 3654 West, Sector 90898
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Oh, here’s the Bardo bus coming down the line!
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See You At The Top!!!
gorby