The Cyberstar

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CYBERSTAR by Val Nolan

“, every perfect world is somebody’s dystopia.”

But this story is not about relativism, but about something special that, I believe, transcends relativism. All my life – and I am 71 now – I have read literature to transcend my humanity, my fallible body, but mostly my fallible mind, creating a sort of religion, that I have in my latter years enhanced, I believe, by the Gestalt real-time reviewing of hyper-imaginative fictions-as-truth, works like this one. Especially this one. It has a missionary feel, as if its own obliquely disarming missionary force has taken me with its mind-frazzling, surgically-forensic language of words, scientific and near-neologistic words that have flayed and flensed me, body and mind, reframed me, primed to meet God, not as on earth with mere prayer or myths like Christ, but in the spaces beyond, symbolised here by two asteroids balanced like Siamese twins, one Greater, the other Blessed Lesser. Amid the mind-frazzling of myself as facilitated by this work, I outdo myself, even when realising what a “gospel-addled mind” it is with which I have been brainwashed; yes, I outdo myself because it has a twist in this tale, a collective unconsciousness, a Gestalt, a “magnetoacquiesence” – which is God, which art in Heaven? An old fashioned nuclear bomb in a holy psalter become an illuminated manuscript, i.e. symbolised by these illustrated pages in Interzone that arguably have been interpreted correctly as a matter of faith by the Gestalt reader that is us, despite the wrong interpretations that may have fallibly been embedded by the author, any author on earth who continues to bear the burden of the generic Intentional Fallacy, a fallacy of literary theory that many have said over the years pervades all art and literature, a fallacy now finally transcended?

Above text appears in my review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/interzone-280/

Image: Tony Lovell, for the Ha of Ha, 2011