Bruce Sterling - Sneaking For Jesus 2001

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Bruce Sterling

bruces@well.sf.ca.us

Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use

From SF EYE #11 Dec 1992

Science Fiction Eye, P. O. Box 18539, Asheville NC 28814 (USA$10.yr $15

global)

SF EYE CATSCAN #11: "Sneaking For Jesus 2001"

Conspiracy fiction. I've come across a pair of especially remarkable

works in this odd subgenre lately.

Paul Di Filippo's treatment of the conspiracy subgenre, " My Brain

Feels Like A Bomb" in SF EYE 8, collected some fine, colorful

specimens. Di Filippo theorizes that the conspiracy subgenre, anchored

at its high end by GRAVITY'S RAINBOW and FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM and at

its low end by quite a lot of cheesy sci-fi and gooofy spy thrillers,

is unique to the twentieth-century, and bred by our modern

(postmodern?) inability to make sense of an overwhelming flow of

high-velocity information.

This may be true. I'm not inclined to challenge that sociological

assessment, and can even offer some backup evidence. Where is that

postmodern flow of information more intense, and less basically

comprehensible, than in the world of computing? Thus is bred the

interesting sub-subgenre of computer paranoia fiction -- hacker

conspiracy! I now propose to examine two such works: the movie (and

book) SNEAKERS, and the novel (and prophesy?) THE ILLUMINATI.

Let's take the second item first, as it's much the more remarkable of

the two. The ILLUMINATI in question today has nothing to do with the

Robert Anton Wilson ILLUMINATI series; in fact, its weltanschauung is

utterly at odds with Wilson's books. Wilson's paranoid yarn is

basically a long, rambling, crypto-erudite hipster rap-session, but

Larry Burkett's ILLUMINATI is a fictional work of evangelical Christian

exegesis, in which lesbians, leftists, dope addicts and other tools of

Satan establish a gigantic government computer network in the year

2001, with which to exterminate all Southern Baptists.

I recommend this novel highly. Larry Burkett's ILLUMINATI has already

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sold some 100,000 copies through Christian bookstores, and it

seems to

me to have tremendous crossover potential for hundreds of chuckling

cyberpunk cynics. To my eye it's a lot more mind-blowing than any of

Wilson's books.

The Robert Anton Wilson oeuvre is perenially in print in New Age

bookstores, and quite well known in the SF category racks. Therefore

the CATSCAN reader may already be aware that the so-called "Illuminati"

were a freethinking secret society purportedly founded in the 1770s,

who had something to do with Freemasonry and were opposed to

established Church authority in Europe.

So far, so good. It's not surprising that a with-it hipster dude like

R.A. Wilson would use the historical Illuminati as a head-trip

springboard to mock All Things Establishment. The far more surprising

matter is that some evangelical Christians, such as the Reverend Pat

Robertson, not only take the 217-year-old and extremely dead

Illuminati seriously, but are also currently dominating the social

agenda of the Republican Party. Reverend Robertson's latest

"non-fiction" tome, THE NEW WORLD ORDER, is chock-a-block with

straightfaced and utterly paranoiac Illuminati-under-the-bed

terrormongering. Robertson publicly credits the "satanic" Illuminati

conspiracy with direct authorship of the French Revolution and the

Bolshevik uprising, as well as sponsorship of the Trilateral Commission

and the comsymp "Eastern Establishment" generally. The good Reverend

also expresses the gravest possible reservations about the occult

Masonic insignia on the back of the one-dollar bill.

George Bush himself, best-known public advocate of a "New World Order,"

is cast under suspicion in Robertson's work as an Illuminati tool, and

yet Bush gave his accuser prime-time TV in his party's National

Convention. One can only marvel!

As a comparative reality-check, try and imagine Robert Anton Wilson

delivering his Hail Eris rap at a Democratic Party Convention (while

the audience, nodding on national television, listens in sober respect

and acts really glad to be clued-in). Odd enough for you? No

imagine ontological anarchists re-writing the Democratic Party platform

on abortion, sexual behavior, and federal sponsorship of the arts.

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