PEERING THROUGH A STRANGE TELESCOPE
My new book Strange Telescopes is about people who invent their own
realities. Believing there is more to existence than the unsatisfactory and
at times unsavoury options provided by the world they live in, these
heroic dreamers go out and create something different, and in their
eyes better- whether it be an underground mythology, an epic spiritual
war against demons, a theocracy in a frozen wasteland or an impossible
tower in the Arctic Circle- all of which I explore in the book.
The four separate but interconnected stories are set in Russia and
Ukraine because 1) I was living there at the time and 2) there are
greater incentives towards spiritual extremism in the post- Soviet zone
than in the West. There’s no social safety net so if you turn your back
on the mainstream you need a lot of faith to persist with the path of
righteousness. You can’t just sit in your council flat, eat crisps and
smoke ganja while fantasizing you’re an artistic genius who never got a
chance, for that way lies starvation. In Russia it’s all or nothing, a zero
sum game. Fortunately people there do have a few advantages that
equip them for a career of visionary madness- a much higher tolerance
for poverty and suffering for example, and they already inhabit a
collapsed reality full of junk both ideological and otherwise, so the
liberated or obsessed mind has a lot of room to play.
Nevertheless, the lives of the people I write about in the book are all
hard- even the most successful of them, an ex-traffic cop called
Vissarion Christ who claims to be the Son of God and lives surrounded
by 4000 followers on top of a mountain in Siberia seemed exhausted by
the act of maintaining everything he had created. And even now, with
the writing of the book behind me, I myself can’t tell if the examples of
Mr. Christ and all the others are an inspiration or a warning. Is it good to
have the courage of your own bizarre visions? Would David Icke have
been happier staying a sports TV presenter? Of course, it’s never really
a choice. Such people are driven by demons to do what they do. My
goal was to enter their realities and walk around in them, and create
something new and unique: a travel book set in parallel worlds. I wanted
it to be as out there and as surreal as any work of fiction, to be
subversive, surreal but full of meaning. Certainly it will be like nothing
you have read before. I also wanted to restore dignity to the utterly
marginalized, to preserve some of the bizarre mutations of history that
unfold in dark corners, to bring the loon closer, to show that cultists and
devil warriors are not as far from us as we may think, to understand and
pay tribute to lost prophets.
And yet in spite of what I just said, I do not in fact think that the kind of
thing I’m writing about is really all that marginal. The best selling work of
non-fiction in America in the 70s was a book of apocalyptic prophecies
based on the book of Revelation. And before we British congratulate
ourselves for being more sophisticated than our transatlantic cousins let
us not forget that in Britain a gibbering charlatan called Tony Blair gulled
millions into believing he could magically regenerate an old nation for
many years before he was found out. Iraq too was invaded on the faith
that it would lead to a miraculous transformation of the Middle East into
a haven of democracy. And so on and so on. ‘Reality’ is clearly not
rational. Visions of other worlds are everywhere, and a powerful
motivating factor in history, but this is a fact ignored by the ideologues
and taste makers of our culture who prefer to think it can all be grasped
by the application of something called ‘reason’. Well I don’t ignore this
fact; I embrace it.
If any of that sounds like it’s vaguely up your alley, then you’ll enjoy
Strange Telescopes.
Regards,
Daniel Kalder
My new book Strange Telescopes is about people who invent their own
realities. Believing there is more to existence than the unsatisfactory and
at times unsavoury options provided by the world they live in, these
heroic dreamers go out and create something different, and in their
eyes better- whether it be an underground mythology, an epic spiritual
war against demons, a theocracy in a frozen wasteland or an impossible
tower in the Arctic Circle- all of which I explore in the book.
The four separate but interconnected stories are set in Russia and
Ukraine because 1) I was living there at the time and 2) there are
greater incentives towards spiritual extremism in the post- Soviet zone
than in the West. There’s no social safety net so if you turn your back
on the mainstream you need a lot of faith to persist with the path of
righteousness. You can’t just sit in your council flat, eat crisps and
smoke ganja while fantasizing you’re an artistic genius who never got a
chance, for that way lies starvation. In Russia it’s all or nothing, a zero
sum game. Fortunately people there do have a few advantages that
equip them for a career of visionary madness- a much higher tolerance
for poverty and suffering for example, and they already inhabit a
collapsed reality full of junk both ideological and otherwise, so the
liberated or obsessed mind has a lot of room to play.
Nevertheless, the lives of the people I write about in the book are all
hard- even the most successful of them, an ex-traffic cop called
Vissarion Christ who claims to be the Son of God and lives surrounded
by 4000 followers on top of a mountain in Siberia seemed exhausted by
the act of maintaining everything he had created. And even now, with
the writing of the book behind me, I myself can’t tell if the examples of
Mr. Christ and all the others are an inspiration or a warning. Is it good to
have the courage of your own bizarre visions? Would David Icke have
been happier staying a sports TV presenter? Of course, it’s never really
a choice. Such people are driven by demons to do what they do. My
goal was to enter their realities and walk around in them, and create
something new and unique: a travel book set in parallel worlds. I wanted
it to be as out there and as surreal as any work of fiction, to be
subversive, surreal but full of meaning. Certainly it will be like nothing
you have read before. I also wanted to restore dignity to the utterly
marginalized, to preserve some of the bizarre mutations of history that
unfold in dark corners, to bring the loon closer, to show that cultists and
devil warriors are not as far from us as we may think, to understand and
pay tribute to lost prophets.
And yet in spite of what I just said, I do not in fact think that the kind of
thing I’m writing about is really all that marginal. The best selling work of
non-fiction in America in the 70s was a book of apocalyptic prophecies
based on the book of Revelation. And before we British congratulate
ourselves for being more sophisticated than our transatlantic cousins let
us not forget that in Britain a gibbering charlatan called Tony Blair gulled
millions into believing he could magically regenerate an old nation for
many years before he was found out. Iraq too was invaded on the faith
that it would lead to a miraculous transformation of the Middle East into
a haven of democracy. And so on and so on. ‘Reality’ is clearly not
rational. Visions of other worlds are everywhere, and a powerful
motivating factor in history, but this is a fact ignored by the ideologues
and taste makers of our culture who prefer to think it can all be grasped
by the application of something called ‘reason’. Well I don’t ignore this
fact; I embrace it.
If any of that sounds like it’s vaguely up your alley, then you’ll enjoy
Strange Telescopes.
Regards,
Daniel Kalder
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Publisher's blurb here