As not much has been going on, which is good for a "holiday weekend", I thought I would take a moment and talk about my favorite book. It isn't a great novel, like A Hundred Years of Solitude or Crime and Punishment. Nor is it Barth's Church Dogmatics or Reaping the Whirlwind by Langdon Gilkey. It is a slim volume of fantasy by an author named Parke Godwin, entitled Waiting for the Galactic Bus. Disguised as science fiction, the work is a scathing attack on religion, America, pop culture, and pretty much any sacred cow you might wish to name. By turns funny, infuriating, insightful, warm, disturbing, with an ending that doesn't satisfy because it refuses to tie up loose ends, consistent with the view put forth in the book, the book offers readers a challenge should they choose it, or an alternative to pretty much everything they have thought to be true.
It concerns the doings of two young aliens, stranded on Pliocene Earth by an angry older group who find it a hoot to strand annoying youth after a graduation party gone a bit out of control. Barion and Coyul, the two twin brothers, awaken to find themselves stuck, bored, and intrigued by a group of primates wandering the savannah upon which they had earlier partied themselves to exhaustion. Coming from a species of "electron-cycle life", they can materialize and dematerialize at will, and, as Godwin notes, "[o]n worlds where they were not understood, the higher life forms proclaimed them deities, wrote sacred works, promulgated dogma on what they were supposed to have said, and flattered them with the sacrifice of surplus populations. Where they were understood, the natives tried to sell them trinkets, real estate and surplus daughters."
Giving the australopithecines an evolutionary kick in the pants, Barion and Coyul together realize that they have created a monster called homo sapien sapien that is by turns sublime and awful, capable of transcendent beauty and the most base horror, sometimes simultaneously. Along with the inability to manage a creation a tad out of control, there emerges a problem they had not even come close to anticipating - they don't die. Godwin notes that as energy can neither be created nor destroyed, once a certain level of intellectual awareness and energy had been reached, that center of consciousness continues after physical death. The problem is that they carry all the cultural and psychological baggage of human life with them - including a tendency towards dualism that, while couched in the poetic language of dessert, usually ends up being either envious desire to satisfy a sense of haveing been wronged, or a guileless remorse for deeds by turns insipid or destructive, resulting in "Topside" for the irredeemably self-righteous, and "Below Stairs". Godwin notes that, after an initial period in which the recently departed indulge their greatest desires or worst fears, they usually settle down to continuing the kind of life they had while embodied, only with fewer distractions. As he writes of the "Hell" Coyul constructed for those who damn themselves, "the exits were well lit and their use was encouraged."
Two young Americans, Roy Stride and his erstwhile, confused girlfriend, Charity Stovall, become the center of a metaphysical storm that Barion insists may yet be the destruction of everything they have labored not just to create but to maintain against staggering odds. In order to stack the deck, cook the books, do what it takes to save humanity from its own worst propensities, Barion talks Coyul into (a) convincing them both they are dead; and (b) taking them Below Stairs and allowing them to indulge both their most base fears and most grandiose fantasies. For Roy, this means becoming the leader of the Fascist movement within hell, toppling the "government" through a violent coup, only to be discovered with his spiritual pants down. For Charity, it means realizing that he has punished herself enough, first with fears of damnation, then with desire for the shallow excesses of what we all call the good life. She comes to first fear then loathe, then finally feel nothing but derision for Roy, whom she once thought of as a "great man", precisely because she discovers both the real horror behind all his talk, and the meaningless following of contingent rules imposed solely for the use of controlling others. She frees herself through the help of, among others, Judas Iscariot, John Wilkes Booth, and Coyul and Barion, who end up destroying Roy Stride's mind in a process of revelation that relativizes and shrinks all his beliefs and desires through the sheer enormity of the reality against which he insists to rage. The greatest difference in the world, as Godwin shows, is between those like Charity who can accept this, and those like Roy who cannot.
Full of humor, great insight, and the occasional moment of horror or grief, I would recommend it to anyone who believes they either have it all figured out, or for those (alternately) who believe such is impossible. For my part, if the afterlife is even remotely as Godwin portrays it, we all have much to look forward to.
