The Mind Parasites Q3 - Characters and settings

RichardAbbott

Did you find Austin convincing as an archaeologist? Reich as a scientist? Any others? How about the locations described?

Apocryphal

We’ll, neither the archaeology nor the science was convincing, but we’re talking about something that is trying to emulate pulp magazine fiction. The locations? I suppose so - didn’t really note them.

NeilNjae

As @Apocryphal says, they were idealised pulp versions of people. Genre-specific stereotypes rather than people. The most memorable locations were hotel rooms, and I think that says a lot about the other locations.

RichardAbbott

@Apocryphal said:
We’ll, neither the archaeology nor the science was convincing, but we’re talking about something that is trying to emulate pulp magazine fiction. The locations? I suppose so - didn’t really note them.

This reminded me of something that (I think) @NeilNjae said a while ago about Ursula Vernon / T. Kingfisher's writing (Paladin's Grace etc) - that it was fine if you took it on the level intended, and didn't try to look for more depth and so on than the author wanted to put in. So Arkady Martine (A Memory of Empire) wants to be taken seriously in depth, and IMHO is very successful at achieving this. But other authors don't want or invite this, and it doesn't make sense to try.

Colin Wilson is, perhaps, an oddity. In most of his writings, largely non-fiction, he wants to be taken very seriously, and feels he is investigating important stuff. But is that true here? Or is the deliberate positioning along with Lovecraft and pulp magazine fiction a signal that it's just a bit of literary fun?

Apocryphal

That's an interesting question, and again without knowing more about the author I wouldn't presume to guess. In once sense, these is perhaps a study of Lovecraft hidden within the book. On one level, you could read into into things that speculative fiction authors are themselves 'mind parasites' - infecting people through their eyes and ears and changing them in subtle ways. So he could very easily be both studying Lovecraft (I got the feel right) and having some literary fun.

RichardAbbott

That's a very provocative idea, and suggests to me that (just maybe) Wilson is trying to push the analogy on a kind of meta-level. Who are the mind parasites in our own world? Within the confines of the book the most obvious human bad guys are the media, so maybe he's suggesting that news media (and by extension in our own day, social media) can be parasitic. Certainly an idea that has contemporary resonance - or maybe I'm just retrojecting into his writing a feature of our times?

clash_bowley

All of the main characters were the same person. All the peripheral characters were dupes. All the locations were the same. I got NO sense that Turkey was any different from Washington DC.

RichardAbbott

@clash_bowley said:
All of the main characters were the same person. All the peripheral characters were dupes. All the locations were the same. I got NO sense that Turkey was any different from Washington DC.

You could probably argue that Wilson was so intent on setting out a prospective inner landscape that the external one was a) neglected and b) irrelevant anyway

clash_bowley

@RichardAbbott said:

@clash_bowley said:
All of the main characters were the same person. All the peripheral characters were dupes. All the locations were the same. I got NO sense that Turkey was any different from Washington DC.

You could probably argue that Wilson was so intent on setting out a prospective inner landscape that the external one was a) neglected and b) irrelevant anyway

That would probably not far from the truth...

clash_bowley

@clash_bowley said:

@RichardAbbott said:

@clash_bowley said:
All of the main characters were the same person. All the peripheral characters were dupes. All the locations were the same. I got NO sense that Turkey was any different from Washington DC.

You could probably argue that Wilson was so intent on setting out a prospective inner landscape that the external one was a) neglected and b) irrelevant anyway

That would probably be not far from the truth...