The idea that there’s more to the world than what we can see with our own eyes is hardly new. It underlies most religions; it inspired Plato’s cave; it has nagged at the consciousness of pop culture since its birth in the Victorian era, with works such as Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. It is the embodiment, perhaps, of all human spiritual yearning, religious or not.
Our grandparents shared Dorothy’s trip to Oz, for instance, in 1939, and probably felt that Dorothy’s mantra "There’s no place like home" applied to them, too -- after the trials of the Great Depression, and with war threatening to catch fire in Europe, home and family must have felt like a cozy retreat from reality. Sixty years later, though, that notion was turned on its head to encapsulate the geek/GenX mindset in The Matrix [click for my review]. Thomas Anderson doesn’t have a mantra: instead he has the disturbing wisdom of Morpheus, who says things like "You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad" and "The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Home is not a comfort to Neo. Before he discovered the truth, home was a place where he didn’t fit in; now home is worse: it’s a lie, a deception. The Matrix is "there’s no place like home" turned inside out, where you can’t be comfortable anywhere, and if you do, that’s probably not a safe place to be.
The Matrix was dismissed and derided and -- perhaps worst of all -- blamed for the Columbine massacre, as if over the course of the three weeks between the movie’s release and the tragedy a couple of well-adjusted kids could be transformed into homicidal maniacs because they saw a movie a few times.
And now we have The Traveler, by the mysterious and perhaps pseudonymous John Twelve Hawks, the literary phenomenon of the summer that was on the New York Times’ bestselling list last month and currently sits at the very respectable ranking of 675 on Amazon.com’s book list. It’s an elegantly written novel of contemporary speculative fantasy about an Illuminati-like group that controls the world, keeping an unwitting populace in submission through fads and pop culture and the daily grind, and the small group of people who oppose them. It’s even got a bit of 1984 thrown in, too: "There was no need to worry about religion or philosophy; the truth was determined by whoever was in power." It’s Matrix-y in the extreme; it is clearly science fiction, for all that, like The Matrix, it feels like it gets perilously close to a hard truth about how we as a society have abdicated genuine feeling and zestful living for
But that’s not the way it’s been treated. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, torturously attempts to frame the book as anything but SF: "Twelve Hawks’s much anticipated novel is powerful, mainstream fiction built on a foundation of cutting-edge technology laced with fantasy and the chilling specter of an all-too-possible social and political reality." (The book is also, PW notes, "the first in a trilogy," and if that doesn’t set off SF bells, then nothing will.) I’d call that a triumph for geek culture, a sign that that off-kilter philosophies that occup the geek mind truly have been acknowledged as something other than weird and cultish... but that’s not the case here. I mean, that is happening, certainly -- movies like The Matrix and books like The Traveler don’t enjoy this kind of success if they’re not pushing buttons for a whole lot of people.
The "problem" is that the people who think they’re the arbiters of culture -- like Publishers Weekly, like The New York Times, which recently featured this bizarre non sequiter in a review of books about Jimi Hendrix: "Drug use made him blurry and rambling, with an increasingly weird affinity for science fiction" -- aren’t ready to admit yet that the culture has changed. It’s ironic, actually, because they’re suffering from the same delusions as the people who live in the Matrix, and the people who remain ignorant of the Travelers. They think they understand what the world is all about, and they couldn’t be more wrong.
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