Have a Close Encounter with Death, Wake Up in a Different Life

 

I reread Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.  It's an engaging sci fantasy yarn about a future American police state. The protagonist, TV celebrity and alpha “Six”, Jason Taverner, is hurled out of his privileged life by a familiar plot ruse that works: he has a close brush with death and finds himself in a different reality.

 The device is used beautifully in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and in the BBC Wales series Life on Mars. In Kin, the protagonist wakes up in another world where he regains his humanity and sense of life’s purpose before being sent back to the reality he came from, where he has bills to pay. 

In Life on Mars, a cop is thrown back to 1973 while his body lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. He has an identity here, close to the one he has in the present. He is again a police inspector, with transfer papers that say he was reassigned from “Hyde”. In 1973 he was (and is) four years old, and catches a glimpse of his child self. He gets engaged in cleaning up a corrupt police department and introducing methods for collecting and handling evidence that no one has heard about. From time to time – through a voice on TV or a phone call no one else can hear - he learns about his situation in the present. Will he die in 1973 as well as the present if they turn off the respirator?

 In Flow My Tears the close call is delivered by an otherwise unexplained monster from a B horror, a “cluster sponge” with fifty feeding tubes flung at him by a psychotic girlfriend. He kills the thing with whisky, but some of the feeding tubes stay in. When he comes round, he’s not in hospital but in a cheap hotel in a bad part of L.A., minus all the I.D. that makes life possible in this reality. The people he knows – agent, lawyer, official mistress – are all in this reality but they don’t know him and when he manages to check, there is no record of his birth.

The scifi elements are charmingly creaky, like old space cowboy flicks without special effects. No cell phones or internet here. When Taverner wants to phone, he drops gold dollar coins in a public phone booth. (Where do you find public phone booths these days?)

Have a close brush with death and come back to a different world. For some of us, it's not fiction. I was pronounced clinically dead under a surgeon's scalpel during an emergency appendectomy in a Melbourne hospital when I was nine years old. In the minutes I showed no vital signs, I seemed to live a whole lifetime in another world. When I came back, my "prime ' reality seemed very strange. I wrote that story in The Boy Who Died and Came Back. Philip K. Dick was no stranger to such things. 

Time for the Night Watch

Russian fantasy scifi writer Sergei Lukyanenko has turned his Night Watch trilogy into a pentalogy, with publication of a fifth volume, New Watch, following a fourth, Last Watch,  that appeared a few years ago. New Watch is not yet in a U.S. edition, but I placed an order for the Heinemann edition from the U.K., because this is an author I like to follow. The previous books in the Night Watch series seized me with an urgent need to go from one volume to the next without drawing breath.

Lukyanenko’s theme in the Night Watch series is one of the eternal ones that is never out of date: the battle of Dark and Light. The Night Watch is composed of Light Others who keep the Dark side in check. Office hours are 20:00-8:00. The Day Watch consists of Dark Others who monitor and run interference on the Light. Office hours are 8:00 to 20:00. In Moscow (where much of the action takes place) the style of both is like that of hard-drinking, somewhat seedy secret agencies of the Russian government. The only non-drinkers are the vampires of the Day Watch, who can’t metabolize alcohol.
    The Others live much longer than humans and have the power of seeing and traveling through a world-behind-the-world known as the Twilight. The Others are described and graded as magicians. Only magicians of the higher levels can see or travel below the first and second levels of Twilight. We eventually learn that there are seven levels of twilight, but not even Gesar and Zabulon – Higher magicians and chiefs of the Night Watch and Day Watch, respectively - can go there.

The protagonist is Anton Gorodetsky a Light watchman with a sympathy for vampires and a girlfriend/wife (Sveta) who is a notably more powerful magician than he is, even after he becomes a Higher magician in book three (Twilight Watch).

Light and Dark Others are monitored by the Inquisition, also known at the Twilight Watch. The inquisitors are drawn from both Watches and their job is to police the rules of the treaty that is supposed to prevent the balance between Light and Dark from being overthrown.

In book three Dark and Light must combine to fight forces inimical to both. The plot centers on a book long held to be mythical – the Fuaran – that contains the secret of how to turn humans into Others. If all humans are turned into Others, the Others will cease to exist. We are given to understand that the most powerful magicians are actually those with the lowest personal energy, sucking in vitality from the humans all around them. In book four, we learn that the magician with absolute power is the “zero-point” magician, an interesting idea.

I like the way the Others enter into twilight by “pulling up their shadows”. This becomes banal in the movie version of Night Watch when they put on dark glasses, like Neo in The Matrix. I wish the film crew had spent a moment considering how to film the act of stepping into your own shadow. Sometimes, in unpropitious conditions, the only shadow available to Anton is the shadow of an eyelid. A wily adversary in book four (Last Watch) places himself in front of the window, preventing Anton from casting a shadow he could use to see into the twilight.

On the first level of twilight, the world goes gray apart from the “blue moss” which feeds and thrives on human emotions, especially fear and lust. Some structures appear as they do in the ordinary world, but leached of color and substance, so an Other can step through them. At the second level, the world is grayer and emptier, and travelers shed their normal appearance. The deeper you go, the more you risk losing your vital essence and the harder it is to come back. But higher magicians can practice rapid teleportation by diving through deeper levels of the twilight. On the fifth level, you learn the terrible truth about the Others – that they gain their power by stealing it from humans, as air rushes to fill a vacuum.

Lovers of old-fashioned books will enjoy the moment in Last Watch when Gesar, the chief of the Night Watch, gives a reason why books will never disappear: “We only use books for studying magic. When a text is typed into a computer, it doesn’t retain any of the magic.”