A collection of short fictions — a miscellany of the apocryphal and grim — including a couple that reference the author's previously-published brain-in-the-vat stories. Many of the stories are what might be called 'alternate history,' although the author uses the term 'apocryphal tales' — as the fictions combine a base of what is considered to be historical fact with conjectures and speculations. The intent is to blur the line between accepted fact and purely creative fancy in acknowledgement of the distance and complexity of the past which preclude our knowing with the certitude we are taught to approach history.
The first story in this anthology of short fiction is a throw-back to the brain-in-the vat theme, which characterized many of my early stories. The intent behind those stories was to challenge the notion of human progress, specifically in the domain of human philosophy. In my view, the clever thought experiments of philosophers investigating mind-brain duality and such reveal something more humorous than profound about philosophy—a field of study I have always loved. With BIV speculations, we have modernized the notion that we are, or may be, self-conscious automatons ... like a refrigerator developing some rudimentary awareness of itself.
However, nowadays, BIV references have become so common that a 13-year-old can easily grow bored with thinking about brains in the vat. The existential questions are cartooned and the ethical questions never get to the surface. The knowledge and technology behind neurophysiological research are important only insofar as the market of leisure commodities continually expands for unsated customer appetites and idle investors. Regrettably, we have not only progressed in our commodification of human beings with our theories of unanimated living matter, but we have also commodified philosophy and the quest for knowledge. We've forgotten about (or perhaps never known about) the Soviet psycho prisons described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in which literally everything can be stripped away from a human being by 'doctors' of the mind.
Perhaps it would be better to shun awareness of our being refrigerators and instead continue in our fragile beliefs about the anima of being so that we don't descend to the point where we regard our lives as no more significant than the functional duration of a kitchen appliance.
The stories in this volume attempt to do that ... to persist with the illusion—if that's what it is—that we are agents with responsibility and value, relative to our shared world.
The first story continues the brain-in-the-vat theme, and 'The Lighthouse at Castro Urdiales' alludes to the mind-body duality theme, but they are the exception. Many of the stories are what would be called 'alternate history,' although I prefer to use the term 'apocryphal tales' as the fictions combine a base of what is considered to be historical fact with what are nothing short of the conjectures and speculations of fictional entities (characters or narrators.) The intent is to blur the line between accepted fact and purely creative fancy in acknowledgement of the distance and complexity of the past which preclude our knowing with the certitude we are taught to approach history.
