That Nietzsche Thing
Page 16
Chapter 14
The first important thing to know about Dark’s Last Novel is that it wasn’t a novel at all. It was, in truth, a journal of his wartime years, spent as a correspondent for the Stars and Stripes and other papers. Everyone assumed it was a novel, because that was how Dark had presented it. But it was no work of fiction. Or perhaps, not intentionally a work of fiction.
The first one hundred and fifty or sixty pages of it I’ll skip over. While it’s an interesting chronicle of his wartime experience, including trips to both the Europe and Pacific theaters, those sections of the book really have nothing to do with Vivan Montavez’s murder, the Rosicrucians, or Q.
The book gets interesting right around page one-hundred and sixty-eight, when he’s state-side after the war, covering the declassified parts of the Manhattan Project, post Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the Chicago Tribune.
He’s no science fiction writer yet. Not at this point. He hasn’t published even a single story, but his writings on the scientific aspects of the Manhattan Project are starting to get his creative juices flowing. The journal contains some interesting observations that are plainly seeds of ideas that would appear later in his books, like War of the Planets. This is some pretty far-fetched stuff, like nuclear small arms and the effects of prolonged radiation exposure on the human body.
But his writing on the Manhattan Project swiftly begins to look tame compared to the sections of the journal that obviously led Dark to encrypt his book in its unusual fashion. These sections start with a midnight knocking on his motel room door. It’s his Army public relations handler, a Lieutenant Owen. He manhandles Dark into his clothes and hurries him into a waiting Jeep. As they’re speeding off into the desert, the Lieutenant starts to explain – well, I don’t need to paraphrase. You can read Dark’s words for yourself: