Fred Brounian and his twin brother, George, were once co-CEOs of a burgeoning New York City software company devoted to the creation of utopian virtual worlds. Now, in the summer of 2006, as two wars rage and the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, George has fallen into a coma, control of the company has been wrenched away by a military contracting conglomerate, and Fred has moved back … back in with his parents. Broke and alone, he’s led by an attractive woman, Mira, into a neurological study promising to give him “peak” experiences and a newfound spiritual outlook on life. As the study progresses, lines between the subject and the experimenter blur, and reality becomes increasingly porous. Meanwhile, Fred finds himself caught up in what seems at first a cruel prank: a series of bizarre emails and texts that purport to be from his comatose brother.
Moving between the research hospitals of Manhattan, the streets of a meticulously planned Florida city, the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the uncanny, immersive worlds of urban disaster simulation; threading through military listserv geek-speak, Hindu cosmology, the maxims of outmoded self-help books and the latest neuroscientific breakthroughs, Luminarium is a brilliant examination of the way we live now, a novel that’s as much about the role technology and spirituality play in shaping our reality as it is about the undying bond between brothers, and the redemptive possibilities of love.
“Luminarium is dizzyingly smart and provocative, exploring as it does the state of the present, of technology, of what is real and what is ephemeral. But the thing that separates Luminarium from other books that discuss avatars, virtual reality and the like is that Alex Shakar is committed throughout with trying, relentlessly, to flat-out explain the meaning of life. This book is funny, and soulful, and very sad, but so intellectually invigorating that you’ll want to read it twice.” — Dave Eggers
“This fascinating, hilarious novel, though set in the past, is the story of the future: technology has outlapped us, reality is blinking on and off like a bad wireless connection, the ones we love are nearby in one sense, but far away in another. Yet at the book’s galloping heart, it’s the story of what one man is willing to go through to find—in our crowded, second-rate space—something like faith. This novel is sharp, original, and full of energy—obviously the work of a brilliant mind.” — Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
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In commenting on the solar system family photo taken by Voyager 1, Carl Sagan referred to the “blue dot” as home to every human who has ever lived. Now, we’re looking at potential lots on Mars, and using real cash for virtual reality property. LUMINARIUM explores computer generated virtual reality as well as the different realities created by the brain itself.
LUMINARIUM is the second novel by Alex Shakar. His first novel, THE SAVAGE GIRL, a fantasy about Pop Culture, was a New York Times Notable Book.
LUMINARIUM begins in the New York of August 2006. Protagonist Fred Brounian sits in a black vinyl recliner as someone attaches wires to a helmet that he’s wearing. Fred is a paid lab rat, part of an experiment by neuro-scientists at NYU. Several sessions have him wearing the helmet. Each session will stimulate a different part of his brain. The aim, the attractive researcher explains, is for Fred to experience an after-death “Rapture,” without the death part. The goal is to induce the “God” experience, freeing the subject from the “ignorance” of faith.
Fred, a thirty-something software designer, needs the money. Fred is paying for the hospital care of his identical twin brother and business partner George.
George, whose cancer has nearly consumed him, has been in a coma for months. George and Fred were CEO partners of a software company whose virtual reality program “Urth” “an anime style world of pastoral villages and underwater bubble towns…” should have made them rich. A “best laid plan,” it falls apart when 911 happens. Slick operators steal the company. Quirky little Urth belongs to Armation, a military enterprise in Florida, where “a ready pool of Disney Imagineers, Pixar animators, and Electronic Arts programmers” convert Urth into a military simulations program. George wanted to start over and create a game of “spiritual evolution.” Fred accused him of thinking “reality was up for grabs.”
Sam, George and Fred’s younger brother, is an executive in the new Armation order, and is helping the move to Florida. Sam suggested that Urth software would be useful in simulating urban disaster search and rescue. Sam’s need for control is right out of the Steve Jobs playbook. His social skills make Jobs look like Bill Clinton.
There have been glitches in the new search and rescue program, and a suggestion of sabotage. Fred is the most likely suspect. He and George saw their company stolen and their work compromised. There were hard feelings, but Fred needs his old job back. Fred’s first lab rat session results in a hyper-awareness that causes him to shadow an old woman in pin-curls, who meanders into a store and shoplifts. This results in his arrest for shoplifting tweezers. That’s right, tweezers. In addition, Fred receives emails from comatose George, a situation that threatens his already tentative hold on reality. As Fred struggles to regain stability in his life, the disorientation caused by the lab experiments, and more messages from George, result in him questioning his sanity. He wonders if someone is playing a cruel joke.
Fred is surrounded by illusion and mysticism. His father is an actor and magician. Fred’s mother practices Reiki, a Japanese brand of energy healing. Mom believes that George emanates a healing energy from his hospital bed. As Fred tries to make sense of his expanded senses, the product, we assume, of the lab experiments, we, along with Fred, have difficulty sorting out reality. Shakar’s use of stream-of-consciousness in these sequences reminded me of the movie Altered States with a swirl (the old woman’s pin curls, “this infinite pinwheel of shit,” “The spiral had twisted shut again…”) of the senses that blurs the lines between different realities.
The cryptic emails from George contain the word “avatara.” Researching Hinduism, Fred discovers identical twin avataras, Nara and Narayana, who represent the human and the divine. The concept of “duality” is used throughout the novel. Fred clings to his identical twin. He reads stories to George about simultaneous twin occurrences, which “according to Carl Jung are …the dual manifestation of a single collective unconscious.” Fred questions how to “stand the two-sided coin on edge”– experiencing the divine, the supernatural, never able to verify. Is existence the result of some cosmic plan or is everything random?
Under all of this searching for alternate realities and the exploration of religions is the fear of death. Calendar pages mark dates leading to the fifth anniversary of the loss of the Trade Center Twin Towers. The enormity of this event permeates LUMINARIUM. Fred contemplates death, but can’t imagine not being somewhere. New York copes, but is forever changed. Fred faces a future where he is no longer a twin.
Creating different realities is a way of coming to terms with death. Besides the programs of various virtual worlds, Shakar takes us to a Florida mini-golf course , which is a virtual world modeled on pre-911 New York. Armation Florida employees live in the planned community “Celebration,” designed for controlled reality. Pre-fab reality is predictable and as safe as the womb. Sam yearns for it; Fred is both attracted and repelled.
George coins the word “holomelancholia…the inevitable disappointment of virtual worlds.” This concept fascinates me. I wrote my second book (currently in revisions) in response to Kurzweil’s prediction of the utopias that await us via mind-uploading. In Bali Hai, the “post-biological destination” setting of my novel Babylon Dreams, everything is perfect but the past. Through mind-uploading, we can escape death, but we can’t escape ourselves. Our bodies wear out, but can the human spirit live on indefinitely? One thing that makes life worth living is the luck of the draw, the chance that dreams can be realized or taken away. As Eric Packer, the protagonist of Cosmopolis (see my August 27, 2012 film review) does, I think eventually, we would all choose the “void.”
In his letter to readers, Shakar puts it this way: “How do we deal with a changed world, with a universe that one day seemed with us and the next seems to turn against us and oppose us at every turn?”
Shakar’s stream of consciousness style is dense. The long paragraphs were a challenge to my short-attention span, but I kept on reading. There were a few places where I felt he was doing a research paper rather than telling a story, but not too many to lose my interest in what happens to Fred. In his comments on LUMINARIUM in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (September 2, 2011), Christopher R. Beha comments, “This premise, however ingenious, might have yielded a schematic novel of ideas, if Shakar weren’t so committed to showing his readers a good time.” I feel that Shakar’s respect for his readers is reflected in this commitment to “show us a good time.” Shakar gives us a complete, heartfelt story. Telling a story well and entertaining readers should not be limited to genre writers. Along the way, Shakar looks for answers, but doesn’t claim success.
If mind-uploading happens before I face whatever waits on the other side of that coin, I would like to float around in a place like Shakar’s “Urth,” especially in one of those underwater bubble towns. Maybe I’ll find Ringo’s Octopus’ Garden.