REVIEW-ESSAY
Andrew Ferguson
Unearthing the Shaver Mysteries
Fred Nadis. The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2013. xiii + 289 pp. $28.95 hc.
Richard Toronto. War over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. 256 pp. $45 pbk.
In the June 2005 issue of Fate magazine, Doug Skinner wrote of Richard Shaver that, though he “ought to be forgotten by now,” he has “remained stubbornly alive…. Maybe it’s time to reassess him; maybe we can even clear up a few puzzles and misconceptions.” Skinner’s call for a “Shaver Revival” largely consists of putting forward some of the basic facts about Shaver’s life—a surprisingly difficult task that involved cutting through decades of accreted misinformation and fan-based bile in order to get at the details of “The Shaver Mystery.” This publishing event is still so retrospectively reviled that, even though he is writing more than sixty years after the original material began appearing in Amazing Stories, and for a periodical running an ongoing UFO Forum, Skinner approaches the topic haltingly, hesitantly, almost as if dreading the condemnation to follow. Yet skip ahead to 2013, and his hopes seem borne out, with not one but two new books reconsidering the legacy of Shaver and his longtime friend and patron, Ray Palmer, erstwhile editor of Amazing and the founder of Fate. Put together, the books make a compelling case for the Mystery not just as a print-cultural pop phenomenon but as a precursor to the New Wave—as well as for Shaver as a speculative materialist avant la lettre.
In truth, War Over Lemuria author Richard Toronto has been paving the way for a Shaver revival since well before 2005: through his digital zine Shavertron, he and a small band of devotees have kept the Mystery in circulation long after the deaths of its historical principals. Fred Nadis, on the other hand, comes to the subject by way of his interest in fringe science. Though his previous book, Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America (2005; reviewed in the November 2006 issue of SFS), did not discuss Palmer in its UFOlogy section, Nadis makes admirable recompense here, placing Palmer’s flying saucers in a continuum with prenatal memory, the Shaver Mystery, the hollow-earth hypothesis, and psychic travel as attempts to get at the “Secret World” lying somewhere above, beyond, within, or alongside the one we know.
But to Nadis’s credit, he never quite allows the biographical impulse—to present a coherent portrait—to obscure an essential truth about his subject: there was never just one Ray Palmer, but many, and often they resisted coherence. Limited to just one, how would you choose between the Palmer who justly dubbed himself “Fan No. 1, 3, and 4” in fledgling sf fandom (40) and the Palmer so hated by fans that obituaries were run for Amazing under his editorship and reports sent to the Society for the Suppression of Vice (110)? Or how would you choose between Palmer the patriot, who loudly upheld the American way of life, and Palmer the peacenik, who drew FBI attention while campaigning for an end to nuclear testing and involvement in the Vietnam War (202-203)? Nadis is at his best when laying out three Palmers from late in his life: an “elder statesman,” corresponding with a new generation of fans; a “bitter right-wing crank,” defending his property against conspiracies with more than a few anti-Semitic overtones; and an “old provocateur,” running articles on atmospheric aliens and tangible heavens (210-211).
Previous writers on Palmer (mostly attackers) have concentrated on this last persona—some less charitably than others, such as those suggesting Palmer used his promotional efforts to compensate for his disability. As a child of seven, Palmer was hit by a truck and dragged down the street, suffering severe spinal damage; later operations nearly killed him and left him permanently hunchbacked. (In an early autobiographical sketch, Palmer called himself “folded,” as though he were himself a periodical [Nadis 21]). To Martin Gardner, this picture resolved into “a strange little man … getting enormous kicks out of hornswoggling people bigger than he was” (qtd. Nadis, 250-251).1 Lack of charity aside, many came to see him as a sort of carnival operator, selling tickets for rigged games and dangerous rides. But perhaps the more apt picture is that of the Rabelaisian barker, who in Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation is “one with the crowd; he does not present himself as its opponent, nor does he teach, accuse, or intimidate it. He laughs with it” (167; emphasis in original). Faced with the technocratic fetishism of John W. Campbell-approved science fiction, Palmer set about carnivalizing the genre, reaching out to audiences untapped (and generally unwanted) by other sf digests; however, the genre’s lack of any sense of humor about itself meant he would be marginalized over time.
That is one way of reading his life—though, fittingly, not the only one Nadis provides. The resulting picture cannot help but be cognitively dissonant since Ray Palmer lived his life in exactly the same way as he marketed his magazines: in the spaces between a multiplicity of interpretations. In a fascinating passage, Nadis reads the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories—the debut of the Shaver material—as Palmer “playing with the categories of truth and fiction” (74), citing as evidence Palmer’s own story “Moon of Double Trouble,” run in the same issue under the pseudonym A.R. Steber, complete with a bogus “meet the author” section and a tagline about madmen and truth. By the definitions of Brian McHale or John Barth, this sort of play would qualify Palmer as at least a proto-postmodernist. In the editor’s own terms, this blurring of boundaries between fiction and reality was “a new mutation for science fiction” (61)—something Nadis esteems perhaps too lightly as “visionary fiction” or “Psi-Fi” (88). There is, quite literally, something deeper at work.
The story that first kicked off the Mystery, “I Remember Lemuria!,” tells of a technologically advanced race that had once lived on the earth but due to the poisonous radiation of the sun were forced underground, then ultimately off-world. Some among their number, too corrupted already by the radiation, were left behind: of these, some few (the tero) attempted once again to live on the surface, becoming the progenitors of modern humanity; many more (the dero) remained below, using the ray-based technology of the vanished gods to torment those above. The tale is focalized through a heroic though not godlike figure named Mutan Mion, who in the end is told to write on indestructible plates a “Message to Future Man” that will warn them about the sun. By this point, Mutan has come a long way from the story’s beginning, where he is “a mild-mannered art student who presents a failed masterpiece to a teacher and is urged to descend deeper … for wisdom and ‘true growth’” (Nadis 72). For Palmer, at least, contemporary sf was just such a failed masterpiece, in need of deeper descent before it could legitimately claim to carry any message to future humanity.
For the ostensible author of the piece, though, the picture was more complicated, and Toronto’s book War Over Lemuria is indispensible in getting at the mysterious figure of Richard Shaver. Where Nadis must rely on printed works and correspondence, Toronto can draw on conversations and personal connections with the principals, as well as extensive knowledge gained from being the clearinghouse for everything Shaver-related after the author’s sudden death in 1975. Deprived of the chance to work directly with the author on his autobiography, Toronto compensates as best he can, piecing together as much material as possible about the author’s life, even bricolaging a passage on Shaver’s younger years from various letters (68). Toronto’s other main source is the autobiographical story “The Dream Makers,” which recounts Shaver’s struggles with “the intrusive voices that plagued his life … voices from the underworld of ancient machines, manned by creatures both good and evil” (74). Palmer initially explained the provenance of the Shaver stories as “racial memory”—triggering a flood of letters from other readers who believed they, too, remembered past lives in Lemuria. But Shaver had his information from a more direct source: the voices of the tero and dero themselves, broadcast from deep beneath the earth.
Shaver first began hearing voices in 1934. While working as a spot-welder at the Briggs auto-body plant in Detroit, he realized one day that he was overhearing the thoughts of his coworkers. At first he believed his welding gun was acting as a sort of mental “receiving unit” but eventually realized he could hear them at any distance (Toronto 89)—along with other voices, sadistic and malign: the dero, talking of subterranean tortures and torments visited upon the surface folk. Nadis and Toronto agree that Shaver was likely schizophrenic and link the onset of the phenomena to the sudden death of his brother, a passing that Shaver came to attribute to interference (or “tamper”) from a particular dero named Max: “The thing that killed him has followed me ever since—I talk to him—many times every day…. He has killed many people” (qtd. Nadis 65; ellipsis in original).2 As the intensity and cruelty of the voices increased, Shaver became more paranoid and soon after was committed to a mental institution, the first of a series he was confined to over the next decade. When out of the asylums, he was often a fugitive, fleeing doctors, lawmen, and dero alike. His lone solace came from two tero, Sue and Nydia, encountered while wandering through Newfoundland. After taking him into their underground refuge and educating him about the dero and the true history of this earth, they remained his allies afterward—Nydia in particular freeing him from an asylum near Boston and providing respite via telepathic travel when later psychiatric treatments (possibly including electroshock, pharmaceutical incapacitation, and hydrotherapy) became too much to bear.
Both authors do well to link Shaver’s condition to the peculiar type of schizophrenia first documented by James Tilly Matthews in the 1790s and diagnosed by psychoanalyst Victor Tausk in 1919 (Toronto 105; Nadis 80), in which the operation of some mechanism—an “influencing machine”—leads to the patient feeling a part of himself is becoming estranged, a part which his enemies eventually deploy against him.3 Where previous sufferers attributed their struggles to witchcraft or other forms of mysticism, Shaver would have drawn on the primary mode of estrangement available within his own experience—or, as Nadis puts it, “science fiction … helped him negotiate his own likely schizophrenia” (81). But for all the admirable detail both authors (and especially Toronto) dig up on Shaver’s mental state and incarcerations, there are grounds to consider his schizophrenia not simply as mental illness or even as impetus to art, but rather as a symbolically accurate representation of Shaver’s struggles to adjust to the massive cultural changes then taking place, as situated in Fordist economic practice and triggered by media ecology.
Shaver’s accounts of ambient voices bear an obvious similarity to radio signals; more specifically, his “telaug” (or telepathic augmenter) recalls shifts undergone at that time from a constellation of individual wireless operators to the dominance of broadcast networks and their mighty signal-boosting towers. In his book Haunted Media (2000), Jeffrey Sconce draws on newspaper accounts from the early 1930s describing this new broadcast era, where “an elevator in Des Moines … would mysteriously play radio music,” where a “tin roof, next door, [would] mak[e] political speeches,” and a woman might “faint one morning in the bathroom after her mirror greeted her by saying hello” (68). “As popular knowledge of radio principles grew,” Sconce writes, “Americans began to realize that they were all continually negotiating an invisible world of radio waves, whether they wanted to be or not, and that anything from a coal shovel to shoddy dental work could serve as a potential gateway into the mysterious realm of ether” (69).
Even in its earlier iterations, Sconce notes, “radio’s demonstrable ability to transmute consciousness into electrical signals and back again seemed to provide an empirical foundation for telepathic possibilities”: no less a writer than Upton Sinclair wrote of his experiments in “Mental Radio,” and no less a theoretician than Albert Einstein wrote for Sinclair’s book a glowing preface, claiming it deserved “the most earnest consideration” (76). It is thus not so ridiculous that Shaver could be hearing voices from his welding machinery; depending on the broadcast and the strength of signal he was picking up, even his claim to hear transmissions of “subterranean torment” might hold up to experiment. And with the etheric medium seen as an “omnipresent and inescapable force …bath[ing] and even occupy[ing] the body” (Sconce 67), Shaver would not be alone in believing his person could function as an aerial or even a transmitter; Sconce quotes a 1928 Literary Digest article “instructing readers on how to make a human chain serve as a radio antenna and how to electrify human hands … to serve as headset speakers” (68).
Shaver would also have had ample practice in functioning as a human component amid a vast machine during his time working on the assembly line at Henry Ford’s first auto plant. His father had also worked in an auto plant—a place Shaver recalled as a “sprawling labyrinth of smoke, fire, blood, poor pay, and strikes” (Toronto 74)—before being terminated and pursuing various schemes, to little success. By the time he took his own place on the line, this sense of the plant as a scene of conflict had been internalized: when his autobiographical protagonist starts overhearing his colleagues’ thoughts, they are not of unrest or resistance, but of more mundane matters, such as “wondering how [to] tell a girl that the guy she was dating was no good, then wondering whether bothering to tell her would do any good” (qtd. Nadis 65). This moral paralysis, particularly in the performance of masculine identity, is countered by the violent ferocity of the subterranean dwellers: “Put him on the rack. It’ll pull him apart in an hour” (qtd. Nadis 65). Shaver—who as an art-school student a few years earlier had joined the Communist Party, though his level of involvement changed retrospectively depending on the audience he was addressing—transmutes class struggle into science-fictional terms: while any potential for a worker uprising is successfully diverted into mundanity, a cruel and unaccountable group prospers solely because they own a means of production far older and more powerful than Henry Ford’s. From this, Shaver derived the notion of “ro,” or organic robots: men “locked into a repetitive life cycle” (Nadis 65)—and he understood that he himself was continually negotiating this invisible world of class relations, whether he wanted to be or not. The part of him split off and estranged by the “influencing machine” was his own alienated labor, which continued tormenting him well after he had left the assembly line.
Greater coercion was to come, of course. Shaver regarded psychiatrists as an especially malicious species of dero: “The hospitals-mental are one of their favorite hells where they torment their victims for years without anyone listening” (qtd. Nadis 81). In Tausk’s treatment of the schizophrenic, this is typical: the “enemies” are “predominately physicians by whom the patient has been treated” (Nadis 80). But where Tausk implicitly sets up a barrier between analyst and patient, with himself firmly on the sane side, Deleuze and Guattari have cheerfully turned the patient loose, offering as a psychoanalytic model not “a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch” but rather “a schizophrenic out for a walk” (2). On this stroll, the schizophrenic is a machine continually plugging into other “machines”: identifying with plants as photosynthesis-machines, mountains as erosion machines, stars as celestial machines, etc., experiencing “nature as a process of production” (3).
Nature, as Deleuze and Guattari are at pains to point out, is not always opposed to industry: each is itself a machine plugging into the other in various ways. The bipolar separation of nature and industry is a manifestation of false consciousness dividing process into the autonomous spheres of production, distribution, and consumption, when the truth—“the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium,” they write—is that there is
no such thing as relatively independent spheres … production is immediately consumption and a recording process without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production: … process … incorporat[es] recording and consumption within production itself. (4)
Furthermore, this process is always immanent: it “must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself, nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself. Putting an end to the process or prolonging it indefinitely … is what creates the artificial schizophrenic found in mental institutions” (5). So what aspect of process was either ended, or prolonged indefinitely, to turn the naturally schizo Richard Shaver into the artificial one in the mental institution—the “limp rag forced into autistic behavior, produced as an entirely separate and independent entity” (Deleuze and Guattari 5)? Perhaps when his welding gear started screaming, Shaver identified himself immanently with that apparatus, plugged into the indefinitely prolonged process of Fordist-Taylorist line production. Then, attempting to replug himself into process as immanence via the schizophrenic’s stroll, Shaver is taken not as nomad but as vagrant, and confined. Yet even within this enforced isolation, Shaver cannot escape the indefinite prolongation of radio transmission: with his body as antenna continuing to receive signals, he is “forced into autistic behavior,” digging deeper into his own subconscious and finding there, not the complexes of depth psychology, but rather a race of demented, moronic dwarfs manipulating human desire through the malicious use of machines whose original, beneficial uses they have long since forgotten.
Such “desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down” (Deleuze and Guattari 8). The prolongation of process by the dero is thus itself a form of psychic assault, repressing the normal (i.e., schizophrenic) workings of the mind by making all desire-production contingent on the workings of their creaky Oedipal mechanism. Upon being released from confinement, and not knowing how much time he has before the dero capture him once more, Shaver counters, naturally and schizophrenically, with production—specifically, production incorporating at once consumption through the pulps (and embedded within that, the conditions of further production, as evidence the “flood” of correspondence) as well as recording, not for broadcast but for playback as a record and an impetus to action. All of this, as process and production, is made to work in the short term by producing production, or building a discourse community separate from technocratic hierarchies; in the medium term, by producing consumption, or resonating to the overtones of ever-fluctuating cultural formations (military-industrial buildup, atomic anxiety, media propaganda); in the long term, by producing processes of recording, by encoding a “Message to Future Man”—the title of Shaver’s original submission to Palmer.
Despite the authors’ best efforts, what Palmer thought of all this can never be known with certainty—he was capable, after all, of encouraging Shaver with one breath, while in the next admitting to a young and insistent Harlan Ellison that it was all just “a publicity stunt to increase publication” (qtd. Toronto 7). Though remaining grateful for Palmer’s patronage and editorial hand, Shaver over the course of thirty years often doubted his friend’s sincerity. From the first, Shaver distanced himself from those enthusiastic readers of his stories that saw in them justifications, encouraged by Palmer’s initial framing, for their own ideas of past lives on lost continents: “I didn’t want you to persist in the idea that I too am touched by the religious bug or ‘hearing things or seeing things’” (qtd. Nadis 98). A staunch materialist, he wanted nothing to do with the occult societies and astral planers that Palmer indulged in his editorial correspondence and eventually, via the spiritualist bible Oahspe, in his private practice.
That single disagreement by itself explains, as well as anything can, the turns of their later years—Palmer toward flying saucers and spiritualism, Shaver toward an idiosyncratic form of geological art and photography. When he left Amazing Stories, Palmer had a job waiting at Fate, which he had co-founded and edited under another assumed name, Robert N. Webster. Palmer also started another fiction magazine, Other Worlds, which included some Shaver material but also published such sf stalwarts as Ray Bradbury, Eric Frank Russell, Theodore Sturgeon, and John Wyndham, often allowing them to take on taboo themes such as racial tension or homosexuality. In Mike Ashley’s estimation, “for once [Palmer] was able to prove what a good editor he was” (9)—though this must be balanced against Ashley’s statement that, by 1955, “Other Worlds had sunk back into a slough of decrepitude from which it would never recover” (63). Palmer sold off his share in Fate and started a competitor, Mystic; he also turned Other Worlds (briefly also Universe) into the “nonfiction” title Flying Saucers, which specialized in obviously faked photos of supposed UFOs. But though this selling of the experience of being hoaxed would seem the last trick of a carnival barker who has run out of all others, Palmer had one more left: true belief (maybe). In the December 1959 issue of Flying Saucers, Palmer suggested the saucers came from “inner space” rather than outer (Nadis 234). Although far from the first to use the phrase,4 Palmer could be seen in the continuum that leads to J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, and everything after. In his final years, Palmer rejected the idea that flying saucers were extraterrestrial, embracing instead an “atmospheric origins theory” involving multiple mythic dimensions, one of which might be heaven itself. Curiously, this led him back around to the idea that spirit is physical (though no less spiritual for all that), asserting “in one of his last articles before he died that ‘Heaven Is Solid’,” which might even allow us to learn how to build our own earths and cosmoses (Nadis 244-45).
Throughout all this, Shaver had his eyes firmly fixed on the earth. Despite his best efforts, no single scientist would even consider the highly complex physics he had extrapolated from what the tero taught him, and he was frustrated by his inability to find any clinching evidence, such as the caverns themselves or the indestructible plates. But then he unexpectedly discovered that the evidence he was seeking was far more widespread than he thought—on the very rocks themselves, found on his own farm and everywhere else, the ancients had inscribed their history—“rock books”—and left them for later races to discover, as they were able. But deciphering them required an “immensely complex optical science” (Shaver 49); he spent the rest of his life trying to devise methods for interpreting them. His primary approach, “rokfogo,” involved taking cross-sections of the rocks and projecting them onto canvas, before attempting to copy and capture the images he perceived. What he had in mind was more than simple pareidolia: he conceived of the rock books as computer-like, “packed with images that may be as numerous as the millions of bits of information that can be stored today in crystals by means of laser beams, and extracted in the same way” (Shaver 85). The imagination he brought to bear on the rocks, and the mythology he extracted from them, was remarkable, including “three major racial groups inhabiting Earth: the Giants, the Amazons, and the Mers. Interwoven throughout … were things like deadly ape bats and multiple moon falls” (Toronto 209). Shaver was inspired to the point of starting perhaps the most curious mail-order business on record, selling and even renting slides from the rock books.
Though he hoped at some point to interest experts—geologists, archaeologists, anyone—to take a look at the rocks or even suggest alternate interpretations, he entertained no doubt about the validity of his findings; Toronto quotes him as saying that “[t]he work I am doing may not be understood for centuries” (223). The rocks would contain the same information whether or not humanity devised ways to read it; no matter if we learned its secrets or not, the earth would continue on, indifferent. Shaver’s materialism at this latter stage verged on pantheism or animism, something very near the Gaia hypothesis or certain formulations of speculative realism:5 “A planet is alive, and its people are its blood-cells, circulating in its seas, moving over its land. When we are healthy and the life is normal, then we know what to do, just as our blood-cells know what to do”; if not, then “we are abnormal blood-cells of the plant planet, sick and burdensome to our greater life-mother, Earth” (Shaver 49). For a natural schizophrenic such as Shaver, the rock books offered a means—perhaps the only means—of plugging into the earth itself, into its processes of accretion and erosion as recorded in the original material, as well as in the complex, variegated inscriptions of the ancient races. Rokfogos, even those depicting these seemingly human forms, are thus non-anthropocentric, relating earth’s history in its own timescale, from its perspective as an entity that is single and yet contains multitudes. Though he would never be entirely free from dero torment and tamper, the consumption and reproduction of these rock books afforded Shaver the chance to reincorporate the work of his hands in ways not possible since his days in art school, prior to his brother’s death and the incident in the auto works. The rokfogos were “the final installment of the Shaver Mystery” (Toronto 206); thanks to the interest in recent decades in outsider art that has led to several exhibitions, they remain his best-regarded work today.
The names of Ray Palmer and Richard Shaver, meanwhile, remain linked for the foreseeable future; it is impossible to imagine a biography of one that did not treat extensively of the other. It is appropriate that, even as their friendship cooled in later years, they both found themselves occupied in projects—for Palmer, a memoir; for Shaver, a prehistory of our earth—that they could not bring to a close separately. Finally, Shaver turned over his huge manuscript, and Palmer greatly shortened his, publishing the pair of documents jointly as The Secret World.6 Their mystery flared up in the late stages of World War II, and it burned intensely (and to many noxiously) for several years before guttering out. Despite the overwhelming publicity it received at the time, it was never within the mainstream of science fiction, and every time it threatened to revive—for instance, in the “Special Shaver Mystery issue” of Fantastic (July 1958)—fandom was there to smother it and make sure it would never scorch them again. Perhaps only after this much time was it even possible to reevaluate Shaver and Palmer’s joint efforts, and Nadis and Toronto are to be commended for taking on that task, opening up once again for research a chapter of sf history that has remained closed for too long. While The Man from Mars is the book with the more general interest, War Over Lemuria (as well as Toronto’s self-published follow-up, Shaverology: A Shaver Mystery Home Companion [2013]) is a necessary if expensive complement; both books come highly recommended to those researching 1940s science fiction, fandom, print culture, conspiracy, and media ecology.
NOTES
1. This remark, and Gardner’s analysis generally, all but begs to be read through the lens provided by Kathryn Allan’s recent anthology on Disability and Science Fiction.
2. Max made a personal appearance in the story “The Masked World” (Amazing, May 1946) as the force responsible for the Great Northern Empire Builder wreck in Michigan, North Dakota.
3. The link between Shaver and Matthews, in particular, was made by Mike Jay in his history of the Matthews case.
4. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits Robert Bloch with the coinage, though noting that it was also in circulation in 1959 thanks to Howard Koch’s story “Invasion from Inner Space” (Clute and Nicholls). Also, Palmer would have been aware of Jung’s work on flying saucers from that same year, as it drew heavily on an account by Orfeo Angelucci that Palmer had published (see Nadis 157-62).
5. Though James Lovelock first put forward the Gaia hypothesis in a 1972 article, the book that popularized the concept, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, did not appear till 1979; it is unlikely that Shaver would have encountered Lovelock’s work. On speculative realism, see Quentin Meillassoux’s anti-Kantian thought experiment of the “arche-fossil,” as well as the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen on lithic agency and vitalism.
6. Shaver was furious that, while pictures of his rock books appeared on the front and back cover, his name did not (see Toronto 234-35).
WORKS CITED
Allan, Kathryn, ed. Disability and Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Ashley, Mike. Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970. Liverpool: U of Liverpool P, 2005.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. 1965. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1984.
Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls. “Inner Space.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 3rd ed. Ed. John Clute. 25 Feb. 2012. Online. 20 Dec. 2013.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stories of Stone: And Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, forthcoming 2015.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. Trans. Robert Hurley, Marks Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Jay, Mike. The Air Loom Gang. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 2000.
Shaver, Richard S. “The Ancient Earth—Its Story in Stone.” The Secret World by Ray Palmer. Amherst, WI: Amherst College P, 1975. 47-144.
Skinner, Doug. “What’s This? A Shaver Revival?” Fate Magazine. Jun. 2005. Online. 15 Dec. 2013.
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