LA3D - Life Among the Three Dimensionals

Introduction to the Preface to the Introduction

Honestly, I have tried to keep the Hippomuse site funny. 'Funny' as in humorous, not as in smelling like old fish. Although that too, sometimes, I know.

The problem is that so much going on in our world these days is damned not-funny. It's almost immoral to force a laugh when you really feel like cursing and screaming about genocide in Gaza, Neo-McCarthyite chicken hawks inciting war, or our political puppet show that gives us the appearance of choosing between the insentient and the infantile.

Thus, this.

"This" is a serialized science-fiction novel. I wrote "this" a few years ago and have continued to twiddle and fiddle with it ever since.

The novel is called LA3D - Life Among the Three Dimensionals. The idea was to tell an adventure story as a sci-fi narrative superimposed on our own world. It is an inverted picaresque novel with an extraterrestrial twist. I meant LA3D to amuse, but also to lightly parody our times.

Initially, I tried to recruit a literary agent to flog this thing to the usual bunch of traditional publishers. I actually signed up for a "writers' symposium," one of those events where thousands of wanna-be authors pay $$ to attend seminars where they coach the deluded how to 'position' their work, how to write exactly like everyone else and, of course, how to monetize your scribblings. In today's world of artificial idiocy and GPT, however, it would not be necessary to coach "human" authors at all because the gibberish churned out by hallucinating AI would be perfectly adequate from a marketing perspective.

Still, the writers' symposium I once attended was a strange experience. Like law school, it was a canine obedience school designed to make us all think the same, write on command, and write all alike. The object of the indoctrination was to create writers who would churn out formulaic rubbish that the publishers and book vendors could sell wholesale at a profit to a preconditioned public. The pop music industry works the same way.

Ugh.

The high point of the writer's obedience school that I attended was the "face-time with a literary agent" session. "Literary agents" are those gate-keepers who (so we were led to believe) know the shibboleths that will get us "in the door," who know the all-powerful editors and publishers, and who have "the connections" to the mysterious world of the print media.

There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when all the lonely adults created by our careerist-driven super-capitalist society were encouraged to engage in "speed-dating." You remember, before the advent of digital meet-up platforms, singles and lonely-hearts would pay a fee to sit at a table and 'chat' for all of two minutes with a stranger before they were shuffled off to another table to meet another prospective life partner. And so on, until, in the course of about 100 seconds per "date" you either met Mister/Ms Right or headed, slightly nauseous, for the exit opting for your cat's company rather than that of any human being. Still, unlike today's dating platforms, you could at least be sure that whoever you were "speed-dating" in person really was (more or less) what she or he appeared to be rather than a deep fake persona adopted by a psychopathic chainsaw murderer.

"Meet the literary agent" sessions were like speed-dating. There were long lines of unpublished, unrepresented authors who sought to "sell" their novels to dozens of agents according to whatever "genre" the authors were seeking. We were encouraged to distill our "pitches" down to just a few sentences, a thirty-second spiel that would pique an agent's interest just enough for him or her to request a follow-up. They were strict about the pitches. The agents all had egg-timers on their desks. When the two minutes were up and the bell had rung, you were done! As you left, another mendicant slob would slide in after you to supplicate the agent.

There were several dozen agents, but thousands of wannabe authors. Even though everyone's "pitch" lasted no more than a couple of minutes, there were so many interviewees standing in line that folding metal chairs had been set up in case someone grew faint or wobbly.

There was a smorgasbord of agents. Some were young and some were old. Most of them were bored. Some of the agents specialized in representing authors who wrote "young adult" novels about sorcerers and warlocks; or they were seeking books about paranormal furry transgender space romances; or zombie splatter-punk; or erotic sword-and-sandal Anime cartoon books. There were genres and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and sub-sub-sub-genres.

I chose an agent's line at random. I waited. I gave my pitch.

"So, youse got any kinky sex or gruesome mass moiders?" asked the agent as he chomped off the tip of a fat cigar.

"Uh, no," I said. "My protagonist is a five dimensional intelligent gasbag and his specie replicates via a third party intermediary, if you know what I mean. [He didn’t.] And my protagonist's companion is an intelligent four dimensional vegetable, and her kind reproduce asexually by budding. So although this is a love story, of sorts, it's not exactly X-rated."

The agent was unimpressed. "Youse don't got no super-heroes? No gender-bending drug-fueled orgies? No sorcerers, no wizards? Whazzamatter wid you?"

"Uh, no. But I do have a few critters with attitude and an embittered palm reader who pines for her activist days from the '60s... "

"Yea? So what are youse, some kind of weirdo?" the agent asked. He bit off the other end of the cigar and spat it out. "Don't call us, pal. We'll call you, okay?"

The egg timer binged.

Thus ended my literary career before it even began. It was probably for the best because, as I now understand, what goes into the publishers' Cuisinart blender comes out all the same and is soon forgotten.

So what's the book about, you ask, if not super-heroes, gender-bending drug-fueled orgies, sorcerers, wizards and kinky mass murders?

LA3D is the memoir of a 5 dimensional gaseous intelligent dispatched from a parallel, but remote slice of the multiverse. The slices of the multiverse are layered on top of each other such that "space travel" is simply a matter of walking to where you want to go... provided that you know where you are going and that you don't get lost as the infinitely expanding multiverse continues to pile up new layers on top (and below) of where you are. Of course, our hapless 5D hero gets lost almost immediately which leads to him getting, more or less, "stuck" on our planet while mired in a 3D bizarre world (that is, bizarre to him). So, our gentleman from 5D is not "Lost in Space," but lost on Earth and looking desperately for some way to get out. Kind of like the rest of us.

More specifically, our 5 dimensional gaseous intelligent (as they refer to themselves) has been substituted for an American substitute school teacher in order to conduct an anthropological field study of Earth's primitive 3 dimensional dominant specie. Hence, the title of the book, Life Among the Three Dimensionals.

This is a book within a book. The main story - the escapades of our five dimensional substitute teacher - is bracketed by a pompous 5D academician's preface and his post-script for gaseous intelligent "grad students" studying lesser-dimensional life forms at a prestigious and gaseous university in another slice of the multiverse. Ergo, this introduction to the preface.

Of course, many things in this book are derived from personal experience. Or, they are tropes and memes borrowed from our common literature and shared cultural memory, then appropriately mashed. In that regard, human minds do, indeed, scrape and transform knowledge just like computers do. And both humans and AI computers similarly "hallucinate." I am not sure whether that means computers are intelligent or that humans are no more clever than computers. However, with respect to this particular academic who wrote the preface and post-script to LA3D, he is a composite of graduate and law school professors I have known. I can actually hear one such prof’s particularly haughty, nasally voice and see his finely manicured fingernails as I reread the academic’s words. Maybe you, too, can hear similar voices of such people from your own lives.

According to the obnoxious professor who introduces the story, there are many versions of this book, some of which might be authentic and most of which are likely fake. In addition, several chapters are "missing," or rather, they were "lost in the mail" (perhaps) as the author (our hero) tried to send them to his publisher by the usual means of a file attached to a Frisbee-like universal postage device that skips across the layers of the multiverse like you can skip a flat rock across the surface of the water.

The novel has its own glossary of neologisms to express concepts that make little sense to humans. It involves ideas, laws of physics, flights of fancy and events that transcend three dimensionality. So, clearly, this is just like the practice of law.

LA3D is told through the eyes of the intelligent extra-dimensional as his "testament." His given name is Ugoñaschßtenätraξo, but, for the purposes of our story, he is known as Hugo Nash, the substitute teacher temporarily stored in the multiverse "mezzanine" and whose identity our 5D protagonist borrowed while conducting his terrestrial investigations. The text of this story - the 5th authorized edition of the textbook - has been "translated" into English from the ur-manuscript that was originally composed in the gaseous intelligent's own 5D language, Field Impulse, based on pulses of energy and electrical stimulation. Obviously so.

Now then, you're either mildly intrigued... or you have already checked out, like my literary agent at the obedience school for writers. Let's assume the former.

The second principal character is a show-stealer. Wait a minute! How can there be two "principal" characters? Well, if we can have five dimensions, then we can have two principals, too, okay? Anyhow. First introduced in the 7th Chapter, principal character number 2 is a nominally female carnivorous "intelligent vegetable" from a 4 dimensional slice of the multiverse. Carnivorous because no principled intelligent vegetable could bear to eat other vegetables. Come to think of it, the story's 4 dimensional intelligent vegetable is not exactly a principled principal. Rather she's like a street-smart Neapolitan scugnizzi. She is pursued by intelligent Vegematic bounty hunters who want to drag her back home to be pruned, espaliered and potted.

Our 5 dimensional gaseous intelligent is a bit of a nebbish who leans toward hypercritical intellectualism and over-analysis. His 4 dimensional vegetable companion is anything but an intellectual. She is a thousands year old anti-authoritarian, street-wise, potty-mouthed, cynical and on-the-run misdemeanant who is hiding in plain sight on our 3D world among the green haired and hooded kids in a public school near you.

Both characters have a similar but opposite problem. He, the intelligent gaseous being, wants to return to his own well-ordered higher-dimensional universe where he hopes to be assimilated into the Universal Gas Cloud. Things go wrong, however, and he ends up a fugitive from the law. Our law, that is.

She (that is, the carnivorous and intelligent vegetable) is a fugitive from the well-ordered 4D world that she loathes. The two of them (5D and 4D protagonists) are thrown together by circumstances and evolve by necessity into a collaborative relationship.

Obviously, this is a love story.

Oh, lest I forget the trigger warnings! Yes, the book does contain scenes depicting violence, drugs, foul language, guns, 6/5 dimensional plasma sex, one seamy adult motel (with a leering proprietor who gets his comeuppance), booze, fast cars and motorcycles, militarized cops, disingenuous politicians, drones and terrorism (the stage props of our real-life world), but all are depicted (more or less) tongue-in-cheek.

Life Among the Three Dimensionals. LA3D.

Coming soon (but NOT to a book store near you).

Chapter by chapter, serialized over several months.

Fasten your seat belts. Grab some popcorn.