Distance Haze - Softcover

Nasir, Jamil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553579959 ISBN 13: 9780553579956

Publisher: Spectra, 2000

Synopsis

If dreams are doorways, where do they take us?

The Deriwelle Institute has millions in funding, Nobel prize-winning scientists, and a mission that could be crazy--or about to change the world....

Science fiction writer Wayne Dolan--his career at a standstill and his life adrift--has just entered the Deriwelle Institute.  Built on sacred Indian ground in southwest Michigan, it's posh, well funded...and perhaps the world's biggest hoax.  At least that's what Wayne thinks.  Using advanced technology, Deriwelle's scientists say they are on a mission to find God.  In reality, one is a grieving father hoping to contact his dead child.  Another has invented a baseball cap to measure unusual brain waves.  Yet another says he has a vaccine to eliminate the genes that program humans to be religious.

Are they all crackpots? Maybe. But from the moment Wayne walks through the Institute's door, eerie events plague him: a recurring dream about a bank account number, visions of an ethereal girl, and the appearance of an old Indian shaman.  Of course, Wayne sees the shaman only when he's asleep.  And what is about to happen when Wayne is awake may be a nightmare of obsession, twisted desire, and secrets no human is ready to know....

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Truth proves stranger than fiction at southwestern Michigan's Deriwelle Institute for the Technological Study of Religion, host to highly paid scientists who are building a computer model of the soul. Suffering from writer's block and on the verge of a midlife crisis, 43-year-old science fiction writer Wayne Dolan agrees to his editor's request to boost lagging sales by writing a nonfiction piece about the institute, which has been built on sacred burial grounds. He soon teeters between insanity and enlightenment: the eccentricities around him filter into his own life; vivid dreams of an Indian shaman lead him to deposit thousands of dollars into a mysterious bank account; and he falls for a crippled, dope-addicted prostitute who says her Nobel laureate father made her the guinea pig for a vaccine that eradicates what makes humans religious. In this captivating near-future novel, Nasir (Tower of Dreams) expertly blurs the already vague distinction between Wayne's reality and fantasy. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review:

"[Nasir is] a writer who loves words and can turn them into the vital stuff of experience....You'll see a world through new eyes."
--Jack Dann

"A fresh and intriguing science fiction voice."
--The Denver Post

About this edition

• Publisher: Spectra
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0553579959
• ISBN 13: 9780553579956
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288