The Revelation

In the early 1990s I was living in LA and working in Hollywood, adapting my novels to film and selling screenplays to the “business” with a bit of success. One highlight was working on a nautical thriller with one of Hollywood’s superstar directors. At one point I was asked whether I’d considered science fiction. I said I’d loved reading it as a kid, all the classics, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, etc. but once I latched onto JRR Tolkien I became engrossed with his brand of world-building. Later, majoring in Russian Language and Literature at Yale—so as to enjoy Russia’s literary giants in the original language and to speak to my grandparents, whose English was weak—my literary proclivities took a different turn. After that, finding myself insufficiently fascinated, frankly, with the everyday lives of human beings, I turned to magical realism in the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I suppose I have always intuited that there was more to this world than we can see, more beneath the surface of the pond, that I remain most keen on plumbing metaphysical and ontological depths.

Still later, to involve my Daoist influences, I wrote fables such as LOVE BECOMES HER, working with Earnshaw Books Back in the early 1990s, and in response to the query about sci-fi, I confessed that I had always found the Abrahamic notion of humanity’s special place in the universe to be hubristic in the extreme, even downright deluded. I’ve always been sure that the universe is teeming with life. So I decided I’d give a sci-fi novel a go. The premise I settled on was to conflate evolution, another of my academic paths, with alien arrival. The underlying idea is that advanced races are watching us. They see that we are manic murder monkeys who must not be allowed to spread violence into the galaxy, but that we have potential to become more and better.

So I came up with a story about the appearance of “indigo children” worldwide, with a focus on one in particular in America’s northeast. These children represent the next phase in the human story, and, as the famed biologist, Stephen Jay Gould noted, changes sometimes happened relatively suddenly during the long throw of evolution. After millennia of waiting for it, advanced extraterrestrials noticed this change and made a truck stop out of Planet Earth.

One of their number made himself known to a radio talk show host named Barron Poole, whose popular syndicated show “Reflecting Poole” dealt with many social, and philosophical issues. Barron met “his” alien under tragic and dramatic circumstances and the revelation of the true nature of things in the galaxy unfolded in much the same way we are seeing happen today, with government allowing the existence of secret programs, reverse-engineered alien technology, the multi-thousand-year alien presence on Earth, and much more. So, back in 1990, I foresaw the weight and acceleration of the disclosure movement as it now appears to be unfolding across media and culture.

John Mack a Harvard psychiatrist, and Whitley Strieber a novelist who himself alleged he had been abducted by ETs, were known to the community at the time. I devoured their work and then did my own research, going to tin-foil-hat conferences in Las Vegas. What I encountered were people who convinced me that they believed their own stories about their traumatic experiences. At that time, I also rode to Arizona from California by motorcycle to visit the Hopi tribe at First Mesa. There I examined rock artwork carbon-dated to 600-1300 C.E. that appears to show extraterrestrial beings and ships, although archeologists interpret the work as rendering mythological “spirit beings”. I found the images marvelous.

My plan for the book was to write it first as a novel and then option it to film as I had done with A CURE FOR GRAVITY. I put in about two years of full-time work without an advance or an option but was so taken with the story I couldn’t wait to get to it every day. One morning, I woke up, switched on my Toshiba laptop (dark screen, glowing orange characters) and received a message.

BAD DISK

The book was gone. Even the ancillary hard drive was damaged. There was no cloud storage back then. I sat staring at the screen. The novel had been 134,000 words, or about 600 manuscript pages and it completely vanished. Panicking, I took the Toshiba to computer stores all over town begging for help in retrieving the file. Nobody had anything to offer. One smart-ass techie asked me if I had any friends in the FBI, saying only they might be able to get the data back.

I went into a kind of dull, removed denial. A fugue state, I suppose. All I remember of the feeling now is desperation followed by grief. In the years that followed, if anyone mentioned sci-fi to me, I would respond with something like “say that to me again and it’ll be our last conversation”. When my son, Tasman, now a distinguished young evolutionary biologist, was a toddler and then a middle-schooler, I would tell him bedtime stories of my “home planet” with details borrowed from the lost novel. As he got older, he begged to read it and I had to tell him the hard truth: it was gone.

In 2019, after a year of living in Southern Arizona, I contracted a fungal disease called Valley Fever. You get it by breathing in spores that hide in the dirt. I was out in a park early every morning to beat the heat and practice tai chi and apparently inhaled quite a load of them. Although I hadn’t ever heard of it, climate change is accelerating the incidence of such diseases around the world. Initially, I was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and underwent a series of biopsies. All proved negative. The correct diagnosis was made during Covid time, which complicated things.

Regrettably, the infection spread around my body to various organs. Eventually, (thankfully for others this is a vanishingly rare presentation) it went to my brain, which even under the best of circumstances is a mortal condition with a low life expectancy and non-existent cure rate, although one can live with it for some time by taking various forms of chemotherapy.

At one point, when the disease affected my kidneys, I passed away from sepsis. This was the second time for me, the first being back in 2010 following cardiac arrest. Following emergency treatment I was revived but ended up in a coma. During that time, I had a “vision” (I call it that for lack of a better term) that did not feel dreamlike in any way; rather, it felt entirely real. I was shown a universe full of inhabited planets, along with a clear picture of what lies in store for the human species. I’ve done a number of podcast interviews revealing the details, including Unexplained Realms, The Drunken Daoist, The Typical Skeptic, and the Duncan Trussell Family Hour

Just a few years later, In 2024, my mother passed away in her home in New York. I flew to join my siblings in going through her things and preparing her house for sale. Going through closets and cupboards and shelves, I came across a cardboard box behind a floor-level door at the bottom of a bookcase. In the box were 600 printed manuscript pages. Atop them sat a note that read:

Mom: please put this manuscript somewhere for safekeeping. I don’t trust computers.

To say I was shocked is to say the Sahara can feel dry. I went through some moments of frank cognitive dissonance, not fully comprehending what I was looking at. To this day—perhaps due to brain damage or PTSD (it really hurt to lose that book) or even age—I have no clear memory of mailing her the book.

I carried the book onto the plane home to Arizona, refusing to surrender it to the X-ray tube at the airport, demanding I be wanded holding it. There was no way I was letting it out of my hands. On board, I put down the seat table in front of me and engaged the manuscript. I did so with a pounding heart, afraid I would find it was terrible. I was a young writer when I first came up with the story, after all, and my skills and worldview have changed right along with the primacy of the subject matter, which was fringe 36 years ago but is nearly mainstream now.

I had forgotten a great deal of the book, including a lot of the evolutionary themes along with some minor characters and some plot twists. I was thrilled to find it still a good read, albeit one that needed an update. It took me a while to edit and rework the novel, as I passed away again, this time from cardiac arrest consequent to brain surgery, in March of 2025. During my convalescence, I started at line one and went all the way through it. 17 drafts later, The Revelation is available for your reading pleasure.

Stay tuned for excerpts, starting next week!