entitled No Longer on the Map: Discovering Places That Never Were (NY: Viking Press, 1972).
This book recounts the most famous, infamous, and occasionally slapstick cases of continents, islands, sea-
passages, cities, and civilizations whose existence was at one time taken for granted - and then which, after the
wasting of lots of time, money, and sailing expeditions, were grudgingly and ruefully acknowledged to be puffs of
fluff.Fortunately Atlantis and Mu/Lemuria are not in the book, else there would be room for little besides in view of
the mammoth amount of material penned about those two turkeys. But there are chapters on El Dorado, the
Northwest Passage, a variety of R’yleh-like now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t islands, the Seven Cities of Cibola, a
variety of other geographical curiosities.
Now the fun thing about Australia is that it was presumed to be there long before it was discovered. The story
begins with the Alexandrian Greek astronomer and geographer Claudius Ptolemy. In his day sensible scientists
knew the world ( ge) was round, and it was proposed by Krates of Mallos in the 2nd century BCE that there had to be
roughly equal land-masses on all surfaces in order to “balance” the known portion ( oikoumene). Otherwise the
world wouldn’t stay upright [the Greeks hadn’t got gravity, orbital rotation, etc. quite worked out yet].
Ptolemy is most famous in history for his bright but wrong idea that the Sun and planets revolve around the
Earth. He had another wrong idea about Terra Australis, which appears for the first time on a 1482 edition of one of
his maps as a gigantic land mass occupying the bottom of the globe, and of which Africa is a northern peninsula. [In
the 7th century BCE an Egyptian Pharaoh had sent a Phoenician expedition around the Cape of Good Hope, but
Ptolemy shrugged that off. To be fair to him, so did Herodotus. Ignoring inconvenient data is not only a modern
phenomenon.]
It is commonly supposed that medieval Europeans thought the world was flat. In fact, following the authority of
Aristotle, it was assumed [in learned circles, at least] to be spherical. Since God could hold the planet together in any
way He chose to, however, it was no longer thought necessary to have land masses just for the sake of weight-
distribution. Australia went off the map.
Besides, argued theologians, God would not have been so wasteful of space to create all that land without
people, and if there were people there, they would be heathen and in need of conversion, and if no one could get to
them, they couldn’t be converted, which was outrageous. There couldn’t possibly be any other people besides those
within reach of Christianity. It was definitely better to keep Australia off the map.
[A little later America was (re)discovered, and there were indeed native people there. Some theologians
proposed that these “Indians” were not true people but an evil race created by the Devil. Orthodox dogma said that
only God could create, however, so the native inhabitants of the Americas went on to receive the blessings of the
Christian missionary efforts. As this issue of the Scroll goes to press, the Catholic Church is proceeding to canonize
Junipero Serra for his California missionary activities, despite the protests of native Americans who recall the
religious persecution of their ancestors somewhat less reverently.]
Terra Australis was decreed not to exist because it was unreachable, and it was unreachable because the
equator was decreed to be uncrossable because it was thought to be hot and burnt-out. One day someone sailed
across it at sea and noticed that he didn’t burn up. After the general astonishment died down, enthusiasts such as
Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator commissioned all sorts of mapping expeditions.
Once Columbus rediscovered America, it seemed that old Krates was right. There had to be more land sprinkled
around the globe until one got round to the oikoumene again. In the 16th & 17th centuries CE Terra Australis
Incognita was re-added to the map. So far no one had actually bumped into it yet.
There were a couple of near-misses. In 1545 the Spaniard Inigo Ortis de Retes discovered New Guinea and
supposed it to be a northern peninsula of TAI. The Peruvian Alvaro de Mendana de Neyra found some islands in
1567, which he named the Solomons in hopes that he would find similar treasure there. [Perhaps it was lunchtime
when Captain Cook reached Hawaii.]
In 1603, having fired up the Pope and Philip III of Spain with tales of Pacific treasures to be reaped, de Retes’
lieutenant, Pedro Fernandes de Quieros, went out to try again. He came back with wild tales about a new continent
larger than Europe and packed with more gold than Peru. He called it Austrialia del Espiritu Santo and said that he
but no one believed him anyway.
Meanwhile the cartographers were having fun. On the maps of the time TAI was positioned everywhere from
underneath Africa to underneath South America, and everywhere in between. Guesses ranged from island-size to
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something big enough to reach from Cape Horn to the Cape of Good Hope. The famous Turkish Piri Reis map joins
South America to TAI, places 6-horned oxen there, and adds the notation that “the Portuguese infidels have
recorded it in their maps”.
In 1613 the Dutchman Dirck Hartog published his sighting of the Australian coast, and thereafter the Dutch
poked around a bit. In 1629, in the best European tradition, they took a whirl at starting a colony. Captain Francis
Pelsart set off from Java with a small fleet. Unfortunately he took a Haarlem pirate by the name of Jerome Cornelius
along. The expedition crashed on the Abrolhos Islands (in Portuguese: “Keep-Your-Eyes-Open Islands”). Ramsay
reports how it all turned out:
Exactly what happened then is not clear; whether Pelsart took some of the party and sailed back to get
help, or whether Cornelius held his mutiny on land and drove out Pelsart and those loyal to him. In any case
Cornelius ended up in control. He killed some 40 of the men to save water supplies, took over all of the
women for himself and his followers, and held a brief reign that was a succession of drunken orgies. He also
killed several more of the men on suspicion of disloyalty to him, including the two ship’s carpenters, and
was thus unable to carry out his plan of salvaging material from the wrecks, building another ship, and
becoming a pirate. When Captain Pelsart and his men unexpectedly returned, Cornelius was overthrown
and was summarily tried and hanged.
As colonizing goes this was not exactly a high point. The Dutch more or less said to Hell with it, and the rest of
the world agreed. Cartographers of the 17th century were accustomed to map only known areas, leaving unexplored
areas blank. So Australia went back off the map for another 100 years.
Of course everyone knew it was still down there somewhere. The fantasy writers of the day knew a good thing
when they saw it, grinding out many tales set there of which Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is the best-known.
The basket-cases checked in too: In 1676 the Franciscan monk Gabriel de Foigny, already notorious for his
scandalous life, published La Terre Australe Connue in which he revealed that the natives of Australia were
hermaphrodites who used a special breed of long-nosed pigs to root in straight lines, thereby tilling the ground for
them.
This nonsense went on until 1768, with a succession of maps showing TAI here, there, or nowhere, and New
Zealand and Tasmania similarly growing or shrinking in size at the whim of the cartographer. Finally the famous
Captain Cook went down to explore and chart the area, and he got a grip on Australia. It went back on the map, and
in reasonably correct proportions, and thereafter its exploration, settlement, and political history leaves the realm of
magic and enters that of conventional history.
____________________________________________________
Part V: Classified Introduction to PERRO: The Novel114
XXXVIII/2003
Paul Kantner shot bolt-upright in his bed, his eyes frozen and unfocused, teeth clenched: awake. Yes, awake -
It had happened again.
The panic began to recede. He felt his muscles relax; he saw the room, smelled perspiration, tasted blood,
realized with annoyance that he must have bitten his lip. He swung his body off the bed, scowled at the twisted
sheets, and walked unsteadily into the bathroom.
The cold shower helped his body, but the ghost of the dream was still there:
* * *
He was standing on Hollywood Boulevard. It had to be the Boulevard, because nowhere else could you feel
that sodden atmosphere of dreams, glamor, failure, corruption - at once the thrill of being There, at the nerve center
of Fame, yet you can’t touch it, your fingers press against the cold stars of the dead stars; they are an eternity away.
But above him -
Above him - it had somehow been there all along - the ... machine. Machine? What other word ..? It was high,
distant, perhaps ten thousand feet in the air. But he couldn’t be sure, because it enveloped the entire Los Angeles
Basin like some gigantic black amoeba of leathermetal, pulsing quietly, wetly. But it was not endless, because there
to the far south was still a sliver of bright blue sky.
Transfixed, he clutched the hand - her hand, Lilith’s hand; she was there with him, her hair cascading in the
electric wind of the machine, her face darkly glowing in its blazing pulses. He had turned, then, slowly, to smile at
her: This is a great dream.
But she shook her head and laughed. “It’s no dream, lover.”
114 [The unclassified version by Paul Kantner, within the novel, can be ordered from the Jefferson Starship website:
http://www.jeffersonstarshipsf.com/main.htm]
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It was somehow very important that he answer her, but he was whirled away to stare at a 1949 Mercury, garish
in candy-apple paint, cruising down the Boulevard toward them, its ancient AM radio blaring tinny, low-fi music
(though he couldn’t make out the tune). Now the car was still, but the music must have continued, because two
youths, a boy in a plastic bodysuit and a girl with green hair, were suddenly beside it, music-swaying, staring up at
the machine. They obviously didn’t see the door.
But Paul did, because Lilith guided his eyes to it. Curving down from, yet oddly separate from the machine, a
rectangle forcing the sky apart around it, distorting everything, even Lilith’s still-waving hair, which was now
angular. Moving in angles, with electricity, she drew him towards the opening.
The Boulevard remained an inert spectator, motionless save for the dancing forms next to the Mercury, silent
but for the music which must have been there for them. Falling towards the door in the sky, Paul looked slowly to
one side, then the other, and was rewarded, preposterously, with reflections of Lilith and himself, both in leather
S&M costumes, in Frederick’s of Hollywood’s display-window. But it was too hot to be wearing them, he knew,
because he was gasping with the heat, tearing the leather away from his body that now shone, like Lilith’s, with wet
electricity, which he also tried to brush from his arms, but it ran ahead of his fingers over his body.
Lilith, now completely a sculpture of electrical angles, was pulling him, finally, ultimately, through the -
* * *
Paul Kantner turned off the shower, ran a towel impatiently over his body, and padded back out into the
bedroom, where Albert Einstein smiled fuzzily at him, riding, as always, his bicycle across the M.I.T. campus, frozen
forever in that faded wall-poster. Paul rummaged in the bedside drawer for his rimless, rectangular glasses - as
much his trademark as Indiana Jones’ fedora, he supposed - and winked back at a now-crisp Albert through them.
The Sun, he saw from his window, had just crept above Mount Diablo over in the East Bay, and was sending
warm rays of golden light across San Francisco to break, finally, against the red towers of the Bridge. He never
ceased to marvel at the contrast between the two worlds on either side of the Golden Gate: the bustling cosmopolis
to the east, the Tolkienesque crags and seascape to the west.
For perhaps the tenth time in so many days he considered the dream, or nightmare, or whatever-it-was. At
first he had dismissed it as the reverie of a brain pretty well saturated, he granted, with science-fiction imagery. But
now a slight worry had begun to creep in. The same dream, too many times. What the hell.
He sat down on the mangled bed, found the phone on the floor next to it, buried under a pillow. At last it was
the date; the thing should finally be here. He began to dial ...
* * *
It had begun with Blows Against the Empire, that 1970 spaceflight-of-fancy album which had won Paul
Kantner both a Hugo Award nomination (which he knew about) and a Defense Intelligence Agency file (which he
didn’t).
DIA, located across the Anacostia River from Washington, D.C., was the Defense Department’s in-house
answer to the civilian Central Intelligence Agency. CIA, after years of more sensationalism and media glamor than it
cared for, had been rewarded with a good deal of Executive and Congressional watchdoggery. DIA reported only to
the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because it had so-far-successfully maintained that its only
concerns were strategic national defense intelligence.
But in the aftermath of the 1969 Apollo-11 Moon-landing, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration’s
civilian funding for its sensible but unglamorous Space Shuttle program had begun to dry up. NASA did what many
another desperate agency has done under such circumstances; it went knocking on the doors of the Pentagon. Could
DoD help with the bills?
Yes, it could. But there was a price. Those old, quaint ideas about peaceful use of space, about shuttles to carry
civilian research and commercial packages, even tourists, as a possible prelude to orbital space colonies? - off the
table. The shuttles will now be doing - our business. Special satellites. For intelligence, for secure communications,
for space-based defense. You don’t have a need to know exactly what they do. Your job is just to get them up there
and keep them there.
None of which was known by, or of the slightest concern to Paul Kantner when he wrote and sang a series of
songs about hijacking the United States’ first functional spaceship for pacifistic planetary touring. However DIA,
which now had assumed a counterintelligence mission regarding the “new” NASA, decided that it was concerned
about him. Was he serious? Wasn’t that Jefferson Airplane of his one of those agitation-bands that had worked
right along with Jane Fonda and Daniel Berrigan to fuck up the Vietnam War? Turn an entire generation of once-
well-bred Eisenhower kids into long-haired acidheads? Now that the war is falling to pieces, are we going to have to
worry about interference with our space programs?
In April 1971 the Kantner file was tasked to the Missile & Space Intelligence Command (MSIC) of DIA’s
ambiguously-named Directorate for Analysis & Production (DI), where it was eventually Compartmented and
ultimately, on January 17, 1972, designated with an MJ-prefix, removing it instantly from DIA’s normal Intelligence
Library tracking system.
DI/MSIC/MJ agents thus carefully followed the progress of Kantner and his band, now the Jefferson Starship,
through the 1970s. Their tours, interviews, lyrics, and private lives were annotated to the file and scheduled for
periodic analysis.
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By 1975 MJ’s interest had lessened somewhat. The NASA security issues raised by Blows showed no signs of
materializing, and while several additional Kantner space-themes had been introduced, all were clearly in the realm
of fantasy. That was, until ...
_____________________
Part VI: PERRO Alive!
Leaked from highly-suspect sources 2013 under blanket anonymity.
All the following strictly denied by all the individuals and organizations herein.
Exactly thirty years ago PERRO introduced the idea of covert mass mind control by technological means
(“Fred”). As developed in that record and novel, Fred, a “black box” connected between guitars and amplifiers, was
used to create a sort of dreamy ecstasy in concert crowds unaware of the device. A malicious U.S. government
became aware of its effectiveness, and sought to steal both it and presumably the telepaths (Paul Kantner and Grace
Slick, alias “Lilith”) for Cold War black operations exploitation. After Grace paid a psychically-revitalizing visit to
Mount Shasta, the two of them fled to Australia, and then, cornered by pursuers, into space.
This made me wonder whether something like that were indeed possible, and that set me on the research path
that ultimately resulted in my MindWar (MW) project. Not a plug-in amplifier box, but an entire interrelated system
of physical forces, capable of not just inducing vague, aimless euphoria, but reaching right back into the core of