About The Gods Of The Gift, my Fantasy Novel

            It was in the late seventies.  I turned right onto Third Street in San Rafael and my inner vision exploded with a scene.  I was seeing a huge monastic building like a Tibetan lamasery.  Think of The Potala.  Here was this enormous structure flying in the air, floating away from the ground trailing roots and boulders.  It seemed to be headed towards a moon that was chartreuse and hovered above the monastery in a kind of leering way, sinister.  Then a voice began speaking.  Never mind what it was saying.  It was talking inside my head.  Like dictation.  It was describing things like Destiny; the way Destiny is determined by the thoughts of the one who thinks.  Yes yes, very metaphysical. 

            I drove home listening to this voice describing a system of discipline, a system that corresponded to what I know of Tibetan Tantric practice.  I know very little about Tibetan Tantric practice.  I have a clue, that's all.

            A book grew from this vision and this voice.  At the time I was flush from my recent award from Playboy Magazine and my agent gave the manuscript to an editor and when I was in New York we discussed the book.  The agent, Scott Meredith, moved the book around from publisher to publisher for a year.  There were no takers. 

            Lucky me. It would have been a tragedy to have published that book in 1980.  I take decades to write my books.  They are like big oak trees.  They need time to develop.

The Gods Of The Gift has changed so much over the years that it has become a real grown-up book.  It's a book for grown-ups.  It' a book that will be most enjoyed by people who've spent some time reading esoteric stuff like Rudolph Steiner, Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant.  The old school mystics. Gurdjieff, Ouspensky.  Most of those books are dense, turgid and old fashioned.  The Gods Of The Gift should be fun, even though it's loaded with subtle information and the science part of it is completely crazy. 

            You don't have to be an Adept of The Secret Doctrine to get enjoyment from this book.  It follows many Fantasy and Sci Fi conventions.  There's the Pinocchio Theme. A race of Androids yearns to be human.  But these androids, or as I call them, Robiots, know they're not human.  They call themselves New Sentients.  They were originally made to perform work but somewhere along the way a few of them started tinkering with their own nervous systems and found that emotion was possible and even desirable.  That's one of my classic Sci Fi themes.  I've got astrophysics galore, Black Holes, all that stuff.  The book is as much influenced by Kurosawa films as it is by metaphysical lore.  There are sword fights, kidnappings, cosmic gangsters and quasi-immortals called Planet-People.  These are avatars from the Starwind Communion.  When their civilization was doomed they decided to emigrate by squishing all the individuals from each planet into one body.  So one hundred eight worlds became one hundred eight Planet-People.  One of them, Calakadon, was a rogue and a murderer.  He is the book's main bad guy.  He's murdering the other one hundred seven of his kindred and stealing their Puzzle Pieces.   These objects are precious beyond knowing.  They will some day be assembled into The Puzzle Of The Endless Gates.  Here is another Buddhist concept, in case you've never heard that mantra: Gate Gate Beyond The Gate Another Gate----Bodhisattva.

So click on over to my other siteArthur Rosch Books, then click on the book title and download
a copy.  Enjoy.