Aldous Huxley wrote: “If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.” One might infer from this remark that seeing ourselves as others see us—and acknowledging our very obvious imperfections—is the beginning of true wisdom. Oscillating between parody, parable, and prophecy, ALL ABOUT EARTHLINGS is a work of hyper-realism. As author William F. Wu writes in his introduction, “[it] is journalist W. E. Gutman’s most chilling dystopia. The historical retrospectives that undergird his narrative and the apocalyptic inferences they evoke prompt Gutman to conclude that humans are neither able nor willing to control their collective destinies: Greedy, hedonistic and reckless, they are engrossed in the here-and-now of their personal lives. Scouring through humankind’s most sordid chronicles of cruelty and hypocrisy, corruption and apathy, suffering, despair and death, and extrapolating from the lessons they impart, Gutman envisions a scenario of otherworldly retribution that seems as fitting as it is horrible to contemplate. “His use of a science fiction device (he doesn’t maroon Earthlings on some faraway planet; instead, he transports an alien emissary to Earth and gives him a voice) only tends to harden the sinister nature of his auguries. In the process, Gutman takes on and unapologetically slays some mighty sacred cows: God; religion; the papacy; evangelism; imperialism; militarism; capitalism; corporatism; mercantilism, and consumerism, all of which, he reckons, incestuously conspire against peace and tranquility on Earth and which, should Earth survive the evils their combined influences wreak, could one day spread beyond its celestial frontiers.”

Morpheus Possessed is a book about dreams. In it, the author, who unabashedly shares some of his most graphic and bizarre visions, asks: Do we dream the life we live? Or are we the misshapen leftovers of someone else’s wild imagination? Are the memories we erect and store along the way mere mental constructs lacking tangible reality? If life is a wakeful dream, is reality the lethal mirror image of the dreams we weave? One thing is clear: When we cease to dream, all that we are ceases to be. Everything else is a tawdry cliché.