REMOTE CONTROL: A Novel by Fred Welden
General Info
approximately 70,000 words.Unpublished.
Warning: if you actually want to read the novel someday, the second paragraph below tells how it comes out. That probably doesn't make a lot of difference, but it might, to you.
Synopsis
The book is set in New Orleans, and covers a period of about a year that spans the Mardi Gras 1979 New Orleans police strike. The protagonist, William Asher, is in his twenties, a drop-out working behind the counter at a rental agency, and given to experimenting with a variety of drugs. One day he shoots a man at the agency in self-defense. After some emotional difficulties he comes to convince himself that it was not a real man that he shot, but rather a sort of man-shaped robot. From that point on his fantasy of humanoid machines grows and becomes more threatening and pervasive until, during the police strike, he commits a series of killings and is finally caught and committed to a mental hospital.Once he is in the hospital and off drugs he begins to doubt himself, and to suspect that he is indeed a murderer. As part of his therapy he writes a memoir of his actions, which we learn is the book Remote Control. In the course of writing it he fights against a double bind--if the world is truly being invaded by robots, he has failed to convince anyone of it, and if it is not, he is a multiple murderer. He discovers a solution to his problem by manipulating his keepers into sedating him to the point where he can believe all things at once.