Bugs: a novel by Theodore Roszak

The story’s beginning is beautifully imagined. It is the misunderstanding of a young girl who is afraid of bugs that sets the whole thing in motion toward global disaster.

Bugs is a novel about the computer age by Theodore Roszak and published in 1981 which is nearly 40 years ago. As we all know, computer technology has exploded since then. Naturally the reader must make allowances, but I had no trouble at all fitting the story and events into something that relates to the current computerized world we live in and the scene in general.
 

The novels of Roszak could be seen as a kind of a spin-off of his main work as an academic in the field of ecopsychology. This could also be the opposite, the academic stuff might have been the day job of a novelist. At any rate this novel’s main overriding theme, and genesis, is an inquiry into the use of high-tech tools by humans and what can go on, which is mostly go wrong, because these tools have an inherent mathematical view of reality that is opposed to the overriding traditional reality of earth and all contained in it which is mysterious and ultimately unknowable or containable.

 This is the basic theme of two of his other novels. They deal with different technologies and the basic questions of the human, mostly male, desire for knowledge to be used for power and domination over the rest of the natural world which humans are only a part of. So the novel and his work is relevant to now because the story, the battle, is still going on. The issues he is on about can be directly linked to the primary issues of our time such as industrially manufactured climate change, and the culture of patriarchy.

With Bugs, noted on the cover as his first novel, the approach is something that feels like a sci-fi thriller, something that would be a cool adaptation to film. If this was the impulse, it was successful, it’s an exciting suspenseful breezy read, that is serious at its core with cautions of real and previously unknown dangers.
 

His later novel, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, is a more serious and to me the better, deeper, novel. These two works also shame a polar conflict dynamic between Male-Science-Technology-Dominionism-Power and Female-Naturist-Wiccan-Magical-Unity, in direct opposition in both novels. The origin of the conflict being an aggressiveness from the “Male” side, a reach too far to a wrong type knowledge while walking away from a long standing human more feminine culture and ignoring its more subtle but deeper in nature, more fundamentally nourishing, old technology rituals and riches. 

In the Frankenstein book it was Victor’s need to create and dominate life while denying unity with Elizabeth and Nature, and the chance to be trained as another type of magician. 

Bugs is set in a national computer center, The Brain, with the male functionary director losing control of the now deadly technology, seeking assistance from a cult of artists and academics that is reviving ancient Wiccan spells and dancing naked in the moonlight.
 

I am happy to have discovered this fine mind wandering the stacks in a Long Island last year. His work has had a lasting effect on me and my view of myself, as the world and in the world. The male/female, nature vs machine, material, being of most use to me currently.

I borrowed Bugs from the Brooklyn Public Library. I was in the main branch. It wasn’t on the accessible fiction shelves but they had it for me out of storage ten minutes after I asked for it. Not many others reading these odd old books that I enjoy so much.