WASHINGTON, D.C.—The current open war within the CIA—between those with good intentions and those who love torture, drugs and dealing on the nuclear black market—had a hidden analogue during the Cold War. Groups operating under various names, one being the Divine CIA, played gift-giving social games on global scale. In Freeplay, novelist Len Bracken envisions a new environmentally conscious generation taking a group of Players away from pedophile blackmail schemes and other suspect tactics toward an impossible act of generosity: giving supersonic implosion engines to the Soviet Union in an effort to prevent the foreseen nuclear meltdown.
Drawing on first-hand experience in Washington with an intentional community that practiced open marriage and had intelligence ties, and experience in Moscow with a terrorist event, Bracken takes the reader into the glasnost era. An American group with access to new versions of the implosion engine created by Viktor Schauberger for the Nazis tries to recruit a Soviet scientist and have him demonstrate these devices to the politburo. As this is happening, other Players are sent on diverse games in various parts of the world. This is a fast-paced tale that, as Mike Gunderloy put it in Factsheet Five, "mimic[s] the rapidfire intercut of information in our media age, collaging together a sort of holographic hyperdimensional text rather than plotting a simple linear story."
Bracken has been honing this text ever since its initial 1989 publication in a hand-bound edition of 300 copies. Now in its third revised edition, Freeplay goes further than ever in depicting the Players and their games. As the author Jim Keith put it before his untimely passing: "From Cam's initial meeting with Tancredo in a bar out of Sam Spade's old haunts, to the debacle in Moscow, to the nirvanic finale, Freeplaykept me glued to the page. It would take someone totally devoid of imagination not to live each scene in this deftly crafted game."
Freeplay is available from iUniverse.com—Paperback $16.95—ISBN: 0-595-41719-1
February 2006
