Distance Haze [Mass Market Paperback]

Jamil Nasir (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 29, 2000

If dreams are doorways, where do they take us?

The Deriwelle Institute has millions in funding, Nobel prize-winning scientists, and a mission that could be crazy--or about to change the world....

Science fiction writer Wayne Dolan--his career at a standstill and his life adrift--has just entered the Deriwelle Institute.  Built on sacred Indian ground in southwest Michigan, it's posh, well funded...and perhaps the world's biggest hoax.  At least that's what Wayne thinks.  Using advanced technology, Deriwelle's scientists say they are on a mission to find God.  In reality, one is a grieving father hoping to contact his dead child.  Another has invented a baseball cap to measure unusual brain waves.  Yet another says he has a vaccine to eliminate the genes that program humans to be religious.

Are they all crackpots? Maybe. But from the moment Wayne walks through the Institute's door, eerie events plague him: a recurring dream about a bank account number, visions of an ethereal girl, and the appearance of an old Indian shaman.  Of course, Wayne sees the shaman only when he's asleep.  And what is about to happen when Wayne is awake may be a nightmare of obsession, twisted desire, and secrets no human is ready to know....

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Truth proves stranger than fiction at southwestern Michigan's Deriwelle Institute for the Technological Study of Religion, host to highly paid scientists who are building a computer model of the soul. Suffering from writer's block and on the verge of a midlife crisis, 43-year-old science fiction writer Wayne Dolan agrees to his editor's request to boost lagging sales by writing a nonfiction piece about the institute, which has been built on sacred burial grounds. He soon teeters between insanity and enlightenment: the eccentricities around him filter into his own life; vivid dreams of an Indian shaman lead him to deposit thousands of dollars into a mysterious bank account; and he falls for a crippled, dope-addicted prostitute who says her Nobel laureate father made her the guinea pig for a vaccine that eradicates what makes humans religious. In this captivating near-future novel, Nasir (Tower of Dreams) expertly blurs the already vague distinction between Wayne's reality and fantasy. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"[Nasir is] a writer who loves words and can turn them into the vital stuff of experience....You'll see a world through new eyes."
--Jack Dann

"A fresh and intriguing science fiction voice."
--The Denver Post

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Spectra (February 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553579959
• ISBN-13: 978-0553579956
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #595,085 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jamil Nasir was born in Chicago, Illinois, but spent much of his childhood in the Middle East, surviving two major wars. He returned to the U.S. in 1970, and started college at age 14, studying hard science, philosophy, psychology, history, and so many other things that he finally graduating from the University of Michigan with a Bachelors of General Studies degree. He also attended the University of Michigan Law School, graduating Magna Cum Laude in 1983. Between stints at school he hitchhiked extensively around North America, working as a carpenter, fruit picker, warehouseman, gardener, shop clerk, and paralegal, among others. He currently works on large regulatory and litigation matters at a Washington, D.C. law firm, and lives in a suburb of Washington with his two daughters. He collects art, holds a Black Belt, 2nd Dan in Tae Kwon Do, and is a devotee of many subjects. His hobbies are photography and rampant metaphysical speculation. He is the winner of the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, France's top science fiction award, and the Special Citation of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award for best science fiction paperback published in the U.S. His website is www.jamilnasir.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Words From The Far Green Continent, March 22, 2000

By 

Jane Campbell (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Distance Haze (Mass Market Paperback)

DISTANCE HAZE, Nasir's fourth novel, is a breakthrough book for this author. Always highly rich and visual, this time his prose comes together with a plot that is downright balletic.

Main character Wayne Dolan, a novelist, is going through a midlife crisis that ought to have a little in it for everyone--absent children, sexual insecurity, financial burdens, spiritual panic, creative block--when his editor arranges a nonfiction book assignment for him. He takes it reluctantly, and begins a painful, scary journey in many dimensions. It's science fiction, not a fairy tale, but midlifers will find no small comfort in the book's resolution.

Slightly flawed by an excess of characters, some of whom are too interesting, too hastily drawn, or both, DISTANCE HAZE is nonetheless full of "maddeningly beautiful" (to quote Dolan), disturbing descriptions. These include ones of Lake Michigan which, not unlike descriptions in THE SHIPPING NEWS, raise a body of water to the status of a character.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A thought-provoking page-turner, March 24, 2000

By 

Lynn Gallagher (Washington DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Distance Haze (Mass Market Paperback)

Distance Haze accomplishes the almost impossible -- It raises important and thought-provoking issues concerning religion and the importance of brain chemistry on the outside world, yet it is also an entertaining page-turner that thoroughly engages the reader. It is also a mystery and a love story. Jamil Nasir has found a wonderful voice in telling this story, which crosses over from the usual science fiction. This is a book that anyone who is interested in these big issues would enjoy, not just science fiction devotees.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A probing exploration of hope and redemption, March 22, 2000

By 

Peter H. Burris (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Distance Haze (Mass Market Paperback)

Where Tower of Dreams, Jamil Nasir's prior book, went out to the limits of our fascination wth Exoticism in its exploration of dreams and desire, Distance Haze pulls the reader back to personal aaccountability for dreams.

By establishing an academic forum with unlimited resources to discover God through Science, Nasir cleverly plays out one man's reach for faith and love, without pandering to maudlin sentimentalism or the very glossy commodities that Tower of Dreams exposed as perilous.

Wayne Dolan, Nasir's protagonist, is a recently divorced writer. As he undergoes some of the most probing and disturbing visions of what could be, what has been and what he wished he'd done in the past confront him at every turn; Counter-balanced against these reflections are the contentious academic egos at the Deriwelle Institute. The egos probing the questions of God and scientific integrity remind Wayne Dolan just how fragile human beings can be and why dreams play such a large part of our inquiries into truth. Such frailties come into sharp relief when Dolan wiggles into a painful affair with the troubled daughter of one of the institute's shining stars.

Distance Haze brooks no quarter where painful inquiry is concerned, but it is not without its hopeful moments...episodes of faith in the human ability to circumvent pettiness in the interests of beauty abd tenderness.