Customer Reviews

The new Apocrypha;: A guide to strange science and occult beliefs

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
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This is a magnificent book, a hugely entertaining look at pseudoscience and various kinds of occult/spiritual silliness, from Nostradamus to various "psychic detectives", taking in eternal motion machines, various ludicrous but successful cults that would no doubt sue Amazon if I named them, Noah's Arc, Erich von Daniken, the incredibly strange people who claim to be UFO contactees, the secret codes that "prove" that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, and various other forms of nuttery along the way.

Sladek's expositions of these beliefs are impressively researched, and his use of original sources to let his various cranks and charlatans speak for, and demolish, themselves is brilliantly effective and often hilarious.

I found it a life-changing book. I was already starting to wean myself away from various kinds of woolly thinking - eg taking Lyle Watson more or less seriously - but it wasn't just the extraordinary range of Sladek's material that impressed me, but how much fun the book was. Sladek's obvious glee at challenging various kinds of straight-faced amd deeply serious nonsense is highly enjoyable - and contagious.

Sadly, though (like the previous reviewer) I too was waiting for the encore, there isn't going to be one. Sladek died in 2000. His friend Michael Moorcock apparently suggested that Sladek write "The New Apocrypha"; perhaps Moorcock might provide us with the long-awaited sequel? Anyway, Sladek's science fiction is also well worth reading, though this remains my favourite of his books.

As for the feeble pun in my review title, it's a homage to Sladek, who does rather better. His chapter on flying saucer cullts is headed, childishly but splendidly, "Will U kindly FO?"

Grab this book if you find a copy. Note to publishers: It's time it was re-issued.

Cheers!

Laon

A text well worth searching for! Sladek weaves an exciting book out of what could be a very dry subject. A must-have to be jealously guarded by any aspirant guru-buster. The only thing left to say is...when is the sequel due

Very funny and very informative, this book is a classic of skepticism, mockery, and paranormal scholarship. Sladek does New Agers and credulists the favor of taking their lofty beliefs seriously, then poking them so full of holes they sag into a limp heap on the ground. "The New Apocrypha" belongs on the bookshelf right next to Martin Gardner's "Fads & Fallacies In The Name Of Science" and James Randi's "Flim-Flam". Better than that you cannot get.

After more than 30 years, it's surely time for a reissue-- sadly, Sladek's untimely death makes a new edition impossible.

The exposure of human gullibility and self-delusion is such easy work - demanding only some accurate research - that one wonders why more people do not undertake it. This is, on the face of it, a peculiar project: a science-fiction writer taking time off his day job to write one long guide of the strangest kind of cultish or pseudo-scientific stuff that was wheeling around in the late sixties and early seventies (a time very sympathetic to such things). The book is economically written, well referenced and good fun, and the author, as one would expect from a capable professional writer, is able to send up his subjects with the minimum of effort, letting them speak for themselves. (One quotation from English bad-writing legend Barbara Cartland is particularly to be cherished.)
One has to wonder about his own intellectual position, though. We find out with dismay that he is a friend of Michael Moorcock, who is not only a prejudiced enemy of religion but the author of some of the most odiously immoralistic books ever written (take the praise of rape in GLORIANA or of mass murder in some of the ELRIC books), viciously using a practised "literary" hand to promote views that make John Norman of GOR fame sound mild. And while there is nothing in this book of Moorcock's more extreme and ludicrous attitudes, there is a good deal to suggest that religious positions are neither taken seriously nor knowledgeably. What he describes as the Catholic position in his otherwise well-deserved skewering of Teilhard de Chardin (and he has not even said the worst of Teilhard, who was a lifelong admirer of totalitarian dictatorships and especially of Chinese Communism) makes Catholicism sound more like a variety of Hinduism than the religion of Augustine or Aquinas, Suarez or Chesterton. Besides, one would never understand from his writing that the Catholic Church has condemned Teilhard's writings for the heretical trash that they are (with loud approval, by the way, from one of Moorcock's favourite targets - C.S.Lewis, who was not a Catholic). From a different point of view, his ridiculously unsympathetic and extremely brief reference to the great philosopher Giovanbattista Vico, quoted,`alas, from Benedetto Croce, is gravely prejudicial and puts his readers - who are not likely to have read much philosophy themselves - in danger of excluding themselves from one of the most original and creative minds in many centuries, the father of half a dozen modern disciplines from anthropology to culture history.
Having said all that, this book is more likely to be an influence for good than for evil. If the author has any negative view about religion as such, he keeps them to himself; there is no implication anywhere that the religious person as such is an idiot (such as one finds scattered all over Moorcock). Sladek has only attacked what is more than deserving of attack, and the dose of scepticism he delivers in this book is healthy for any intellectual constitution.