Review of the New Remote Viewing Novel "Circles" – An Exploration of the Crop Circle Phenomena
Revealing the plans behind The Mystery Revealed.
by Author X
When billionaire Elliot Burbank hires PSICORP to find his missing son, they assemble the finest psychic remote viewing unit since the cold war. Able to penetrate the deepest secrets of the universe using only their minds, the Omega Team soon find themselves in a race to save the child from the clutches of his abductors. But in this race there is only one way to win. The team must solve one of the most elusive enigmas of our century.
So goes the jacket blurb on the newest addition to the Remote Viewing family, a publication released by the Lifequest Publishing Group for PSI TECH by the name of Circles: The Mystery Revealed. One could certainly insert a Monty Python-esque tidbit here about the name. "Circles? What secrets do circles have? Do they go around in a lopsided fashion? Is it going to elope with a triangle? Tell me now, what sinister plans could this deviant polygon have to unleash upon the world?"
As the cover image suggests, the "circles" aspect actually has little to do with shapes and more to do with the unusual markings that have come to be known as cereal glyphs: more succinctly, crop circles. Of course, even there the mystery lies rather flaccidly, unless one takes upon the myriad stories of energy ley-lines and other cosmic artifacts able to be sensed by a handful of self-proclaimed 'sensitives' who know more about these things than any of us care to know. The key questions to be answered are not what the circles are, but rather who makes them and more menacingly, why these acts of terrestrial graffiti continue to appear around the world. The answer to that, obviously, lays inside the book itself, wrapped around a delightful story of the circumstances and the remote viewers who are called upon to solve this mystery. But more about that later.
For years now, PSI TECH has been eager and excited to release tales of Remote Viewing projects and the associated mysteries therein to the mass populace, in a form easier to swallow than the usual glib reply one may find in the chat room, such as "Why don't you just TRV it?" Of course, not many will be willing to perform the requisite mental gymnastics required to accomplish said Remote Viewing session, an endeavor akin to assembling a 1,000 piece puzzle set for the sheer entertainment aspect of it (and my apologies to those who actually do assemble crossword puzzles for entertainment on a nightly basis — I will hope for your cable television to be turned back on soon). For the more HBO-oriented crowd, something more simple than undertaking the full-on course was required.
Enter the Omega Series, a serial-style collection of novels set in the modern day, but with a twist. Although the usual daily events go on, such as wars, famine, kidnappings, political intrigue, and even the brewing at Starbucks, the world portrayed in the Omega Series contains a small difference. In the world of the Omega Series, there exists a secret base, home and operations center for the world's most elite psychic spies. Deep in the jungle, under its glass-lined ceilings, sculpted rock walls and lush botanical expanses (which contain a few mysteries of their own, from what I understand), the center known as Eden hums away as the world's central hub for serious psychic spying. You might call Eden and its residents the A-Team of the intel world. Fortunately for us, this psychic A-Team doesn't wear fancy gold jewelery or need to spend inordinate amounts of time constructing battle vehicles from backyard scrap; they have everything they need right there in their heads. As regular readers of The Matrix will no doubt be aware, this refers to the skill of Technical Remote Viewing.
The first book in the series, as noted earlier, is Circles. As with all books in the series, the story revolves around a central core of information gleaned from actual Technical Remote Viewing sessions performed by PSI TECH and its viewers. Like a tootsie-pop, this chewy, caramel-like core is covered in a sweet but somewhat more challenging fictional aspect, most of which revolves around the Eden center, its resident administrators, and the five Remote Viewers who do the actual 'enigma penetration'. This daring crew is brought to us courtesy of the writing talents of Kimberly Snow (yes, the same one that writes articles for The Matrix newsletter).
Like many good authors before her, Snow cut her literary teeth on poetry (some of it detailed in the independently published Fire and Mirth), capturing the fine details in small cutaways of ordinary, everyday life. This attention to detail comes through with great effect in her portrayal of the Eden team. In many ways, the social dynamics amongst the team, and their own personal reasons for both learning Remote Viewing and choosing to abandon their old lives to a degree to join up with the Eden program, are far more interesting and overshadow the data itself in some instances. But this is not a bad thing at all. In fact, I could compare the dynamics and their completeness to a level usually seen in a good Stephen King mystery/horror novel. Like King, Snow enjoys getting inside the character's heads, not just dictating to us what they are doing but what on Earth makes them do so. In many instances this is a fantastic addition, as most would agree running off to a secluded island in the Pacific to hang around scribbling odd shapes on paper isn't quite up to par with normal weekend hobbies. I was never left wanting to know what was going on, why it was going on, or faced with terminal boredom during slower moments of the story.
As with many first installments of good series, a large part of the book is spent identifying and introducing us to the characters that propel the story forwards. Head of the Eden project, the dynamic duo of Jane and Daniel Byron call upon the resources of three live-in associates. Shawna, a high-spirited, bubbly blonde (but with brown hair), manages the plants, animals, files, and acts as general gopher, providing a much-needed exuberance around the life-and-death projects carried out on the premises. Jeff Kilmer is a driven, though somewhat aggressive groundskeeper, the kind of anchorman you want to make sure everything gets done. Elric, the resident technophile, maintains and runs everything electric, and his dark personality provides an interesting black comedy aspect to many parts of the project. Gene, the gatekeeper, ensures security with a sidearm and his ever-present collection of ID badges. This crew supports the Remote Viewing wunderkind who fly in and out of the project while performing their feats of mental gymnastics.
The foremost of these teams is known simply as Omega. The Omega team is comprised of five individuals, taken from all over the world. Each of them has their own reasons for coming to Eden, and all of them have their own skeletons in their closet, as well as their own hopes and wishes for their lives as well as others'. Jorge Jones, an eccentric gambler, attempts to live large the easy way, and finds out the hard way that doing so usually comes at a great cost. Rodrigo Mondego, a young professor in particle physics, brings a withdrawn and shy side of the team, intrinsically capable of fantastic things but often without the personal knowledge of how to accomplish them. Joe Keats, a retired beat cop who has seen more heinousness in his day than his psyche wishes to admit, attempts to save the world one missing persons case at a time. Melanie Tipton is the straight-up country girl with attitude. An accomplished veterinarian, she can do anything she sets her mind to, except confront the ghosts of her lost child. Aiden Shepherd is a dynamic bad boy archaeologist, for whom rules are merely things in the way of uncovering secret historical digs discovered with TRV data. These five individuals make up the Omega Team, some of them reluctantly, some of them eagerly. Propelling this lot of characters forward to a confrontation with things larger than themselves is the larger-than-life billionaire Elliot Burbank. Burbank is a man who is used to buying everything. That is, until all the money in the world is useless as investigator after investigator comes up empty in the search for his abducted son. And so we dive straight into the world of Remote Viewing.
If there is a failing with the book, it could only be that it is done too well as a dramatized account. In some respects the reader is left with the definite feeling that the Eden project and her crew are simply too good a thing to exist in this world. Yet in others, the interplay of politics and the everyday shortcomings of humanity captured within demonstrate a certain realistic downer that keeps the book from being able to be enjoyed on a simple, pure fantasy level. None of this really intrudes on the purpose of the story. If anything, it created an entirely different experience that I was not anticipating: an enjoyable adventure on its own merit. While the mystery and Remote Viewing data is indeed "revealed" as promised, it is done so in the manner of a good play. We see a little bit of what is behind the great curtain on the stage, but only enough to keep us wanting to go from one scene to the next. By the end of the book, there are more questions than answers, but none of those questions stem from the original topic of the book. We definitely know what created the circles, and a little bit about why. Some of us probably already have a pretty good guess about what form the answer to the who part will take, but I doubt that anyone has yet uncovered the why part that is touched on in this book. Could it have been more explicit in that detail? Most likely. This is not a CIA after-action report. Those of you looking for a cut-and-dry debriefing session will not find it here.
For the introductory cover price of $5.95 (ebook) or $9.95 (paperbook), this is definitely not a bad thing. Let there be no confusion about it: this is a serious, bona-fide novel, despite its initial form as a downloadable PDF document. This is a much better deal than I've gotten on many of the real-deal books of the dead-tree variety hanging out on the aisle displays at Borders, and the story itself is just as entertaining if not more so. The next novel promises to be even more of a character-driven powerhouse, expertly interweaving more of this grand story of the creators of crop circles and their plans for humanity, with the page count to prove it. Author Snow informs me that the next installment of the series will be darker, more dramatic, and continue to open up the grand back-story just touched upon in this first part of the series.
For whatever reasons, be it the subject matter, the team dynamics, perhaps just the Wizard-of-Oz-like magicality of the setting, Circles just clicks. It's an entertaining romp through the world of what-if, mixed in with just enough truth and mystery to make the entire concoction intellectually stimulating as well. I would encourage anyone who is interested in Remote Viewing to take a look at what is possible with a little desire, a little luck, and a lot of TRVing. There are four other books in this series, links are available below.
http://www.superlifecatalog.com/solutions/books/circles.html