This is a rare treat indeed; a lot of really interesting ideas in a well-written delivery vehicle. The star of this book is a latter-day grotesque named Dr. Hieronymus Fields. Aside from his food-stained clothing, lurid diet and trademark grease-stained paper bag, he is best known for a book called Starpower. It postulates that the human need for deities, saints and points of reference (in both geography and time) will be met in the future, by celebrities. What gives this book its particular edge is that the good doctor works for the British Secret Service. Thus we see how an agency that wishes to manipulate and shape public perception interacts with these theories, and, we are made to wonder if this is not already taking shape out here in consensus reality.
“Entertainment State was now a muscular and questing animal, thirsty for depth-propaganda, desperately anxious that its liberally scattered first spores fell on fertile ground. Passing by him now was a gaggle of shifty pink-rinse lecturers in the now-approved Pop Culture courses at colleges and universities… He was glad to know that if Jimmy James and Tommy Trinder and Bo Diddley and Sharon Stone were to be seriously studied to the same depth as Einstein and Shakespeare, then a hell of a lot of resistance had still to be broken before the worn-down middle ground was captured and secured.” SA

Publisher: New Futurist
Paperback: 274 pages