A Richard Thieme Reader: A Collection of Selected Fiction and Nonfiction

A Tale of Two Sciences: Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist by Peter A. Sturrock

April 6, 2010

A Tale of Two Sciences: Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist by Peter A. Sturrock (Exoscience: Palo Alto) 2009. by Richard Thieme “A Tale of Two Sciences:  Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist,” by Dr. Peter A. Sturrock, is a personal work by the well-known Stanford physicist and astrophysicist, reflecting on the sometimes complementary, sometimes discordant threads [...]

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Northward into the Night

April 1, 2010

Old men sometimes try to tell the truth. But no one listens. No one listens because no one wants to know.  People prefer to sleepwalk through life. They use the trance logic of a hypnotic subject, walk around chairs they insist are not there. Old men’s words fall to the ground like birds hitting windows. [...]

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Remembering Who We Are

January 8, 2010

The Second Edition:  Remembering Who We Are Most of us live a large part of our lives skating on the ice of trivial essentials, the necessary tasks that fill our waking days. We pause from time to time and look at the etched images in the ice and think, this is the pattern of our [...]

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I Remember Mama – A Mini-Memoir

May 12, 2009

I Remember Mama by Richard Thieme published in Review Americana, Summer 2009 I remember my mother talking on the telephone. She sat on the telephone bench in the hallway, turned toward the wall. She always talked loudly, as if what she had to say had been compressed and forced itself out of her. Energy sprayed [...]

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BRB – chapter three

April 21, 2009

“I forgot how to cry,” Cerie said, “so I don’t. They say cry if you can but I can’t. They told me to write everything down, even a poem or a song, but who the fuck knows how to do that? I can’t make up a song. I don’t know how to write a poem. [...]

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Cliche – chapter two

April 21, 2009

“There he is!” his mother shrieked. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Look at him—Paul! Paul!” He was twenty-fourth. His mother had counted. They marched through the door from the quiet transport into a screaming mess, cameras and lights, frantic wives and husbands and kids. The chaos hit him like a shockwave. Paul abstracted out [...]

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Entering Sacred Digital Space: Seeking to Distinguish the Dreamer and the Dream

February 6, 2009

By Richard Thieme Defining the Challenge: The ‘Study’ of ‘Sacred Texts’ in the Digital Era The single quotation marks around ‘study’ and ‘sacred texts’ signify that the words inside them no longer mean what they used to mean. The symbols and images of religious experience are no longer fixed in print but are now flowing. [...]

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Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark

December 1, 2008

A splendid slipstream anthology (Subtle Edens, from Elastic Press: London, November 2008) includes this breakthrough story, which received this review: “Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark” by Richard Thieme opens with a quote from James Joyce, whom I consider to be a primogenitor of slipstream. Thieme, fortunately, doesn’t try to match Joyce for wordplay and instead gives [...]

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Changing Contexts of Security and Ethics: You Can’t Have One Without the Other – for New Paradigms in Security Workshop 2008

September 27, 2008

CHANGING CONTEXTS OF SECURITY AND ETHICS: YOU CAN’T HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER by Richard Thieme Because implicit ethical and moral dimensions emerge from new social and cultural structures as a result of technological transformations, any discussion of ethics in relationship to the implementation of new technologies must take into account a heightened awareness of [...]

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The Man Who Hadn’t Disappeared

June 1, 2008

by Richard Thieme [This story was published in the Spring 2008 edition of Karamu (Vol. XXI, No. 1), a literary magazine published by the Department of English and the Office of Grants and Research at Eastern Illinois University with additional support from the Illinois Arts Council. It was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.] Harry or [...]

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A Review of Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense By Jonathan D. Moreno

June 22, 2007

Dana Press (The Dana Foundation: New York and Washington DC) 2006 Richard Thieme “What we don’t know is so much bigger than we are.” — A Haitian Proverb Oh, how I wish that reviewing a book like this were simple and straightforward! That would mean we live in a world of transparency, government accountability to [...]

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Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror by Steven H. Miles, M. D. (Random House. New York. 2006)

December 26, 2006

Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror by Steven H. Miles, M. D. (Random House. New York. 2006) Reviewed by Richard Thieme ThiemeWorks PO Box 170737 Milwaukee WI 53217-8061 414 351 2321 rthieme@thiemeworks.com www.thiemeworks.com We all come to big issues like torture and terror from our own biographies. We cannot be  dispassionate [...]

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My Summer Vacation

July 8, 2006

[The line between fiction and non-fiction is sometimes easy to discern, sometimes not. In this case, not. Names are always changed, of course, to protect the not-so-innocent. Someone might note that I had jobs every year with the city of Chicago while attending Northwestern University thanks to Alderman Tom Rosenberg, later a judge, with whom [...]

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Interview with David MacMichael, former CIA Analyst, US Marine and historian

February 13, 2006

Interview with David MacMichael by Richard Thieme David MacMichael is a former CIA Analyst, US Marine and historian.  He was a senior estimates officer with special responsibility for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the CIA’s National Intelligence Council from 1981 to 1983. He resigned from the CIA rather than falsify reports for political reasons and testified [...]

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Interview with Edgar Mitchell, ScD., Captain USN (Ret)

July 18, 2005

Interview with Edgar Mitchell, ScD., Captain USN (Ret) by Richard Thieme RT: You’ve been involved with consciousness studies, including the exploration of UFOs, for some time. What’s your primary focus? EM: My focus has never been primarily on UFOs. My focus has been consciousness studies for thirty years. I kind of back doored into this [...]

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Gibby the Sit-down King

June 1, 2005

[This was published in the Timber Creek Review in 2005. I'm glad it was. Like "The Geometry of Near," it's a geek story, and the people on whom the character Gibby McDivitt was based comes clearly and with a chuckle to mind. The story links to "They Call Him Mister Tubby" in Imaginary Gardens (May [...]

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Road Warrior

December 31, 2004

The real life of a modern knight in a landscape of sameness. Published in Porcupine.

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Incident at Wolf Cove

October 1, 2004

[Incident at Wolf Cove was published in the Summer/Fall 2004 issue (xxiii,i) of The Puckerbrush Review, Gossamer Press, Old Town, Maine.Prior to her death, the editor, Constance Hunting was a wonderful editor and offered nuanced support for many writers. The old PR was a treasure. The story was also published online as "a real page-turner" [...]

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Break, Memory

July 11, 2004

The story was subsequently accepted by Timber Creek Review but then not printed because it had appeared in some form somewhere, and it was reprinted by Bewildering Stories and included in their “best of” quarterly collection. I wrote this story not long after a good friend, Clint Brooks, who had a distingished career with the [...]

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The Enemy is the Machine: A Letter from Israel

June 12, 2004

The Enemy is the Machine: A Letter from Israel by Richard Thieme In a world frightened of both terror and warnings about terror, what is the worst danger?  To live with fear or not to live at all? And if we dare to live, should we fear most an explosion or the loss of our [...]

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Coming of Age

March 23, 2004

The number isn’t important, friends have been saying when I talk about turning sixty. Some say, age is only a state of mind. Some say, you’re as young as you feel. Some say, age doesn’t matter. And some say, why, you look great! which unfortunately confirms that there really are three stages of life: youth, [...]

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Talking to Ourselves

January 14, 2004

Once upon a time in the sixties, I published a short story in Analog Science Fiction about a man who invented a virtual reality machine and let a carnival owner try it out. The carnival owner was so hypnotized by the fantasy world and its contrast with the grim realities of his life that he [...]

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A Miracle By Any Other Name

September 20, 2003

If any column is about “the human dimension of technology,” it’s this one, inasmuch as last week, my beloved youngest son Barnaby had more tubes in him, more drips dripping, more monitors flashing around him than a cyborg out of Terminator 3. When I arrived at the ICU and saw, moving among the noisy machinery, [...]

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Why We Are All Getting a Little Crazy

September 5, 2003

James Jesus Angleton embodied the inevitable trajectory of a person committed to counterintelligence. Maybe he got a little crazy at the end but that might explain why we are all getting a little crazy too. Angleton was director of counterintelligence for the CIA from 1954 until 1974. Fans of spy fiction might think of him [...]

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Whistleblowers and Team Players

January 17, 2003

It was only after whistleblowers came out of the closet during the Great Deflation that Time Magazine honored the practice of what team players call “ratting out your pals.” Conservative magazines like Time may give lip service to whistleblowing in the abstract but never champion whistle blowers until after they have sung. Instead they support [...]

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Child’s Play

April 3, 2001

Games Engineers Play was one of the first Islands-in-the-Clickstream columns I wrote. In it I observed that a society socializes its young through games, teaching them through play the attitudes and skills we want them to have. Those of us who have grown to middle age through the current technological revolution have learned to partner [...]

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“The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up” by Terry Hansen

March 26, 2001

“The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up” by Terry Hansen Xlibris. 2000. Reviewed by Richard Thieme IUR, International UFO Reporter, Spring 2001 (Volume 26, Number 1) a publication of the J. Allen Hynek Center for the Study of UFOs It is a staple of the modern era of propaganda and public relations [...]

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All Geered Up: An Interview with Dan Geer

October 27, 2000

ALL GEERED UP:  AN INTERVIEW WITH DAN GEER Dan Geer, @Stake CTO and the new president of USENIX, muses about privacy, security culture and the importance of self-reliance in the age of ubiquitous networks. INTERVIEWED BY RICHARD THIEME Editor’s Note: Dr. Dan Geer, chief technology officer of @Stake, was recently elected president of the USENIX [...]

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A Vision of Possibilities

October 24, 1998

It is one thing (some would say the only thing) to apprehend that clear focus inside our own field of subjectivity that enables us to aim our lives with greater precision and another thing to begin building a different construction of reality based on the modular building blocks provided by our society. But that construction [...]

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Signatures of All Things

July 25, 1998

The experience of a mystic and the wisdom of James Joyce converge in a single phrase. “Signatures of all things I am here to read,” wrote Joyce, putting the words of Jacob Boehme, a German mystic, into the mind of Stephen Dedalus. Boehme struggled to articulate the meaning of the symbols he saw emblazoned on [...]

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Voyagers

April 4, 1998

When we come to a new place or enter a new environment, the landscape looks all of a piece, and we have to learn how to see it in depth and detail. Our interaction with new cultures teach us over time how to understand them. When I moved to Maui in the eighties, I lived [...]

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Ferg’s Law

December 16, 1997

This is how the Internet works: Somebody in Kentucky finds one of my columns and asks to reprint it in a newsletter. Our email exchange begins a dialogue – in this case, on Buddhism, on-line spirituality, and how the world works – and in one of her exchanges, my email pal says, “I have a [...]

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Detours

November 24, 1997

When Carl Jung was an old man, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a friend asked, “Dr. Jung, could you please tell me the shortest path to my life’s goals?” Without a moment’s hesitation, Jung replied: “The detours!” My wife was taught by her parents that trips began at the front door and headed straight to their [...]

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A Digital Fable

November 14, 1997

A sacred canopy of shared belief used to soar above our heads like a large umbrella, keeping us warm and dry as the contradictory data of real life beat down. A canopy doesn’t have to be sacred — any canopy will do — but because our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it [...]

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The Day the Computer Prayed

October 24, 1997

When a computer prays, is it really prayer? And I mean real prayer, I don’t mean some mood-altering self-manipulation. I mean, is there an intentional focus of energy and intelligence, the intelligence of the heart, so that something happens beyond the merely subjective, something that percolates powerfully through all the levels of our consciousness? Nor [...]

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Contact

August 20, 1997

Some people don’t like the scene in the movie “Contact” in which Jodie Foster as a SETI scientist meets the aliens because we aren’t shown what the aliens look like. I think that was the right way to do it. We can’t think the unthinkable; from inside the old paradigm, we can’t imagine what the [...]

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Fractals, Hammers, and Other Tools

May 1, 1997

“Fractint” was one of the first computer programs I encountered that blew my mind. (It’s still out there on the Internet. Download one if you want to try it.) Fractint generates fractals. Fractals are mathematical formulae that express complex realities with elegant simplicity. Before computers, you had to have a mathematician’s mind to grasp the [...]

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The Interior Castle

April 19, 1997

The Interior Castle The spatial metaphor of architecture has deep implications. A house, for example, is an archetypal symbol for the psyche; when we dream of houses, we are dreaming of our interior “space.” Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle described spiritual development as analogous to the exploration of hidden rooms. Similarly, orators in ancient [...]

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Dreams Engineers Have

January 1, 1997

I confess: I’m a right-brain guy in a left-brain world. Images and visions are more real to me than abstractions, I see the future more easily than things that are right in front of my face. That’s why I started writing fiction and sold my first story at seventeen. “Pleasant Journey” was published in Analog [...]

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Stalking the UFO Meme. or, How to Build a UFO … Story

November 1, 1996

Stalking the UFO Meme by Richard Thieme published as  “How to Build a UFO … Story”  in Internet Undergr0und. November 1996 (Vol 1, Issue 12) “There is Thingumbob shouting!” the Bellman said. “He is shouting like mad, only hark! He is waving his hands, he is waggling his head, He has certainly found a Snark!” [...]

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In Search of the Grail

May 18, 1995

In Search of the Grail Originally published in Wired For Moses, it was a burning bush. For Buddha, it happened under the bo tree. For me, it was playing a game of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with my son. As we threaded our way past babel fish and Vogon poetry readings, I discovered that [...]

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