Hi, I’m the author, Tyler Alterman. Right now I’m querying literary agents for Psychofauna, and the letter I’m sending them contains a pretty good summary of the novel. If you know a good agent, please introduce me!
[WARNING: Don’t read the parts below if you want to feel surprised by the first section of the book.]
Hello.
You may be alarmed (or thrilled) to learn that the entire world has turned telepathic. Lies now leak. Emotions spread like plague. The collective unconscious is waking up: myths, archetypes, and warring ideologies leap mind-to-mind across the streets of New York. Amidst this chaos, one fifteen-year-old obsessive named Dante Baruch-Williams must save his only friend from an idea that he set loose.
That’s Dante over there, hiding behind a hot dog cart, cataloguing you in his notebook. Hopefully it’s not too weird of him to jot down the clothes you wear, the way you walk, the way you talk—oh! There! He’s found your archetype amongst his extensive maps of human culture. You’re a [literary agent].
Dante’s maps have made him internet-famous for exposing the psychic organisms that possess more New Yorkers by the day. The catch: these psychofauna feed on exactly the sort of attention that Dante is giving them.
PSYCHOFAUNA is a 117,000-word adult speculative novel. It combines the cognitive horror of THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION with the voice-forward worldbuilding of THE CITY WE BECAME and the intimate stakes of Pluribus.
The novel comes directly from my experiences at an institute called Leverage Research, which imploded amidst its investigations into contagious mental phenomena (really). Futher inspirations for Psychofauna include Dune, Foundation, Nexus, Ted Chiang’s “Understand” amongst many many others. I live in NYC, where I help run Fractal – a creative collective with a housing network, a peer-led university, and venues across Brooklyn and Manhattan.
A Guided Tour to the World of Psychofauna
The year is 2025. A bioengineered pandemic has swept the world. It’s a retrovirus that genetically alters nervous systems. Now our bodies grow more magnetoreceptors. We all become sensitive to the weak electromagnetic fields given off by other people’s brainwaves (and the bodily equivalent). As a result, everyone becomes "vibe psychic."
Subway rides become psychedelic experiences as you become permeated by the inner worlds of others.
Walking through the park, the vibe of each person you pass washes over you, sometimes alongside their intentions, emotions and vague mental imagery…like an aura of hazy psychic information & feels that radiates out from them.
Psychic contagions rise as boundaries between minds fall. Dancing plagues & flash riots sweep the streets.
Shockwaves of peace radiate out from meditation groups. (And/or self-denial, depending on what type of meditation they’re practicing.)
The spirit of Woodstock bewitches boomers, making them strip naked and practice free love all over again.
Increased feedback between brains grants new life to imaginal entities. Phantasmal beings form frequent mirages across the streets of our cities, where the high density of brains increases the vividness of our shared daydreams.
Hallucinatory devils, dragons, unicorns, and famous fictional characters run rampant – toying with us humans, befriending us, inspiring us, or generally hogging our attention (which they live off of in the same way we live off food and water).
Novel, stranger psychofauna start to develop ecological niches in our shared imaginations. They are documented by new publications like Psi-tings and by people like Mapmaker.
The power of these imaginal beings is belief-based. If we believe that a particular psychofauna is powerful, then it will have increased power over our minds and actions. And so hallucinatory gods fill the top of the hierarchy, growing larger as they possess the brains of new followers.
Though these psychic creatures exist only in people's minds, they begin to influence worldly events by capturing both willing and unwilling hosts.
Egregores (collective minds) & ideologies spread like wildfire. Culture wars become holy wars, each side fighting to stop the other tribe’s beliefs from spreading.
Many people fall into hallucinatory fantasy worlds. Human avatars reinforce their own memeplexes through extreme dress & behavior.
Meditators, hypnotists & mental magick practitioners unleash sorcerous powers across the realm of shared imagination.
For example: If one throws a phantasmal fireball at you, it won’t light you on fire (it’s imaginary). But if that person’s charisma convinces you that the fire is real, you will feel its illusory flames burning you. And that might just give you a heart attack.
The fate of human consciousness will be decided by whichever coalition of humans, gods, and living ideas can create the most compelling memeplex. (Memeplex: a system of beliefs, behaviors, and modes of presence.) Most of these coalitions are dangerous – prizing the survival and expansion of the memeplex over the wellbeing of its hosts.
However, a few intrepid members of society are devoted to psychoecology: evolving and nurturing an ecology of memeplexes that promote flourishing. The dreamers amongst them call this ecology “the Polyphony.”
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When I describe the world of Psychofauna, a common reaction is, "But our world is like that!" And I reply, "Huh, you don't say." =)
