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Radix #3
Arc of the Dream
The ARC—Earth’s Last Hope? The Arc, a being of immense power, trapped within a continuum too small, fights for its freedom. Its monumental struggle will touch a few select individuals on Earth—and in doing so, change their lives forever. The Arc may also be the last hope for humanity’s survival. Another mind-bending work from the critically acclaimed author of Radix. “Arc of the Dream melds physics and metaphysics, adventure and speculation, intellectual entertainment and deeply felt emotion...A step forward for a major writer.”—Norman Spinrad “A. A. Attanasio’s Arc of the Dream is a kaleidoscopic adventure, a potent piece of storytelling pulsing with menace, yet thoughtfully and gracefully rendered.”—Roger Zelazny
336 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 1986
11 people are currently reading
254 people want to read
About the author
A.A. Attanasio
47 books360 followersI’m a novelist and student of the imagination living in Honolulu. Fantasies, visions, hallucinations or whatever we call those irrational powers that illuminate our inner life fascinate me. I’m particularly intrigued by the creative intelligence that scripts our dreams. And I love carrying this soulful energy outside my mind, into the one form that most precisely defines who we are: story.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 15, 2022
This is one of those books. It not only has a slow start to it but there's a rocky shoal that crashes our boat and leaves us bereft of anything to anchor ourselves until much later.
I'm not saying this is a bad book. Indeed, later on, once we get to know our four main characters and a multidimensional alien that needs their help to save the earth, it fairly rocks.
BUT first, we need to get through the mind-trippy extradimensional dense worldbuilding that makes me both very happy and bewildered because it requires some close attention to get through it without the initial investment/payoff that we normally achieve long before such a thing crosses our eyes -- if it ever crosses our eyes. Most books don't go off the deep end with fantastical hard-SF quantum physics extrapolations and theories about life forms or how they slip into our universe or get snagged on matter, hurting them so badly that they reach out -- quasi-unsuccessfully -- to humans all over the world for help.
From there, however, it's a pretty neat Theodore Sturgeon-esq More Than Human adventure/romp that gifts all four humans with cool powers. Massive foresight, massive physical abilities, or massive telepathy make this character-driven novel pretty rocking... LATER ON.
I guess I'd say this is a cool-idea novel that suffers from a few writing snags but it is still worth the effort, regardless.
I'm not saying this is a bad book. Indeed, later on, once we get to know our four main characters and a multidimensional alien that needs their help to save the earth, it fairly rocks.
BUT first, we need to get through the mind-trippy extradimensional dense worldbuilding that makes me both very happy and bewildered because it requires some close attention to get through it without the initial investment/payoff that we normally achieve long before such a thing crosses our eyes -- if it ever crosses our eyes. Most books don't go off the deep end with fantastical hard-SF quantum physics extrapolations and theories about life forms or how they slip into our universe or get snagged on matter, hurting them so badly that they reach out -- quasi-unsuccessfully -- to humans all over the world for help.
From there, however, it's a pretty neat Theodore Sturgeon-esq More Than Human adventure/romp that gifts all four humans with cool powers. Massive foresight, massive physical abilities, or massive telepathy make this character-driven novel pretty rocking... LATER ON.
I guess I'd say this is a cool-idea novel that suffers from a few writing snags but it is still worth the effort, regardless.
June 15, 2015
3 and a half stars. imperative to read this series in order. high mark for concept. low mark for actual writing, which veers unpredictably from avant-garde to pure pulp, and i'm not sure how well the false-naive voices of the narrative suit the story anyway. still, an important series, about the collision of a 5-dimensional universe with our own in quantum space.
July 16, 2025
review of
A. A. Attanasio's Arc of the Dream
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 16, 2025
I've only read one bk previously by Attanasio, In Other Worlds (my review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). The writing in that one takes the reader on a pretty wild ride, the main character goes thru fantastic transformations that. just. don't. stop: "the author just keeps accelerating the pace of dramatic change throughout, it's relentless." Arc of the Dream is similar, 5 mere mortals become subject to an extra-terrestrial creature that enables them to have special powers so that they can help the ET get off this planet, thusly surviving. It's a thriller, never a dull moment. If I were to speculate, I'd reckon that Attanasio has used consciousness expansion drugs w/ great success for inspiration.
The main action takes place on Hawaii. I've been there & been to both of the volcanos that're featured. I even have a tattoo of one of the volcanos on my left knee b/c I scarred myself on it & I put white tattoos of what scarred me next to the scars. As such, there's a bit of familiarity to the story that enhances it for me. I even made a movie there called "Signs & Symptoms of Leptospirosis". It includes my girlfriend & me walking naked w/ monster masks, hands, & feet thru the active volcano on the Big Island. A sign warns people that if the volcano erupts they'll be burnt into nothingness w/in 15 seconds. We were fine.
"No wonder the Polynesians thought the land belonged to the Gods, Donnie Though. No one else would want to live here. Mountaintops, oceanbottoms, lava fields—the gods always get the crappiest real estate.
"Donnie was a seventeen year old from Honolulu on his high school's senior calss trip to Mauna Loa, the biggest volcano in the world." - p 1
Donnie has a withered laeg & lives in a home for orphans where he's tormented by Dirk, a young bully & criminal. As if that's not enuf, he finds the alien object, roughly the size of a quarter. There the trouble begins.
"The bright object was a slender metallic ovoid, cool to his touch and shimmery as a piece of the wind. He picked it up and the sunlight fanned off it in a spectral smile as he turned it with the fingers of one hand, like a monkey with a strange fruit. It was featureless."
[..]
"He had not the slightest inkling that the object that he was holding was alive, let alone that it was a vaster being than himself.
"The alien in his palm was terrified and in great pain. It was a 5-space being exquisitely bound to a precise point within the continuum, and by moving it, Donnie was killing it. Within its iridium shell, its brain was verging on panic. A conflagration of horror and confusion consumed it." - p 3
The ET, Insideout, checked out Earth for thousands of yrs before it picked a landing spot. Have you ever ridden w/ a driver who's indecisive about picking a parking spot? This was worse.
"The mountain was more inviting because it was surrounded by the warm waters the dolphins loved. Insideout had rejected the site on its first flyby because of the electrical clutter there, signifying again the presence of the photon-loud but otherwise songless animals that the alien had come to fear. There was a sinister texture to their thoughtwaves, and the jumble of radiation that they were dumping into the photon field was appallingly centerless and growing louder with each orbit." - p 10
Not to mention that there's an impressive thunderstorm outisde as I write this & that I'm listening to Alice Coltrane's ashram music. So do the arc & Donnie hit it off?
"The arc had been moved! Insideout was churning with the expanding knowledge of what had happened: Some animal had moved its physical form! It could see the beast in electromagnetic light—one of the radio noise creatures, climbing clumsily over the black rocks, the arc in its hand.
"Donnie saw himself climbing up the rocky incline, and when he reached the exact place where he was standing now, the trance imploded and all memory of the alien's memory was snuffed out in him. He stood like a flash of rain, all awareness of Insideout falling out of him." - p 12
The arc is stolen from Donnie by Dirk, the bully. In previous times, Donnie had gotten revenge on Dirk.
"Another time, Donnie had concocted his own curare, tipped a bent needle with it, and taped it to his shoulder under his shirt. After Dirk slugged him there in his daily endeavor to strike the righteous nerveblow that would numb Donnie's whole arm, his hand swelled up as black and rubbery as an eggplant. He spent two days in the hospital sweating a possible amputation, and Donnie claimed it was purely accidental." - p 37
Well, Dirk becomes one of the 4 humans that Insideout needs to return him to his landing spot or he will die. Another of these 4 is Reena, a woman rescued from a hospital home in France where she's living the life of a vegetable thanks to brain damage, Insideout temporarily makes the barin damage go away, empowers her w/ telepathy & enables her to control what other people do. She leaves France & travels to Hawaii where she's to meet her fellow temporary superhumans. She worries, rightly so, that once Insideout is helped to escape his death on Earth, she'll revert to her brain-damaged state. Insideout promises to save her.
""When my arc is complete, I'll have almost infinite power. Enough power and computational potential to turn you into light with me and to put you back together again whole. On my way home, I'll take a short detour and return you to an earth where you don't exist yet and where you can live a normal life."" - p 122
The ET speaks to Howard, another of the special 4(ces), via Dirk:
""There is no future." Dirk took Howard's arm and turned him to face the ocean so that the wind was kissing him. "The past and future are always here. All times, all minds, all screams and songs are here. But where is here?" Dirk bent close to his ear and said "Rihgt inside the atoms that make up your brain, Howie, That's where reality lurks. Not as atoms but in atoms. Right inside the protons that make up those nuclei is all the time there ever was, is, or will be."" - p 140
It turns out that a completely relaxed state-of-mind is the best weapon against the orcs that our heros must battle in order to get Insideout back where it wants to be.
""Yes-out-of-mind," Reena echoed.
""Lusk is handier. It means the same thing, you know. The primal affirmation of onesness beyond thought. The spell of wholeness. Your ancestors didn't think much of it. To them it was a kind of sloth—a sin. But what can we expect from the great-grandchildren of the rat? Humans are never satisfied unless they're toiling. But to stay close to me, you have to be languid. Lazy. Lusk."" - p 174
Dddduuuuddddddeee! You ARE a stoner!!
There's an Epilogue in wch the reader is informed about how everyone fared.
"Dirk correctly figured out all the details. The arc, he thoerized, had conserved its inertia and the cosmos' total quark-number by using its hypertubes to draw enough energy from the vacuum field to equal Reena's mass. If that energy had been released simply as energy, much of Hawaii would have been vaoprized. Instead, Insideout condensed most of the 4.86 X 1025 ergs of Reena's mass-energy to atoms and fused those atoms to a molecular lace of naphtol ethers, oleo-resins, and cinnamic acid—several hundred cubic liters of a harmless gas. Reena had disappeared in a puff of colorless smoke." - p 255
Right. Insideout cd do that but cdn't just fix her brain & leave her on Earth where she & Dirk cd live happily ever after. Well, that's b/c:
"Megauniverses opened, and timelines spread like crystals across the interface of the singularity and the continuum. The One burst apart, and infinities of shapes unraveled inside the swooping parabola of an event horizon. Mind surged helplessly through these mazing patterns in the form of energy, bewildered and dazzled by the expansive awareness of radiance—radiation!—quanta streaming outward!" - p 258
Ok, ok, I twisted things a little there. Get rrreaaaaallllly stoned & read this bk. It's fun!
A. A. Attanasio's Arc of the Dream
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 16, 2025
I've only read one bk previously by Attanasio, In Other Worlds (my review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). The writing in that one takes the reader on a pretty wild ride, the main character goes thru fantastic transformations that. just. don't. stop: "the author just keeps accelerating the pace of dramatic change throughout, it's relentless." Arc of the Dream is similar, 5 mere mortals become subject to an extra-terrestrial creature that enables them to have special powers so that they can help the ET get off this planet, thusly surviving. It's a thriller, never a dull moment. If I were to speculate, I'd reckon that Attanasio has used consciousness expansion drugs w/ great success for inspiration.
The main action takes place on Hawaii. I've been there & been to both of the volcanos that're featured. I even have a tattoo of one of the volcanos on my left knee b/c I scarred myself on it & I put white tattoos of what scarred me next to the scars. As such, there's a bit of familiarity to the story that enhances it for me. I even made a movie there called "Signs & Symptoms of Leptospirosis". It includes my girlfriend & me walking naked w/ monster masks, hands, & feet thru the active volcano on the Big Island. A sign warns people that if the volcano erupts they'll be burnt into nothingness w/in 15 seconds. We were fine.
"No wonder the Polynesians thought the land belonged to the Gods, Donnie Though. No one else would want to live here. Mountaintops, oceanbottoms, lava fields—the gods always get the crappiest real estate.
"Donnie was a seventeen year old from Honolulu on his high school's senior calss trip to Mauna Loa, the biggest volcano in the world." - p 1
Donnie has a withered laeg & lives in a home for orphans where he's tormented by Dirk, a young bully & criminal. As if that's not enuf, he finds the alien object, roughly the size of a quarter. There the trouble begins.
"The bright object was a slender metallic ovoid, cool to his touch and shimmery as a piece of the wind. He picked it up and the sunlight fanned off it in a spectral smile as he turned it with the fingers of one hand, like a monkey with a strange fruit. It was featureless."
[..]
"He had not the slightest inkling that the object that he was holding was alive, let alone that it was a vaster being than himself.
"The alien in his palm was terrified and in great pain. It was a 5-space being exquisitely bound to a precise point within the continuum, and by moving it, Donnie was killing it. Within its iridium shell, its brain was verging on panic. A conflagration of horror and confusion consumed it." - p 3
The ET, Insideout, checked out Earth for thousands of yrs before it picked a landing spot. Have you ever ridden w/ a driver who's indecisive about picking a parking spot? This was worse.
"The mountain was more inviting because it was surrounded by the warm waters the dolphins loved. Insideout had rejected the site on its first flyby because of the electrical clutter there, signifying again the presence of the photon-loud but otherwise songless animals that the alien had come to fear. There was a sinister texture to their thoughtwaves, and the jumble of radiation that they were dumping into the photon field was appallingly centerless and growing louder with each orbit." - p 10
Not to mention that there's an impressive thunderstorm outisde as I write this & that I'm listening to Alice Coltrane's ashram music. So do the arc & Donnie hit it off?
"The arc had been moved! Insideout was churning with the expanding knowledge of what had happened: Some animal had moved its physical form! It could see the beast in electromagnetic light—one of the radio noise creatures, climbing clumsily over the black rocks, the arc in its hand.
"Donnie saw himself climbing up the rocky incline, and when he reached the exact place where he was standing now, the trance imploded and all memory of the alien's memory was snuffed out in him. He stood like a flash of rain, all awareness of Insideout falling out of him." - p 12
The arc is stolen from Donnie by Dirk, the bully. In previous times, Donnie had gotten revenge on Dirk.
"Another time, Donnie had concocted his own curare, tipped a bent needle with it, and taped it to his shoulder under his shirt. After Dirk slugged him there in his daily endeavor to strike the righteous nerveblow that would numb Donnie's whole arm, his hand swelled up as black and rubbery as an eggplant. He spent two days in the hospital sweating a possible amputation, and Donnie claimed it was purely accidental." - p 37
Well, Dirk becomes one of the 4 humans that Insideout needs to return him to his landing spot or he will die. Another of these 4 is Reena, a woman rescued from a hospital home in France where she's living the life of a vegetable thanks to brain damage, Insideout temporarily makes the barin damage go away, empowers her w/ telepathy & enables her to control what other people do. She leaves France & travels to Hawaii where she's to meet her fellow temporary superhumans. She worries, rightly so, that once Insideout is helped to escape his death on Earth, she'll revert to her brain-damaged state. Insideout promises to save her.
""When my arc is complete, I'll have almost infinite power. Enough power and computational potential to turn you into light with me and to put you back together again whole. On my way home, I'll take a short detour and return you to an earth where you don't exist yet and where you can live a normal life."" - p 122
The ET speaks to Howard, another of the special 4(ces), via Dirk:
""There is no future." Dirk took Howard's arm and turned him to face the ocean so that the wind was kissing him. "The past and future are always here. All times, all minds, all screams and songs are here. But where is here?" Dirk bent close to his ear and said "Rihgt inside the atoms that make up your brain, Howie, That's where reality lurks. Not as atoms but in atoms. Right inside the protons that make up those nuclei is all the time there ever was, is, or will be."" - p 140
It turns out that a completely relaxed state-of-mind is the best weapon against the orcs that our heros must battle in order to get Insideout back where it wants to be.
""Yes-out-of-mind," Reena echoed.
""Lusk is handier. It means the same thing, you know. The primal affirmation of onesness beyond thought. The spell of wholeness. Your ancestors didn't think much of it. To them it was a kind of sloth—a sin. But what can we expect from the great-grandchildren of the rat? Humans are never satisfied unless they're toiling. But to stay close to me, you have to be languid. Lazy. Lusk."" - p 174
Dddduuuuddddddeee! You ARE a stoner!!
There's an Epilogue in wch the reader is informed about how everyone fared.
"Dirk correctly figured out all the details. The arc, he thoerized, had conserved its inertia and the cosmos' total quark-number by using its hypertubes to draw enough energy from the vacuum field to equal Reena's mass. If that energy had been released simply as energy, much of Hawaii would have been vaoprized. Instead, Insideout condensed most of the 4.86 X 1025 ergs of Reena's mass-energy to atoms and fused those atoms to a molecular lace of naphtol ethers, oleo-resins, and cinnamic acid—several hundred cubic liters of a harmless gas. Reena had disappeared in a puff of colorless smoke." - p 255
Right. Insideout cd do that but cdn't just fix her brain & leave her on Earth where she & Dirk cd live happily ever after. Well, that's b/c:
"Megauniverses opened, and timelines spread like crystals across the interface of the singularity and the continuum. The One burst apart, and infinities of shapes unraveled inside the swooping parabola of an event horizon. Mind surged helplessly through these mazing patterns in the form of energy, bewildered and dazzled by the expansive awareness of radiance—radiation!—quanta streaming outward!" - p 258
Ok, ok, I twisted things a little there. Get rrreaaaaallllly stoned & read this bk. It's fun!
May 16, 2012
While not as strong as Radix or Last Legends of Earth, this is still a gorgeous book, filled with indelible imagery, far-out science, and the lush, gorgeous language that makes Attanasio such a pleasure to read. Fans of dry, workmanlike prose need not even pick it up; Attanasio's words are dense and vivid. Every sentence is a loving brush-stroke. Worth seeking out.
February 1, 2017
The third in the four volume so-called “Radix Tetralogy” by A. A. Attanasio, Arc of the Dream is the odd man or woman out.
I dearly love Attanasio for his boundless imagination, his verve, and his headlong prose that may hit a speed bump now and then, but after the truly mind-bending shock of Radix, the Nebula-nominated first volume, and the second volume, the rollicking In Other Worlds, things ground to a slow crawl here. The tetralogy is linked in terms of ideas and not narrative, with few and ultimately inconsequential exceptions, but this installment just seemed a little more pedestrian and distant from what came before, certainly in comparison the resounding The Last Legends of Earth which closes the series—and is one of my three favorite books of all time in any genre.
Arc of the Dream revolves around a five-space being stranded on Earth (Hawai’i, no less than Attanasio’s home state). The alien divides its abilities or consciousness among 4 humans, the Islander bully who took him, who is granted the ability to understand; a catatonic schizophrenic French girl who suddenly awakens and can read and influence minds; an old, old man in China who is suddenly super fast, strong and telekinetic; and an American gambler who can now see possible futures.
The challenge with Arc of the Dream is not in the writing or the story, but in its structure; to understand these four remarkable humans—and what they were before they became so remarkable—takes a lot of backstory. Being that the book is barely over 200 pages, that consumes a lot of ink and the urgency of the narrative unevenly suffers for it. I wish I could give this 3.5 stars, so the fourth full star is for Attanasio’s wonderful, wonderful prose.
You don’t need to read the Radix Tetralogy linearly to enjoy it. Even the sparse forward referencing in the books is ultimately unimportant when the all collide in The Last Legends of Earth because the story is so new, so vast, you just nod your head and keep reading. Voraciously.
I dearly love Attanasio for his boundless imagination, his verve, and his headlong prose that may hit a speed bump now and then, but after the truly mind-bending shock of Radix, the Nebula-nominated first volume, and the second volume, the rollicking In Other Worlds, things ground to a slow crawl here. The tetralogy is linked in terms of ideas and not narrative, with few and ultimately inconsequential exceptions, but this installment just seemed a little more pedestrian and distant from what came before, certainly in comparison the resounding The Last Legends of Earth which closes the series—and is one of my three favorite books of all time in any genre.
Arc of the Dream revolves around a five-space being stranded on Earth (Hawai’i, no less than Attanasio’s home state). The alien divides its abilities or consciousness among 4 humans, the Islander bully who took him, who is granted the ability to understand; a catatonic schizophrenic French girl who suddenly awakens and can read and influence minds; an old, old man in China who is suddenly super fast, strong and telekinetic; and an American gambler who can now see possible futures.
The challenge with Arc of the Dream is not in the writing or the story, but in its structure; to understand these four remarkable humans—and what they were before they became so remarkable—takes a lot of backstory. Being that the book is barely over 200 pages, that consumes a lot of ink and the urgency of the narrative unevenly suffers for it. I wish I could give this 3.5 stars, so the fourth full star is for Attanasio’s wonderful, wonderful prose.
You don’t need to read the Radix Tetralogy linearly to enjoy it. Even the sparse forward referencing in the books is ultimately unimportant when the all collide in The Last Legends of Earth because the story is so new, so vast, you just nod your head and keep reading. Voraciously.
June 28, 2021
It was definitely a quite inventive and interesting story, but a struggle to get through at the start. The story never really got going until the third chapter, which is a hundred or so pages in to a just over two hundred paged book.
After finishing, I'm not too interested in reading the rest of the series, which I didn't realize was a series when I apparently started on book three. I am also unsure how it is part of a series, being book three it had a clear beginning and a clear end. Can someone tell me if the other books have the same characters and follow the same story?
I'm sure there are people who really enjoyed the story, so I'm not slagging it, but in my own personal opinion I would rate this book as a "meh...".
Side note, I know this book was written in the 80's and it's so fitting, the use of the insult "toilet head" put a smile on my face every time I read it, haha.
After finishing, I'm not too interested in reading the rest of the series, which I didn't realize was a series when I apparently started on book three. I am also unsure how it is part of a series, being book three it had a clear beginning and a clear end. Can someone tell me if the other books have the same characters and follow the same story?
I'm sure there are people who really enjoyed the story, so I'm not slagging it, but in my own personal opinion I would rate this book as a "meh...".
Side note, I know this book was written in the 80's and it's so fitting, the use of the insult "toilet head" put a smile on my face every time I read it, haha.
Read
June 23, 2017Probably my second favourite of this sequence [i]Radix[/i] being easilly the first). It's certainly a page-turner, though a fairly conventional one. Attansio's writing style, as usual, veers between the lovely and the almost silly. The story is a bit dated now, but this would have made a good film in the eighties.
July 12, 2023
This is my least favorite book of the four-dimensional tetrad, this one dealing with ‘‘width’ or the spread of thought from individual to society and civilization as a whole. I just didn’t care for the characters, starting with the handicapped teenager and a teenage bully. To me it read too much like a banal TV show. So, if this represents width, it is also very shallow.
May 22, 2009
This is how you write a science fiction novel based on theoretical physics and advanced math without straining the science to provide yet another inner/under/hyperspace faster-than-light merry-go-round.
March 16, 2020
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3349322.html
I got ten pages into this and realised that I would get no further; the writing style is simply awful. Turns out to be the third of a four-part series, which surely did not help my appreciation.
I got ten pages into this and realised that I would get no further; the writing style is simply awful. Turns out to be the third of a four-part series, which surely did not help my appreciation.
February 21, 2010
I am always a sucker for fantasy mixed with absurd science. Occasionally beautiful writing. Great ideas about consciousness. Fun read.
February 14, 2021
Author has imagination and some scenes are mind-blowing. Imaginative pieces do not cohere and conclusion does not live up to premise.
January 2, 2020
Thrilling
Thrilling. On line with last legions of earth. I am somewhat better for reading it. Those with lively imaginations with find this uplifting.
Thrilling. On line with last legions of earth. I am somewhat better for reading it. Those with lively imaginations with find this uplifting.
July 23, 2022
Deeply obnoxious, and at points (inadvertently or otherwise) is incredibly ableist. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/200...
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews