Prometheus: The Autobiography

Prometheus, ancient Greek God of Consciousness, long tortured for the “crime” of compassion to human beings, is now free to give us his view of the history of Western Civilization.

Myth, language of the psyche, before the insurance market ate psychology, need not succumb to a choice between living possessed by fundamentalist fanaticism or soul death of solipsistic fad.

The individual is a central figure of our culture’s mythos.  Prometheus is a voice who articulates the experience of the individual, out of our peculiar cultural history, which both demanded the individual and persecuted the consciousness that is the individual’s defining feature.

Uncle River trained with Jungian analysts, earned a Ph.D. in Psychology of The Unconscious, then spent much of the last quarter century living simply, in the Mountain Southwest, contemplating our culture, its history — as mythos interacts with worldly event, and how that history reflects possible further direction.

In Prometheus: the autobiography, Uncle River addresses the question of history: where our culture and its characteristic personality structure come from, and where we might be headed, in the language of myth, in the voice of Prometheus, who knows all too well the struggle of the individual to live with that history.

Review Comments

… a retelling of many ancient myths, retooling the archetypal themes of compassion, gift, envy, revenge, pretense and deception…. There is much to chew on here, and for those who want more than Lit Lite, this is highly recommended.

Harry Willson, author, Myth and Mortality: Testing the Stories

... Uncle River explores the themes of time and nature with a unique and sometimes painfully honest perspective.

Chris Reed, Publisher, BBR

 …SF’s own Gandalf figure…

Paul Di Filippo, Asimov’s Science Fiction

 …warmth, wit, and keen eye for detail…

Eric Heideman, Minneapolis Star Tribune

 … knows how to keep the reader interested.

Lucas Gregor, Absolute Magnitude

 … We have few sages among us, what with all the distractions in the world, and this sagacious tale needs to be heard and heeded, around campfires, in coffee shops, and in History of the World, Part MMIII undergraduate seminars.

Kathleen Kesson, Ed.D., Professor of Education, Long Island University

About the Author

At the time of Uncle River’s birth in 1947, both his parents were in analysis with a pupil of Sigmund Freud’s. Uncle River’s father was a psychiatric resident, which in those days provided an apartment in the mental hospital where he worked. The patients were River’s first babysitters. He thus came to initial awareness believing that sanity was an important subject.

Conventional ways to do things develop from layer on layer of cultural history. What is the difference between conventional ways that may seem arbitrary but which just are how our culture’s history came up with to do good and necessary things, and other, equally conventional ways that really are crazy? Finding our world perplexing, Uncle River has wrestled with this question all his life.

At the peak of the 60s, Uncle River studied mythology with a nuclear physicist at Goddard College, the most experimental accredited college in the United States. During a year abroad, he began Jungian Analysis in Switzerland, with another nuclear physicist. He thus came to recognize math and myth as two symbolic languages for addressing strikingly similar questions.

Uncle River earned what he believes to be the world’s only Doctorate in Psychology of The Unconscious through The Union Institute in 1974. He completed private training in Jungian Analysis in 1976.

Immediately thereafter, the world pulled several nasty tricks, which cast River into such doubt about the credentials he just had finished exerting so much effort to earn that he let go entirely of his expected professional role. At the same time, his writing began appearing and catching attention, over the byline Uncle River, in a periodical called The Wellspring. Instead of the analyst he thought he was studying to be, he found himself among a community who knew and respected his work, but related to it in the much older role of shaman and bard.

Fleeing embarrassment at his own difficulty to function in a society whose contradictions he could not help but see and did not know how to reconcile, Uncle River landed in the Mountain Southwest, where he has lived, mostly as a hermit/monk/writer since the early 80s. Gradually he discovered that enough quiet solitude enabled him to get past panic at trying to find a sane place in a crazy world, to some creative, possibly useful, purpose.

In recent years, Uncle River’s writing has found growing outlet, notably in Speculative Fiction publications, including Asimov’s, Analog, Amazing Stories, Interzone, Tales of The Unanticipated, and the Year’s Best Fantasy 2 anthology edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. Several of his stories have been included in the Honorable Mention lists of Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. And a story from Talebones was on the Preliminary Nebula Ballot and a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award for Year’s Best SF story. His stories also have appeared, in translation, in Russia, both legitimately and pirated.

Uncle River’s “Mogollon News”, fictitious news from the real New Mexico ghost town where River lived for five years in the late 80s, ran in several newspapers and as a weekly feature on Public Radio Station KRWG, Las Cruces. Later the “Mogollon News” became a regular feature in the U. K. in BBR. Look for the collected Mogollon News, forthcoming from LBF Books.

Thunder Mountain, a novel of Southwest Speculative Fiction, is published by Mother Bird Books.  A novella, Camp Desolation And An Eschatology of Salt, and a collection of Uncle River’s stories which have appeared in Science Fiction/Fantasy periodicals, Counting Tadpoles, are scheduled for publication with PS Publishing.

About the Illustrator

I am a travel photographer on a journey into the realms of dreams, visions and trances.  I try to take photos of border lands, where realities blend and melt into each other. My images are simply a reflection of this journey. Postcards from the path, so to speak.

I am heavily influenced by the magic realist world of African and Latin American writers, where the lines between dreams, visions, nightmares and what we call reality are not as rigid and not as clear. A world where reality and dreams intermix and coexist.

I am also greatly influenced by religious imagery from all spiritual paths, especially the esoteric and mystic veins.

You can see my work at www.samiparbhoo.com.

Ordering Information

ISBN: 978-1-890109-83-7
$12.95 US
Imprint: Xemplar
185 pages
Trade-size softcover