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At length. ST1 is a 128-page collection of articles on 'alternate history, secret history, conspiracy, and horror' aimed at gamers looking for campaign inspiration. The articles deal with such topics as Spring-Heeled Jack, the Philadelphia Experiment, the history and symbolism of the Tarot, the web of whispered secrets surrounding Coca-Cola, and possible occult inspiration for Winter's Tale. He also provides a series of brief campaign frames - for instance, a collection of alt-histories that turn on UFO crashes at Roswell in 1541, 1827, 1861...
Hite's RPG worldbuilding philosophy begins 'Start with Earth' and gets weird fast (cf. his wonderful Day After Ragnarok). In the same vein, several columns in ST1 take up some familiar topic, event, or symbol-set and carry on, in the manner of a conspiracy nut, that It All Means Something - or better yet (since he's designing expandable storyworlds rather than a paranoid political program) that Everything Means Everything It Can. So his essay on Emperor Joshua Norton I (RIP) starts with biographical specificity; spins through astrology, Grail myth, and a bit of kabbalistic numerology; and ends up with a list of ten different Illuminati-themed explanations for the weird phenomenon that was Norton, each of which is enough to hang a whole campaign world on.
Hite's job is to open up questions for use as game/story premises (what if the Confederates had jetpacks? what if Spring-Heeled Jack was a harbinger of something darker?), so the essays in ST1 tend to spin out from 'Huh, that's odd' to a rush of possibilities, their various mutual contradictions not ignored or explained away but rather embraced as evidence of the very Strangeness of things. Which makes his restraint all the more admirable, and a little creepy.
The Transmission is all in fun, as befits a nerdy roleplaying column, but there's this prickling sensation as you read, which should be familiar to readers of Lovecraft or Charles Fort (not coincidentally two of Hite's literary heroes). Everything in ST1 is explicitly marked Just For Laffs, yet the book's tone sits (un)comfortably somewhere between 'accessible, little-known history' and 'scholar succumbing to articulate paranoia.' It's apophenia put to literary use, the sort of thing that gives Pynchon and the Illuminatus! trilogy (and to a lesser extent Hite's seeming literary idol, Tim Powers) their weird power. Charles Fort caught some of this self-aware/self-dissolving authorial mindset in this passage from Lo!:
There's small chance of such phenomena being understood, just at present, because everybody's a logician. Almost everybody reasons: "There are not supernatural occurrences: therefore these alleged phenomena did not occur." However through some closed skulls, mostly independently of eyes and ears and noses, which tell mostly only what they should tell, is penetrating the idea that flows of coins and chunks of coal may be as natural as the flows of rivers. Those of us who have taken this degree of our initiation may now go on to a more advanced stage of whatever may be the matter with us.
Or more succinctly, here's one of Hite's credos, from A.E. Waite:
There are few things more dull than the criticism which maintains that a thesis is untrue, and cannot understand that it is decorative.
Hite does a similar scholar-of-paradox-and-irony routine in a slangier register, though of course his purpose is a lot less high-minded than Fort's, and maybe less serious than I'm making it out to be. Hite is merciless in his dismissal and occasional dissection of genuine conspiracy nuts (and his jovial 'Complete Idiot's' U.S. history book is as pragmatic as it gets), yet when he jokingly admits in ST1 that 'by [Umberto] Eco's definition, I'm a lunatic,' it's hard not to feel a tiny bit uncomfortable.
That discomfort is the point of the exercise.
So what the hell is this book? If you can believe it, it's psychedelic kinda-nonfiction masquerading as RPG scenario ideas, a manual for Seeing Conspiratorially (apophenically, paranoiacally, bisociatively...). But in its weird (or rather Weird) way, it's also a guide to reading skeptically and historically - a rigorously irresponsible bit of Fortean fun with a manic (excuse me: maniacal) tinge.
Is it useful? Really? You want to talk about use value after all this? Well, what's the use value of the inescapable memory of a place you've never visited? Sigh...OK. Yes, it is useful. I defy you to read a single entry in this book and not go base an RPG campaign on it. Happy now, jerk?
