Everything is Linked to Everything

I’m reading a cheesy-yet-incredibly-entertaining novel Area 51 last night when I stumble upon yet another table leg to the belief that Everything is Linked to Everything. When you read enough books like I do – and they don’t even have to be books on the same subject – you start finding references and mentions and citations and parallelisms cropping up all over the place. If you’ve ever read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, it’s just like that, except the computer, Abulafia, is the gray matter between my ears.

Anyway, the book is written in a techno-thriller style reminiscent of a Clancy or Cussler, a group of disparate desperate people across the globe racing against time to stop something Very Bad from happening at the mysterious government base Area 51 in the Nevada desert. It attempts to intertwine UFOs, the Great Pyramid in Egypt, alien abductions, Nazis, and Atlantis and form some sort of coherent explanation in the framework of a potboiler. It partially succeeds on all of those counts, but fails when considered a work of literature (you know, the requirement of having three-dimensional characters, for example). There’s a gritty investigative reporter chick, the rogue special forces agent, the eccentric college professor, the remorseful old German, the bat-crazy General – you know, clichés.

Still, I can’t put the thing down. I read something like 60-70 pages a night and will have it done in a day or so.

So I’m at a scene about two-thirds through the book where the rogue special forces agent says to the gritty investigative reporter chick, “Ever read a book called The Killer Angels?” and proceeds to use its subject to describe their next plan of attack in order to survive.

The Killer Angels? That’s right on the bookshelf behind me! It’s by Michael Shaara, and if I recall correctly, it won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s about the Battle of Gettysburg. Except told in novel form, with the generals and other important soldiers rounding out the cast. His son, Jeff, wrote a prelude, Gods and Generals, and a concluding work, The Last Full Measure, creating a father-son trilogy of sorts of the Civil War. I’ve read the son’s works over the past six weeks, and both books were excellent.

And here the original novel, the award-winning Killer Angels, is mentioned in a novel about UFOs.

Everything is Linked to Everything!