FWIW echoes of GR in a SF novel description

[pynchonoid]

Mockeymen 
By: Ian Watson

Description:
In the present, a young British couple who make
specialty jigsaw puzzles are hired by an elderly
Norwegian to take nude photos of themselves in a
sculpture park in Oslo and to make jigsaws of these.
It turns out, horrifically, that toward the end of the
Second World War, a blood sacrifice was carried out in
the park by Nazis trying to create an occult cordon
around Norway to become the last redoubt of the Third
Reich. The aging Norwegian hopes to access the power
residing in the park to achieve reincarnation for
himself. In time, the British woman gives birth to a
son, who may be the Norwegian reborn. Her mental
breakdown means that the boy is taken for adoption. .
. .

Then the Hardship Years occur, when climate change,
eco-collapse, and global economic crisis seemed set to
shipwreck human civilization. But in 2010 salvation
arrives in the shape of an alien expedition promising
new technologies. In order to supply these gifts,
transit stations must be built for instantaneous links
between Earth and the aliens' worlds. In exchange, the
aliens want enzymes and biochemicals from terrestrial
plants and creatures.

Only living beings can transit, along with what they
can carry, and the experience is agonizing,
intolerable to the aliens. Human volunteers who
tolerate or welcome pain become highly paid couriers
for the minds of visiting aliens, who thus avoid the
agony of transit, and who, arriving on Earth, are
transferred into the bodies of "dummies." The drug
Bliss, which the aliens introduced to Earth, gives its
human users a year of rapture, but a tiny percentage
of users become mindless dummies which the "Mockymen"
can use as puppet bodies.

A young Blisshead named Jamie, who had become a dummy,
is the only dummy to reawaken, resulting in his being
monitored and followed by the Earth authorities. These
same authorities are also questioning the motives of
the Mockymen, and are concerned at the dearth of
information that is available about the home planets
of the Mockymen, and the fate of the races that had
inhabited these planets. A Mockymen artifact
accidentally results in the young Blisshead Jamie
regaining his memories of his prior life, that of the
Norwegian. Jamie and some of his friends begin to
undercover the secrets of the Mockymen, who, upon
discovering the news of the reincarnation, are more
willing to cooperate and reveal some of their secrets.
. . .


<http://www.clarkesworld.com/books/watson_mockeymen.html>

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