Beginning with the premise that a race of super-intelligent beings calling themselves the Transcendentals emerged millions of years ago and have been guiding human affairs in secret throughout our history, Blair's book unspools in a series of vignettes illustrating their wars and interventions in this universe and in others. The ghost of a boy who died in the Roman siege of Masada in 70 AD speaks telepathically with men in the present day. An immortal being known as Charr Naerroan teleports an archeologist onto a starship and shows him a documentary entitled Revolutions: An Alleged Secret History of the Creations of Several Worlds, the Lives and Deaths of Many Species, and Some of What Has Happened in the Great Beyond. Carthaginian reptiles construct an atom bomb "on the 28th day of July" in the year 270,000,000 B. C., which is accidentally detonated at sea by a priest in the time of the Roman Empire. In one of the book's best sequences, a woman named Florence enters a mysterious shop called Dimension Dimestore and has a series of daydreams featuring aardvarks, ghosts, and the annihilation of various worlds.

Blair's most precious gift is his imagination. There are sequences in this book that no one else could have imagined, and over the course of its 400-plus pages, one begins to enjoy his well-honed sense of absurdity and hallucinatory flair. The experience of reading the book is not unlike trying to parse the cryptic references in the song "American Pie," or the depictions of Bruce Willis' character's thoughts in 12 Monkeys. The various parallel worlds, contrasting timelines, and strange hypotheticals avoid the trap of feeling derivative, although there are echoes here of Childhood's End, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Man in the High Castle. Blair appears to have read widely in philosophy, history, religion (the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Dhammapada are mentioned), and science fiction. His vast reading, combined with his unconventional way of seeing, creates a world that is occasionally bewildering but wholly unique.

It can be frustrating, at times, when the reader feels that the author is sharing a private joke with himself. However, as one becomes accustomed to the contours of Blair's vision, these concerns diminish, and the scope and strangeness of the work become endearing. For example, we learn that Evelyn Waugh "interacted with multiple divine and semidivine beings." Two inebriated scientists ponder how "maybe there is also magic in everyone and everything." A race of beings known as the Igweolintians holds it an article of faith that planets such as Jupiter are alive and asleep, "sometimes dreaming and sometimes dreamless." The cosmic sweep and surreal thought experiments call to mind the short stories of Italo Calvino and Alan Lightman, and in this work, Blair shares some of their playfulness and ambition. As a child, William Blake believed he saw a tree full of angels in Peckham Rye. If he had been a novelist rather than a poet, this is the book he might have written. Readers of science fiction and speculative fiction seeking something new and innovative to explore will find it here.

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