Billy Lee Harman

Dust Billy Lee Harman

A question this book asks is how novel is any novel, and another question it asks is whether the fictional cosmology it presents is actual, and another is whether anyone knows. Superficially, Dust is a story of a team of immortal space aliens who travel the universe trying to bail worlds out of the trouble they get themselves into. But those and other fantastical characters are a means of concisely giving focus to a perspective of the history of humanity, beginning with the cave paintings at Vallon-Pont-d'Arc about 30 millennia ago and culminating on 9/11, with the continuing terror in the Middle East. Most of the story is the civil rights issues of the twentieth century, from the Russian revolutions through the Montgomery bus boycott to the Palestinian problem showing both failures and successes, but it's also ordinarily personal. So the main questions this book asks are not only how much fact is in any "fiction" and how much fiction is in any "non-fiction, but also why and for whom.