Strange Attractor - by Graham St John (Paperback)

About the Book

"The first intellectual biography of the psychedelic pioneer Terence McKenna"--

Book Synopsis

An intellectual biography of one of the most celebrated and yet least understood figures of the late twentieth century, Terence McKenna.

A stand-up philosopher who made a unique contribution to science, humanism, and the hidden arts, Terence McKenna (1946-2000) was the twentieth century's psychedelic Renaissance man. Perfecting his rugged philosophy on the role of psychedelics in evolution, consciousness, and time, McKenna was a riotous charmer who stalked the shadows, but also sought the iridescence. More than twenty years since his untimely passing, McKenna has an enduring magnetism across the virtual pop stream, in pervasive digitization, and within social media networks. In Strange Attractor, the first biography of this enigmatic figure, Graham St John detects the signal behind the noise.

This book is an engaging chronicle of the life, works, and legacy of this brazen adventurer of the inner and outer dimensions, whose weird intelligence has affected multitudes and whose spirit continues to haunt the present. It draws on original documents and letters, features fifty two rare photographs and artworks, and shares previously untold stories from over eighty people. Neither glorifying nor disparaging its subject, Strange Attractor will appeal to those interested in the evolution of a psychedelic intellectual, and to those for whom McKenna's wisdom endures.

Review Quotes

"An account as weird, wild, and nontraditional as its subject."
- Publishers Weekly

" [A] delightful new biography."
- Reason

"Due to St John's intellectual reach, the book has, like a dark planet, drawn an entire menagerie of late 20th-century weirdness into its oblique orbit. With two appendices and 75 pages of notes, it is comprehensive and reference-heavy and seems to have left nothing unexamined in the labyrinth of the McKennaverse. The McKenna persona, familiar today from countless audio recordings strewn across the internet, is not so much invalidated here as given a merely human quality; the book is nothing if not the biography of a mortal. And for this we can be grateful, given the near-deification of McKenna that is well underway in some corners of the internet . . . The second part of the biography is a valiant attempt to lay out the various components of McKenna's theoretical project, in what may constitute a groundwork for McKenna studies."
- Los Angeles Review of Books

About the Author

Graham St John is a cultural anthropologist and a recent recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship in the Department of Media, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Huddersfield where he is a Senior Research Fellow. He is the author of ten books, including Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT, Global Tribe, and Technomad. He is founding Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture and has published widely on the ethnobiography of transformational events.