Written in 1967 this book reflects the real hippy cutture- or at least the author's perception of it at the time., The plot is thin, almost non-existent and only the main characters show any development. The fun of the book is in the language and attitudes.

re-read 8/31/2023 ( )

I loved this when I read this as a teenager but having bought the new version, I found a couple of sentences that I found deeply disturbing so can't rate it as highly as before. ( )

Merry lobstery Christmas! Come take a Reality Pill and make all your trippiest dreams come true!

Or rather, sidle up to your best buds, take as much LSD or tokes that you like, and welcome the alien invasion, man. Don't forget to jam and rap! This is gonna be one wildly imaginative ride. :)

Welcome to the hippiest days of NYC when walking hallucinations roam the streets or transform them, where milling crowds take the drugs that let their imaginations change reality, where six-foot pacifist lobsters in Jesus Robes enlist a devoted hippie pacifist to fight their wars for them.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Honestly, I've read a good number of mind-blowingly imaginative books that revel in the strange and the wonderful and just don't care whether or not you're on any mind-altering substances. Hell, I've written a few books like that, myself. But after all this time and a rather huge bibliography to draw from, I can honestly rank this one up there with the very best. :)

Context is important. This came out at the height or the very end of the beginning of the LSD heyday in 1967. Chester Anderson more than capitalizes on the movement... he puts himself right in the tale. As a character. With reality slipping all the time.

This is a real trip and a half to read and imagine. I bet he had a fantastic time writing it. :) It takes courage, strength, and fortitude to let quite this much of yourself hang out for the world to see.

Of course, I really should mention that it would work just as well to read this in today's age for one good reason. Comics and superheroes play a huge part. Context-wise, back then, it was usual for kids and a very select number of the counterculture to still love Marvel. Not like today where the love has gone totally mainstream.

So, for the day, it's not exactly normal to read about dropping acid and going totally green-lantern in the middle of NYC. I'm a huge PKD fan, but even he never pulled something quite this extroverted. :)

Merry trippy Christmas! :)

( )

Chester Anderson’s The Butterfly Kid is listed as the number one weirdest science fiction novel ever written. With the likes of such bizarre sf whoppers as Dr. Bloodmoney, Ubic, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, A Voyage to Arcturus, Panda Ray, Flesh and Gold, Dhalgren, Time Snake and Superclown, to name just several (I’m sure avid sf fans could list many other out of sight titles), that’s really saying a mouthful.

I suspect The Butterfly Kid got the nod for its combination of hallucinations from acid trips materializing to create pandemonium all through New York City, giant blue alien lobsters speaking impeccable English, and a torture machine that forces its victims to watch the complete adventures of Donald Duck on a wide screen with full sensory participation.

And that’s just for starters. Once this groovy (THE all-purpose adjective - keep in mind the novel published in 1967), supercool Greenwich Village hippie hipster narrator gets going, there's no stopping him. The Butterfly Kid makes for one fabulously fun read with the following flashing, swirling strobe light highlights:

CHESTER: None other than author/musician/hip philosopher Chester Anderson is the narrator and main star of this literary show. That’s right, Chester wrote himself into his own novel. Interestingly, its Chester’s observations on human nature that prove key to his understanding the ways he can take action to deal with menacing outer space aliens.

One of my favorite Chester quotes from when he realizes the orchestra playing Handel's Water Music behind him in the hallway is his own personally drug induced hallucination: “Every now and then a false note rang out through the otherwise exceptional ensemble. Not a wrong note, mind you, just a slightly out of tune one. Bassoon, from the sound of it. This bugged me mainly because, the orchestra being merely an external figment of my own imagination, the false notes were my fault. The implications were humiliating.”

THE DUDES: Chester also wrote good friend Michael along with a few other of his pals into the novel. Michael is one of the heroes in this tale (once he roused himself from snoring in his sleep, that is). Also worth noting, Michael J. Kurland is a prolific author of science fiction and wrote The Unicorn Girl, sequel to Butterfly. The third volume in this modish Greenwich Village Trilogy is The Probability Pad by T.A. Waters.



THE BUTTERFLY KID HIMSELF: Fresh from Fort Worth, Texas, young guitar playing Sean manifests all varieties and sizes of butterflies right there in broad daylight in Washington Square Park. Turns out he isn’t a magician; he dropped a super colossal LSD-type hallucinogenic “reality pill.” Too bad the John Voight character also fresh from the state of Texas didn’t likewise have "reality pills" courtesy of aliens in the 1969 film, Midnight Cowboy - if he did, he and Ratso Rizzo could have had some real fun in the Big Apple.



HORNEY HONEY: Of course, being a hippie in Greenwich Village involves getting nude, getting stoned and having loads of great sex. Sativa is a singer in Chester’s rock-n-roll group The Tripouts. Sativa is lovin’ the sex with her new sweetie pie – none other than the aforementioned tall, handsome, blonde Sean who crashes in Chester’s pad. Chester figures all those wild sounds Sativa is making in the next bedroom with Sean are good for her singing voice. That’s the way to put a positive spin on it, Chester!

STRANGERS FROM A STRANGE PLANET: As the book's author, our main man shifts his imagination to overdrive in coming up with those aliens who plot to take over the world with the help of "reality pills." Not little green men from Mars but ten foot lobsters who can change colors, from blue to pale green to iridescent. And the way the head lobster speaks, I bet he has a British accent.

THE BAD GUY: There’s Laszlo Scott the poet wannabe who is in league with the aliens. Our Greenwich Village author gives Laszlo the ultimate wicked quality for the villain – he stinks like a skunk on a bad day. And Laszlo’s loft looks like a trash heap with loads of misspelled anarchist slogans scrawled on the walls. Laszlo’s redeeming qualities are . . . well, sorry to say, he has none. The dude changed his name from an all-American kinda name to Laszlo Scott when he came to NYC cause he thought it was cool. If Laszlo only knew his ultimate fate, I suspect he would have spent his time bathing and reading quality literature rather than planning the conquest of the human race. What some no-talent poets won't do to grab the spotlight.

SAVING THE WORLD: : Would you believe the climax to this hippie novel features dozens of groovy, far-out technicolor hallucinations creating an upbeat 1960s version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds? Dig it, baby, with the future of the human race on the line, Chester and his band of stoned longhairs come through with flying Peter Max psychedelic colors.



FUN FACTS: Chester's hippie bus in The Bufferfly Kid (see below quote) predates that famous bus of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters by exactly one year since Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was published in 1968. Hippie buses and vans were the thing back in those swingin' sixties. A second fun fact: although Chester sets his novel in the late 1970s, the language, attitudes, fashion and culture all belong uniquely to the sixties.



"That was our most treasured possession, that bus. It was an old Army surplus ground-effect troop carrier, made in 1969 or so and obsolete before delivery, that we'd converted into a mobile rock-n-roll dream pad. It could seat sixteen and sleep dozens, depending on how friendly they were, and was equipped with hot and cool running everything. . . . We toured the Midwest in it last summer." - Chester Anderson, The Butterfly Kid ( )

This is set theoretically in the then-near future, with a Kennedy as governor of New York (perhaps, Robert, as it was written in 1967) but the "feel" of the story is intensely that of the "60s" hippy scene in Greenwich Village. Personally, I was only very distantly on the fringe of this culture, and only in New York a few years later, but the basic cultural pattern seems very real -- semi-pro bands and poets, coffee-houses, casual sex, marijuana, all seen from a mildly sardonic viewpoint. However, the scene very shortly tops over the edge into unreality, beginning with a boy who makes butterflies and moving on to characters creating an 18th century orchestra and a whole pantheon of hippy gods and goddesses, and then the discovery of a relatively subtle and strongly non-violent alien invasion. All of it is delivered with deadpan wit, ( )