That's a gross oversimplification of a book that I'm less than halfway through reading, but it's a remarkable and startling thesis. In any case, "Bluff" is a first-contact story. A human expedition finds a planet inhabited by aliens whose cultural resembles that of ancient Mesopotamia, and who are guided in their everyday lives by the voices of their own gods.

Hunting Party and Sporting Chance by Elizabeth Moon. My introduction to this writer was Remnant Population but these books are very different. Remnant Population is a naturalistic, realistic First Contact novel with a subtext of feminism and anti-ageism. Those two themes are still present but these books are straight space opera with no real attempt made to create a realistic spacefaring culture -- the background for the action is a hereditary aristocracy that owns whole planets and systems, and still indulges in dressage and foxhunting. Which makes for a fun read, as long as you donŐt take it too seriously. There's a third book out now in the series which I intend to pick up.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber, translated and edited by Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter. To say this book is a little weird is like saying Ken Starr has a touch of hubris, or my dating life is just a bit of a disaster. This book is exceptionally weird. Daniel Paul Schreber was a highly educated man living in Leipzig, Germany, around the turn of the century. He was a highly respected lawyer and judge, extremely articulate, a writer of exceptional clarity (or so it seems in translation)...who went completely bug-ass nuts. Apparently it was the pressure of a new appointment to a judicial tribunal which precipitated a psychotic break; whatever the cause he spent several years confined to a high-class asylum. But so great was his erudition that even in the depths of a hallucinatory psychosis he remained able to describe his warped universe coherently. This is possibly the only contemporaneous chronicle of schizophrenia as experienced from the inside; Schreber wrote it during his confinement, not after his release and recovery.

There's a very disturbing quality to Schreber's perfectly matter-of-fact descriptions of how his psychaitrist, the long-suffering Dr. Paul Emil Fleschig (1847-1929), was entered into a conspiracy with God to (literally) un-man Schreber by transforming him into a woman; of how voices, sometimes thousands at once, talked to him constantly in a strange form of the German language where words often meant the opposite of what they did in the "ordinary" world; of how most people were not really humans, but "fleeting-improvised-men", sort-of doppelgangers created to sustain the illusion of the world. These fleeting-improvised-men were necessary because Schreber's nerves threatened the very existence of God and the universe. In fact, on numerous occasions the voices told of how various stars and planets were "disconnected". And it goes on and on like that. But beyond the "freak show" quality is a deeper glimpse into the interior world of the schizophrenic, a world where the mental qualities that we ordinarily count on to order our existence have vanished: Schreber's sense of time is badly distorted so that planning and the simple understanding of causation is nigh impossible. He is unable to control his own thoughts, to have any moments of interior quiet; instead he is tormented by voices constantly asking him, "what are you thinking now? And what now? And now?" And of course, he's lost his bodily integrity. On several occasions he writes how he transforms into a woman.

Schreber's intellect was so great that even while still in the grip of these delusions, he was able to go to court to challenge the court order under which he was involuntarily confined - and win! Once the trusteeship he was placed under was lifted, he remained at the asylum of his own volition for more than another year. When he left in 1903, apparently recovered, he vanished into history. Nothing more is known about him.