REVIEWS
Reviews of the Blueprint
The Blueprint received many reviews when first published in Dutch.
Below are some translated reviews.
‘The Blueprint is a dizzying road trip through the consciousness and cosmos of Ralen, the main character. In the false world in search of truthfulness, freedom and happiness. A world in which Huxley's Soma world fades into a cozy tea party. Hallucinating, without mescaline or alcohol, like Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. But with a kind of orgasmic mysticism and a penchant for brutal violence. An intelligent contemporary Easy Rider. A must read for anyone fed up with the psychobabble and micro-stuff of most novels.’
‘An intriguing, addictive, fascinating, philosophical, ambitious and innovative science fiction debut that certainly doesn't belong to the 13 in a dozen category! It has been a long time since I was so impressed by a debut book. When I started, I had my doubts, because it turned out to be a book written in the "I" form and that is generally not my favorite writing style. But the fluent writing style and the oppressively realistic world in which the story takes place quickly removed this objection. The book gets a hold of you and you want to know if Ralen is achieving his goal: understanding the Blueprint.’
‘We live in a world that seems self-evident. Very few people are still looking for answers to the important questions. Now every important question has many answers. That means that real questioners are much rarer than people looking for answers. I appreciate the Blueprint so much, because the protagonist is one of those rare and authentic questioners. He is leading us into the dark, so to speak. He takes the characters from his world, but also his readers, that is to say, us, on an exciting and always surprising quest. As a publisher, and also as a reader, I too rarely have the pleasure of reading a work that has been successful on many levels. The Blueprint is such an exception, from above ground to deep in the tunnels. It offers as much adventure and excitement as a future novel that classic science fiction master A.E. Van Vogt could have written. It takes the readers by the throat, with a rich variety of characters who have their own answer to the Blueprint; oppressive, unsettling answers. But above all, we empathize so intensely with a real questioner that we, in our own aboveground existence, may be more inclined to ask questions ourselves.’
‘The Blueprint is truly a special book. It is philosophical, so often complicated, and until you are about halfway, you don't know what it is about, but the clever thing is that it is exciting. I also think it is a very interesting book, because I can compare it with the current circumstances of the world. In short, I think the Blueprint is the best book I have ever read.’
‘What is the future of man? Should we return to the original hunters-gatherers we once were? Or can only a complex society guarantee our survival? What lies beyond the void that surrounds us? An answer to all our questions or a deadly danger? Frank van Dongen examines these and other questions in his book the Blueprint, an ambitious and philosophical future novel.
The immortal Ralen is a Traveler, looking for the fragments of the Blueprint without knowing exactly what the Blueprint is. Some of his old tribesmen help him, others betray him, while the ruthless Boger seeks the destruction of most of humanity. Ralen runs through intercontinental tunnels, chased by inhuman enemies. His quest is also internal: he skims the outer limits of human emotions. Will he succeed in concocting the Blueprint? And what does this lead to?
The Blueprint demands a lot from the reader: Ralen is a very unreliable storyteller, the story structure is just as fragmented as the Blueprint itself and the jumps in time told require a thoughtful approach. The reality surrounding Ralen is confusing enough, but he is also plagued by fragmentary dreams from his shattered memory. Van Dongen paints a bleak and raw vision of the future, full of war and death. But don't expect sci-fi with hip-shooting space heroes, be prepared for lengthy musings. This is not a novel that offers diversion or entertainment: Van Dongen forces you to think.
The Blueprint cannot be classified under any regular genre. Is it an essay in a novel form? Is it a vision of the future, based on biology and paleontology? Is it philosophical science fiction? I have a warm heart for any initiative to innovate and Van Dongen has succeeded in making me think, but he has quite ignored the writing conventions, which makes his work inscrutable here and there.
The Blueprint is a book with eternal themes, so Publisher Verschijnsel has outdone itself: The Blueprint (the Dutch version Het Bouwplan) is a beautiful, bound publication, with an intriguing cover and a reading ribbon. Clearly an edition that is meant to last a lifetime and to be reread often without falling apart.’
‘Ralen is a Traveler, a man obsessed with rooting out the structure of the world and revealing the Blueprint's mysteries. The Blueprint, the mysterious building scheme of the world, one that is both the origin of life and a prison in which to capture it. A structure shattered in six separate sections that Ralen wants to reunite. He is cursed with amnesia but never lost this obsession with the Blueprint. Throughout the book, as one theory after another about nature the Blueprint is proposed and rejected, he never loses sight of this objective.
One of the ideas Ralen seems to toy with is the idea that happiness and a purpose to life are found in the tribal hunter/gatherer cultures of humanity's past. A structure where an individual is still an important part of the collective, without the individual being crushed by anonymity of a larger structure.
The writing feels like raw sensory input, a creature trying to make sense of the world around him but misses a framework to make sense of what he experiences. The world he lives in and his obsession are as much a mystery to Ralen as they are to the reader. In the last chapters the reader is rewarded with a fitting end.’
The six zones of the Blueprint
The Blueprint is split into six zones, each giving access to a closed realm of alien knowledge, strength and power. With the first zone, finders build the strongest cities. Zone two builds armor and tunnels through the hardest layers of the earth. The third zone breeds weapons and warrior creatures and raises ferocious armies. The fourth zone makes Travelers tireless, stimulates the metabolism and protects against disease and degeneration. Zone five expands consciousness and sharpens the senses. Zone six is most lethal and gives access to uninhibited growth and multiplication.
Six archetypes of Travelers
Just as there are six different zones in the Blueprint, there are also six archetypes Travelers. Master builders look for the foundations of the first zone. Geologists and engineers drill for zone two. Hunters and warlords compete for zone three. Farmers and doctors draw their breeding skills, surgery knowledge, healing power and life extension capacities from zone four. Scientists seek for the connections of the fifth zone, exploring the forbidden void. Technocrats and rulers venture into the deadly darkness of zone six.
A-mortality and alienation
Through their contact with the Blueprint, Travelers become a-mortal. They stop aging and if they are not struck down by war, hunger or accident, they live an unnaturally long life. This affects their memory. After centuries, their minds becomes overloaded and old memories are overwritten by new ones, with the result that they forget their childhood and their existence before the Blueprint, they lose their roots. Travelers become increasingly alienated, caught in infighting, wandering through endless tunnel systems, obsessed with tracking down the last untapped fragments and invading the archives of their enemies. It is getting more and more difficult to find the strength to lead a life of their own, to break out to the outside world now and then, to enjoy light, friendship and love.
Ralen, the first finder
Centuries ago the a-mortal Ralen discovered the first fragment of the Blueprint. Due to his unnaturally long lifespan, Ralen has forgotten that he is the legendary first finder. In the course of the story, when he reads archives in which Travelers have recorded their oldest memories, Ralen rediscovers that he is the first finder. Ralen comes from another world, but that too is a black hole in his memory. During his quests across and underneath continents and oceans, he occasionally experiences flashbacks of this bitterly lonely journey through the forbidden void, reminding him that an unknown enemy from afar is on the way to this world. These are rare moments in which Ralen realizes rationally why the Blueprint should be reunited at all costs. It is the only means that can keep mankind from extinction. Together with Casten, his only reliable ally, Ralen tries to forge the warring Travelers into a united tribe in order to reunite the fragments in time. Ralen's character does not cooperate in this. By nature he is a restless solitary hunter, who prefers to retreat to the jungles. But every time he gives in to that desire, the call of the Blueprint catches up with him and forces him back to the endless tunnels, in search of the last undiscovered fragments and the underground archives in which the excavated fragments lie.
The main characters, the Travelers
Bilder, master builder of zone one, the foundation and construction zone, guardian of the archive under the first city.
Auger, driller of zone two, the armor and piercing zone, warden of the archives below the second city.
Boger, warlord of zone three, the zone of hunting and war, commander of the strongest armies, author of the Retort, the antithesis of the Word of Richter.
Casten, healer of zone four, the zone of resilience, metabolism and recovery.
Ralen, explorer of zone five, the zone of connections, observation and information, discoverer of the Blueprint, the first finder.
Richter, ruler of zone six, the forbidden zone, the zone of life and death, once the great unifier of the six investigative powers and administrator of the central archive, writer of the Word that should have established a stable global society, but thwarted
Clashing views and perpetual zone wars
Over the centuries, Travelers develop different theories and philosophies about the nature, origin and meaning of the Blueprint. Opinions are also divided on what the relationship is (or should be) between Man and Blueprint and what will or should happen when all the fragments are united and the six zones merge. Leading Travelers impose their conflicting views on their forces as the only truth. The clashes between their Words and Retorts demolish civilization and depopulate once densely populated continents and islands. In the worldwide zone wars, all available weapons and resources are used, including the derivatives of the Blueprint itself.
Beliefs about the nature, origin and meaning of the Blueprint
Bilder of zone one sees the Blueprint as a form of anti-life, a destruction plan. According to him, the Blueprint was deliberately split by our distant ancestors into six zones that should never come into contact with each other again. The hundreds or thousands of fragments, no one knows exactly how many, are built into the foundations of hermetically sealed archives, deep below the forbidden tunnels. They must remain hidden forever. The slightest knowledge of the Blueprint’s is as deadly as physical contact with its fragments.
Female Traveler Arch says of the Blueprint: ‘Men search, fight and die for the Blueprint, precisely because men don't know what it is. Unbearable longing for the unknown is what propels men over the edge of the abyss. Men must and will fathom the unknowable Blueprint, even if it kills us all.’
Auger of zone two sees it as a borehole through the unbridgeable emptiness that surrounds the world on all sides, an entrance to a distant form of existence.
Boger of zone three is sure the Blueprint is a war machine. That the machine has jammed and fell apart is the work of an unknown intruder, possibly to protect humans. Boger believes in individual resilience and a return to the original state of man, that of hunting tribes in the jungles. He wants to use the power of the Blueprint to build a line of defense around the world to protect mankind from the arrival of an enemy that has not been weakened by an intruder.
Casten of zone four sees the Blueprint as an aid plan of forgotten ancestors from far away.
Ralen of zone five struggles all his life with the question of what the Blueprint is, and what to do with it. At first he thinks it is an explorer of a distant world, looking for alien sources of life. But with all the death and destruction that the Blueprint sows, he begins to question it. Actually, Ralen wants nothing more than to live a carefree life as a solitary hunter in the wilderness. He tries to escape the influence of zone five, but again and again he is seized by its call.
Richter of zone six sees the Blueprint as a prematurely deployed invasion force of an enemy from far away that has failed due to teething problems. Believing in the eternal progression of a technocratic state, he wants to reunite the Blueprint to dispatch an armed invasion force to the forbidden void to track down and destroy or embrace the unknown builder of the Blueprint, depending on whether it is a friend or a foe.
Discussion between Richter and Ralen on the nature of mankind and the Blueprint
Richter pointed up toward the world of air, light, and life, almost a mile above. ‘We are born as colorless players with empty minds. But in the larger game we will have to choose a color, or we will be appointed one. That’s why people come in all colors; writers and build masters, diggers and masons, hunters and warlords, farmers and doctors, scouts and scientists, technicians and rulers. You’re a Traveler. Tell me how we must fight.’
‘By reuniting the fragments of the Blueprint,’ I answered.
Richter nodded. ‘And how do we do this?’
‘By reuniting mankind.’
‘No!’ Richter pointed at the blackboard. ‘Mankind cannot be reunited. This has never been possible. Sheep and wolves don’t befriend each other. Hunters and prey never become allies. We cannot escape the war.’
I grabbed my head in desperation. ‘What then?’
‘We have to venture out and fight. But not right away. Even invasions can be rushed. The Blueprint is a failed invasion, a war machine from another world, felled by teething troubles. Which is literally a gift to us. When we retrieve all of the fragments, reunite the zones, and combine them with our own science, we will fuse two sources of knowledge and power that should never have come into contact. Then we can finally go back to playing our own game, according to our own laws and rules. We stop waiting for the enemy to arrive and go to war with an army of unequalled strength.’
Richter crossed over to me and pressed his finger to his own chest. ‘Before you travel to the North, I will reacquaint you with all the interactions between our world and the Blueprint. Mechanical, physical, morphological, chemical, information technological, everything except biological. With this knowledge you’ll be able to break into the third archive. After that, we will be unbeatable together. Whosoever rules the third archive, rules the world.’
‘So why isn’t the North ruling the world?’
‘Because they cannot open the third archive. Only you can.’
Original back cover text
‘My life is a hopeless fight against a machine of which I am a part,’ I cry. ‘A monstrous machine that in blind gluttony crushes everything in its path. Fighting other machines has become our only goal in life. But I want to go out into the real world. I want to break free from the inhumane system we built ourselves, that suffocating blanket that makes us blind and vulnerable.’
I feel a hand on my shoulder. ‘Forget the existence of the Blueprint. Get lost in the woods and don't come back until the last echoes have disappeared from your memories.’
‘What is the Blueprint?’
‘Nobody knows what the Blueprint is.’
‘Then why do I have to forget it?’
‘Because the slightest knowledge of its nature is as deadly as physical contact.’
I shake my head in confusion. ‘How is that thing or being, or whatever is buried beneath us, defeated?’
‘The Blueprint has not been defeated. That is not possible. It has only been split into six zones that should never be allowed to touch again. The zones have again been split into hundreds or thousands of fragments - no one knows exactly how many - that are built into the foundations of hermetically sealed archives, deep below the forbidden boundary.’
A menacing glow begins to shine in the east. Hungry I look at the steaming primeval forests that stretch over the horizon. I want to disappear into it, not to forget the Blueprint and start a new life, but precisely to trace and reunite all its fragments. Whether the Blueprint is hostile or friendly doesn't matter to me. I have grown with it from my first memory. The Blueprint is the reason for my existence.
Why did I write the Blueprint?
From the age of eighteen, a dark future story entitled the Blueprint has been in my mind. The theme then was: a lonely scout searches abandoned tunnel systems and there stumbles upon a strange creature that has become petrified in fragments. In the beginning it was mainly the confrontation with a hostile creature of unknown origin that I wanted to explore. Later on came the search for the true nature, cause and reason of our existence and our struggle against the systems we created ourselves. Questions about the origin and future of mankind also played an increasingly important role in the book, and questions about finding the ultimate happiness: the connectedness of the tribe, or rather the solitary predator existence, or something in between these extremes. I tried to forge all these themes into an intriguing philosophical thriller.
Metaphor for technological and social developments
You could see the Blueprint as a metaphor for the current technological and social developments, which make us increasingly alienated from our original nature and way of life, developments that continue to destroy our natural world and our natural happiness, yet cannot be stopped by anyone, as if they are irresistible, like drugs.
What is the Blueprint?
Long ago there was an intelligent life form, the original builders, with an unbearable desire to hunt for strange sources of life in neighboring galaxies, to compete with other Blueprints of existence, life forms with different genetic codes. However, the distances to the stars turned out to be so great that they could not possibly be bridged within the time span of a natural life. Their native world seemed to be surrounded by a forbidden void. As if different sources of life were not allowed to come into contact with each other. This interstellar travel ban only intensified the desire to bridge the interstellar void. The original builders began to change over the generations from an organism of flesh and blood into thinking machines of steel and silicon. As living invasion machines the original builders left their world and traveled in deep solitude for thousands of years through the forbidden void, forgot their origins and history, existed only to compete with natural life forms and competing interstellar traveling war machines.
The Blueprint is one such living invasion machine that, after an almost impossibly long journey, has found a world of man. However, something went wrong during the journey through the forbidden void, an alien intruder penetrated the Blueprint, causing it to break up into six zones and 3,600 fragments. Instead of conquering the human world, the Blueprint has hit the continents like a shower of petrified eggs that can no longer germinate on their own. The fragments have since been buried deep in the earth's layers. Although the intruder prevents the fragments from reuniting on their own, the Blueprint cannot be destroyed and is still alive, it exists in a coded, dormant state. When the fragments are drilled open and come into contact with humans, animals, and machines, they begin to re-exert their strange, hostile life force, in a desperate attempt to drive out the intruder and reunite.
What is the influence of my background as biologist and paleontologist?
This has played a big part, especially in the choice of the themes: the purpose of life, encounters with strange life forms, the future of man, the search for the experience of primordial human life. Paleontology is the study of the biological history of life on earth, the evolution. The deep, dark origins of man and the other life on Earth are as intriguing as the distant, dark future and the total unknown that stretches beyond the yawning, hitherto unbridgeable void that surrounds us on all sides. It is all about the immeasurably great and comprehensive wonder of existence. You can also see the Blueprint itself as the blueprint of a life form from another source of existence. The Blueprint is Life. The fight against non-life. Both literally and figuratively, on many levels.
What is the message I want to convey with the Blueprint?
As the only species in the history of life on Earth, we have been given the opportunity by nature to escape the genetically determined behavioral patterns. We are the only species that can gain some form of freedom in us to feel, think and act independent from our genes. We have the ability not only to escape our own physical, chemical and biological programming, we also have the ability to escape the artificial programming of this world, and even the ability to escape physically from this planet. We have the opportunity to conquer distant worlds, to roam the universe forever on a voyage of discovery. But instead we have returned to the petty, the compulsive. We have all become addicted to our homemade game of entertaining and being entertained. We are slaves to our invented rules and virtual toys. We have made everything equally small and compulsive, while we can be so big and free.
Instead of focusing on the great unknown in the distance that surrounds us on all sides, humanity is turning en masse into our small inner world. More than ever we live for the petty, ephemeral, virtual. Our collective virtual reality continues to grow exponentially and objective reality is getting further away. En masse, we become addicted to consuming virtual entertainment, convenience and pleasure that is tailored to satisfy our minds that are getting more spoiled and our bodies that are getting bigger, more demanding and gluttonous.
Almost every modern philosophy assumes that we live in a finite world. This assumption makes the future hopeless. Together you have to end up in a world that is too small with too many people, who all take up too much resources and living space and are getting older and more demanding. These philosophies are actually systems of thought and rule of destruction and oppression. Destruction of one kind by another kind, oppression of one human by another, but above all suppression and destruction of our original nature and reality, of our natural potential to utilize all the possibilities of life. Suppression of our pursuit of true happiness and our true destiny.
What if we throw overboard the limitations we impose on ourselves, all those rules and laws and conditioning that fix our thinking and doing? What if we do everything we can to make our world endless? We act as if we are on an island in an unnavigable ocean. But that's not true. Our world is part of a larger world, an infinite world in which travel is possible, in which an infinite existence is possible. We can conquer the infinite world. It is our destiny, yours and mine. A natural duty according to the universal laws of life. We must do everything in our power to survive forever. To conquer the universe. To be the first life form to cross from our world to other worlds. We have to seek for other sources of life. That is the reason of existence of civilized man. The goal of self-conscious living is to attain eternity. Changing the imposed temporary existence into an eternal being is up to us to accomplish. Finding and becoming the strongest form of existence. And thus explore and conquer the infinite universe, until the end of time.
A short biography
As a child I wrote fantastic stories and I never stopped. The origins and future of mankind have always fascinated me. That's why I love science and writing fiction. During my study evolution biology and paleontology I was a race rower and I developed the first ideas for my philosophical future thriller The Blueprint, an exploration of a distant, dark future. It took me 25 years to finalize this life’s work. After my military service as platoon commander, I started working in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, in commercial and strategic positions where my creativity and leadership skills come in handy. In my career I have launched more than twenty new therapies and products, from national product manager to global vice president marketing & sales. I have three daughters (18, 23 and 27 years old) and live with my Mexican wife Diana in the Netherlands. Besides my work, I am always writing. Between 2009 and 2015, I worked on fiction and non-fiction about the original form of society of man, the tribe. It was during this period that my idea arose to write a novel about the near future of man: Alfaman. I have been working on my second novel every day since 2016. In Alfaman I sketch how the world could develop from now until the end of the century, seen through the eyes of my alter ego Jack Newman, who will be born in 2036. The changes in society that I have seen happening during my life are nothing compared to the dramatic developments that Jack is a part of in the latter half of this century.
Rise and fall of immortality
This is a painting that means a lot to me: Rise and Fall of Immortality - how we as mankind lost our ability to be immortal.
The left side shows how mankind step by step acquired the unique qualities of creative intelligence and unpredictable thinking by overcoming his compulsive fears, urges and behaviour patterns determined by congenital instincts. Our distant ancestors must have been aware that this only just discovered spiritual freedom gave them the potential to gain boundless ingenuity and eternal happiness. We seized this in the evolution unprecedented opportunity with both our hands. The development of free observation, free movement, free interaction, free coexistence, free thinking and free will gave us the ability to populate all continents in just a few hundred generations, a unique feat in the history of life on Earth. Mankind acquired immortality by his ability to escape our finite world, as we proved in 1969 by bringing the first men to the moon. The right side of the painting shows how laws of culture took our spiritual freedom, so hard wrung from the laws of nature, away from us. Free observation was thwarted by written language, free movement by agriculture, free interaction by property, free coexistence by law, free thinking by church, and free will by state. Step by step we lost our ability to conquer new worlds. We traded our immortality for suppression, deception, gratification of needs and addiction.
In the centre of the painting glows Mars, the planet that could have been conquered decennia ago, but now again is unreachable far away.
De linkerkant laat zien hoe de mensheid stap voor stap de unieke eigenschappen van creatieve intelligentie en onvoorspelbaar denken verwierf door zijn dwangmatige angsten, driften en gedragspatronen te overwinnen die bepaald werden door aangeboren instincten. Onze verre voorouders moeten zich bewust zijn geweest dat deze pas ontdekte spirituele vrijheid hen het potentieel gaf om een staat van grenzeloze vindingrijkheid en eeuwig geluk te bereiken. We grepen deze in de evolutie ongekende kansen met beide handen aan. De ontwikkeling van vrije observatie, vrij bewegen, vrije interactie, vrije co-existentie, vrij denken en vrije wil gaf ons het vermogen om alle continenten te veroveren en te bevolken in slechts een paar honderd generaties, een unieke prestatie in de geschiedenis van het leven op aarde. De mensheid heeft onsterfelijkheid verworven door zijn vermogen om aan onze eindige wereld te ontsnappen, zoals we in 1969 bewezen door de eerste mannen naar de maan te brengen. De rechterkant van het schilderij laat zien hoe onze spirituele vrijheid, zo hard bevochten van de wetten van de natuur, ons weer werden afgenomen door wetten van cultuur. Vrije observatie werd gedwarsboomd door geschreven taal, vrij bewegen over de aarde door de landbouw, vrije interactie door eigendom, vrije co-existentie door de wet, vrij denken door de kerk, en vrije wil door de staat. Stap voor stap verloren we ons vermogen om nieuwe werelden te veroveren. We ruilden onze onsterfelijkheid in voor onderdrukking, bedrog, behoeftebevrediging en verslaving. In het midden van het schilderij gloeit Mars, de planeet die decennia geleden veroverd had kunnen worden, maar nu weer onbereikbaar ver weg is.