The Butterfly Kid

It's better than it looks. Really.

The trouble with most warlocks is that they talk too much. That's how I happened to notice the kid in Washington Square: he wasn't saying anything. He just sat there, quietly making tropical butterflies, while the teenyboppers rippled past, unnoticing.

The Butterfly Kid is a Science Fiction novel written by Chester Anderson and published in 1967; it has been described by one reviewer as "a science-fiction novel, a detective story, and a comedy of manners (or lack thereof) that depicts Greenwich Village undergoing a psychedelic sneak attack of unknown origin". It is most commonly referred to as "psychedelic SF", and as such actually was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1968 (it lost out to Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny).

It is the first book in the "Greenwich Village Trilogy", followed by The Unicorn Girl (1969) by Michael Kurland and The Probability Pad (1970) by T A Waters.

It starts when Chester Anderson, narrator and harpsichordist for the band Sativa and the Tripouts, spots a teenaged boy sitting in Washington Square Park creating psychedelically-designed butterflies out of thin air -- real, living butterflies in the most improbable patterns possible. Chester carefully befriends the boy (who is named Sean) and brings him back home to find out just how he's manifesting butterflies.

It turns out someone is distributing a new drug -- something called "Reality Pills". And as Chester and his friend Michael discover when they sample the drug themselves, it's not only a hallucinogenic, the hallucinations it causes are solid and real and can affect the world around them. The sole source of this new drug is Laszlo Scott, the pariah of Greenwich Village. Scott is a talentless would-be poet and a conniver who delights in abusing everyone while at the same time hating almost everyone he meets. The Reality Pill clearly gives him a new status to lord over the other denizens of the Village -- but where is he getting it from?

Chester and Michael decide to investigate the source of the Reality Pills (and find out who in their right minds would choose Laszlo Scott as their front man). Despite their spectacular incompetence at detective work, Chester eventually follows Laszlo to a warehouse on Canal Street, where he discovers the supplier is a group of aliens -- six-foot blue lobsters. Naturally, Chester gets captured, whereupon he learns the Awful Truth: the Reality Pill, it turns out, is the first step in their plan to take over the Earth nonviolently. The Lobsters are pacifists by their very nature and cannot do direct harm to any living thing, but they have no problem letting other creatures be violent for them. Once the local testing is done, the Reality Pill will be spread worldwide, causing chaos and destruction; the Lobsters will then step in to "help restore order", just coincidentally installing themselves as rulers of the planet in the process.

Later, once Chester is rescued by his friends, it becomes a race against time to herd cats assemble a strike team of hippies to chase after the Lobsters and prevent them from dosing the entire city with the Reality Pill as their next step up in "local testing". Chester understands what the Lobsters don't -- that seven million humans with the ability to physically manifest their every fear, prejudice and hatred will be the real doomsday scenario. But then he realizes that they have a secret weapon that the Lobsters cannot possibly stand against... a briefcase full of Reality Pills.

While it has been out of print since a small 1980 paperback reissue, copies are still available through Amazon and book finding services.

Tropes used in The Butterfly Kid include:
  • Alien Invasion: By pacifist six-foot blue lobsters.
  • Aliens Speaking English: The Lobsters, but they've been studying Earth for a long time and appear to have learned our languages in the process -- mostly (see Blunt Metaphors Trauma, below).
  • Author Avatar: Chester Anderson.
  • Bad Liar: Laszlo. Not so much because of poor imagination, but because he tells so many lies he can't remember who he told which lie to. Chester calls this his "greatest personal weakness".
  • Baroque Pop: Implied strongly to be at least part of the repertoire of Sativa and the Tripouts, given that Chester plays the harpsichord in the band. (A fad for harpsichords in rock music in the middle 1960s resulted in the coining of the term "Baroque Pop".)
  • Benevolent Alien Invasion: What the Lobsters make their invasions look like -- they indirectly cause social collapse on their target worlds, then sweep in and "restore order".
  • Big Applesauce: Almost all the action in the novel takes place in Greenwich Village; the climactic battle is fought on the banks of the reservoir in Central Park.
  • Blunt Metaphors Trauma: While Ktch, the leader of the Lobsters, speaks English very well, he doesn't quite have all the idioms down:

Your people have a folk saying: 'If you can’t run your tongue across them, merge with them.' I ask you to give this quaint wisdom your serious consideration.

Amusingly, Chester takes up this particular mangled aphorism and uses it himself later in the novel.
  • Book Ends: The book begins and ends with Sean producing butterflies.
  • Butterfly of Transformation: Sean's butterflies at the beginning of the book herald an oncoming change to Greenwich Village; his butterflies at the end herald a change to the entire world.
  • Captain Obvious: Partially subverted when Chester points to Mike as an example of Alfred North Whitehead's statement that "It requires an unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." So he keeps pointing to the obvious everyone has overlooked.
  • Children Are Innocent: Heartbreakingly averted with the bloodthirsty and murderous alien army who all look like beautiful children, set loose by the Lobsters during the final battle.
  • City of Weirdos: Greenwich Village, as ground-zero for hippie culture.
  • Contemptible Cover: The original paperback. It doesn't look all that impressive, but it hides a fun and funny book. (The 1980 reprint is both far less contemptible and far less interesting.)
  • Country Mouse: Sean, but he adapts quickly and well, mostly thanks to Sativa.
  • Deus Ex Machina: THE Judge, who may have been a creation of the Reality Pill, except the Lobsters took him very seriously.
  • Dirty Coward: Laszlo Scott.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: Sativa, upon meeting Sean. And every few pages afterwards.

A slow voice, like a tawny port, breathed, "Who is That?" into my left ear. "He's Pretty!" Sativa always talked like that.

  • Fantastic Drug: The Reality Pill. Other than its "Reality Warper-in-a-pill" effects, it seems to be little more than a mild euphoric/hallucinogenic.
  • Glass-Shattering Sound: During the climactic battle, Chester briefly notes one of the others defeating a crystalline alien by singing at it until it shatters.
  • Gondor Calls for Aid: The last-minute rush to assemble a vanful of hippies to fight the Lobsters before they can dose the reservoir with liquid Reality Pill.
  • A Good Name for a Rock Band: "Sativa and the Tripouts" follows the classic "X and the Ys" pattern, obviously.
  • Granola Girl: Sativa has elements of this, as do the other (human) female characters.
  • Helpful Hallucination: A frequent effect of the Reality Pill.
  • High Times Future: Implied to be imminent in the alternate 1976 in which the story takes place, and pretty much a fait accompli in the unspecified "now" of the narrator.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: The Lobsters are ultimately defeated by humans using the Lobsters' own doomsday device against them -- combining bloodthirsty human ingenuity with a drug that allows its user to manifest anything they can imagine.
    • Also Laszlo Scott; he voluntarily acted as the Lobsters' human agent in exchange for preferential treatment after the invasion -- and is exiled with them after the Lobsters are defeated for being a collaborator.
  • Humongous Mecha: Chester creates a battalion of combat robots as part of the final battle against the Lobsters.
  • Invisible to Normals: Very much averted, both with the effects of the Reality Pill, and especially the vast assortment of alien corpses left at the edge of the Reservoir in Central Park after the final battle.
  • It Only Works Once: Sadly, Ktch and the other Lobsters have cloaks that protect them from "Love Sold in Doses" at the final battle.
  • Jerkass: Laszlo Scott, oh so very much:

The trouble was that Laszlo was a skunk, a nerd, a slimy loathsome thing whose major joy was to bring trouble and discomfort to everyone he encountered. For kicks he sold oregano to high-school kids from Queens. He stole from people poorer than himself as a matter of habit. He invented foul stories about innocent people and circulated them for a hobby. He once caught a social disease and spread it broadcast, especially among the naive and virginal, for upward of six weeks, until it got too uncomfortable even for him.
Laszlo was an incurable backstabber. In the Village society, where trust took the place of law, he could not be trusted. He was a wolf in black sheep's clothing, a one-man plague. Even worse, he was a notorious drag.

  • The Judge: THE Judge. He spontaneously appears (along with a court room) when someone mentions a trial for the Lobsters after they've been defeated. Although the heroes aren't entirely sure he's real, Ktch and the Lobsters take him and the sentence he pronounces very seriously.
  • Lust Object: Sean, for Sativa. They fall into both bed and a serious relationship with each other within a couple hours of their first meeting, so it's probably mutual.
  • Made on Drugs: In-Universe example -- anything manifested under the influence of the Reality Pill, of course.
  • Meaningful Name: Sativa and the Tripouts.
  • Military Alphabet: Chester comes up with a military alphabet of his own for designating the Humongous Mecha he creates at the last battle, noting that he didn't care to use anyone else's "second-hand" phonetic alphabet.
  • Mind Control: Deliciously played with. Even as he's being interrogated by Ktch with a psychotronic "torture machine", Chester discovers that he can control him and the other Lobsters by focusing on a song, "Love Sold in Doses", that his band performs. As a result, he learns far more about the Lobsters' plans than they learn about his.
  • Misfit Mobilization Moment: Happens about halfway through the battle with the Lobsters at the reservoir, when the Lobsters start taking the gang seriously and it goes from an attempt to Curb Stomp the primitives to an all-out battle.
  • Mushroom Samba: The plot revolves around a plot by pacifist aliens to take over the world by overdosing humanity with a drug that causes solid, physical hallucinations that can be seen by people other than the one taking the drug.
    • Also, the unintended effect of the alien torture machine on Chester.
  • New Age Retro Hippie: Practically every human character we see, but there's no "Retro" here -- in the 1976 of the book, the hippie counterculture is still a vibrant and living thing, almost at the tipping point where it stops being "counter" and becomes the culture. And the narration suggests that that's exactly what happened after the events of the book.
  • Physical God: Michael manifests a "small pantheon" the first time he takes the Reality Pill: Mick, the god of teenyboppers; Moe, the god of tourists; Phlipout and Phlippina, twin dieties of disorder; Fellatia, a goddess whose sphere is unspecified but is pretty obvious; Buldge, the goddess of minor disasters ("whose merest glance could delay a chick's period two weeks."); Toke, the god of Pot; Chuck, the god of miscellany; and Zap, deity of changes. While they exist, they are pretty much the real deal, though subject to Michael's control.
  • The Quisling: Laszlo Scott.
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The gang Chester and Michael assemble to battle the Lobsters at the reservoir.
  • Reality Warper: This is effectively what taking the Reality Pill makes one.
  • Shout-Out: Sean greeting Chester with "Howdy, Mister Dillon"; Mick, the god of teenyboppers.
  • Stage Magician: When Michael encounters fellow author Tom Waters, he (Tom) is working as a fortune teller and trickster at a traveling carnival. (In real life, Tom Waters was indeed a professional magician and member of the Magic Castle.)
  • Starfish Aliens: Blue lobsters, in this case.
  • Technical Pacifists: The aliens, who get physically ill at the thought of directly doing harm to another sentient being themselves, but have no problems whatsoever arranging for other sentient beings to kill each other.
  • Torture Always Works: Subverted -- when he is captured by the Lobsters, Chester is strapped into an alien torture machine, but their ideas of torture are... alien; he finds them easy to withstand, with the possible exception of being forced to watch hallucinations of Donald Duck playing Brahms. It does, however, force him to answer questions without his conscious mind being part of the process at all -- Ktch asks Chester "What do you do?", and he finds his vocal system, without his own intervention, telling them what he does, starting with a detailed account of his digestive processes. When he is left alone in the warehouse with the "torture" machine turned to full power, the experience is so enjoyable that Chester is upset when the machine is accidentally destroyed by his rescuers, because it gave him a better Mushroom Samba than all the drugs he had ever taken:

However, I was still being tortured. All around me I could see tiny noises intertwining like spaghetti in the air. My body was covered with acute perceptions of color in flux—solemn reds, introspective blues, pulsating greens and browns—all intimate and not to be ignored. My ears were full of the flavor of hot buttered corn with salt and lemon juice. (And oh, yes, I was still hungry, which felt a bit like being underwater.) I could taste smoothness and abrasiveness and sharpness alternating in intricate patterns of what was not quite motion, and the temperature of the air—night-cool, growing cooler—smelled . . . I don’t have a word for how it smelled. Like calculus, perhaps?
This was not at all unpleasant. In fact, I’d spent lots of money in my day for exotic pharmaceuticals I’d hoped would produce some such effects.

  • Tuckerization: In addition to Author Avatar Chester Anderson, there is Michael Kurland (who wrote the first sequel) and Tom Waters (who wrote the second sequel).
    • There is an uncertain instance in the character of Andrew Blake, an unashamed pornographer with artistic pretensions. Some fifteen or so years after the book was published, porn director/producer Paul Nevitt began working under the name "Andrew Blake" and began releasing almost incomprehensibly-artistic adult films; it is unknown if Nevitt was known to Anderson and had been using the name already, or if he just took the pseudonym in tribute, or if it was all just a coincidence.
    • At least two Amazon.com reviewers claim to have been neighbors of Anderson, Kurland and Waters in the 1960s and indicate that everyone in the book, even walk-on characters, is based on a real person.
  • Twenty Minutes Into the Future: Well, the future of 1967 -- set in a 1976 where there are videophones, military surplus hovercraft, a Bicentennial exposition, and a Hippie counterculture that is still flourishing instead of having burnt out with the rise of Watergate -- oh, and no disco.
  • Water Source Tampering: The lobsters' plan to dump the Reality Pill in liquid form into the New York City reservoir in Central Park.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The creations of the Reality Pill are disturbingly sentient, even some of the ones that shouldn't be. Chester shows some obvious sympathy (in between dealing with first a mystery and then an Alien Invasion) for those that know they're temporary and unreal.
  • Worthy Opponent: How Ktch comes to regard Chester and all humans other than Laszlo Scott, after the Lobsters' defeat. He apologizes for insulting humankind by underestimating it.
  • Zeerust: Hippie counterculture zeerust instead of the usual, but yeah. In 1984, a reviewer was already calling it "dated".
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