(still image of Hardiner from Jazra Jaban's film Max Larry, Haunted Fairy, 2012)

So what did Harry Hardiner leave us? 

A staggering amount of text: 26 discovered short stories, more than 200 poems, 15 or more novels, 17 or more short and full-length plays, and about 40 essays written for magazines and his own personal edification. 

An enduring mystery: his origins, his writing methods, his philosophies, and his baffling blip out of existence, not to mention the subcultural phenomenon born to detect the truths he buried.

A theory of modern culture and the obsession with data and "expansion" that we now call Explosionism: that endless repetition of wholecloth, burst, explosion, mortaring, and the kettle that takes us into the next wholecloth to start the cycle over again, evident in Lost and the plays of Martin McDonagh and the music of the Flaming Lips and everything in between. 

A fingerprint on the throat of the world:

Hardiner references suddenly appear everywhere around you when you look.

Sufjan Steven's sprawling songscape "Onward Ho, Across the Maghreb, Into the Plot Device, Go!" borrows heavily from Conquest of Algiers and Harry Hunters.

The Sesame Street skit "The Shattered Muppet" about logarithmic growth and overpopulation mimics the "foam" of Rise. 

The Simpsons reference Lights Low (Al Brooks has said publicly that it's his favorite of the Rosewire novels) in very nearly every episode produced after the novel's publication. 

Even President Obama in his first inaugural address quoted President Jemison's Hunter 3 speech wholecloth: "We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you." 

Harry Hardiner is all around you. If you haven't stopped to pay him any notice before, maybe now you will. He might be dead. For all we know, he did "rise up" out of this universe and into some other one. But if you look around, you'll still find him here. He's gone, but he's everywhere.

You can't escape him.