Introduction
As we write these words, the first explosion of astonishment and debate over the unauthorized publication of the "Pentagon Papers" has died away and the public has turned its attention to such other crucial matters as the 1971 World Series, the future of wage-price controls, George Wallace's chances in the coming presidential race, etc. Perhaps we are prejudiced because we are publishers, but we think the Pentagon Papers affair is more important than any of these, and probably one of the most important historical events of the year.
What the entire question boils down to is whether we as citizens of a democracy are really masters of our own fates or whether we are being manipulated like puppets by some sort of evil coalition of selfish interests-and thus headed toward a totalitarian state like that described by George Orwell in 1984. If our democratically elected rulers are taking so much power into their own hands that they are afraid or unwilling to give us all the facts about what they are doing, the latter alternative becomes a real and frightening possibility. In that case, we should all be seriously worried about whether or hot we are in danger of being controlled by "secret masters"-potential Big Brother-type dictators-or not.
It is important, of course, not to try to leap to quick and simple conclusions. Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, discussing the entire matter in The New York Review of Books, is careful to establish this clearly: "The Pentagon Papers, like so much else in history, tell different stories, teach different lessons to different readers. Some claim they have only now understood that the Vietnam war was the 'logical' outcome of the cold war or the anticommunist ideology, others that this is a unique opportunity to learn about decision making processes in government. But most readers have by now agreed that the basic issue raised by the Papers is deception. At any rate, it is obvious that this issue was uppermost in the minds of those who compiled the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times, and it is at least probable that this was also an issue for the team of writers who prepared the forty-seven volumes of the original study.
"The famous credibility gap, which has been with us for six long years, has suddenly opened up into an abyss. The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to probe this material, which, unhappily, he must recognize as the infrastructure of United States foreign and domestic policy."
Superficially, it may seem like a very large jump indeed from a discussion of United States foreign and domestic policy to the novel you are about to read, Captive of the Lust Master by Peggy Swenson. The story will at first appear to be a pure fantasy. On closer examination, however, the discerning reader will notice many resemblances to such novels of prophecy and extrapolation as Orwell's 1984. We feel it would also not be inaccurate to compare this work to the best of Kafka: what seems at first to be a simple horror story is actually much more, and very close in the final analysis to the most ultimate reality of all.
Tammy Jenkins, Miss Swenson's young heroine, is certainly subjected to horror almost beyond human conception. In the opening pages, she is kidnapped and drugged-and awakens as a captive of one of the "Secret Masters," a group of strange, power-mad, almost inhuman beings whose headquarters occupy a hidden island in the Caribbean. It takes Tammy a long time to discover exactly what the motives of the Secret Masters are, and in the meantime she undergoes many strange and shocking adventures. The world she has been abducted into is a weird and unreal one-but beneath the unreality is a terribly tangible threat to the future of human civilization as we know it.