Doppelgangers - An Episode of the Fourth, The Psychological, Revolution, 1997
First edition, 1947
Doppelgangers (1947) by H. F. Heard, the fiction pseudonym of Gerald Heard, is a dystopian novel subtitled An Episode of the Fourth, the Psychological, Revolution, 1997. Set in a future world governed by two opposing but mutually sustaining powers, the hedonistic dictatorship of Alpha above and the ascetic underground resistance of the Mole below, the novel follows an agent surgically remade as Alpha's exact physical double and deployed as a weapon of assassination. Heard was a close associate of Aldous Huxley and the novel's debt to Brave New World is direct and acknowledged.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth boards. New York: Vanguard, 1947. #10195.
Fine in nearly fine dust jacket with short closed tear.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth boards. New York: Vanguard, 1947. #10195.
Fine in nearly fine dust jacket with short closed tear.
Additional Details
Set in the year 1997, Doppelgangers presents a dystopian world in which traditional political and economic struggles have been superseded by what H. F. Heard terms a “Psychological Revolution.” Society is no longer ruled by force alone, but pacified through carefully engineered pleasure, mass distraction, and the systematic manipulation of desire.
The surface world is governed by the dictator Alpha, whose regime maintains control through spectacle, sensory stimulation, and a philosophy that equates happiness with submission. Beneath this brightly lit order exists its necessary counterpart: an underground resistance led by the Mole, whose ascetic rigor, secrecy, and brutality mirror the very tyranny it opposes. Heard constructs these two powers not as moral opposites, but as mutually sustaining forms of domination, each justifying the existence of the other.
The novel follows an agent of the underground who is subjected to a grotesque surgical transformation, reduced to “living clay,” and remade into the exact physical double of Alpha. Intended as a weapon of assassination, the doppelganger becomes instead a vessel through which Heard explores the erasure of identity under absolute authority. As the agent assumes the dictator’s role, he discovers that Alpha himself is less a sovereign than a captive, imprisoned by the mass appetite for adoration he has cultivated.
Written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Doppelgangers anticipates a psychological cold war in which control is not achieved through terror alone, but through pleasure, reverence, and the management of belief.
The surface world is governed by the dictator Alpha, whose regime maintains control through spectacle, sensory stimulation, and a philosophy that equates happiness with submission. Beneath this brightly lit order exists its necessary counterpart: an underground resistance led by the Mole, whose ascetic rigor, secrecy, and brutality mirror the very tyranny it opposes. Heard constructs these two powers not as moral opposites, but as mutually sustaining forms of domination, each justifying the existence of the other.
The novel follows an agent of the underground who is subjected to a grotesque surgical transformation, reduced to “living clay,” and remade into the exact physical double of Alpha. Intended as a weapon of assassination, the doppelganger becomes instead a vessel through which Heard explores the erasure of identity under absolute authority. As the agent assumes the dictator’s role, he discovers that Alpha himself is less a sovereign than a captive, imprisoned by the mass appetite for adoration he has cultivated.
Written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Doppelgangers anticipates a psychological cold war in which control is not achieved through terror alone, but through pleasure, reverence, and the management of belief.