I randomly googled Shaver Mystery and after reading Richard Sharpe Shaver's wiki I just can't stop thinking about how people with schizophrenia might have had a huge impact on scifi. Like take telepathy. A person hears voices and logically assumes they are hearing other people's thoughts. Richard thought he was telepathically picking up torture sessions from evil subterranean people. Like any person is capable of radical creativity but there must be something to schizophrenic peoples who are trying to make sense of disordered thinking. Idk am I out of line in saying that? I don't mean it in a derogatory way. Maybe they believe their own fantastical stories maybe they don't. As a person who grew up in a mentally ill religious family I also liken it to weird lore in the Bible. There's an all powerful man in the sky who can hear your thoughts. Sometimes believing in God made my mental illness better sometimes it made it worse. I imagine writing scifi is similar. You could get deeper in your delusions or you could feel validated in your writing.
That’s not out of line at all. The human mind is endlessly fascinating
It appears rather evident that the esteemed Richard Shaver did indeed suffer from some sort of paranoid schizophrenia. According to his friends and colleagues, Shaver truly believed that his life was being controlled by unseen forces residing in deep, subterranean caverns. The voices that emanated from this underground realm were sometimes kind and benevolent, other times cruel and vicious. Both voices spoke to him regularly, constantly assailing with all manner of ideas, assumptions and commentary.
Shaver coped with these intrusive verbal hallucinations by creating a rich and textured mythology around it all. The benevolent voices came from the righteous Tero; whereas the malicious voices came from the villainous Dero. These two races of beings lived in the center of the earth and were the descendants of extraterrestrial travelers.
The stories that Shaver wrote about the Tero and the Dero were super vibrant and rich. They were fantastical, often absurd, yet told in such an ernest, convincing and multifaceted fashion that readers were just whisked away. Fans couldn’t get enough of these wild tales his contributions to ‘Amazing Stories’ made it a hugely successful pulp periodical.
Shaver’s ability to seize his psychological difficulty and use it for the benefit of his craft is similar to the mathematician John Nash, author Zelda Fitzgerald, jazz musician Buddy Bolden and painter Vincent Van Gogh. This is not to suggest that genius is derived through psychological malady but rather there can be instances were extreme adversity can contributed to the brining about of something unexpectedly awesome.
