The San Francisco Bay Area was a lively place in the 1960s, from the Free Speech Movement at the University of California campus in Berkeley to black radicalism in Oakland to the Summer of Love in San Francisco. But something else happened then: the Blue Light. Traveling from the orbit of Neptune, a narrow needle of light brought a matrix of alien dreams and equations millions of miles to Earth. The Blue Light transformed the life and consciousness of everyone it encountered.

One of the people it hit was a young drug burnout who called himself Orde. The Blue Light brought him visions, which he preached to the small congregation that assembled every week to hear his teachings. His own quest for transcendence led Orde to commit what the police called murder. Orde's disciple Chance, through whose memories we learn what happened, also found himself in trouble with a legal system that did not understand the implications of the Blue Light.

In the course of several years' wanderings across northern California, Chance encounters others affected by the Blue Light: the nymphomaniac Claudia Heart, an undead sadist called the Gray Man, and Miles Barber, a detective obsessed with bringing Orde to justice. Chance and his companions spend years in the mysterious woods of Treaty, until the Gray Man seeks them out. In the final battle against this personification of Death, Chance's fate is sealed.

Discussion Questions

1. Why did the author set Blue Light in California during the 1960s? How did his decision expand or limit his options? How might the novel have differed if it were set in our own time, or ten years from now?
   
   
2. In what ways does Blue Light hold up a mirror to American society, either as it is now or as it was in the 1960s? Is there a message in this book for the next generation?
   
   
3. Are the people struck by the Blue Light still "human" as we understand the term? Do the changes they undergo make their motivations and actions incomprehensible to us?
   
   
4. Is there any character in Blue Light with whom you can identify? Why? How?
   
   
5. What might have happened if a much larger number of people (perhaps the entire human population, or everyone except a very small number of individuals) had been struck by the Blue Light?
   
   
6. We are shown very little of the Blue Light's impact on society. How might we expect the government, the press, the country, and the rest of the world to respond to such an occurrence?
   
   
7. How does the ending (the last two pages) of the book affect your understanding of what has gone before?
   
   
8. Is there a political message or social commentary in Blue Light? If so, what is it?
   
   
9. It has been argued that the "genre" of a story -- whether it is realistic fiction, science fiction, a detective story, or a romance -- is a way of agreeing on certain rules about the meaning of the words in which it is told. Blue Light appears to contain elements of three genres: science fiction, horror, and mystery. From which of these perspectives did you read it, and how might your experience of the novel have changed had you read it differently?
   
   
10. What do you think was Walter Mosley's intention in writing this book? Is Blue Light a cautionary tale? A moral lesson?
    
    
11. Would you describe Blue Light as optimistic about the human prospect? Pessimistic? Cynical? Do you feel better having read the book? How? Why?
    
    
12. When Orde tells Chance, "You are half of a thing," Chance says, "The emotion I felt at realizing mountains for the first time was a weak emotion compared with what Orde made me feel there in the darkness." Was Chance's response a reflection of his discomfort with his mixed racial heritage? (Chance's father was black, his mother white: "How I blamed her for bearing a black child and rearing him in a white world.")
    
    
13. The Close Congregation contains members of several races, but their leader is a white man. If Orde had been black could he have held their loyalty so deeply? Consider the location of the story and the political movements of the time.
    
    
14. Orde can "taste what has happened in blood." After sharing blood ritual with him, Chance says that "a pane of light opened before me." Our society often uses "blood" as a metaphor for race. Is that what Mosley is doing in Blue Light?
    
    

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