The Liquefactionists

The Liquefactionists are a political faction organized around the eventual merging of everyone into one person through protoplasmic absorption. Their promise of a common human substance is also a program of radical erasure: individual differences do not survive the movement’s imagined final absorption. In Interzone, where political organizations overlap and public authority often takes absurd or coercive forms, the faction makes the danger of unity itself a political question.

Doctrine and Political Position

The Liquefactionists’ stated horizon is a single collective person, produced by absorbing everyone into one. Their position stands opposed to the Factualists, who resist both liquefaction and the Divisionists’ replica program, and especially reject the Senders’ coercive one-way transmission. The contrast is not simply between competing parties: it is between a politics that makes sameness its conclusion and a defense of living individuality against organized control.

The faction’s doctrine is not presented as a stable public platform. Its membership is described as largely duped, with who is deceiving whom remaining unclear until the final absorption. That delayed revelation makes the movement’s internal structure resemble its promised outcome: the boundary between participant and instrument may become intelligible only when individual agency has already been swallowed. The account does not identify the one exception to the otherwise duped membership, leaving the center of manipulation deliberately uncertain.

Concealment and Membership

Salvador Hassan O’Leary, the After Birth Tycoon, conceals his Liquefactionist activity behind a dense screen of international finance. The financial cover shields the movement’s operations from its rank and file, even as Salvador relaxes among friends after several strong doses of Yage. His position links the faction to immense economic resources while preserving uncertainty about how much its ordinary members know.

The Liquefactionists are also associated with every form of sexual perversion, especially sadomasochistic practices. The text sets this account beside its description of the Senders’ ignorance and self-righteousness and the Divisionists’ fear and rage. In practice, however, the parties do not remain separate: they blend in combinations. The political map therefore offers no clean refuge from the faction’s influence or from the control systems it shares a city with.

Public Face and Political Performance

The faction’s public identity sits uneasily beside its hidden program. Salvador Hassan O’Leary’s international finance screens his Liquefactionist activity from the rank and file, while among friends, after several stiff doses of Yage, he drops the reserve and announces that Islam is already a liquefied mass. He follows the claim with a comic song about its trembling on the brink and needing only one push to fall. The performance turns political absorption into a joke that is also a warning: the movement’s private confidence concerns not a distant possibility but a system poised for collapse into unity.

This rhetoric belongs to a wider political landscape of staged authority and unstable allegiance. The rank and file of Islam Inc. consists of an assorted assembly of religious and political representatives who attend meetings while higher-ranking figures prudently stay away; even careful searches do not prevent the gatherings from ending in riots. Interzone’s ordinance barring Islam Inc. meetings within five miles of the city limits makes political organization subject to geographic restriction, while the meetings’ repeated disorder exposes the distance between formal membership and effective control. Against that backdrop, Salvador’s financial concealment and private declaration suggest that the Liquefactionist project operates through both public political forms and less visible networks.

The book also presents politics through abrupt, theatrical set pieces rather than a single continuous account. At the inauguration of Escuela Amigo, a school for delinquent boys of Latin American origin endowed by A.J., the patron appears on a platform draped in American flags and demands the promised statue. A technician has it towed into place by tractor; A.J. presses a button, turbines roar beneath the platform, and wind tears the red velvet drapes loose, tangling them around faculty members as dust and debris sweep through the spectators. The delayed unveiling converts a civic ceremony into spectacle, with the crowd left staring at the statue in silence. The scene does not establish that the Liquefactionists directed the event; rather, its place among the political fragments helps show how authority in this world is repeatedly staged as a collision between official ceremony and uncontrolled display.

Doctrine, Mixture, and Political Theater

The Liquefactionists’ imagined unity contrasts with the Factualists’ rejection of both liquefaction and replica-making, and with their opposition above all to the Senders. The Factualists’ tentative bulletin does not reject telepathic research outright: it argues that telepathy, properly understood, might defend against organized coercion, while condemning its use to control or erase another living creature’s individuality. It also insists that telepathy is not inherently one-way, defining unilateral broadcast as an evil. Against that standard, the Liquefactionists’ project of absorption belongs to a broader struggle over whether contact between minds can preserve difference or become a means of domination.

The parties’ apparent distinctions are unstable. The Divisionists live in continual fear and rage, the Senders are characterized by ignorance and self-righteousness, and the Liquefactionists are associated with sexual excess; yet the factions blend in practice rather than remaining separate. Political affiliation therefore offers no reliable boundary between competing systems. The Liquefactionists’ final absorption intensifies this instability: membership itself is said to consist almost entirely of dupes, although it remains unclear who deceives whom until the moment of absorption. The text withholds the identity of the exception, leaving the movement’s center of power unresolved.

Other political fragments make the same gap between public procedure and effective power visible. On the Island, a British military and naval station opposite Interzone, the population must gather each year at the municipal dump to renew the rent-free lease and residence permit. The Island’s President crawls across the garbage to deliver the citizen-signed papers to the Resident Governor, who pockets them and asks whether everyone is happy. Soldiers sweep machine guns across the crowd; the Governor’s joking assurance that he will keep the papers is followed by laughter under their guns. The ceremony preserves democratic forms while showing how little consent means when backed by armed force.

The Island’s legislature likewise has narrowly limited jurisdiction: its Senate and Congress debate garbage disposal and outhouse inspection, after losing even the authority to oversee baboon maintenance. The purple-assed baboons, brought there by pirates in the seventeenth century, are protected by a capital prohibition on killing them despite the trouble they cause; a legend says the Island will fall when they leave, though no one specifies what that means. The lease ceremony and the Liquefactionists’ promised absorption differ in scale, but both make political order appear as a managed arrangement in which formal participation coexists with sharply restricted agency.

Narrative Significance

The Liquefactionists’ promise of one final person gives the political fragments a governing pressure: the movement treats individual difference as something to be absorbed, while the Factualists’ tentative bulletin argues that telepathy should not become a one-way means of control and that individuality must not be coerced or erased. The contrast is sharpened by the parties’ mixture in practice. Their labels do not establish secure boundaries, just as the Liquefactionists’ membership does not guarantee that members understand the project to which they belong. The account’s withheld exception and delayed disclosure leave the faction’s center of power indistinct; absorption is both the movement’s stated end and the point at which its internal relations would finally become clear.