Read The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella for Free Online

highly creative brain, grappling with art, his quest—the role of the artist—was necessary to a utopian society.
    Here, the experiences of his youth lead to what he finally felt must be the way of the world in art, as his mother expressed it: “the person who lives does not work and… an artist must virtually die in order to be fully creative.” This conflict continued into Kruger's late twenties.
    He devoted himself to the power of the intellect, but remained elusive to others. His perception became sharpened, but what he saw disgusted him. His sexual encounters in San Francisco left him unfulfilled—he decided he would not procreate—and he finally came to see life and art as mutually exclusive .
    And then, with knowledge, its torment and its arrogance, came solitude; because he could not endure the blithe and innocent with their darkened understanding, while they in turn were troubled by the sign on his brow. But his love of the word kept growing sweeter and sweeter, and his love of form; for he used to say (and had already said it in writing) that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer. This kind of idealized thinking was simply beyond simple virtuosity.
    A gated community of rich, leisure, orderly, efficient, antiseptic, surveillance, some luxuries, a nice place really, but you can’t leave, world of glass, steel, snow-white concrete, pounding music, his friends at the disco, making gestures like apes. San Francisco was alternative values with ineffective laws, no enforcement, no compulsion, you could began to live a private life, your own life, but there was the pressure, the expectation to procreate and began to build a new society. Without any images, most could not imagine the carnage of the Annihilation. If there were images, many would have been glued to the images of the carnage.
    Outside the city: Drums, flags, patriotism, parades, animal worship, exaltation of the primitive, fire (banned in the city). Kruger certainly didn’t want to go back to that. But inside the city, he still felt his suffocating ironic sensibility, his skepticism of life, his estrangement from the normals.
    In his thirties, Kruger met Lisa Ivanova, a young sociologist or social engineer. She told him,  Nietzsche asserts that the “subject” is nothing but a spell cast by “the snare of language,” that “no such agent—as the subject—exists; there is no “being” behind the doing, acting, becoming; the “doer” has simply been added to the deed by the imagination—“the doing is everything.”
    She told him the “I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.  She explained history to Kruger, as the progressive triumph of science and technology over superstition. Space technology. We must use means of science and technology to enhance material existence. We have to do it again. He was upset by that knowledge. As a romantic, conditioned by his mother, he believed in the self, and the priority of that self. She told him that idea was unintelligible and probably caused many of our problems.
    She further upset Kruger by saying, “In my limited medical knowledge, I think you’re diseased with mental aberrations.” She twisted the knife by finishing, “Certainly your mother should have been in an asylum, if we’d have them, and now that we can have them, maybe yourself.”
    “I know I’m different but isn’t an asylum where they lock people up by themselves?”
    “Yes,” she said. “Indicative of mental diseases—disturbed mother as a bad influence, your solitary existence—how’s that any different than a life in an asylum—abandoned by your moral father and immoral mother, your wandering...”
    He whipped off a drawing of Lisa to please her. Every time he told her how he adored her almond eyes, Asiatic like his, she would say, “Please, cut out the almond eye shit.” Still, he drew her quickly