Huck Magazine – Radical Culture. .<< O s a m u T e z u k a >>. Windupstories.com – fiction by paolo bacigalupi. The Techno-Pagan Octopus Messiah - Review - Mumbai Vacation. Ian Winn's debut novel, The Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah, is nothing less than superb. It is a shame that Terrance McKenna, internet shaman, advocate of psychedelics, and author of Food of the Gods, he who had predicted the end of the Mayan calendar, did not live long enough to read it. Imagine if you would, a Jewish-American writer from California that is part Jack Kerouac, part William Burroughs, part Timothy Leary, part Paul Theroux, with a dash of Shirley MacLaine thrown in, and that is what you have in the novel and writings of one Ian Muir Winn (named after the Naturalist John Muir), a self-imagined messiah and the self-proclaimed Serpent Muse of Poetry.