MegaMiscellanea

Neal Stephenson wrote a book called Anathem. You can buy it from Amazon or you can read about it on Wikipedia. I really enjoyed it, because it’s dense and full of interesting ideas and wonderful writing. Stephenson is a master of science fiction, and like all good writers in any genre, his craft surpasses it.

The bits about Anathem that matter to what I’m writing are these:

- it takes place on a world a lot like Earth but it’s not exactly earth and it evolved completely separately from our planet (which is to say, it’s not a long-lost colony in the future)

- the larger culture has the run of the place. They’re a lot like our worst vices – obsessed with television, movies, fantasy, escapism, money, sports, competition. Their world is called “extramuros” by the other group of people on the planet, who call themselves the “mathic.”

- there are a bunch of little colonies called “concents,” that are like a combination of cloistered monastery and university. The people in them are like monks who have only their clothes as their possessions. Their chief features are 1) they are largely self-sufficient 2) they have very limited contact with the outside world.

This contact is restricted depending on what kind of avout you are – the “unarians” open their gate to the outside world once a year. The “decenarians” open their gate to the extramuros world (and to the other avouts) every ten years, every hundred years for the “centenarians” and every thousand years to the “millenarians.” These groups mostly recruit from the newly-born and lower maths. This is to say, the Millenarians are only seen every thousand years, so most avout never see one! And because they have so much time for self-reflection and really detailed, slow, long-view studies that they’re said to have amazing, secret powers.

Well, there are all different kinds of “concents” (it’s a kind of convent, see?). Some of them even have legends about each other. One of those legendary concents is the Ringing Vale concent, known for their apparent study of “vale lore,” or martial arts.

So get this – these guys have been studying martial arts for thousands of years, mostly uninterrupted and with very little polluting contact with the fly-by-night saecular world. They don’t have a huge role in the book but it’s pivotal.

One of their central concepts is the idea of an “emergence.” The main character who hears the word spoken in context thinks the Ringing Vale avout means “emergency,” but she explains it further.

See, in the confines of a concent, you can’t really test martial arts. Sure, you can throw each other around and maybe do some hardcore sparring, but in the end it’s still nothing like real combat.

So, when some of these guys go out into the real world (which, again, is rare), they consider opportunities to test their knowledge in real-world circumstances as an emergence. It’s when they find their purpose in life – an emergence is like a hadj, a pilgrimage.

When it happens in the book, a small group of Valers (as they’re called) turn back an entire riot, in the kind of crunching, surgical, kinetic fight scene that few writers can do and Neal Stephenson can always do.

It makes me think of my own moments of emergence, and how those are what we work for.

Stay tuned for further reflection.

I’ve decided to bow to the interminable public pressure and finally allow comments on the Info-Matic section of my blog. I don’t like the sight of 0 comments all over my blog (it makes me feel lonely and irrelevant), so I didn’t have them before. But after a year of blogging at this domain, my traffic is always going to be what it is, and there’s no point in stifling the public discourse because of my little insecurities.

Therefore, comments are back on.

If there is a genetic component to verbal skill, it’s a dominant gene in my family. Even though my sister has pursued the laudable path of reason and logic, she’s the best writer that WVU’s psychology department has ever seen. I’m easily the worst writer in my family, which says all you need to know.

I have four brothers, but only one of them is as active online as I am. His blog is funny and full of insight, much like David himself. It’s mostly about his family, which David is also. An excerpt that caught my fancy:

In discussions in the car after the film, we agreed that the theme of Jumper is that cool people need to kill the religious people that are trying to kill them first because cool people have the right to be cool, even if they routinely violate the laws of physics and time-space in compleete disregard to the will of God.

His wife is Arwen, who immediately ingratiated herself to me by being named after a character in my favorite book. Since being born and named, she has started a blog about one of my other favorite things: food. Although recent recipes came from the Food Network, Winnie is someone wholly more authentic than anybody on the Food Network, which naturally means she’s pretty much way more awesome than anybody on the Food Network. I am loath to reduce my darling Nigella below anybody, but I’ve never eaten Nigella’s cooking. I’ve eaten Winnie’s cooking, and it wins.

I wish my brother Rob had a blog, but he doesn’t. Get on that, Rob. I know he’s reading, though, because he linked to me from his class’s blog. He also says in his comments that he often disagrees with what’s written in this space, but I think he mostly just means the political stuff. In matters that matter more, we agree. For instance, something that is funny to one of us is funny to the other one. This is always true. For instance, I know Rob will laugh at this:

I am hesitant to spoil the series, but I will do so in order to more fully be able to speak about it. Beware those spoilers, because they’re going to be big ones.

Lyra is a young, preadolescent girl. Her soul exists outside her body. It has a will and a mind and a name of its own, but it’s still her soul. It can take on the shape of any animal, and it can talk.

Everybody in her world has one of these animal companions, called a daemon. Childrens’ daemons have no set shape, and can change form at will. Adults’ daemons have a set animal shape that in some way illustrates or reflects the owner’s personality. It is considered unspeakably taboo to touch another person’s daemon. This becomes obvious later in the series.

Kids and daemons alike have no idea when or how their daemons will pick a shape and stay with it – Lyra and her daemon, Pan, just assume that he’ll pick one when he feels like it.

But very late in the very last book, we learn how and why and when a daemon picks its final form – it is touched by the owner’s first lover. This is why it’s taboo to touch another person’s daemon, because the act of doing so is highly sexual in nature. Instead of shaking hands with a man you meet, it would be like sticking your fingers in his mouth.

This is the central point around which the book pivots, and there are hints to this throughout, finally coming to fruition when the main character, Lyra, fulfills her destiny and becomes a second Eve – bringing about the “fall” by having sex and falling in love. Through this, she saves the mutliverse.

But not quite. To really save the whole universe and the free will of humans and the creativity and sentience of our entire species on every world and in every universe, she and her first and greatest love can never be together. They get a few days together, but that’s all – they have to split up and live in separate universes, never again able to communicate.

His Dark Materials is about growing up. Growing up is about falling in love, but it’s also about having your heart broken. Being an adult is simultaneously reveling in the bright brilliance of life’s greatest joys while accepting that every one of them is finite, and that things end. Life and death, joy and sadness, all that stuff.

I’ve read a lot of books about growing up and coming of age, and I’ve even written a few stories about it, but few writers have captured it as well as Pullman has.

I’m not just saying that because he’s an atheist, either, or because he’s written an atheist answer to The Chronicles of Narnia. He’s also written a literate answer to The Chronicles of Narnia, and an educated one, and a clever one.

What does one do with 10,000 word story about Noah’s ark?

That’s what I’ve got. I’ve serialized some of it here before, but now I think it’s largely finished. One more run-through of the red pen should be enough.

But then what?

Although the story is Biblical, it isn’t what you’d call a religious story. I always had major philosophical issues with that God fella, and the idea that we, as human beings, should honor him by, say, killing our children if He asks us to do it. I believe in free will, and I agree with Philip Pullman that Lucifer is only heroic for questioning the authority of the Authority.

This philosophy is reflected in the story, so religious publications are right out.

It’s not science fiction at all, but it is a kind of fantasy. It exists in that weird pre-historical era of Noah’s, a period of time that is (obviously) lost to historians and can consist of any cultures or characters of which I can conceive.

It has angels in it, too. Actually, it has a lot of angels in it.

Is that enough to qualify it as fantasy?

But anyway, it’s long. It’s probably a little too long to publish. I have a kind of problem with the lengths of stories I write. It takes a certain amount of space in which to write the story I’m trying to tell, and I have trouble tearing the stories down into more manageable portions. 10,000 words is about 35 pages. That’s a lot to read. If you’re not digging the formalized voice or the teenaged narrator or the angels in the architecture, you’re not going to want to read all 10,000 words of it.

I’m stumped.