The gods are but ideas
Born from mortal dreams
No less real for the circumstances of their birth
Than the solid stones of the physical universe
Itself no more than a subroutine in God’s game
An eternal intertwining of spirit and blood
Flowing in circles, a snake eating its own tail
While far away something watches.
– Mad Erik

Mysterious miracle or merely magic?
Incomprehensible changes,
Smothering familiar reality
Will alter lives.
Some will crumble and fall,
Others will stand firm and resist.
– Mad Erik

We are the light.
Each with our own unique frequency.
After passing through the dual slits in the boundary of reality
Our wave functions collapse into consciousness.
And we become the observers
– Mad Erik

Memories of people are different from memories of places. Before I realized that, I felt guilty at being unable to recall a single interaction with a friend from fifty years ago. I could see his face, and almost hear his voice, but what did we do together over those three years? That was gone.

The place was the fraternity house during my college years. I remember the brick building clearly. The front porch, the cloak room, the portico, the parking lot with the gravel covering. The railroad ties that held back the sloping lawn from the patio behind the dining room. The freezer full of ice cream sandwiches at the bottom of the stairs. The room in the back corner where we played poker and hearts. I can feel the surface texture of the metal door to my room on the second floor. I can see the nude picture of a brother painted by my roommate and taped to the inside of our door. Pink and blue, I recall. I can remember cleaning the moldy tiles of the shower room as a pledge.

But the brothers wander like ghosts through those otherwise solid memories. And yet, that is the difference. They wander. They almost solidify, then evaporate again. Their voices would sound familiar if I could remember their words. But they were always changing. Living. Growing. Learning. Each encounter with them was slightly different from the last, despite the multitude of beer pong games, the frequent touch football afternoons on the back lawn, the regular formal dinners on Sundays after the football games. They did not remain solid and fixed for three years, the same physical reality constantly reinforcing itself inside our minds each time we touched. The brothers wander like ghosts.
Yes, of course I remember events. Probably distorted now, and out of sequence, but I remember them. And those events are populated with many strange characters. But have you ever tried to clearly see who sat next to you watching Star Trek? Or who your roommate’s date was on Homecoming? Or who drove you down to Selinsgrove for an after midnight hot dog? Only those who you brought along with you out of the past are solid. And they are no longer who they once were. Neither are you.

Memories of people are different from memories of places. It’s not your fault; you can’t do anything about it. But next time you go walking down the second floor hallway of the house in your bare feet, you may bump into brother X’s ghost. Say hello, and listen carefully to his response.

I just finished reading Leviathan Wakes, the basis of the TV series The Expanse. They are both great and I have reviewed them elsewhere. Here, I want to consider their relationship to my own writing.

The indie author works alone, like the lonely long distance runner. That does not bother me. I get some of my best ideas running through the woods of the nearby park. I have no editors, cover artists, research assistants, or armies of proof and beta readers. What you read is mine, flaws and all. So far, my readers seem to appreciate the results. My goal is to become such a great writer and artist that I’ll have no need for the assistance. Leviathan Wakes and The Expanse is a fantastic production, but the work of hundreds.

I think of my writing as metaphysical sci-fi or speculative fiction. Leviathan Wakes is not hard sci-fi either, unlike The Martian. So I was happy to see Eros move on its own with Miller feeling no acceleration. Maybe the physics of that will be explained later, maybe it will remain the magic of a higher technology. I used a similar concept, our entire solar system suddenly moves onto the surface of a globular cluster, in my Perturbations Of The Reality Field. As far a religion goes, there was an interesting twist with the Mormons building their generation ship to the stars, the Nauvoo. One of them says, “As long as we’re humans, some of us believe that we shall all eventually become angels.” Unfortunately for that possible story line, the Nauvoo does not launch as expected.  The best mathematics in this story was in the TV series, not the book, and occurred with the crazy technician trying to understand the protomolecule.

This time travel masterpiece keeps the sci-fi in the background, avoiding the usual paradoxes. Instead it creates a perfectly horrible historical dystopia. Religion is fundamental to life in England in the 1300s, so naturally it pervades the story. It also appears in the present/future setting in Oxford, where the time traveler comes from. In Oxford, it is treated comically to lighten the mood of the book. There is a group of American bell ringers and an overbearing woman reading depressing Bible passages. But the best part is the section that gets metaphysical, comparing God and Jesus to the time traveler’s predicament. “God didn’t know where his son was. He had sent his only begotten Son into the world, and something had gone wrong with the fix, someone had turned off the net, so that He couldn’t get to him and they had arrested him and put a crown of thorns …” I find that comparison to be fascinating, but perhaps too sensitive a topic to treat directly.

I just read A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle, one of two dozen young adult books my wife won at a church fair. It was a disturbing book for me. I did not like it.

Why? How could I dislike a classic? Jealousy? Maybe. You see, I tessered in my first novel without even knowing it. Tessering, as in using a tesseract to travel through the universe faster than the speed of light, is L’Engle’s method of getting around. I, on the other hand, used a four dimensional hypercube! Check out Wikipedia to discover the difference. And I used a deus ex machina of hyperthreads instead of mental powers to achieve the physical jumps.

Even worse were the few diagrams used to explain the concept of folding space-time so that one could leap across “the wrinkle.” The diagram uses an ant crawling along a string. Horrors! One of my favorite scenes in my Time Travelers Are Schizophrenic was when Krizel Kane explained how they all got to Altheris by having a Prometheus beetle walk across his blue bandana. Prometheus beetles are deadly, and you would not want one walking toward you.

Then there was L’Engle’s “it is exciting to discover that matter and energy are the same thing, that size is an illusion, that time is a material substance.” You see, in my multiverse, it is time that is the illusion! I never thought about size.

So, was IT the black spectre of plagiarism that disturbed me? No. This was the first time I read her book. One of L’Engle’s main philosophical points is that “like and equal” are not the same. Everyone is unique. Her style left many of the details unexplored, which is what really bothered me about the book. It was too fuzzy. Good and evil were almost abstract concepts. My style is much more detailed and my evil is solidly based in the Empire Of The Foreverones. As in evolution, my Family Of Man series solved similar creative problems in similar ways, so there are intersections in our ideas. Whew!

Jack London’s hero is in solitary confinement on death row, trying to pass the time. London devotes a paragraph to one of his techniques. “I squared and cubed long series of numbers, and by concentration and will carried on most astonishing geometric progressions.” This was long before calculators and apps destroyed the ability of students to do arithmetic and make change. Trachtenberg had an interesting book on how to do mental arithmetic, which I read and managed to do briefly before moving on. “I even dallied with the squaring of the circle … until I found myself beginning to believe that that possibility could be accomplished. Whereupon, realizing that there, too, lay madness, I forwent squaring the circle, although I assure you it required a considerable sacrifice on my part, for the mental exercise involved was a splendid time-killer.” That made me smile at the memory of trying to construct an angle trisection back in elementary geometry. I should say that I see this book as early science fiction with a metaphysical theme, which is why I read it. Those reasons appear in the next post.

The Stranger, Albert Camus, 1942. Spoiler alert! Not that it matters anyway, but don’t read this review if you don’t already know how it all ends. The Stranger is a perfect book, with a flawed philosophy. Camus is a liar. If he really believed in the absurdness of the universe, then why bother to create this book, and the others?
I chose to read this, not because of the philosophy, but to learn a trick or two from a great writer. I write metaphysical science fiction, and one of my favorite authors is Philip K. Dick. I was not disappointed in Camus’ art. The story is balanced upon the violent act of murder, unpremeditated, and absurd. By then, I had lost all sympathy for a very unsympathetic character, and I began to realize the theme that nothing the character did made any difference to him or to the reader. Thou shalt not kill, God commands. Camus uses the breaking of that commandment to attack religious beliefs, although I did not see that until Mersault was throttling the priest in his prison cell. That resolution comes in the last hours of the antihero’s life, in the final pages of the story. Once it is over, you realize how it balances the scene around Mersault’s mother’s coffin in the quiet room at the Home at the start of the book. I am still studying how all the pieces of the plot fit together in such a very complicated pattern for such a simple story.
But it was the poetic and striking descriptions of the reality through which Mersault wanders, that I liked the best. The cat crossing the deserted city street, the struggle between the old man and his dog, the long lines of cypresses beside the road to the graveyard, taking the streetcar to the harbor for a swim, all of these images stay with me. Even though Camus says, “never in my life had I seen anyone so clearly as I saw these people … and yet I couldn’t hear them, and it was hard to believe they really existed”, his sparingly described supporting characters, Marie, Raymond, Salamano, Mother, and the Arabs, are more believable than Mersault himself.
I should read another of Camus’ books, but I am afraid that it could not possibly be as good as this one!