Category Archives: writing

Writing: Supernatural teacher reboot

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What is the meaning of surrounding yourself with girls!

Thou shalt have no other girls before me!

I may try to reboot “The Teacher Will Appear” for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, formerly known as “November”) this year. Possibly before, if the urge grows too strong – it is still over a month left, and a month is enough to write 50 000 words, as I have shown occasionally. What I consider is to merge it with my dream a couple years ago about working for the Norse gods.

In my original (and stalled) attempt, there is a decidedly oriental flavor, ranging from Japanese names to Chinese Qi-Gong and Daoist immortals. Which is also OK, I guess, but as a Norwegian I have a competitive advantage writing about the Norse pantheon or derivatives thereof. I can draw on a great body of lore, quite a bit of it in my head. I know the locations and the images associated with it. And I just think they have a greater potential for wacko fun than the more refined Eastern traditions. (This is quite likely because I don’t know the Eastern traditions well enough, though!)

***

Blurb-style plot introduction, updated with pantheon changes etc:

MC is a Norwegian high school boy, showing up to the first day of his senior year. He finds that he has gained a new classmate and a new teacher. The teacher is young, beautiful, strong, intelligent, ignorant about contemporary subculture, and seems to hate him with a passion from the first time she lays eyes on him. This all turns out to stem from the fact that she is a second-generation Norse goddess, and Odin, the Allfather of the Norse pantheon has decided that MC is her fated husband-to-be, and it is her job to teach him the ropes of immortality.

The young goddess is not too pleased. And neither is MC, once he realized that the privilege entails a couple decades of celibacy until he has qualified for immortality or died trying. To ensure his compliance in this matter, the goddess’ younger sister has enrolled as his classmate and proceeds to defend his chastity with excessive measures, both in school and on his supposed free time. Over time his weekends are increasingly filled up with cosmic Viking raids to Utgard, Svartalfheim, Niflheim etc: alternate dimensions that seem like badly designed role playing games filled with monsters and loot, in the company of wacky Norse gods and immortal (or at least resurrectable) warriors, valkyries, and superpowered animals of varying intelligence and generally unpleasant temperament.

At least his mother is happy that he has finally found some friends, although she is a little worried about his overly attached girlfriend…

Accustomed to this world

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“Everyone has grown accustomed to this world” says Asuna in Sword Art Online. Ain’t that the truth.

The closer we come to the end of our life in this world, the more accustomed we are to it.

Philosophy and religion occur in the strangest places. This season unveils the anime Sword Art Online, a story with a rather dark beginning. In 2022, ten thousand people have signed up for the new online role playing game “Sword Art Online”, which is the first that uses a brain scanning helmet to fully control the in-game character by using the same type of signals used to control one’s real body. Unfortunately for them, the creator of the game is a madman who has coded the game interface to electrocute them in real life if they die in the game. Also, you can’t log out.

The story is moderately interesting, but the premise struck me as being a kind of metaphor for materialism. It is this way with most people, after all: We think, at some level at least, that if we die in this world, everything ends. Although various religions claim this is not the case, we habitually act on the assumption that death is the end of all things

However, Sword Art Online is not entirely without hope. There is a giant tower of supposedly 100 levels, each progressively harder than the one below it. If the inhabitants of the game manage to clear them all, they will supposedly be free. Unfortunately, nobody knows for sure whether this is the case until it is done, just like nobody knows for sure whether they will really die in real life if they die in the game. They only have the word of the game creator for it. And so, people are hesitant to risk their hide to help clear the higher levels. After all, they have a life of sorts in the virtual world. After a while, they have gotten used to it, and have carved out their niche in this world.

***

In my Master of Magic fiction story resumed from 2008, the main character is a 18 year old boy from our world (or one indistinguishable from ours). He is drowning after driving into the sea, when his soul is pulled into a body in the magical world of Arcanus during an attempted resurrection of a young boy there. Probably. Or he may be in a coma in the hospital and imagining it all. He is somewhat undecided at first. But after seeing magic used first hand, he realizes that it is similar to programming, something he is very skilled at. It may take a lot of time and unreasonable effort, but he has decided to learn magic until he can figure out how it works, the very nature of the world he is trapped in. He intends to bypass the operating system of the world, writing his code directly into its registers, to slip through the laws that holds him in this world and ascend to the real world.

*** 

I think it is a very fascinating concept. But in my own life, I am not actually making this great effort to clear the enemies in my own nature, or to understand the laws of the mind that keep me trapped. It is more like a hobby, really. It would be nice to think that some outward event, some circumstance, would convince me if it is really possible to survive death. But I don’t think such a circumstance would actually make the big difference I imagine. After all, it was Jesus Christ who once said: “If they don’t believe Moses and the prophets, they won’t believe if someone rises from the dead.” History kind of proves him right on that, doesn’t it?

It is a disturbing observation that the closer we come to the end of our life in this temporary world, the more accustomed we have become to it. And in the end, we only have stories from long ago that there is a way out, that the end of this life may not necessarily be the end of everything. Everything pales in comparison to that – in theory. In practice, even the smallest coin at arm’s length will completely block the sun.

Winning JulNoWriMo!

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In the anime Moyashimon (and here Moyashimon Returns) the main character is able to see microbes. They appear to him as roughly marshmallow-sized – they are the floating bright things in this picture. Needless to say, people tend to not believe him at first…

My JulNoWriMo novel is not the one with spider-men and squirrel-girls, but something rather more realistic. And that is why it is harder to believe. That is as it should be: High fantasy lets us easily suspend our disbelief, because we know it will be back in full force as soon as we close the book. When we are reading something more realistic, we have to make more of an effort to keep it separate from our everyday reality. This is not so much of the problem if what we read goes along with what we think we already know. But much of what I write is in the borderlands between fact and fiction, or even between sanity and madness.

I was brought to think about this as I had a conversation with a former boss today. Or is it tomorrow? My memory gets a little fuzzy sometimes. Must be the Power of Now. Anyway, she’s not my boss anymore, but we still get along well. We talked a bit about vacation, and the fact that I take November off. (Evidently she never asked me about the reason for this back when she was my boss.) I told her about my writing, and she asked what kind of stories I wrote. And that was when I had to crystallize it. I have been writing for many years, and have dabbled in a number of genres. I still do. But over the last several years, I have noticed a theme in what I write. And it is that uncanny valley between sanity and insanity. The fact that some people can have experiences most don’t, and still remain sane somehow. Or are they?

In real life, there are actually many people who have “supernatural” experiences. They may see a ghost, or an angel, occasionally. They may know things they have never learned, like where some object is located or what someone is thinking. But unlike in superhero comics, these “powers” are usually just kicking in when you are thinking of something else. The more you concentrate on them, the more they fade away. So it is not only impossible to test in a scientific environment, but also mostly useless. Still, for some people this is a part of their life.

As my boss mentioned, we both grew up in villages on Norway’s west coast, where people had a more casual attitude to such things. There were generally a few people, either in this village or the next over, who could see things that others couldn’t. It was usually not a big deal. It was just part of life – life was less structured, less defined than it is now in the age of digital watches. If you are not just the same as everyone else, you know there is a diagnosis waiting for you.

I am descended from families where there were such occurrences from time to time, and I experienced various types of them in my own younger years, although fairly moderate stuff like telepathy and just “knowing things” that I could not possibly have learned. I did not trust myself to live in such a world, and prayed to my God to take it away from me. I also cut down on the emptiness meditation, although I have meditated more lightly over the years with no ill effects, quite the opposite.

Now we live in an age where even religion, which has been part of the normal sphere of life for most people since ancient times, is increasingly seen as some sort of brain malfunction. The more unusual personality types are almost entirely diagnosed and often medicated away, if the diagnosis itself is not enough to silence them. I believe that something important is lost in this process. And I try to restore it. That is the essence of my writing. To bring the fantastic back in a world that has become black and white and rectangular like a chess board, on which most of us are pawns.

So while I do write “high fantasy” occasionally, my home turf is really the urban fantasy, realistic fantasy or fantastic reality, the slightly supernatural, the magically spiritual, these kind of things.

The Japanese new religion Happy Science is a great boon to my writing (as it has been in some other ways too) exactly because it has a greatly expanded universe, where the physical is just a small corner of a much greater reality that is ever-present. Stray spirits drift around like shadows trying to live vicariously through people who don’t reflect on themselves. Angels and other high spirits watch over us, inspire us and try to help us in various ways. Ordinary people are reincarnations of others who have lived in strange and exotic civilizations going back to the age of the dinosaurs or before, many of them arrivals from other star systems in a distant past. Miracles are not only possible but to be expected, although you should always opt for avoiding the need for them through using wisdom if you can. It is a world that is vibrant with extraordinary dimensions and things just barely unseen. And yet, these people seem able to not only hold a job, but frequently become very successful in various corners of the Japanese society.

This summer’s 50 000 words of fiction (well, in a couple days it will be 50 000 words) are roughly inspired by that religion, but takes place on an alternate world that should be well outside their copyright. The name of the great Master is not mentioned (in fact, even I don’t know it) and it is not clear what deity he is supposed to be an incarnation of. But the Servants of Truth (the new religion in the story) live an extraordinary life, some of them more than others admittedly. The main character is one of the more extraordinary. Unlikely coincidences are more or less the rule, and occasionally he has visions or hears the voice of his Guardian Angel. But none of this sends him scurrying to the doctor. Rather, he finds in the Teachings of the Truth a framework where he can feel normal and healthy and even blessed with extraordinary gifts, in a situation where others would have bolted for an early disability pension. He lives a happy, harmonic and productive life, although he increasingly does so with members of the same faith.

In real life, of course, not all are so lucky. And not just lucky in finding a friendly sect. I mean, many of those who hear voices are hearing very angry voices telling them to kill or die, or berating them. Some who have visions have visions of blood and entrails and other horrors. So it is not always easy. But in many cases, I think borderline psychiatric cases could have taken a different turn if they had been accepted and put into a framework where you could use your unique abilities for good instead of being left alone with the voices in your head and heavy medication. Evidently I am not alone in thinking so.

In the Netherlands there is a movement to get people to talk back to the voices in their head. We are talking about people literally hearing voices here, not the internal voices or independent thoughts that authors like me have. Voices that can sometimes not be told apart from actual human voices outside you. These voices are often very aggressive, lambasting people and telling them that they should kill themselves. But when the Dutch patients talk back to them, firmly but respectfully, the voices change their tune. One voice, which had formerly wanted the patient to die, now wanted him to perform Buddhist prayers instead. The man compromised with the voice, reading some Buddhism each day and saying a prayer, and this satisfied the voice.

It is eerily similar to the teachings of Happy Science, in which stray spirits are just unhappy souls who have gone to Hell due to their ignorance, anger and greed. The living can help free them from Hell by living a Light-filled life. Buddhist prayers would be right up there with the things you would offer a malevolent voice in your head in order to help free it from Hell. (I am not convinced it is that easy to get our of Hell, but what do I know, I have only been there while alive, which is I guess more like a preview.)

So anyway, I don’t want to make light of people who are in great suffering because of unusual things happening in their head. There certainly are many who are seriously sick and need help. But I also don’t want people to experience unnecessary suffering because society is super fast to brand them as crazy, when they have experiences that are within the range a human mind can handle. And human minds can be amazingly elastic. I am quietly trying to encourage that, even in my non-fiction.

But if my interest in these matters can help me win JulNoWriMo, I don’t mind that either. ^_^

 

Return to Oktagonien

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Summoning a hero from a faraway world

When all else fails, summon some random person from Earth, they are always so awesome…

So as I mentioned in my previous post, I listened to this song, The Call, performed by Regina Spektor, and a story started to grow in my head. And that story took me back to the imaginary world of Oktagonien, which I wrote about last November, during the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). As regular readers will know, I take NaNoWriMo off each year to dabble in writery.

At first, I was somewhat unsure whether this would be a reboot or a sequel, but it pretty quickly became a sequel. Evidently the previous hero at some point left Oktagonien for good, and the Book found its way to a new high-school boy.

There is actually a reason why I pick 17-18 year old boys as my protagonists so often. Well, three reasons, since in this part of the world that is where they most frequently lose their virginity. Boys will consistently lie about this from around the age of 15, so those who are still virgins by this time tend to be pretty desperate. It is the time when the male sex drive reaches its top, almost two decades earlier than the female. -_- Intelligent design, huh? Well, I suppose it may have come in handy in the Stone Age, when most men died young.

The other reason is that 18 is the “normal” time when young men first manifest schizophrenia. Or so I’ve been told, and it seems so to my limited experience with them. So this lets me keep both the main character and the reader guessing as to whether we’re actually seeing a magical world or just another sad psychiatric case.

Finally, there is a lot of anime about high school boys and girls, which I can use for inspiration. Although in this case, the lands (and furries) of Oktagonien are a lot more like Skyrim than Dog Days. And it is not like I have not written about sexy squirrel girls before. “Lesbian squirrels” used to be a running joke for a while, years before one appeared in Dog Days’ Dash. (The current, second season.)

Now, the squirrels. In my original Oktagonien story, Timelands, there were three races of cuddly furries: The dog people of Dogland (the western continent), the cat people of Catagonia (eastern continent, connected by a narrow land bridge), and the rodent people of Mousinana (the southern subcontinent). Together, their lands constituted the Empire as we knew it. In the northern lands and the mountains lived the spider people, an elder race which had immigrated to the continent in historical times and had originally raided and enslaved the furries. They were well-behaved citizens in Timelands, although the other races were still wary around them.

In the new story, the snake people from the eastern Serpent Isle have rediscovered ancient magics used for seafaring and navigation. Or perhaps they have invented new ones, but the general belief is that they have found them – such things were common in the Golden Age. They have become their world’s counterpart of the Vikings, raiding the nearest continent, which happens to be Catagonia. As the Empire fortifies its coastal towns, the snakes stir up rebellion by giving a group of malcontent spider-men access to their communication magic (seemingly on a similar level to two-way radio). Using this, the young and rash spiders overthrow their Elder Council. Due to the spiders’ alienation from the three other races, it is entirely too easy for the rebels to gain the upper hand and launch an ethnic war against the three younger races.

However when ships from Serpent Isle manage to make their way all the way around the two continents, they happen upon the Western Isles, which is populated by squirrel people. These capture a snake vessel and are able to copy their navigation magic (probably a simple compass), but not their communication device. Being already excellent shipbuilders, the squirrels combine their own skill with what they can learn from the captured craft, and create the best ships since the Golden Age. They come over to the mainland and soon ally with the other furries against the double invasion. So that’s why we have a party of a warrior dog, a mage cat, a ninja mouse and an alchemist squirrel, plus the new Emperor. (That’s what humans are called in Oktagonien.)

While the earlier Emperors have come to Oktagonien on their own, this one is the first to be summoned. This has its own complexities, although I have not written much about that yet. So that’s where the song comes in. “You’ll come back when they call you – no need to say goodbye.”  Evidently the previous Emperor was the one who came up with the idea of the summoning, but for some reason the furry “temporary” rulers who took care of the Empire while he was gone, never thought it was a good idea to have him summoned or let anyone else ever know that it was possible… until the snakes and spiders are overrunning the empire and OMG we’re all gonna die!!!11 At which point 2000 years have passed, which translates into 2 years in the real world, and the Book is back in the library, waiting for some other inexperienced teen to take it home…

“I’ll come back when you call me – no need to say goodbye.” Heh.

JulNoWriMo has started

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Regular readers will know that I each year take the month of November off, more or less, to participate in NaNoWriMo, the (inter)National Novel Writing Month. Tens of thousands of people do this now, after the movement has grown year by year. But some are not satisfied with just one novel writing month, or they may have all or some of July off and are not spending it traveling. So some years ago JulNoWriMo was born. It has never really taken off the way NaNoWriMo did, and may well be headed for extinction: NaNoWriMo has now expanded with “Camp NaNoWriMo” in June and August. It is NaNoWriMo with fewer participants and a different atmosphere, people join into small virtual groups (if they so desire) rather than a “zerg” (stampede).

On the first day, I have written 8343 words, so that is a pretty good start. (Except it was Sunday so I didn’t need to work.) It’s a new story, but yes, it has lots of amazing books. ^_^

More imaginary books

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My elderly self-sim again, visiting the library.

Thinking back, my TSI (Happy Science) fanfic are not the only places that my love for books (lots and lots of books) make up a core of my story. I have several magic stories in various states of production where books are central. My Lightwielder stories tend to feature libraries, although they are only instrumental in one of them.

In my Castle Keepers / Living Stones universe, there is a tangent to the Lightwielder universe by the presence of the Songs of the Light, a small easy-to-read book featuring a collection of poems. There is the Commentary on Songs of the Light, which is in 20 heavy tomes, drawing out all kinds of theological and philosophical meanings of the book- Each of these have a commentary in 20 heavy tomes as well, named Commentaries IX on Commentaries VII on Songs of the Light (for an example). These are so heavy in theology and philosophy that they are pretty much unreadable for the untrained reader, and you need to study them all before you can participate in writing commentaries on one of them, which the intellectual and spiritual elite of the land is currently in the process of doing. No obvious allusions to real-world writing, of course!

The most “bibliolatry” of my stories may however be the original 1001st book. In it, those who have voluntarily read 1000 books are offered the 1001st book, which enables them to spend their dreams at night fully conscious in an alternate world where magic is real. The magic is not controlled by emotion or willpower, but by understanding the Sigils. These are very similar to Japanese and Chinese complex characters, with numerous strokes that need to be made in the right place in the right order. But drawing them is the least of the challenge in this imaginary world: The extent to which you can use a magic sigil depends on how deeply you understand it. Thoth, god-king of Attalan (Atlantis), wrote one book for each of the 4000 sigils. Only by reading and deeply understanding such a book can you truly unleash its magic. If you understand it poorly, the magic will be weak, unreliable and may even backfire.

Luckily for all involved in my imaginary lifelong learning of magic, the time spent studying the Lore does not contribute to your aging. So many of the sages reach an age of 175 or even 200 years, having spent over half their lives in the reading and practice of the Art. If only it worked like that in real life! (Actually, there may be a trace of it – sages tend to live to a ripe old age if nothing unfortunate interferes. The reason could be that they are more resistant to Alzheimer’s and other brain damage, due to a better trained brain – or perhaps they started with more brains to begin with. Once your mind goes, it becomes much harder to preserve the body without constant help.)

***

As you can see from all this, my approach to books is mystical and magical. Books are holy, powerful, transformative: They are not tools pointing outward toward the outside world, but are more like medicine or even implements of surgery, pointing inward to alter the very nature of those who read them.

This view of books is based on my own young days and my experience with the Bible and the books of “Smith’s Friends”, the Christian Church I was a part of for many years. Rediscovering to varying degrees the same effect now in my mid-life transformation (which I suppose is in some ways a second puberty), the longing for the Ultimate Bookshelf expresses itself in my fiction as well as in my non-fiction.

Jesus Christ chided (at the very least) the scribes of his time, who pored over books thinking that in them they had eternal life. Jewish Rabbis still tend to do this, and I can certainly sympathize with them. It is a beautiful dream, the more powerful because it is partially true: Books really can change a person. But there are limits, and eternal life is one of those, I guess. There are almost certainly other limitations as well. Except in dreams.

But even with limitations, I suspect I will love books as long as I live.

More Happy Science fanfic

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My Sims 3 self-sim during his late years, going on about his bookshelf. I would not be surprised if I do the same, if I live to be white-haired (or nearly so).

Whatever else you may say about the Japanese new religion “Happy Science”, it works wonders for my creativity. A year and a half ago I wrote a fanfic very loosely based on their movie “The Rebirth of Buddha”, or rather the world in which that movie took place. None of the characters from the movie appeared in person in my 50 000 words story. As I wrote back then, the story more or less wrote itself, to the point where even my wrists did not hurt the way they usually do when I write a lot. Not quite a miracle, I guess, but certainly unusual.

I’ve tried this two times later, the last being now. It really is baffling. I start with basically nothing – no plot, not even a character – and just invite this imaginary person to tell his story in first person limited view, the way a friend would tell a story to another friend. And there they go. The first one was pretty unstructured in that he would come with hints of things that happened later, and suddenly would get distracted by some point of doctrine that he would eagerly expound on. That was actually rather charming, I thought, and fun to write.

The one this summer is more systematic, more restrained, telling things in chronological order, sticking to what is relevant to the story. So it is a bit less exciting but more polished. Well, less exciting at the start. Things definitely take a turn for the exotic when he discovers that he is a reincarnated alien from the Pleiades, where he lived and died. After going to Heaven he and several others volunteered to incarnate as humans on Earth. He still has some trouble getting used to it.

This is a work of fiction and has nothing to do with my habit of referring to people as “humans” and “earthlings” and not understanding their obsession with romance and amassing property. Just thought you’d want to know. ^_^

There seems to be a  new personality each time I start one of these stories. Even the way they speak, although they do have certain common traits that they may have picked up from their common source material, the books of Master Taiyou Sorano, containing his Teachings of the Mind.

Am I the only one who finds this a bit… spooky? That I seem to have a bunch of voices from an imaginary parallel world in my subconscious?

***

I do consider that the reason for this effect is that there is a great deal of this type of personality in myself. It is not autobiographical as such, but I think I have the tendency. If I had been a little different, and Happy Science had been a little different (in particular not referring to the founder as God), I might have become a Happy Scientist in fact if not in name. It comes down to the books, you see.

There is in me a deep wish for there to be books so filled with light and life and power that they change the understanding and even the very personality of those who read them. There is the Bible, of course, but the Christian Church also had some books written by a few holy men, explaining the teachings in more detail and exhorting the faithful. I tried to read them all. And they worked, too! I was changed greatly. At first it was a confusing process, taking a few shortcuts through the wilderness outside of sanity as we know it, but I soon got into the light which grew brighter and brighter. I became the genius you all know and love.

It really worked – up to a point. There were changes that were never effected. There were limits never overcome. And a part of me has secretly hoped that somewhere I would find The Books, the ones that would unlock more doors and let the sunshine in. The Books that would change me without me having to go through strict discipline, without having to make great sacrifices. Simply by learning the Truth I would be set free – a rather optimistic interpretation of the Lord’s words perhaps, but why not? The words of Jesus were spirit and were life, as he himself attested. And he said to his disciples: “You are already clean [or pure] because of the words I have spoken to you.”

If Jesus had written hundreds of books, certainly that alone would suffice? By reading them, I could have become transformed into a being of immeasurable light, right? But for some reason he never did so. Neither did his disciples; one of them admitted that the world would not have space for all the books that would have to be written. Still, I would have appreciated a few hundred…

From time to time I come across another book that is so luminous, it changes the way I think, either temporarily or even permanently. (Well, so far.) Mainly books of timeless esoteric wisdom, these days, or hagiology (the lore of saints). So the dream remains alive.

So the TSI members who have a library of hundreds of luminous books, they are each in their own way an expression of my own dream.  Indeed, most of the few books of Ryuho Okawa that are in public sale in English have to some degree this effect on me, to increase my inner brightness, or so it feels. Am I wrong? Or are these exceptions? Am I the exception? There are supposedly sold millions of some of these books. Why has not Japan become transfixed with the glory of the Buddha or something? Of course, there have been sold millions of Bibles, and one may wonder how that worked out. Then again, we don’t know what society would have been without them. If something like the Viking Age, which was my direct ancestors before they got Bibles, I think we should keep the Bibles coming.

But in part I banish my relentless optimism to the realm of fiction, in which the whole libraries of miraculous books really exist and those who read them repeatedly become filled with unquenchable light that surpasses the normal limitations of the human condition. Even more than I have seen in this life, I mean. Of course, I sincerely encourage anyone who actually has become filled with celestial brightness through the reading of books to comment with their recommendations.

Lifetome worldbuilding

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"Oh gosh. My imagination ran wild there."

Isn’t a library the best place for your imagination to run wild? ^_^

I have yet another idea for a story I’ll probably never write, although if I live, I may give it a shot either in JulNoWriMo or NaNoWriMo.

The basic premise is related to “The 1001st Book”, but this is closer to my own reality, although it is still highly symbolic, vertical projected onto horizontal and with a tinge of urban fantasy. That would be the closest genre, I guess: Urban fantasy. Although that genre seems overrun with vampires and werewolves these days. This is not like that. Very unconventional.

The main character is a rather solitary adult man (unlike the late teens I usually have, but somewhat similar to my Eternal Road in this regard, which makes sense from the intended audience).  His favorite place to hang out is the library, and one day an unfamiliar librarian tells him that he has read a thousand books. As a reward, she lends him a book that is not in the shelves: The Chance of a Lifetome.

Yes, the mythspelling is intentional. For the book tells the story of the mysterious and legendary book called “the Lifetome”, which enables the reader to travel to worlds outside of our timestream. While in these worlds, one will hardly age at all, even should one stay there for many years. One is also virtually immortal while there, as even if one should seem to lose one’s life, one would just return to the timestream. There are supposedly a myriad of these worlds. While they may seem to be outside of time, they have their own time, although it flows differently from ours: While there, one will see not only the seasons come and go, but people are born, live and die; only the visitor, returning home after decades, will find that hardly any time has passed. In this way, one may live for centuries or even millennia, just not in one’s homeworld.

The Chance is not itself the Lifetome, but contains clues to the next book. Each book must be read and understood in order to correctly predict which is the next, until the last in the series is the Lifetome itself.

I have picked up the word “lifetome” (as in “the work of a lifetome”) from the One Cosmos blog, but there is no relation between its use there and my worldbuilding here. Well, apart from the obvious, that the blog has sent me down the path of chasing numerous books, some of which have sent me to other books and so on. But then again, that is what happens when you read a thousand books, don’t you think? ^_^

(In case it isn’t obvious, the books are themselves “lifetomes”, allowing us to sit in on the lives of many others. Through the magic of books we can travel in time, we can see empires rise and fall, even the stars are within our grasp. We can visit worlds filled with magic, or worlds sparse and harsh and gray, or worlds so mundane that they might be our own. It is an amazing thing in its own right, and I am glad to see that neither the gramophone nor the cinema have managed to eradicate reading, contrary to predictions…)

What if … instancing?

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Today is fluffy entry! We all know that parallel worlds only exist in science fiction and such. (Of course, so did communications satellites and flat-screen TVs…)

Not only are online roleplaying games becoming more and more lifelike: The real world is also becoming more like one of those games. (Or rather, our image of the real world is changing to that. It seems reasonable to assume that reality itself does not change.) Recently, science seems to verify that there is a lower limit to size. Particles cannot be divided into smaller particles forever: The so-called Planck size puts an absolute limit on how small things can physically be, kind of like the pixels on a screen limit the graphics of video games. Some scientists also claim there is a Planck Time, a smallest possible unit of time, playing a similar role in reality as the clock frequency of a computer.

Real life seems to have gotten the occasional upgrade as well: When I was a kid, it was doubtful whether Earth could actually feed 5 billion humans. Now we are 7 billion and produce enough food for 10 billion, although much of the food is wasted, some is used for “biofuel” and some is lost in transport. The laws of nature are supposedly the same, but the software – the human mind – has been upgraded. This is superficially similar to how a multiplayer online game is upgraded to handle more simultaneous players as it becomes more popular. And human life has certainly become popular lately.

So far, though, we have not seen instancing in real life. In MMORPGs, instancing was spearheaded by City of Heroes 8 years ago these days, and has later been adopted by other games both older and newer. In CoH, most missions were “door mission” which you entered through the front door of a more or less random office, warehouse or cave opening. But even if two teams went through the same door, they came into different – sometimes strikingly different – locations, each of them unique to the team.

In addition, CoH had zone instancing. A particular part of the city, such as the newbie area Atlas Park, might get so full of heroes that there would not be enough villainy for them all to stop, not to mention that the abundance of special effects and unpredictable movements might slow down the computers. So past a certain number of heroes, the next arrivals would go into a new instance called Atlas Park 2, and after that Atlas Park 3 etc.

It seems unlikely that we will have instancing in real life! But if we did, what form would it take? I have of course given this much thought. (As Scripture says: “The eyes of the fool is at the ends of the world.”) The result is a fictional “n-space”, based on an utterly imaginary second time dimension. Modern cosmology assumes that there may be an infinite number of alternate universes, that the possible universe branches continually every time two different outcomes are possible. One where Schroedinger’s cat is alive, one where it is dead, and so on. If it were possible to travel sideways through these universes (which would require a second time dimension, as far as I can see), we could get to worlds where humankind failed to arise or survive, and claim them for ourselves. (Of course, the victorious Nazi empire might already have done that – but probably not, since most major scientific breakthroughs seem to involve Jews at some stage or another…)

Right now the whole concept is as fictional as can be. I may, in fact, use it in some of my fiction; I have several half-baked ideas to that effect. One important factor is the cost and convenience of traveling between timelines. It would probably require some kind of base station, although it would be interesting if one could have personal worn shifting devices or at least car devices allowing one to shift the car to another timeline. This would probably not be safe enough to be widespread, even if it were technically possible. (Besides, the more impossible the technology, the more impressive it should look, right?). A more reasonable approach is building a large gateway through – a portal to the parallel world. If the cost of sending things to a nearby world was similar to a trip to the moon, it would probably mainly be used for science and to bring back exterminated species, stuff like that.

If it was feasible to keep a permanent “gate” to an empty instance of Earth, where you could drive through for a modest fee, we could start building a new city in the same place as an old, dig a new mine in the same place as one we had emptied etc. I really doubt anything like that will ever happen in real life. Then again, now that the idea is out there, who knows. There is a saying in Genesis that when humans all have one language, nothing will be impossible for them. Perhaps it is safer for all if the Chinese stick to Mandarin for a while yet…

Magic tech levels

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In the world of Daggerfall, a kindly mage or priest may heal you in a minute, unlike my state-appointed doctor who usually just tells me to exercise more. ^_^

Yesterday I wrote about how the chance of women doing dangerous work depended largely on the medical tech level of society:  If plagues keep killing people off, someone has to supply more babies. Each human has a slightly different immune system, so rolling the dice over and over makes perfect sense in that perspective. This is how it has been in the real world, but any fantasy world using mortals will have to contend with the same issues.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, but I would also argue that any sufficiently researched magic is indistinguishable from technology. For instance in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, the One Power is reliable and thoroughly researched, making magic a very predictable thing. Healing is available but limited by the number of channelers in the world.

In Stephen Donaldson’s first Covenant trilogy, the Land is rich in magic. It is not well understood, but simple healing magic is widespread. The citizens there seem to be no worse off than modern man when it comes to surviving ordinary afflictions. There are of course other dangers in Covenant’s dreams, but ill health is not the worst of them.

In contrast, the Middle Earth of Tolkien – while fantastic in some ways – does not have widespread magic use. Magic is spectacular, miraculous, and rare. The elves seem to have healing power and are pretty much immune to non-violent death, but they live by themselves for the most part. Ordinary people and hobbits cannot expect to have their wounds cured quickly and cheaply in their local village.

The inhabitants of the role playing game Daggerfall, on the other hand, are in luck: Pretty much any town or large village has a temple where diseases and wounds can be healed either for free or at a reasonable price. There are also potions to be bought. The Mages Guild also has a school of Restoration, as well as selling various healing items.  With regard to diseases and accidents, Daggerfall would be a better place to live than the modern world. (Of course, the rampant violence makes up for this.)

If you create your own fantasy world, it would be wise to give some thought in advance to the “magical tech level” of the world, or the parts of the world where your story takes place. Is magic widespread, reliable and well understood? In that case, life may be similar to modern life in many ways:  Affordable health care, fast transportation, long-distance communication and so on. The principles would be different, but humans have largely the same basic needs and desires everywhere, so magic would be used to accommodate them much like technology is here.

A classic example of this is the “Darkness” series by Harry Turtledove, set on the continent of Derlavai. This world has undergone a thaumaturgical revolution similar to our industrial revolution, and magic is used in much the same way as technology is here. In fact, the series is an elaborate paraphrase of the second world war, but different in details so as to remain unpredictable.

It can be quite interesting to look at books and role playing games in this way, seeing whether their “magical technology” is in line with the culture described. And of course, it will be useful if we try to write our own fantasy stories, as some of us like to do.