James Recommends - Emperor of the Fading Suns - 4X Space Opera Strategy ...

My Time Among the Stars: The Collected Alustro’s Journals (Tales of the Fading Suns)

My Time Among the Stars: The Collected Alustro’s Journals (Tales of the Fading Suns) is now available in ebook format. This book collects the journal entries that originally appeared in every Fading Suns sourcebook, taken from the actual journals of Illuminatus Guissepe Alustro and translated for pre-Diasporan readers (i.e., you) by me. If you’re new to Fading Suns, this is a good place to start. If you’re a veteran of the Emperor Wars, this is a good place to take a walk down memory lane (no, not the “Chauki stride,” but a thrilling time with old friends).

• Kindle: You can get My Time Among the Stars in Kindle format at amazon and at smashwords(as a .mobi file).
• ePub (Nook, iBook, etc.): Available at smashwords.

Alert the Town Criers Guild! Please spread the word far and wide! Don’t leave Alustro alone in the Dark Between the Stars — bring a lantern to the Dark! 

Sign up to hear from me whenever I have a new book or story. 

Down to Earth: Thoughts on Cuaron's Gravity

WARNING: SPOILERS!



Beautiful, stunning, awe-inspiring, and adrenaline-triggering: Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is all these things.

It's also an elegy for space and a farewell to the dream of human expansion into space. For those reared in the space age, there's still a romanticism and a hope that our future and our evolution (read: our transcendence) lies in outer space. That age is over. NASA's shuttles are grounded and there are no public plans for the next step. Robots on Mars are interesting, but don't engage our full imaginative faculties like a manned mission.

Gravity is the final trip. Here it all goes to hell. The trigger event -- curiously synchronous to the NSA story burning through the headlines when the film was released -- is a Russian missile destroying one of that country's spy satellites, to keep it out of other hands. This sets off a chain reaction that destroys everything -- the last shuttle, the International Space Station, and the Chinese space station, along with scores of communication satellites. All our footholds in space are destroyed, as well as our worldwide communications net. (Presumably, some satellites in lower orbits remain, but the metaphor here is that spying has destroyed that dream, too -- no more frontier Internet freedom.)

Also gone, drifting away from us slowly, just like the old astronauts who are dying one by one, each year of old age (Scott Carpenter just the day before I wrote this), is George Clooney's character. The last astronaut, a Captain Kirk ladies' man figure. With him go our dreams of new frontiers.

Sandra Bullock doesn't actually survive -- not as the Dr. Stone she was at the start of the film. She undergoes a rebirth. When she enters the ISS and sheds her space suit, she curls into a fetal position, complete with a hose behind her giving the impression of an umbilical cord. But unlike the Star Fetus in 2001: A Space Odyssey, who promised a birth into some new and transcendent form, Bullock's fetal form is destined not Up but Down.

After floating for a blissful time, she comes to and shoots through the tight birth canal of the station to finally eject from the womb into the cradling arms of her new mother -- the Russian Soyuz capsule. (Hey, didn't they start this whole mess in the first place?)

But her infancy is short-lived. Her new mother -- the machine -- is cold and non-nurturing. Indeed, she's actually dead in space. Bullock can't survive here, emotionally or physically. She prepares to die but is jolted back to life by the ghost of the space age. As we all know from Apollo 13, the superpower of the astronaut is ingenuity-in-crisis. George Clooney's shade (her fantasy of his return) clues Bullock in on what she needs to do: jury rig the tech, humanize it through the human faculty of imagination and foresight. He is able to literally point her in the right direction and give her the kick she needs to leave this already-dead substitute mother.

Her new destination, her last hope, is in Descent, falling from the stars, an Icarus whose humility promises to deliver her home: the Chinese space station and its capsule. It is heating up as it begins re-entry, and she must use a fire extinguisher to reach it. Waiting in her escape capsule is the smiling face of the Buddha, a sign that no matter what happens now, she has achieved at least a degree of peace with herself, and a reminder to let go of attachments to the past.

She falls and sinks into the ocean, but is nearly drowned by her old skin. She must once more shed her astronaut self -- her space suit -- to escape its weight (the pull of the past, those wonderful dreams of breaking free from this fragile globe to Find the Father) and emerge, free, into the air, in the arms of the real mother. Not a spiteful, jealous mother angry that her children would try to leave her, but a patient, long-suffering, beautiful (especially when seen from space as the sun rises), life-giving Great Mother, tolerant of all her children's dreams and folly.

Bullock slowly, unsteadily, regains her legs, readjusting to gravity, standing on Earth once more, as the only home where she -- and we -- can possibly live in an age where the skies are now closed to us, where we are now and forever within gravity's pull.

UPDATE:

I posted a bit hastily; I feel I'd be remiss to not elaborate a bit on the motherhood theme as it concerns Bullock's character directly, since it is the emotional core of the film.

Bullock has been betrayed by gravity -- it murdered her child. Her daughter fell down and hit her head and died.

Now, gravity is the force of attraction exerted by the earth, the Great Mother, in her embrace of her children. This is the dark side of the mother. Bullock freezes up inside and seeks to escape the mother's embrace in space, where the temperature matches that of her heart and where she can forget her own motherhood. But as she discovers, and as the film specifically tells us in text at the very start, nothing can live in space. Life belongs below, on Earth.

Bullock has to reconcile her mother's grief with her need for life and the Great Mother.

UPDATE 2:

My brother brought this to my attention: Bullock's barking like a dog in her lonely capsule is an homage to poor little Laika, the first dog in space, who died drifting away just as Bullock seemed fated to do. (Or so we were told for years. It was revealed later that she died within hours of overheating, a fate Bullock also escapes.)

It always made me sad that they'd launch Laika up but there without a way to get her back down. The Old Yeller of the space age.

Walter White in Search of His Soul

It is no stretch to see alchemical symbolism in a drama about chemistry. Beware: this includes spoilers about the ending of Breaking Bad.

When we first meet Walter White, he has lost his soul. His genius, or daimon, has left him. Flashbacks later in the show reveal to us what he was like when he was animated by his daimon -- brilliant, innovative, destined to be a lord (of the corporation he co-founded). But Walter White, high school chemistry teacher, is a man bereft of his animating genius, a shade walking on earth. He discovers that his soul death is now becoming body death: cancer. 

To reclaim his soul, Walt must journey to where his soul now resides: the underworld. It is a place fraught with monsters (Tuco, Gus Fring, sociopathic Todd). His daimon is now a demon -- in its exile, it has broken bad.

Walt's journey involves him doing terrible things to reclaim himself -- to feel alive again. He rationalizes all these actions, of course, as being done "for his family" (the proper role of a genius in Rome was as a guardian of the household and the family), but his daimon is in the negredo stage of the alchemical Grand Opus, the blackened or putrified stage -- the "dark night of the soul". If he is to reclaim himself -- and his namesake, the albedo or whitened stage of illumination -- he must journey through Saturnine Night, the darkest, most despairing stage of the Opus.

His darkest moment comes when he claims a sacrifice: letting Jane choke on her vomit. His decision point here was to either save her, and so give up the Work and become ordinary Walter White, or let her die and give life to Heisenberg, his dark daimon. He chooses his daimon. At the lowest point, when everything is at its most dense, the horrible gravity of this deed reaches up to the very sky to draw it down -- in pieces. Jane's father's airplane falls in fragments down onto Walt's lawn, the spoils of his murder, a grand act of Separation from whence Conjunction can begin.

His daimon reclaimed, Walt is ascendant. He destroys the underworld monsters who bar his return (exposing Gus Fring to the Philosophers Fire) and resumes his original destiny: the empire business.

But he cannot be both Walter White and Heisenberg. He splits himself: he remains Walt while Heisenberg becomes legion -- Todd's gang of white supremacists, Walter White's shadow given form. Walt thinks he's out, but his dark side is running the empire. Thus, it is really Walt himself who slays his own kin (poor Hank) and enslaves Jesse.

Walt cannot live without his other half. Removed from it in the cabin in New England, he begins to literally wither away. Thankfully, the Charlie Rose interview with the Schwartzes reignites the fire and allows Walt to finally realize what he must do: atone. His white jacket in the final episode symbolizes not only his reclamation of his true name but his purity of motive at the end. He makes things right -- as right as they can be made, at least. He calls on his daimon's genius a final time to secure his family's future (and also allowing the Schwartzes to atone for their former betrayal) and builds a weapon that annihilates the monsters of his own making and frees Jesse.

Jesse was also a part of Walt. Pinkman's release is the final rubedo (reddening) stage of the Great Work. Walt is done.

His last act is to realize the Philosophers Stone, his "special love", his "baby blue" meth. The blue sky of eternity.

Robert Walter presents "Finding Joe", Sept 12, Atlanta

Mythic Imagination Institute is seeking funding for a talk by Robert Walter to accompany a screening of "Finding Joe" in Atlanta this September 12 at LeFont Theater. Please help out at the Kickstarter here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/927510102/talk-by-robert-walter-on-finding-joe-in-atlanta-se?ref=live

Why We Must Win The War on Christmas

Bill O'Reilly and his compatriots at Fox News are once again fighting the Good Fight, taking on the vile foes of Christmas who would silence our season's greetings.

Yes, that's right, I said the Good Fight. Am I as crazy as they are? It's bleedingly obvious that there is, in fact, no "war on Christmas", despite all those infidels who say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." It's a joke, right? Yes, when considered literally. But mythically? Oh, it's quite real.

You see, the wingnuts have taken literally what is meant to be a figurative and mythical battle -- the ancient war between the Yule King and the Summer King over who would rule the seasons of the year. It's a ritual war at the Winter Solstice where the Yule King ritually loses to the Summer King, whose power then rises in ascendance until it peaks at the Summer Solstice and gives way to the new reign of the Yule King. 

Since this is a mythic pattern, it plays out in many ways. In our current culture, it's the ritual annual threat that, if not met and won, will CANCEL CHRISTMAS. It means a year without a Santa Clause. Countless holiday specials dramatize this ancient story, with some circumstance threatening the very existence of the sacred time. Only through pluck, grit, courage, and an open heart, can Winter be beaten back and the Light of the coming year be rekindled. 

The threat comes in many forms: the shriveled heart of Ebenezer Scrooge (necessitating ghostly intervention), a rising fog that prevents Santa from flying (Rudolph to the rescue!), a boy left home alone (you know what I'm talking about), the passing of the old king and the crowning of the new (Tim Allen's lame The Santa Clause), or the machinations of the Bogey Man (Nightmare Before Christmas and Rise of the Guardians). Or, of course, those atheist scum who sue local governments and force the removal of Nativity scenes from public grounds (the local church's Nativity scene to the rescue!).

So, you see, Christmas (the Solstice, Yule, etc.) is threatened every year -- as it must always be. And each year, defenders arise to fight back the Darkness. If those defenders are blinkered idiots like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity who completely misunderstand what they're fighting for or why, then so be it. The story must ever be told.

Taking Thaumatagens

I posted my review of Morris Berman’s Why America Failed yesterday, over at Goodreads (here). One thing I did not address in the review was Berman’s critique of technology. I did struggle with that a bit. While I certainly agree with the premise that technology comes with unanticipated consequences, and limits some freedoms while expanding others, and we do need to engage in more critical thinking about technology to mitigate our current utopian technological idolatry, still… I think we need to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I admit that as a sci-fi fan from a wee age, I’ve perhaps drunk the Kool Aid, so to speak, and am in love with the wonder that technological advancement evokes. We could call technology a thaumatagen, a wonder-making drug. Indeed, like entheogens (“God-making” drugs), technology is like a drug under whose influence we experience and believe in wonders.

But like a lot of drugs, our perceptions under the influence of thaumatagens are widened in some ways but restricted in others. We love the high but we’re blind to their downsides. Yes, automobiles allows us access to places we might not have been able to travel to in the past, but once they were invented, society reorganized itself around them such that, in places like Atlanta, you simply have to have a car. The freedom to opt out isn’t freedom at all. The spell cast by thaumatagens prevents us from bringing foresight to bear on our inventions and anticipating how they might impact the common good. Instead of integrating tech into our human lives, we rearrange our lives and schedules at the behest of the machine. This is ironic because Prometheus, who brought us the Divine Fire that is often associated with invention, was forethought – that’s what his name means. So why don’t we have any? Is it because we are not actually the Prometheans we pride ourselves on being, but are instead Epimetheans, scions of Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus, whose name means “afterthought”?

While doing yard work today, I listened to Erik Davis’ Expanding Mind podcast (here). The guest was Jason Silva, who is a self-proclaimed techno “wonder junky.” And this is where it struck me that techno progressives (actually, techno transhumanists) like Silva are embodying the puer aeternis, the Eternal Child archetype. They’re off on flights of fancy and seek to escape the grounding – the laming – that comes from living in a mortal body. Meanwhile, Berman is embodying the Senex, the Wise Old Man archetype, warning the techno puers that they’re heading for a fall and they’re going to take us all with them.

Isn’t there a middle ground? A sacred way in which we can use these thaumatagens for insight without becoming addicts fated to crash and burn and hit rock bottom? Can we not have something akin to the ancient Mysteries, where we can take our thaumatagens in the context of the sacred and society? That is, use technology’s intoxicating effects not just for material gain but to enliven society and culture? Technology made in the context of culture, rather than the context of Capitalism and individualism. Tech that doesn’t cause us to “bowl alone” or only in virtual leagues in online games instead of in-person. Tech that brings us together rather than sets us apart, as in the individual cells of our automobiles during rush hour. How can we honor the puer’s sense of wonder without falling into the Senex’s depressive gloom?

I don’t know.

I think Berman’s right that an individual solution will only work for individuals. We need a systemic solution to address a systemic problem, and the alienating effects of technology are systemic to society. We don’t see it because we’re on drugs. And yet, I keep going back for more hits -- as this blog, and the Internet it rides on, attests. As does my livelihood, too – making computer games. Eternal Child, indeed.