I’m pleased to announce the release of the second volume of the Second Edition of the Stone Dance, The Chosen (I hope people aren’t confused by my recycling of the First Edition titles—it’ll all make sense in the end!). I published the book on Saturday because I wanted to give it a leap year publication date. My previous experience taught me that it takes time for a new book to propagate through the Amazon ecosystem. The ebook is now available from all amazon stores, and the paperback from the majority of them. I commend the new edition of The Chosen to you. Happy reading 🙂
I am happy to announce that The Masters, the first volume of the seven that will constitute the Second Edition of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon, is now live as an ebook on all Amazon stores, and as a paperback on Amazon in the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan and Canada.
The First Edition took me at least ten years to write, and the Second Edition a further two—the traditional publishing industry will consider this madness—and it certainly has not made the slightest financial sense—but it is a labour of love and, constitutionally, I seem to be incapable of doing things half-heartedly. So, from my heart, I hope that you will join me on this journey. I intend to publish all seven books throughout 2020 and have some notions for little extras that I will release here as we go along.
Roy Eastland is an old friend of mine. When he put up another of his beautiful life drawings on Instagram, I asked him: “Roy, what is that you get from doing this?” I would like to share his sublime answer with you.
“Good question. Hard to answer briefly and hard to know fully. Here are some thoughts off the top of my head though. I don’t exactly enjoy drawing but there is pleasure in seeing good lines, or bits of good lines, come into play in the drawing-process. I suppose it’s a pleasure of surprise and meaningfulness. It’s to do with what hand-drawn lines ‘say’. For example, the way a single continuous line might change its function as it plays out its time to mean different things. It might designate a separation between the figure and air, and then it might continue to become a shadow (implying the presence of something solid), then a texture, the weight of a part of the body, an implied but invisible line between two points, it might also simply be the course of the line between two points on the paper or the speed of the hand drawing or its hesitancy or decisiveness (implying the presence of the person)… etc. There is something really interesting in the way drawings are the traces of ideas. I think the whole process, of carefully paying attention (through drawing) to the presence of somebody, can be quite a meditative act. It’s partly to do with noticing one’s own presence in the act of drawing too. Drawing, for me, is never about achieving a preconceived effect for its own sake or achieving a specific outcome that can be predicted. For me it’s a process of noticing things and changing my mind about what I think I am in the presence of. I think it’s also got something to do with touch, or memory of touch, and some kind of affection for the presence of people or things. Drawing generally (for me) has also got something to do with making souvenirs of moments (for want of a better phrase) and it’s got something to do with noticing the presence of time. A hand-drawn line has its ‘life story’ of beginning somewhere, of changing and then coming to its end. But we can look at the drawn line out of sequence and all at once. I like playing with ways of seeing and playing with ways of conjuring up the presence of things through drawing. These are just stream-of-consciousness thoughts btw.”
As part of the process of ‘clearing the decks’—in the run up to the publication of The Masters—I want to pay a little attention to my novella, Matryoshka—with a special offer over the next two days on the limited edition hardback (see below).
After ten years working on the Stone Dance, I set out to write something considerably more modest, and Matryoshka was the result. To be honest, I overshot: it was supposed to be a novel but ended up being a novella. Don’t let its shortness fool you: it required a serious effort of world creation.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Matryoshka was to be the stepping stone between the two editions of the Stone Dance. Through countless rewrites, I developed a leaner, terser style that was a reaction against—what I came to feel was—the verbosity of the First Edition Stone Dance. I applied this new style to produce a vastly leaner and reworked Second Edition.
Matryoshka is a response to Robert Holdstock’s wonderful Mythago Wood in which, like Narnia, there is a hidden world in which time passes more slowly; so that visitors to that world from ours experience adventures that last years—decades even—and still return to our world only a short time after they left. I wondered what would happen if time in the hidden world, instead of slowing down, were to speed up: so that, like a spacefarer, returning from a long journey close to the speed of light, the traveller would find that an immense span of time has elapsed on Earth. I suppose that such a story is more Rip Van Winkle than it is Mythago Wood.
Another inspiration for Matryoshka is Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers—from which Tarkovsky made the film Stalker—where ‘rubbish’ discarded by alien picnickers has startling and terrible effects on the physical world. Such a device lies at the centre of Matryoshka—vibrating at relativistic speeds that distort time ever more violently the closer you get to it. Thus, though it appears to be a tale of fantasy, underlying it is a series of fairly ‘hard science’ conceits; those interested in puzzles may seek to decrypt the references in the story. In short, Matryoshka is science fiction. Alas, I did not make this clear to Ian Whates, my editor and publisher at Newcon, and when I received a hard copy of the book, I discovered Matryoshka had been labelled as fantasy. In truth, I may have made the sci-fi underpinnings a tad too subtle…
The Invaders were here for less than eleven generations. The land—especially where it nears the ocean—is disfigured by the bleached shells of their habitations. People trek there to salvage trinkets. It’s dangerous: you have to tread carefully. Children love to burn the brightly coloured plastic—that is the only way to get rid of it. The Elders warn against the noxious smoke and say its stench is characteristic of that terrible time.
The Invaders devastated the land with their unnatural power. They poisoned the sky and the ocean. Their reckless, insatiable greed provoked retribution. The land burned, not the way the Elders do it—with love and knowledge—but with such fury that it drove the Invaders away. When children ask where they went, the Elders admit they do not know. Perhaps they are all dead: there was a great dying. The Elders show the children a record of that time scratched into the rock: strange, narrow figures almost lost in the wide record of the vast, sacred time before the Invasion. What are those eleven generations in the stretch of thousands of the dreaming? Nothing but a bout of fever we have recovered from.
We, who live in the United Kingdom, have fallen into a habit of considering our politicians as a bunch of dissolute and feckless, mostly grey, ‘servants of the people’, whom we like to mock and complain about. Westminster seems a quaint, at times almost irrelevant, institution struggling to keep up with the times.
We consider the United Kingdom a middling country with a relatively small population; though there are enough people here that many of us feel these islands crammed.
In the recent General Election, because of the peculiarities of our ‘first past the post’ voting system, less than half the people who voted have elected a party that, by dint of its sizable majority in Parliament, empowers its leader, Boris Johnson, to do just about whatever he wants. He is now something akin to an elected monarch.
The Roman Empire had a population of between 50 and 60 million people—less than, though comparable to, the population of the United Kingdom. Boris Johnson now exerts power over as many people as did Nero.
I drink tea from a Japanese cup. Because it has no handle, when I pick it up, I feel how hot the tea is and will not put it to my lips too hot and scald my mouth.
Eating with my fingers makes sure my food is not too hot. I feel its texture before I put it in my sensitive and subtle mouth. I pick an orange, bring it to my nose and inhale its perfume, peel it, strip it of its white pith undershirt with my nails, and coax it into segments. I pluck a grape and slip its juice-tautened skin from fingers to lips. Why dissect my food with instruments? Why bring their metal to my soft mouth and brittle teeth?
Entering my house, I remove my shoes. Free, my feet spread over the just-yielding wood floor and stroke the fur of a rug. Feet are meant to feel what they walk on. Was it the filth of cities, the skin cutting and piercing rubbish, that made us insist on shoes to mute our feet. Wearing shoes, I no longer hear the crumbling earth speak, nor enjoy the cool slap of stone or lap of water, the slick of grass, the soft, cushioning moss. Upon the flat surfaces that we cover the world with, I walk with deafened feet. True, I will not stub a toe, and, safe from the inconvenience of being alert to the world, I walk blind.
Living much of our lives through screens. We can see and hear anything we wish, but we touch nothing. Seeing and hearing: the remote senses preferred by the voyeur.
If we do not touch the world, are we really in it?
Have you ever wondered why so many recent political votes divide their electorate almost 50:50? This is my attempt at a simple—perhaps obvious—explanation.
The results of the referendum for Scottish Independence (No 55.3%: Yes 44.7%) and the Brexit Referendum in the UK (Leave 51.89%: Remain 48.11%) seem to me remarkably close—especially given that in one case you had 3.6 million people voting, and in the other 33.6 million. Why were these not 60:40, or even 80:20? What occurs to me is that, when you ask an electorate a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question, they will naturally fall into a normal distribution—’yes’ on one end and ‘no’ on the other. If you pull from both ends, the distribution might tear nearly 50:50—people naturally tending towards the end of the distribution that they are already closer to.
The 2008 US presidential election (Obama 52.9%: McCain 45.7%) and the 2016 election (Trump 46.1%: Clinton 48.2%) are also remarkably close to being 50:50—and, in these cases, 129 million and 128.8 million people voted, respectively. With only two parties, the electorate of the USA will also naturally fall into a normal distribution, and we can apply the argument above.
Even in elections where there are more than two parties, the results still seem to follow this pattern. The 2015 UK General Election (Conservatives 36.9%: Liberal Democrats 15.1%: Labour 30.4%) and the 2017 General Election (Conservatives 42.4%: Liberal Democrats 7.4%: Labour 40%)—excluding a few percent for smaller parties—have the Liberal Democrats holding onto a bit of the centre of the normal distribution, and the rest moving to either end. That having more than one party does not make the distribution move into an extra dimension (so there would be three or more points of attraction), would seem to be because, politically, electorates are on a left/right spectrum, or open/closed, or even optimistic/pessimisti—and, so, again we can apply the argument above.
As an afterthought: I wonder if this is why so many political systems formulate themselves into having only two parties, or, indeed, if the normal distribution—using our oft-used argument—encourages the formation of two parties? Whatever the truth of that, a democracy with two parties can be confident that it will divide an electorate nearly 50:50—thus precluding the danger they may end up as a one party state. Perhaps this explains the mantra behind occupying the ‘centre ground’—after all, it is in the centre, where those few extra percentage points can be gained, where an election is won or lost.
With our creativity, we explore a space of art and culture, of science and technology, that expands outwards in all directions. By perceiving reality more clearly, we develop more sophisticated skills and tools that, in turn, deepen our perception of reality. It seems natural to believe that this virtuous circle is accelerating us towards an infinite horizon. But is this true and, if so, in what way?
The further back we look, the less has been explored, so that a single person can make great advances, sometimes in several sectors at once. The first explorer of a sector lays claim to the foundational part of it. As each new sector is found, fewer are left to be discovered, and are likely to be further out and narrower.
As children, we must trek over this discovered country from its centre. With each generation, in any sector, we have to travel further to reach its frontier. The further we are from the centre, the more difficult it is to discover anything new, and the smaller any discoveries become. Ever more people and resources, ever more complex instruments, are required to push the frontier onwards.
This process of exploration does not seem to be accelerating—never mind it being an exponential curve ramping up to the ‘singularity’. Though the frontier tends towards an infinite circumference, its radius seems to be tending to a limit. We may be trapped within an event horizon we can never hope to escape.
(One way to escape this event horizon may be to increase human creativity. This could perhaps be accomplished by some kind of genetic or technological enhancement—but, most likely, these would only push the limit a little further out. Another way might be to supplement human creativity with that of artificial intelligence: here is an argument about that possibility.
It may seem foolish to put limits on what our science will discover—reality is likely to surprise us. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there are good reasons to suppose that our ability to penetrate reality may be limited—if only because the instruments we need to probe it are already beyond our capability to construct. As an example, consider how physics has resorted to String Theory, considered by many to be more metaphysics than science.
The Internet could be the ultimate liberation of human creativity: into the hands of anyone with access to it, it puts a printing press and a recording and film studio—all connected to a world-spanning distribution system. By volume of output, by its breadth and quality, it has brought us a New Renaissance. But this revolution casts a shadow.
When one of these dotcom colossi offers social spaces where people can meet and discuss and share, art galleries where people can hang their pictures, concert halls and clubs where they can play their music, cinemas where they can screen their films, presses where they can publish their books—they do so to grow their power. Gorging on our creativity, they have swollen into economic and cultural giants. They own the pipes that channel this artistic outpouring and, though they have not yet laid actual claim it, we have many of us signed it over to them.
We contribute our work and imagination, but it is the corporations that take the lion’s share of what they earn. An online publisher that offers to publish your ebooks, tempts you with the lottery promise that you may have a winning ticket. Like a lottery, very few win. Most only sell their ebooks to family and friends to whom they could simply have given their books directly without need of a middleman. The writer makes a pittance: the publisher, in the aggregate, makes a killing. While so much of our creativity is being burned to power these corporations—furthering their policies, neutering our opposition to them—we are left with less with which to tackle the problems that face us.
(I wrote this in 2014, but have only got round to editing it and publishing it now.)
