I have a way with the obvious. A bad way. Wherever I go, I don’t see what is there, but what could be. Or more often yet, what was.

When the going gets good enough that I can spend most the day outdoors, I seize it. That’s not something to be taken for granted this far north. I explore the ancient burgh in which I live, and I try to figure out the land as it was for the longest stretch of time before civilisation emerged and reached us.

But all these journeys have one thing in common. I’m looking past what I actually see.

Out in the hills beyond the town, where I am often am in the daylit half of year, away from the urban and Victorian layers of what we’ve built and how we live our lives, there’s something else all the more important. It’s not the highways, not the power lines, the canals, the rails or the reservoirs, where I write this. The vital piece of the modern human puzzle lives out in the fields. It’s the high technology of ten thousand years ago: the cow, the pig, the bull!

Yali’s question lives behind every fence out here. The crops and animals our farmers raise are little different to those you’d find in Russia or Iran. And the same was true five centuries ago when the Earth’s two worlds met. The pace that new technologies, like horses for one critical example, could spread across the breadth of our great supercontinent was unknown in pre-Columbian America, Australia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Jared Diamond describes this in his book, whose implications I’m still yet to limit in my work. A great contrast to how we prospered here was the very different state of affairs between the Inca and the Aztecs. Those greatest civilisations of the New World separately invented writing and the wheel, but did not share them. Why not? Here’s the kicker. The neighbours didn’t even know of each other’s existence! Such was the world that narrow Panama, mountains and rain forests built. The Aztec wheel remained a children’s toy without Incan livestock to pull it.

The narratives of differential history are very strong on Earth. And, so to my inevitable question: what then for Andala?

For the longest time, I have shied from exploring the untold options of truly alien life. I have my reasons: my essential finity being the supreme. Good things come from changing as few fundamentals as you can, then riding the results as far as they’ll take you. So I’ve heard, more or less. The literal world of choices I have available to me is, I’m sure you’ve guessed, the primary brake on my progress. I recognised this long ago, and like to set my limits where I can. And at the back of my mind, like so many of them, has been one to keep the animal life of Andala just as similar to our own as they, its people. With few exceptions, based on whims, based on evolution’s.

But even within our confine, Earth’s history played out with Yali’s question writ so large as to be incomprehensible until recent times. How is this not to be the case on Andala too?

I’ve one excuse. You know it by now. Aner! And in this case flight in particular. Andala is not the globe of worlds apart that ours was until just a few chapters of our story ago, each whole human cosmos perfectly ignorant of the other. How could they know? And yet but how could Andalans not? On their world, there was no such difficulty in movement, of body or ideas, as has so defined the human experience until so very lately. Andala is but one world, from long ago.

So do they farm or not?

Before I read Guns, Germs and Steel, I really did wonder how we ever started. Surely agriculture was the greatest invention in all of history! As it enabled everything else. But how could the idea have ever arisen, intact, in the mind of some forgotten genius who had lived the old way as has every human being before? How did we ever make that quantum leap?

Diamond goes through the details of how he thinks, very credibly, the Neolithic revolution came about. Not by master plan but at a natural crawl. (I do suggest you check out the details, I surely hadn’t thought them through.) The fact that farming was invented, from scratch, several times in human prehistory was news to me. As were the domestications of the precious few species of animals we have ever turned to our use. Animals and plants we took with us to the new world, as essential to our survival as our mighty boats, if not quite as obvious to the modern mind.

So to answer: I think they do. Andala has a handful of urban centres, which need feeding. And fundamentally all food is either farmed or hunted. It’s the animal part I’m still in doubt about. As it and greater nature call around me, to the springtime’s precious sun.

I’ve a bit of a side-interest in future tech. My story necessarily includes a fair range of it; set a good ways out, and featuring a pretty savvy cast. My desire is for screens to be weightless, virtual and immaterial. But current developments have me turn to look in another direction.

Google Glass is getting a lot of coverage now. It’s awkward, but it does have something like the ring of the future about it. Computing used to be a task you had to wait your turn for, in a building of its own. Then it became personal, sitting on your desk. Then your laptop. Then your phone. Computers are the defining technology of our age; and with each shift, everything changes once again. What happens when it’s as ubiquitous as your eyes?

The “glasshole” meme is picking up some steam, as the implications begin to sink in. Mobile phones came with unintended consequences. When people start carrying video cameras mounted at eye-level, what happens to the very notion of privacy while in public? Are we just another generation of oldies quivering in the sight of something new? Good questions, and ones to work themselves out in due time.

But there’s another aspect of Google Glass I find all the more intriguing still. The sterile little world it creates, inside ourselves. John Pavlus addresses this in Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface.

The trouble is that unlike technology, your body isn’t something you “interface” with in the first place. You’re not a little homunculus “in” your body, “driving” it around, looking out Terminator-style “through” your eyes. Your body isn’t a tool for delivering your experience: it is your experience.

In its current early version, Glass needs its user to snap their chin upward, or to stare at things directly until it gets the message, like the click of a mouse. But because there is no mouse there, the technology makes us use ourselves as a pointer and the other staples of a computer user interface. It’s something of a puppeteer that way. Pavlus spots the metaphor quite nicely, invoking one of my favourite wildly philosophical films.

Think of John Cusack’s character “driving” John Malkovich from the inside. If you ever saw that movie, you may remember that John Cusack’s character got pretty messed up by that experience. But this inner-homunculus-like dissociation of the self from the body, by turning it into a technological interface, is exactly what the designers at Fjord think would feel totally “natural”.

When you look into someone’s eyes, are you highlighting them for a command? When you roll your tongue, are you selecting between incisor enumerated menus? When you walk, are you pulling little levers to the muscles and the tendons in your legs? I don’t think this is the shock of the new. I think it’s a quite specific flavour of madness.

We want our technology to be ready-to-hand: we want to act through it, not on it. And our bodies don’t have to become marionettes to that technology. If anything, it should be the other way around.

Indeed. Clarke’s third law strikes again. For a technology to mature, it must become transparent. Like the hammer raised by Pavlus, which becomes an extension of your own hand. Glass is nowhere near such praise as yet. But its failure is an early one. The promise is still there. As it always was.

I think that rather than inside glasses, there’s a better place to put a perfectly personal display. Namely your vision itself. I don’t mean by tinkering with your eyes, but in the final stage of the signal chain, inside your brain. Nasty! Well, of course, for now. We’re still a long way from giving blind people vision in our primitive state. But this will not always be so. Signals are signals. Someday, I surely hope, we’ll sort it out. Like we imagined we would.

Say I have such computers in my story, how would I go about describing them? My instinct is to say as little about it in the prose as I can possibly get away with! Less is so often more, that way. Present ubiquity as it is: unremarkable, everyday, and entirely at ease with whatever then becomes of society. Perhaps we’ve kissed our shaky semblance of privacy goodbye long before then, as we have already started. And so too anonymity. Those are bigger social changes in themselves than I often see well shown. I wonder what I’d be saying about them, and which characters react what ways. There’s surely thought required in all this stuff. That’s the basic good of it. The good of every dystopia.

Whenever I go on about futurism, I also like to play with different times. Proteus is on its voyage of discovery in the late 2100s, while Alpha is set in 2301. One way to show that these are different times is to give them appropriately advanced versions of the same technology. I’ve already played into this, quite accidentally, by mentioning glasses several times in Proteus. I intend them to be almost entirely absent by Alpha. Perhaps there’s more to them than my own simple frames.

But the homunculus! I think you may be hearing more of him, as I work my way through this. Not everything is as sublime as a bird on the wing in this story. Some of us just have to struggle; whether technology’s involved or not.

As it is the season for digging into the parts of this project where I find the most resistance, I thought I’d cover flight.

It’s always been there. Right from the very beginning. I never so much as chose that the people of Andala could up and fly as easily as we can walk. They just arrived that way.

Flight is an age old dream. An archetype all of its own. Everyone’s heard of Icarus and his many imitators, the men who made themselves wings; before we figured out how to build our own machines instead of mimicking the birds. Flight has transformed since then, until, for most of us, it is something quite mundane. An unpleasant confinement with our fellow passengers, from one port to another. Though if you ever do get the chance to take the controls for yourself, the magic is most surely there intact. Not least in a glider.

But there’s just something about the way the birds do it. Unhindered. Unaided. Innate.

I was watching one of Edinburgh’s birds of prey circling in the wind this morning. I was only waking up when I looked into the brisk stirred blue and saw its telltale silhouette, climbing thermals high above. Buzzards are fairly big, and yet it looked so small up there. Its movement told me what it was, as its wings held solid on the glide, then flowed like cloth when it turned. Then I saw something I haven’t before. This one climbed through a cloud, vanishing completely, until it appeared again on the other side. It wasn’t up that high to get a better look down on its prey, so far below, it was just enjoying the climb.

The way I see Andalans flying is both like and unlike birds. They don’t rely on air, so they don’t rely on wings, and needn’t have the specialised bodies of all the flying creatures our world has seen. The force that keeps them up there is, of course, aner. Their experience moving in the third dimension is much like ours when we lose ourselves in the action, like, say, when dancing or playing sport. They’re practised in flitting around in quite the same way as we are at using our legs to move without over-thinking the details. In that sense, they are very much as I imagine birds must be. The more you watch them, the more you see that everything is instinct to them. They inhabit the air in the fullest sense. They see where they want to be, and the next thing, they are there; at the speed of their choosing. This is also precisely the case for people on Andala.

The irony being that there are no birds to fly with them, there.

Something I have in mind for Beta, the second book if you can believe in such a feat, is a ground-up experience of learning how to be Andalan. Christopher, the crucial link between our worlds in Ana form, has his work cut out for him. He must learn his aner. His only glimpse so far of the power he was born with was inside-out, so to speak. Jocaster was the one calling shots, while Christopher supplied his unconsciousness. Yes, I’ve still Alpha’s writing all ahead of me yet! But I think the fleeting experience of the first book’s introduction to all of this would be well balanced by a truly first person perspective in the second. Flight being at once the simplest and the damnedest skill for Christopher to achieve.

I’ll tell you what: talking about flying folk doesn’t sound like “science fiction” to me. Quite whenever I decided that was what I’m doing, I don’t know. Despite myself, I still feel an awkwardness at what my story actually involves. I hope this doesn’t get in the way of doing it justice. Perhaps, or surely, it has in my getting on with it in all this time. But this is how I am. A touch shy of the glowering light of my ideas, even when, all along, I know I can only choose to make them.

Beltane rises once again. Spring strikes back in force. Last night, high on a hilltop in the heart of my own little town, at the fire festival the queen was restored.

I don’t know about you, but fire has always fascinated me. Strike a match and there it flows: a glowing, potent, magic. What especially caught my eye was the way it moves; just like water, no matter quite what the Greeks thought. They are opposite and still alike. Water has body, and mass, to it. Flame is nothing but its very surface, and flows upward in the face of gravity instead of down. Fire breaths, and will soon die; while water can be forever. Yet in their movement, both have a life of their own, quite beyond our ability to foresee. I can’t help but be absorbed in this show of complexity’s emergence from out of seeming nowhere.

Fortunately, this keen interest of mine never wound up in burnt buildings or a trial! As misguided as all children can be, I never did desire to make an inferno. The smaller the flame, the purer, I thought and still think. The worst in pyromania you’ll see from me is a hesitance to blow a match straight out after lighting up a candle. I want to watch it, the same way I do the chaos of a running river’s tireless cascade.

Perhaps it’s my history that shapes the way I see Andala’s just as magic power. I think of it as flow, as spark, as heat and as water. The ripples and shimmers of the aner sea.

The only way I’ve seen aner as yet is when I work with music. That’s when I know what I’m dealing with. That’s when it’s as tangible as a living flame. Music is quite magic too, which is why it can reach where words find hard to go. I will describe aner to my satisfaction someday, as Andala depends on doing this more than once or twice. In the meantime, like the beginning, I can feel it, but I can’t quite touch it. Yet.

This whole book truly comes from the back of my mind. It’s unconscious, in the grandest sense. I didn’t as much as plan a damned thing out, as just kept on finding more of the deep stuff, rising up from there. The archetypal pieces I sometimes dream I might put all together.

What I like to think sets my work aside from other superpower fantasies is its world. Andala is, very simply, an entire civilisation where everyone has their share of these abilities. Aner is not the special gift of a chosen few. It belongs to everyone.

Think about that for a second. Everyone can do it. All of them. Not just the mighty élite, but the lowest of the humdrum everyday ornery. And then we arrive.

My peculiar interest is in just this kind of culture shock. From its destructive effect on the traditional tribal lives of the Bushmen, to its broader impact on the very foundation of our global history: this stuff is right up my alley. What little I know of super heroes tells me what I’m doing is quite distinct from the norm. Where episodic adventures require a rhythm and a routine reset to the way things were before, I can explore a whole different horizon.

There’s something that really appeals to me in the idea that aner – that unsettling, uncanny, and essentially un-human power – is so perfectly natural on Andala. Marie’s described the first time that we saw it. Aner is startling, terrifying and baffling stuff; a veritable deus ex machina of course. And my hesitance to work on it is as just much a metaphor beyond the book. But there it lies. The focus and the magic.

The world, then, is where I see my best work. It’s a playground for my own games of consequence. There is one continuity in this story. One timeline! (And a relativistic one at that; as long as I can keep the details straight.) Everything the characters do is done for good. Change is eternal, as it is in reality. Anything less doesn’t feel the least bit right. Dodgy prequels and the like have torn the patience out of me!

But what’s a culture like when everyone is Superman? I’ve spent a good while wondering about this very question. Andala is my attempt at answering it. The only way you can: one piece at a time.

From out of those a world is made. No more, no less.

It’s often said that you can tell when something is worth doing when doing it is hard. You know, the idea that we have to push ourselves beyond the tried and tested. Beyond our limits, or never break our routine. Climbing up on giants’ shoulders isn’t easy, but it is the only way to see what’s still to come.

In writing, the hard begins with resistance. Creating stories can be an open ended, solitary affair; naturally suited to long doubty nights of the soul. Not least the way I do it. And so I’ve been spinning my wheels a bit of late, trying to look into my work and decide quite what it is.

Truly at the heart of my persistent doubts is this hanging question: Magic? Really? What is this thing I’m writing other than another puerile fantasy of flying folk and awesome rays?

So says my resistance.

Well? What’s the least bit wrong with that? Why shouldn’t I explore the genre? What is there to fear about fantasy in the first place? Even if I love to deck it out with all the trappings of science fiction; why fear it, why avoid it, why this persistent awkwardness?

No answer. That’s the way with these things. Unless you dare to press the point.

My trouble with super heroes boils down to inexperience. Simply, I just didn’t read the necessary comics as a kid. In fact, I was much more into science fact and real world history at the time than all of fiction; an oddity of mine I’m sure shines through in what I’m making here. It’s not that I’m at all against a great epic of a story, but that I’ve old prejudice lying unquestioned in the back of my mind. There’s no irony in the fact that Andala is rooted right there in the epicentre of my life-long doubt. It was an unexpected effort to put things right, from out the deep itself, I suppose. And no matter that I struggle with the notion even now, it still is.

Guess, try as you might, you can’t fight your muse. Indeed, to get anything done at all, you’d better go wherever she takes you.

The inimitable Rands had this to say about his favourite archetype in heroic form in the face of America’s painful week past:

When a twisted someone believes that they are delivering an important message by blowing up innocents in a city that is a cradle of our liberty, I choose hope. I choose unrealistic and unbounded hope. I choose Superman.

Superman is a story. It’s a great story. It’s an unrealistic story full of fantastic elements that appeal to our desire to be intensely good humans, to perform amazing feats of strength, and to live forever. These stories, while unrealistic, give us direction, they temporarily relieve our burdens, and they give us an ambitious plan forward.

He puts his finger on the very source of my doubt right here. The idea that these fantasies are vapid, pointless escapades without a higher purpose:

Perhaps the biggest critique you can make of Superman is that because he makes it look so easy with the flying and the invulnerability that doing the impossible is somehow easy or even achievable. It’s big. It’s over the top. It’s unrealistic and no one human can ever complete the feats of a single Superman. But it’s not the individual feats of Superman we care about, it’s that we, as a group of humans, working together, can do anything, even though it’s never easy.

That’s me told. Superman as metaphor: for the collective genius of all of us. Whatever would Nietzsche say!

My family loves Superman because he is an unrealistic and impossible creature. We know that. We know he sets an impossible bar, but we need that bar because that is how we dream big, that is how we aspire to something great, and that is why we choose hope.

The impossible. The supreme. The wholly literal Super Man. I can see the power in it. An archetype we’ve been chasing all along. I shy, though, from embracing it quite as freely as Siegel and Shuster. I like my heroes dark, and I like my characters at every level as fallible as man. Perhaps what I’m writing, for all its “powers”, isn’t much like caped super heroes in any case. Or rather, this is my translation, taken from the one place and put somewhere wholly else. Run the experiment some many generations and you might just find Andala.

You know, once I make it.

Ripples and shimmers, in the mind sea.

— October 2004

There’s much to be said for big dreams. The ones from the deep. The ones that change you.

It was literally a century ago when I started dreaming of “the mind sea”. Awake as much as sleeping. I was having a rough old time as the millennium loomed ahead, and never did get around to finishing my studies. A theme developed, as I tried to figure out what was going on, an ancient one as clear as can be; not that I even realised it at first. I kept seeing the sea, from below. I was submerged.

Water is our symbol for the other part of us. It’s the unconscious image of unconsciousness itself. When the ocean comes to inundate your dreams, you can be sure the sleeping counterpart of yours, with which you share your mind, has a point to make about where you’re headed. I didn’t like such airy fairy sounding nonsense the least small bit myself, when it met me head to head. But the experience was deep and inescapable. I learned something. Big dreams do indeed change you.

There are a few of them lined up, of course, in my book. The original one of which, for Alpha’s leading boy, Christopher, I described in my notes like this:

Water, the stars and the energy, swirling, submerged. He lights it, and sets it backward, as it dances around him as though with an intelligence. He tries to use his power, even though he knows asleep that he can’t, and it crackles and distorts in this strange surrounding prescient horizon. Then, flying, he emerges from it, the world draining as the drops of water fall from him onto its endless night’s surface. He looks up, hearing them, and sees a space, infinite and with nothing. The most terrifying sight of all, as below the light of creation ripples and shimmers in the mind sea.

— October 2002

Yes, ten years and counting. Well, this project’s been going on for quite a while.

Christopher is the story’s closest approximation to a hero. He’s just a boy, aged twelve or thereabouts, thrown into his momentous fate without the least bit of preparation. He doesn’t even know what and who he is. Christopher’s introduction to his powers takes place while he is unconscious. Jocaster is the one in control, as he takes Christopher’s body out into the fight without the boy’s presence or permission. While Jocaster fends off his foes using his stolen arms, Christopher is trapped in his own unconsciousness. What better place to dream of the deep?

The next step was the song.

A few years ago, I got into Xploding Plastix. A Norwegian duo whose music defies sensible description, I’ve lined up one of their songs for my writing soundtrack to Ambassador Walken; an oddball fully qualified for the fact. But the deeper into their catalogue I went, the less I could get a grasp of them. This is usually a bad thing, but in their case it was quite different. They surprise me good and bad at every turn. And the one that really caught me was Cashmere Tarmac.

Simply put, this song is absolutely mind boggling. The first time I played it was immediately followed by the next dozen, as I tried to work it out. This old pattern of mine of trying to boil things down into the knowable, digested truth. Cashmere Tarmac defies my attempts, even now a good few years later. Instead, I find it as alive as the first moment I heard it. And where there’s life, there’s invention.

Christopher’s big dream is set to Cashmere Tarmac. The part of it he experiences in Alpha takes place during the first two minutes of the song. The rest is reserved for reprise and sequence later.

It goes like this. He semi-consciously awakens in a vast, undefined space; much like you may have done too in many a dream. Awareness only develops slowly over time when you’re under. Several seconds in, at the music’s cue, he breaths out a cloud of bubbles. That’s the jolt right there. He’s underwater, even though it doesn’t feel like it. He doesn’t feel submerged. His weightlessness isn’t immediately obvious. And yet, the air flows out of him in bubbles and he knows he’s in real trouble.

Next, Christopher does the only thing you could in that predicament: he tries to find the surface. In his hurry, he doesn’t even notice the means of his movement. He doesn’t thrash about, as you or I would in deep water. He flies. Instinct is all he’s got in such a panic, and instinct teaches him his first lesson in how to use his power. Not that Christopher is one to learn quite as easily. His struggle to come to terms with his Ana nature is a story for another day.

Lastly, Christopher finds he is not alone in there. He sees another child, the same size and age as him, but a girl. She’s as calm as he is panicked, and deigns not to speak but just to look at him with a slight and yet impenetrable grin. The two are perfectly opposed when he meets her eye to eye. If only it weren’t for the gulps of air he exhales every few seconds. When he tries to touch the ornate Ana jewellery she is wearing, again on a cue in the music, the dream ends instantaneously.

Through all of this, Christopher has not been simply lying down in bed. He’s been fighting, under Jocaster’s power, in an immense battle with no room for the slightest mistake. And yet he does awaken, beyond the master’s control, when his father, Alexander, revives the old prince with a start. Christopher’s dream is about the great ocean of our unseen minds within. Christopher’s awakening occurs right outside in space.

For all this avoidance I’m still up to when it comes to Alpha, I am still truly beguiled by that book of mine as yet all but started. I’ve a good few tricks to play in there, and they feel so right to me. If anything, I know it too well. So it takes a song I cannot understand to inspire me.

Amongst the infinite dichotomies by which you can split man, lies the one about perseverance. There are those who stride ever onward, guided by goodness knows what, drawn in every step by a passion they themselves might not be able to describe, ever seeking the way of the future; and then there’s the rest of us.

I took up Jared Diamond’s epic answer to Yali’s Question as an exercise in broadening my own perspective. Oh, it worked all right. His book is rich with consequences for my own project. So much so, that I’ve found myself thrown back in introspection. I can take a while to digest what I read, but this is something else, and by no means any one else’s fault.

I’ve not given up on Andala. I’m not sure, after all the times it seems I’ve tried, that such a thing is possible as long as I am still around. But I do find myself in the midst of something of a breather. One of these things where it’s not my own initiative, but the realm of the unconscious muse.

Truth be told, I suppose it is the way I’m telling Proteus that’s at the heart of my doubt. That backstory has been out of control for as long as I can remember. I meant for it to be a fragmentary report of distant discovery, but it’s already about as long as I mean Alpha itself to be, and showing no sign of a conclusion. When I’m writing it, though, I do like Marie’s story. Coupled with my apparent inability to pull the reins and steer where she’s going, you get where I’ve been headed. The choice between it and the central story that I came here to tell is one I seem unable to take. Or in the right direction, at any rate.

All of which is to say that Guns, Germs and Steel isn’t at fault for my time off the keyboard. And, in fact, that I am well pleased for the most part by how suited my little fiction of a world matches the analysis Diamond wrote there. I haven’t thought at all of ancient man’s spread around our own planet, before the rise of farming and subsequently everything else, being drawn to Sumer for my inspiration more often than not. But now that he’s explained it, I see the implications of prehistory around us everywhere. For whatever reason, they’re more or less as snug on Andala. The details of which I’ve some reading yet until I can describe.

If you’re like me: you think in writing. Seems to be the only way. Just as music is to dream, and reading is to see.

Lessons in differential history continue as I make my way through Guns, Germs and Steel. I’m fresh out of the part on the invention of writing. Yes, this is crucial stuff for me.

So far, I’ve established that there is at least one kind of writing on Andala. Tani just so happens to be her village’s teacher. As Marie describes the experience of learning alongside Tani’s little sister:

Aia let me play with her writing squares, which I found more intricately detailed than I imagined.

“ra” she said as I picked one up, and “ni” as I pointed to another.
“Spell my name, Aia. Spell Marie.”
Little Aia grabbed two squares and righted them, then read them out to me. “Ai-a!” She said with pride.
“Oh, okay, well done.” In just that moment, she had taught me these weren’t letters but sounds. Each square was a syllable. Or at least what the Ana considered one to be. I figured she’d need another pair for me. “Now spell my name, Ma-Ree, Marie!”
She grabbed three more squares, and slid them around the first half of her name.
“No. That can’t be it.”
Aia grabbed my finger and brought it down the line she’d made. Reading aloud, “ta-kai-yeen”.
“Ah, I should have guessed!”

That’s a syllabary. A writing system similar to an alphabet, but with more symbols as it chooses the next larger unit for its sounds. The Ana use the Azu script, developed by their neighbours for themselves. Anatara is a little awkward when put into written words, as it doesn’t work quite the same way as Azu; a clumsiness Marie hints at above. Nothing quite as bad, I imagine, as the English language’s maddening flights from all reason in the Roman writing you and I share here; but not quite as clean as the Azu’s own tongue for which it evolved.

Speaking of which, I’ve found myself questioning my assumptions given where I’ve just been. So writes Jared Diamond:

To us today, it is tempting to ask why societies with early writing systems accepted the ambiguities that restricted writing to a few functions and a few scribes. But even to pose that question is to illustrate the gap between ancient perspectives and our own expectations of mass literacy. The intended restricted uses of early writing provided a positive disincentive for devising less ambiguous writing systems. The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, ancient writing’s main function was “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.” Personal uses of writing by nonprofessionals came only much later, as writing systems grew simpler and more expressive.

Guns, Germs and Steel, p.235

Sumerian cuneiform was indeed born a dirty mess. Writing, the handful of times we invented it from scratch here on Earth, was not a thunderbolt of inspiration, fully formed in one shot. It evolved. I knew this, but I overlooked it in the interest of clean and shiny simplicity and design. That’s what happens when you read more about Sumerian than you read the stuff for yourself, with the old master as a guide.

You can either invent writing the long and messy way, for yourself, or you can steal it. Actually, it’s not always just that. Sometimes, if you hear someone else has a way to scribble down their language, you rush to its conclusion and invent your own way. Diamond describes this as carbon copying versus diffusion. A good example of the latter is Cherokee. Its inventor, an ingenious fellow by the name of Sequoyah, borrowed some printed English that he couldn’t read, and devised his own syllabary around symbols from our alphabet. He didn’t invent writing, but he didn’t just copy the Romans as we did, either. He didn’t know that the characters he saw worked the way they did as he invented his alternate system, closer to the what the Minoans used than us. Funny what’s possible, when you know it can be done.

Perhaps Andala’s true first writing is dead and buried come Marie’s day. And so the Azu script is a descendant, more like Sequoyah’s, created anew without the telltale cruft?

The Andala that I’m writing, come the time of our discovery, is one in transition from illiteracy into its modern age. We weren’t a necessary trigger, but happened to arrive coincidentally to see it. Or the way it could have been.

I’m not about to kluge up the pretty little writing system I’ve long had squiggling through my mind in the interest of looking the original. Not yet. But this research is leading me to consider the whole geography and history of Andala in new light. The Azu are my world’s oldest people, its first empire and the most populous. Azuya, their continent along with the Ana, is clearly my Old World. What went on there, long before Proteus showed up? And what have I already created, in my unwitting assumptions, that could well be for the better in any case? This is what I’m working on. While I can.

To write, you must read. Given quite what I’m knee deep in at the moment, I’ll say it is so. As in the history of our world, painted afresh, I’m finding a wealth to consider for my own.

Jared Diamond’s crucial point, if I may make it for him, is that history did not and indeed could not unfold at the same rate for everyone the world over. There is a range to progress’s progress. He goes to great lengths to spell out the likeliest, most plausible, ultimate reasons. The farthest reaching of which being the comparative shapes of the continents. It’s a fine read as he pulls at the consequences’ threads. His book is a grand exercise, and to his credit, he did the work such a challenge requires.

If playing more Civilization than makes sense counts as work, then I did a little too, in my own way. I’ve designed a few worlds (in simple tile form) and played through the results, cobbling up my own alternate histories as my eager conquests and bitter withdrawals scorched imagined earth on a quaint computer screen. It’s been a while (and many versions of that game) since I did, yet I can’t help but think of the experience while reading Guns, Germs and Steel. As trite as it is to say that empires fall in a day, and that history turns in a moment, there is some inevitable truth to it. Not least when the rivals are from what may as well be different planets.

What Diamond proposes is, piece by piece, quite sensible and already apparent. It’s when you see the whole thing as a cohesive package that its power is clear. I’m learning a great deal about our origins, an ever favourite subject of mine, and that alone is music to my ears. But unlike the histories I’ve devoured before, this one has a master narrative subtle enough for me to agree with. Our past is not the triumph of any one empire, any single leader, or the victory of any supreme ideology. The lesson, again and again, is that might is right. Beware the ones who have it. By the lasting fate of ancient dice.

If you’re wondering where all of this will show up in Andala, join the club. For the moment I’m reading, and letting this stuff work itself in. Certainly, I can design my own world quite as I want. Nothing is beyond first draft yet. The experience I’m trying to put my finger on here is that the continents are shifting, all right. I’m just not sure whether it’s the land or the people.