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.

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.

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.

Fermi’s Paradox looms as large as space itself. If we aren’t alone in the universe, then why does it look that way? There are a number of reasonable answers, all speculation of course. My favourite in reality is an appeal to the fact of scale. We live so very, very brief lives; and we are so utterly, vanishingly small. To rule out alien life after so feeble an effort as we have made so far is, surely, solipsistic folly.

Another answer, however, is that life truly is just as rare as a cursory glance to the night sky stubbornly suggests. (Not to mention everything we’ve seen thus far in astronomy, or the results of our painfully early adventures out there for ourselves.) Our sister worlds in the solar system have sorely disappointed as of yet. Who’s to say that the first few million stars we should venture out to might not fail us too?

There’s a trope for this: Absent Aliens.

Done for a variety of reasons:

• Not every sci-fi plot requires aliens
• Isolates humanity in the depressing void of space
• Makes humans even more special
• Saves on the effects budget.
• Makes it easier to make characters relatable and believable.
• Is consistent with the fact that no aliens have yet been found. (See Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness.)
• In an attempt to be different and appeal to those who “don’t like sci-fi”.
• Even if aliens did theoretically exist, in settings where the population is confined to a single star system and there is no FTL, neither humanity nor the aliens would be in any position to encounter the other.
• Theoretically, intelligence could be a rare evolutionary fluke, rare at least elsewhere in the Milky Way. Even if intelligence evolves on other planets, it may be extinct by the time humans leave the Solar System, or alternatively, humanity could be extinct by the time aliens leave their home system. Thus, even interstellar civilizations may be separated by immense distances or timescales, and unlikely to interact.
• Nobody talks about it much, but the existence of other intelligent species would raise uncomfortable questions about whether or not humans are the chosen species of God. On the other hand, the Catholic church is open to the idea.

Glad to see the brotherhood and keepers of the trope have thought about this before me. As it happens, my story does feature precisely one alien world, by which it takes its name. Granted, alien life in any shape or form casts us and our world in quite a different light. The questions of human uniqueness and creation come fully into play. And I do suppose that, ultimately, I’ll be dabbling in them. But they weren’t my motive, in all honesty, and I surely don’t want to multiply my troubles with a galactic zoo to tear me from my point entirely.

Beyond us, of the Earth, and they, of Andala, space is void of life in my story. So far as either of us have explored it; which is to say but a nook of our shared galaxy. In other words: not so vastly different to where we begin, back here in reality. It’s never definitive, by its nature of seeking to prove a negative, but Andala aside, Fermi is still in play.

Wait just a moment, though. Andala aside? Why do I even think of it as any less than a full blown alien world?

Well, because I made it so, of course. Andala is more familiar to us than our own world was in many an age of its past. Not only the atmosphere and the landscape, but the life as well. Andala’s our eerie twin right down to its people. Our ancestors looked less like us than they do.

All the better to question its origin. And by doing so, as always, to cast a look at ours.

I have my reasons then to picture our stellar neighbourhood as a tabula rasa. First among them is the sheer amount of work to do. You might have noticed that I’m a nit-picker. I’d rather a concentrated focus, where I can pile in the detail, instead of a diffuse metaphoric sea of destinations, to be mentioned and forgotten whenever.

So Andala, alone, it is. “One world well.” And the rest, a mystery, lost in the unending deep. Space may well be the place, but I’m well aware that I can only forge a certain part of it. Constraints, of all things, in eternity.

I can’t really say what it is that makes me want to write. As if it’s any single thing. But one theme that makes me tick is an interest in putting diverse knowledge to use. I like my fiction laced with insight.

Among the better reads on the internet is Horace Dediu’s Asymco. The name’s shorthand for asymmetric competition: a crucial pattern if ever there was one. He’s a protégé of Clay Christensen, rightly well known for The Innovator’s Dilemma. But he amounts to more than his influences. He’s a storyteller as much as an analyst. If there’s someone who can spin a yarn about history, its ebb and its flow, it’s Horace.

The latest episode of his podcast, The Critical Path, is titled rather ominously The Best Single Invention of Life. It’s always worth a listen. The part I’m pointing to, however, starts at the full hour mark. I think it’s a classic bit of big picture thinking, on the fly.

Business is business. Cut-throat, dynamic, possessed. Companies thrive and starve by the strength of their ideas and execution. That turbulence is what sets aside our free market capitalism from other failed ideas. Pity they were designed to be so much better. Innovation is fire. Without it we freeze, but never pretend that no one gets burned.

Cities are built by the commerce within them. Horace notes that London is still, at its core, Victorian splendour writ in stone, while Tokyo is the corporate towers of its own boom, post war. No doubt the same will be said of now when Shanghai and Beijing reflect on their future pasts. You build in the good times. And, as long as war or other monumental catastrophe doesn’t tear your city down, so the urban landscape remains.

But why do golden ages end? For cities, for companies, for cultures and for men?

The key may well be that we must learn how to destroy as well as to build. As in to topple those achievements we made our very selves. We’ve got to disrupt ourselves, before someone else inevitably does. We’ve got to keep breathing, instead of fighting off the future from our precious past. We, the individual, have got to get to grips with the disturbing truth that nothing is eternal. History rolls on, wherever innovation takes it.

Being European, I can see his point. I live in a Victorian city of sandstone terraces and villas, with scarcely a sixth storey let alone a tower in sight. The twentieth century left Edinburgh almost alone. A resident of a century ago wouldn’t have much trouble finding their way around. The eyes of the world were elsewhere. What work did go on in recent years came to a sudden end, thanks to a certain bank and crisis.

Horace is quite right of course. Renewal the like he describes is no less than rebirth. An ancient archetype of culture the world over. Yet one we much prefer for our heroes than ourselves.

As for my writing, the idea of the truly eternal city fascinates me just as it does in real life. Make no mistake: to be any such thing is a struggle. A fight, between the drives to create and destroy, and between the instincts to invent and preserve. A metaphor suited perfectly, I think, to Aria and Gaia. The thriving city of billions, and its sanctuary of a moon.

Rebirth here is more than figurative, as Aria was not spared the discontinuity of apocalypse. It takes more than the memory of a metropolis to build it again from scratch. It takes an infectious ideal.

For whatever reason, I’m unsatisfied with dreaming of cities under alien skies for their own sake. The aesthetic is one thing, but why else are they there? What makes them viable? What draws people to them in the fist place? From where we are back here, so early on in history, we haven’t the faintest idea what could truly drive us to the myriad of worlds in those countless stars. Curiosity won’t pay the bills. That’s the place for economics.

But there’s something to be said for the artful guess; when you know the pattern, if not the ultimate answer or the underlying cause. And while we might not know much as yet, wherever we go in the fullness of time, we can’t help from being ourselves when we’re there.

What’s the deal with Mina?

Once upon a time, a good while back in Marie’s yarn, Mina seemed infallible. More or less. I suppose the stereotype rings true: that every ship needs its Spock. Objective, cerebral, pragmatic Logos. Cast for a change in female form, if not exactly the first time. (Am I ever?) Mina is science personified on Proteus. Prickly, overconfident, and a touch too satisfied at times, maybe; but aren’t we all? Besides, she was of course the one to discover Andala, and when she did, conservation kicked in. She feels the greatest responsibility of them all for what will happen to our worlds. The weight of this is stifling her.

So she begins to crack.

If there was anyone you could truly count on, it was Mina. She was terrific at staying focused and keeping cool, even out here in a strange old world we never thought we’d find. But something unnerved her this time.

Something, someone.

Deep inside Bee’s cabin, a cave of shadows against the sunlight outside, I saw Maigan’s outline at last. She stood between the chairs up front. Caught in the dancing glow of our computer screens.

“There you are!” I puffed.

Her eyes turned to me, a great and knowing smile upon her face. She had before her in here everything that she wanted. We each paused a moment, unclear what to say or do next.
“I am sorry, Marie.” Came Mina’s voice as she approached outside. “I was not thinking.”
“That’s unlike you!” I shouted out to her, keeping my eyes on Maigan. “What’s the matter?”
“All of this.” She said, as she walked through the open airlock. “I do not know if I can handle it for much lon…” She saw Maigan’s almighty smile in the electric dark behind me. I heard the sudden end of her breath.
“It’s all right, Mina.” I said to her.
“No! It is really not!” She shouted, shaking. And then she left. She stormed right back outside again.

Mina’s opposite number is none other than Maigan, of course. Our scientist and Andala’s magus, what a pair. Mina shares a good deal with Maigan in steely intellect and cocky precociousness. Neither of them fits our own imaginary model of a woman; for whatever that’s worth where they are, and when. But their differences from one and another are the most telling thing of all. Oh, I’ve not as much as worked them out as yet, I just know that’s the way I’ll go.

Every one of the four crew who landed on Andala gets my sympathy. As in a way I’m all of them. Marie speaks in much my voice, and thinks the best of those around her, trying to coax them on in a protective act of naïveté. Kingston is a rock, doing his best to hide his fear and guilt at where he’s stuck his stricken crew. And Robin, well, old Robin’s soon to get his fun all right. They aren’t the most inventive quartet ever assembled, nor need they be. They balance, as their story does for mine, still not as yet begun.

So what then really is going on between Mina and Maigan? As always, I’ll excuse my own uncertainty with Marie’s. Our narrator has her own agenda, and may very well enjoy a touch of foreshadowing for dramatic purposes besides. Quite whether Maigan’s very appearance outside their ship was the cue for Mina to catch a sharp case of the nerves, or if this is just Marie’s liberty, is a question for a later day and draft. For now, it’s how she’s done it. And that is that.

Aside from exact timing, the truth is there. Mina sees something very sharply in Maigan that she has not in anyone else. Here or on her home world. Something captivating, commanding, and more compelling than she had yet imagined. But how she sees this is not with her rational mind, it’s from another place entire. The realm from which this whole story came as well.

I hope to capture a semblance of this. As that, I suspect, is as much as any of us can do. I’m talking about the unconscious foundation of our minds, scientific or otherwise, and the very seat of our power. Not to mention theirs.

As haphazard as it may seem, and as that it may well be, I really didn’t have a plot set aside for Proteus when I started. I mean, four humans discover and arrive at Andala, that much was down. But what would they do there? With who? And when would they return? Not to mention their number. My ideas were vague. The unbound possibilities enticing. Just the way I like it. Let chaos reign until I discover who it is.

Well, a turning point came when Maigan showed up, much to my surprise. Fully formed, I like to think. Even so, it took me a while to reach her in the story, but here she is.

I conceived her as that rare and mesmerising mind, the kind which seems to read people’s ambitions clearer than they can themselves, and who can rally them to make them real. What Jung called “an extroverted intuitive”. Yes, the Steve Jobs archetype. The troublemaker, the all consuming dreamer, and the leader of men not on wars or fleeting vainglory but in making a dent in the universe the right way, through creativity. They can often be literally insufferable up close, as their way to bring the best out of people is oftentimes to squeeze them dry. But we need them, and are fascinated by them, good or bad.

One thing I didn’t spill was that she’s pregnant. An idea I came up with sometime after I last wrote of her in the light of Jung’s idea. Only yesterday did I read that and spot his own use of the very same metaphor in a quote right there.

The intuitive is … always present where possibilities exist. He has a keen nose for things in the bud pregnant with future promise.

Nice one. You know my theory on foreshadowing I assume, as I return to it again and again. I imagine the idea this time was already sitting there, the veritable bun in the oven of my mind. That’s how these things grow. No wonder I often take my sweet time.

Maigan is her own beast. She lives in a world more like Sumer than our today. She is every bit the magus, too, her own formidable prowess being the resource she relies upon more than any other. She’s a teacher, a grand master, and an institution in her own right. But Marie will see why I draw the parallel. Maigan is my magic bullet. Where Tani has been the focal point of our colliding worlds, Maigan will reinvent the whole affair. She’s the force of nature no one knows to handle. Let alone the four travellers who never expected to meet a soul out there.

I don’t want to give away what I’ve concocted. Not least as it’s in such sweeping flux until it hits the page. A perilous state indeed with me. But I think I have the tools now to tell the kind of story worth a read, quite besides serving as an introduction and scaffold, forever to be behind the scenes. I think I have the end in sight. Of the beginning.

Something about Les Misérables never did chime with me. My instinctive distaste for the musical is almost as petulant as Mike Monteiro. Perhaps I should just read the damn book. But something good did come from the movie, an analysis by a certain Critical Hulk.

He’s pretty sure that heroically bad cinematography is to blame. Thoughtfully explained, for a hulk. The guide to what cinematography is and an annotated list of its key principles is especially welcome. Well worth a read; although I did cheat by uttering the “text-transform: lowercase;” mantra to make it easier on the eyes.

Naturally, Kubrick is invoked:

For those unaware (or who may just disagree), Stanley Kubrick was probably the best english-language director of all time. He has made some of the great all-time classics of cinema with Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining. You’ve probably seen those films a thousand times. But hell, Hulk could write a book about each one of his not quite as classic but still totally classic films. Whether it is Lolita (the greatest subtext movie ever made), The Killing (a brilliant revisionist throw-back noir), Barry Lyndon (it’s an absurdest comedy!), Paths of Glory (his anti-war movie) Full Metal Jacket (his war movie) and Eyes Wide Shut (his unsung masterpiece). All incredible films, but the things that made Stanley unique was his style and approach. He was renowned for supposedly having an IQ of 200 (which was likely, believe it or not), and had the true mastery of filmmaking technician skills (and mechanical engineering on the whole), which he employed regularly. He was infamous for his perfectionism in camera set-ups and intricate lighting. And he was perhaps even more infamous for his demanding perfectionism with actors, why so many people thought he did so many takes… but the truth is that for all his exacting attitude on the technical side of filmmaking, he was actually quite open and philosophical when it came to performance.

I have indeed heard this apparent contradiction before. From Malcolm McDowell no less:

You’ll be shocked; he didn’t explain anything. Because he didn’t know. I mean, to be honest with you. Stanley, you know, he was meticulous in many ways, but he wasn’t good at explaining stuff. If he saw it he knew it, and if he didn’t see it, he hadn’t a clue what it was.

So, I remember saying once, “So, you got any ideas for this scene, Stanley.” And he just looked at me and said, “You know Malc, that’s what I hired you. I’m not a writer.” And so I say, “Oh, that’s interesting. Does anyone have a call sheet? Oh, look at this – Director: S. Kubrick. Hmm? How’s about a bit of direction?” and it just made him laugh.

With most directors you’d say, “You have any ideas for this scene?” and you’d sit down and have a discussion for an hour and they’d come up with whatever. With Stanley? In a way he gave me the greatest gift of all, he just said, “Show me. Make it up. Do it!” So, I did.

I love that line: “If he saw it he knew it, and if he didn’t see it, he hadn’t a clue what it was.” Because it fits right in with my own experience in how the creative process really works. You don’t get to add things up in a linear, predictable, or even basically comprehendible way. Not before the fact. You’ve got to fool around until you see something. Then you’ve got it. No sooner.

I hear it’s the same way in design. Well, besides for when it’s not. Overview and details.

Back to the Hulk:

It’s true. When he sat down to do a scene he had no pre-determined idea what he was looking for with the actors, just that he was always looking for the most interesting way to possibly do the scene and convey new meanings. He wanted to find it. Hulk knows this sounds downright Lynchian, but it’s true. He did take after take after take not until an actor gave him exactly what he wanted, but until an actor surprised him. And that was usually when they did something unnerving, or something that could have two different interpretations, or something was exactly the opposite of how you might think that character would behave. And all the while he would be considering how that played with his lighting schemes and changed them to reflect how the subject was changing in performance. He wasn’t being a perfectionist. He was searching. And he did all of this until the actor gave a performance that felt almost surreal but deeply-felt, like it was vomiting up from their bones.

It’s true of his entire run from Dr. Strangelove on (a lot of that credit goes to Sellers for the inspiration), but he was deeply interested in creating cinematic worlds that were soooooo unlike our own. Rigid, formal worlds that shook us deeply. He made diorama-like scenes of staged action. He filmed dead on center-points. He used wide angle lenses. He had characters look directly at the camera. But he knew what every single one of these actions did to change his subject matter and affect his audience. He used all these things to a very specific import.

He was trying to put the audience off-kilter. He was trying to shake us out of moral and cinematic conventionality. He was directing his movies at us for the sole purpose of making us uncomfortable, but then using this crack in our exterior to load us with deep, textural information and codified language. The reason 2001 is such an off-beat film is that he understood it was the only way to make that film work. The way to make true transcendent cinematic art is to give an audience a visceral experience (which he always does) and crack us open with unnerving provocation (which he always does) and then provide deep symbols which make us want to engage the film on an intellectual level (which he always does and we almost always reciprocate). Which may sound confusing, but let Hulk put it like this: He was essentially creating the best possible atmosphere for semiotic deductions. Like almost no other artist working in cinema, he understood the core dynamic of the art film and he managed to make it strike such a chord that it translated to mainstream America. It’s downright brilliant. And it’s barely scratching the surface of what Kubrick was really up to.

That’s the thing with Kubrick. You think you see it all, but you don’t. He was the master of that. And, what’s more, a popular favourite while he was at it. I’d never believe someone could achieve what he did, if he weren’t there, doing precisely that.

So yes, some hero worship. Not that I’m disinclined. But the pseudonymous Hulk did bring a new one to my attention: Gordon Willis. The man behind the look of many an all time great, from “both” Godfathers to Manhattan. I’ve got a hankering to watch The Parallax View and All The President’s Men again. It’s been too long.

All I can hope is that I can learn. Pretentiousness is the worry. As the Hulk put it:

When talking about movies, or art, or individuals people seem to use the word pretentious wrong all the time. Most of the time they mean esoteric. Sometimes they mean ostentatious. But when someone is pretentious it means they are reaching for merit that is undeserved. It is not when they are displaying apt intellect in a showy way. The intellect is truly not there.

I don’t need to know everything to make something great. I just need to know it when I see it. Like everyone else.

Alpha Zero strikes again. I should make one into a deadline, someday, or else the future that I’m writing will become far too soon. Not that I expect to see 2301, of course, but we have enough to do already.

What I’m really up to is contemplating Zuba.

Amongst the most vital aspects of Andala is its multiculture. The world I’m building is no mere homogenous lump, but a land of many peoples, each unto their own. Marie’s sighting of Azubayeer is the first we explore beyond the Ana. We’re crossing lines, going to the heart of the Azu world. I want to do the journey justice. I want the Azu to breathe a distinctive character from their Ana neighbours.

No wonder, then, that I’ve had borders on my mind.

Many ideas are cooking. Not that I can jump ahead to tell quite what they are. My notes are taking on an Azu focus, as I project on them what I think I’ve missed in the Ana. Art, clothes, the way they speak between themselves; there’s something going on in the gestalt I can’t as yet discover. You know how it goes. And I will too, once I’m done.

Not only is there Zuba, Andala’s birthplace for writing and so much else, but I have the Magus to contend with too. I’m getting the sense that I’m beginning to know her now, but I’ll only have some confidence once she is on the page.

A lot of work, isn’t it, for a book inside a book. But it’s not as if I could skip the details even if I had shot straight for Alpha. They’d ruin it from the outset. Besides, I’m getting to fair like this world of mine as I explore and make it. The whole would hardly be Andala without Andala.