Destiny? Or predestiny?

Some days take a little wriggling into to fit comfortably, like a beanbag. You start off planning to do one thing, get diverted, and then before you know it you're on a plane for Bermuda with only a sack of potatoes in the hold and the address for a man called Jericho. Well, that is quite an excessive wriggle but it does demonstrate the power of destiny. Or is that predestiny?

Destiny and predestiny are quite different things. They both concern their ultimate fate, but if James Kirk is to believed in the novel 'Best Destiny' then the second is unavoidable but the first... That you make for yourself. The notion of a destiny is an ancient one, perhaps more ancient than any of us can know. If there is a giant predestiny guiding the universe then it's as old as time and unavoidably linked to divine agencies of myriad varieties.

It seems that over the ages the distinction between destiny and predestiny has become almost vanishingly small. If it weren't for the aforementioned Star Trek novel I would never even have questioned it, but it does make sense that they would have different meanings. So, do we have destinies or predestinies? Is all set out in some cosmic order somewhere or can the course of future history be changed if we work for it?

Perhaps both can be true. If you're unaware of destiny, then surely there is some chain of events that will happen irrespective of all the chaotic distractions and interferences of life? No, it doesn't make sense as all it would take would be for one person to take a hand and pioneer his own path and then chaos would take over with the side effects of that one aware person's actions. Either it's all predestined or it's chaos. The major problem with predestiny from a human perspective is that firstly it removes all personal agency and responsibility, and secondly that in the absence of time travel it is utterly true. We do all have predestined paths that we will tread over time from birth to death and whatever may have been before and may be after. At least now our predestinies aren't governed by fickle gods and goddesses playing games atop high mountains, even though said pantheons would have eased the boredom a little.

The more humanly acceptable (for our sanity at least) option is destiny, that concept that we can make a difference and that our futures aren't all laid out in advance. We can make a difference, if we care to, if we have the awareness to make the change. Everyone in the world could set their cap for higher hills if they had but the ability to step aside and assess what they've done in the past, what they're doing now, and set their sails for different actions in the future. It's not impossible but it is hard, for we're all trained to accept what we know rather than what can be.

Nonsense? Maybe. However, when given the choice between destiny and predestiny I would take the latter every time. Because that's the one we make for ourselves.

O.


PS 'Best Destiny' is actually a very fine Star Trek novel. It has flashes of fire. Check out Diane Carey's other masterwork 'Final Frontier' while you're at it. I personally like 'Dreadnought!' and 'Battlestations!' even more but I've been proven to be very strange.
PPS Booga booga booga.

Weird Worlds

'Write and the world shall write with you.' That's not a true statement, but it helps to start a blog which you have no ideas for; Running a loose thread of consciousness can be hard but it is always possible. You don't need inspiration if you can tap into what's going on around you.

Out there in the world people get randomly wacky and do mad things. Not mad as in the ideas that come to mind when you play 'Balderdash' but in other stranger and queasier ways. You only need to turn on the news to see it, and it's sometimes very scary. Obviously it's very tempting to hole up in your home and never venture out. Should you?

Learning about the world from the Internet and the media is a mistake. You only ever get the extreme opinions and the crazy people. You only ever get the terrible news and over-hyped populist news. Do I care that the Royal Baby was born? No. Do I want to know it was called George, in deep detail? No. It's just silly.

You have to go out into the world and make up your own mind. The key is finding some excuse for doing it; That's the hardest part.

Do you think that when the early humans started eating vegetables and other plants, allowing for significant mental development and the creation of a new potential for culture and civilization, that they thought all this would happen? The heights we have reached are amazing, but they did they think it would all go into a bizarre retrograde in so many places? That intelligence and civilization would go under in a wave of brain numbing burgers, sausages and fries? Of course not, they were busy looking for the best animals to rear and then kill for steaks. It's all about balance at the end of the day; Vegetables for the brain and meat for the muscles.

I played 'Balderdash' today, and it was as fun as usual. Nothing allows for such creative runs of lunacy as that game. You can go from writing a film synopsis about cold wars surrounding immense mutant potatoes to defining false meanings for acronyms and creating funny word definitions. It's awesome. That's what all those vegetables were for, and the meat is for the swimming lessons.

Rant over. Bring on the essay about preternatural abilities. And the fun. Gosh, I need fun!

O.

Soul Sick

Everyone can be soul sick. It doesn't matter if you believe in souls or not; It's a universal condition. Past decisions and ideas can niggle at us and sap our spiritual/mental self until we don't know what's going on any more. It is quite the sad thing, and is unsurprisingly becoming more and more prevalent.

'Soul sick' is not a term you hear much any more. It means something slightly different to 'heart broken', which is very much connected to romantic woes and broken ambitions. To be soul sick is to be fundamentally lacking something or be aware of something you really don't want to know.

Whenever I think of 'soul sickness' I think of the much underrated film (it's always a film!) 'Joe Versus The Volcano', where the third character played by Meg Ryan makes a terrible confession to Joe. She has broken her word to herself and agreed to work for her manipulative father in exchange for the boat she so wants from him. The knowledge that she has a price is making her soul sick and she just has to explain her angry behaviour. Joe can't really do anything but listen as one of the best little speeches in film history goes on, and we learn the knowledge that has taken her will to live.

I've been soul sick a few times, and it's always because at heart I know I've done something wrong or that something is missing. The worst thing is that you can get used to the second variety, that gnawing sense of always being in the wrong place or the wrong time or simply not knowing what it is that you need to feel complete. It seems like a huge thing at the time but really... you have to believe me here... it's inside you all along if you can just relax and accept yourself. We're all capable of being self-aware and happy as individuals; It just seems like we must have partners to be happy. Society has a great habit of pressuring everyone to be the same and pushes people who don't cooperate to the back of the line.

Still, soul sickness is a terrible thing. Maybe if you've feeling a bit afflicted you should go see 'Joe Versus The Volcano'. It's good. I love that movie. There's a bit of 'soul sickness' in the latter stages of 'Cities in Flight' by James Blish, although that's also more of a malaise.

O.

PS James Kirk in Star Trek II is another good example.

Story: 'Triangles', XI [Revised]

Power has returned to my fingers and the juice is flowing once again. Welcome to the Quirky Muffin, my friends, the land where nothing remains the same but also never changes. I'm your host, the perennially lost mathematician Oliver and this is the land of make believe. Today we see the latest episode in what may turn out to be something special (for some definition of the word 'special'. As part of the James Horner score for 'The Rocketeer' soars around the room, it's best to get down to business.

It always pays to write them fast!

-----

'Triangles', XI
(Part X , XII)


The food was delicious, and Delores could hardly get enough of it as Ernest retrieved it from a little empty alcove in the wall. It was just a little reminiscent of Star Trek. That brought on a pang of nostalgia and she examined Ernest anew.

"You can't see it. It's well hidden." Ernest tried a smile but kind of flopped into puzzled half-grin instead.

"Huh?"

"I'm just as you are, a mortal on this plane of reality, such as it is." Ernest gestured around at the statuary and grandiose surrounding. They were in a yellow stone square, that smelt faintly of honeysuckle and wine, and was utterly deserted. There were buildings facing all around, seeminly deserted.

"'Such is it is'? You are going to tell me where we are, aren't you?"

Ernest shifted in his seat a little. He had dragged a couple of folding chairs from what seemed to be a little bazaar a little further around the fountain to the left. He was monumentally unused to the ways of such mobile furniture. It wobbled a little dangerously. More like a scene out of 'Doctor Who' than 'Star Trek', after all.

"This is not the easiest thing to explain." More thought seemed to tear through the impassive mind buried deep in Ernest's brain. "Perhaps an analogy is in order. Observe. No, hang on a moment." He ducked back into the bazaar and emerged quickly with a small sack of juggling balls and a determined expression. "Observe." He began to juggle eight or nine balls effortlessly and started to talk. "I'm juggling in three spatial dimensions, and the balls are following a circular path as well as I can manage. You can perceive the centre to their motion. Now I'll do this!"

Delores was shocked to see that the balls were now spitting in and out of view in a small shower of water droplets. Little rainbows shattered on a moment by moment basis. "What...?"

"I'm now juggling in four dimensions - don't look at my hands - about a new centre of motion that means nothing to your perceptions. And this... five dimensions... means you hardly see the balls at all... No matter how many dimensions we go to there's always a way to juggle around a common centre of motion in what is equivalent to a circle. You just can't see it." The juggling balls vanished and didn't return as he ceased his efforts. "I put them back in the bazaar in a much easier manner."

"We are in the Junction, the ancient nexus by which life forms - of whom we shall not speak right now - from all over every dimension came together to exchange goods and ideas. It has been neglected for several long cycles now, but shall inevitably be discovered again one day, perhaps by you. You have great intelligence and perceptivity, much more so than I thought initially. You observe all."

Delores finally had her turn to speak but chose not to.

"While the Other bonds all the dimensions together in his mysterious ways he may not know about the existence of this place, if it is a place at all. In many ways it is more of a state of mind. A home away from home. It's strange to be so small, so far away from my own home. Even as I juggled my balls, all the known planes of reality gravitate around a common point, the Junction."

"In reality you're a vast entity, no more a person than a God, something else entirely. What are you doing here? Why talk to me? What is it you want?" Delores stood up, suddenly a little angry. "Why are these things happening to me? Why am I here and not back at home in my little flat, wondering what to do with my holidays? Alone again."

"I don't know. I was hoping by meeting you I could deduce why you were chosen to cross the thresholds and become a leader in whatever the Other was planning. This... Junction... has existed since time immemorial and I created a temporary bridge just to get you here without their noticing. I had hoped you could tell me what to do. This idea of conflict is unknown to me as crossing into whole new worlds is to you."

What would happen if you were alone over all time eternal, with no equals and only one task to be performed? Would you know what to do if a rival appeared, seeking to pervert the course of things that must be? Could someone who had never been faced down by the school bully and stood up to tell the tale even conceive of the ways lesser beings lived their lives on a day to day basis. It all became clear.

"Ernest - What a name for such a being! - you're saying you don't know how to save everything?" Delores looked the once omnipotent being in the eye. "You've been alone for your whole existence?"

The earnest Ernest hesitated a moment. "Let's say 'yes'? There are parts I don't remember to be honest, moments of abandon inevitable in a sojourn so long amongst hyper-stars and cosmic ribbons."

"I think I'd better give you some schooling in how to do things the down and dirty lesser being way. And then I'm going home. After helping save everything, including ice cream and apple pie. And after you've told me how people could get to this Junction without building tunnels and bridges that you said were dangerous."

Ernest nodded, winced, and waited. There had to be more.

"And you have to explain to me why this has to be the work of an enemy, an adversary. Why can't it be the way things are supposed to be? Why can't it be the result of something bigger than even you?"

<faint to black>


You all have to wait too... for the conclusion to Phase One of 'Triangles'!

Story: The Disappearance (VII)

(Part VI , VIII)

So far, so twisty. Carter and I had been called out in our capacity as Plain Chocolate Digestive Detectives, fearless and peerless investigators of bizarre occurrences linked to those baked goods, and now I was on a mission to prevent a temporal rip at the heart of McGonagle Biscuits that would ultimately engulf most of the country and have me meeting myself in dingy pub back rooms. Truly, I had got the girl in the end apparently, but a death toll exceeding three is not a price worth paying for loving walks in the park.

The worst part of the whole mess was that there really wasn't much to be done about a time travel problem when the travel was taking place in the future. It would be like trying to stop a cannon by putting cardboard over the target. Thinking about that option, it didn't seem that bad, and that scared me even more than a temporal schism. Cardboard over a cannon target? Pshaw!

Why hadn't future me vanished? He didn't remember meeting me so he was from another timeline. His report on the events of the next few days was troubling and complete. Agnes had calmed down considerably upon being untied and left to talk to her future self for a few minutes, which led to where we were now: Deep in the heart of McGonagle Biscuits awaiting a shipment of super-profitable biscuits from the future. That wasn't the most unlikely thing I had ever written on an activity report, sadly.

Throughout all our inspections of the McGonagle plant we had never discovered a single discrepancy or evidence of shady misdeeds in the company; They were  squeaky clean and yet they had the highest incident rate of every company. Now it all made sense, as the new president Agnes explained it. We were hidden in a corner of the warehouse at one o'clock in the morning, holding hands as people do in the dark, and when she squeezed I knew something was about to happen. A great prism like effect shimmered with sickly yellow light above the crates and a suspiciously empty patch of floor. From out of the effect a crate was lowered by wire and people bustled about in protective clothing that sparked in contact with the cargo. A second was lowered and then a third, and finally what I knew to be the final one began to be moved into our time frame.

There was no reason to do what I did next, nor even for Agnes to follow me. As the crate was released I dashed forward and grabbed the hook end of the rope and we were raised up toward the effect and through.

Only in the future could we save our present, and maybe even the people who had all died or disappeared in the past. That shadow on the sidewalk of the street that began this incident could be avenged at last. Some people talked about biscuit futures, but we knew the real saviour would be in future biscuits.

Some times awful jokes are necessary in the face of the unknown. Wherever we were going, the reception was going to be interesting to say the least.
 
To be continued...

Rewrites

I'm toiling away on corrections and have learnt from long experience that I'm much better at rewriting passages than fixing individual problems so the joy of rewrites is upon me. Sending off texts for appraisal and feedback is never a pleasant experience, as normally one of two cases is true: 1> You know you didn't try hard enough and are about to get a shed load of comments, or 2> The carefully wrought piece of high art that you had thought to be perfect in every respect is about to be shredded and used for critical fuel.

Rewrites are what publishing is all about, even in the case of academic articles, although perhaps 'especially' is a much more accurate word to use rather than 'even'. The path to a publication is a long and tortuous one and here I will try to explain it as succinctly as possible. The stages, in this case for a scientific article, are:

1> Do the science
2> Draw useful and relevant conclusions
3> Work out what would be next
4> Write it all in publication form
5> Send to co-authors and get feedback
6> Incorporate feedback
7> Repeat 5,6 until all satisfied
8> Send to journal referees (via journal) and get feedback
9> Incorporate feedback
10> Repeat 8,9 until conclusion reached
11> If positive conclusion go to publishing, and if negative return to 1.

If that seems like a lengthy process to you then you aren't wrong, and of course it is even more arduous if there's something contentious or extreme in your work.

"I say, that chap Einstein was talking total cobblers, don't you think? Here's how you do it the right way!"

The system is logical and quite sane but it's also slow. James Blish had it in 'Cities in Flight' that at some point in the future conventional science would lead to a dead end and that then crackpot theories would be the place to find the next breakthrough and I can rather see that happening. My, that's a good book; You should go out and read 'Cities In Flight', my demented readers. And 'A Case Of Conscience' after that if you liked it.

Returning to the beginning, rewrites are an arduous process and one I take willingly over corrections, but ultimately it is all worth it as rewriting a section will ultimately produce something even far far stronger and better written. I shall plug through it and produce something even better than the last version, and then it will come back and... more rewrites.

Oh. Good grief. Help, world, help!

O.

Book: 'The Hollow Man' (1935) by John Dickson Carr.

The Golden Age of detective fiction - mainly between the two world wars of the twentieth century - was populated by a ridiculously large number of detectives. It was the age of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and a myriad of others but how many of those others can you name?

John Dickson Carr was a notable 'other' and with his sleuth Dr Gideon Fell he loved to examine impossible situations and locked room mysteries. He tackled other styles using other detectives and adventurers but rationally decided that simple adventures had become obsolete with the advent of the Second World War, that the world had become too small and in my opinion probably too wearied. In retrospect he was proven right as adventures then moved on to the next broad canvasses supplied by science fiction and fantasy. The old canvas had become too small as he said.

Expertise in the field is not something even vaguely within my experience but this is probably the best known of his mysteries and encapsulates his mighty abilities as an intellectual puzzle maker adroitly and exactly. It's a macabre mix of old Transylvanian mythology, locked room murder, invisible people, and red herrings aplenty. Transylvanian mythology come in that the primary victim actually hails from the Old Dark Country and coffins feature heavily in the narrative, as does as a heavy dose of mysterious magical goings-on.

I'm not going to talk about the plot much, beyond the fact that Dr Fell is a very well developed character at this point. His worries about the cost of revealing truth recalls some of the best moments of Poirot and Holmes, but with added weariness at the motivations of the culprits. Fell also does something very unusual in this story which none of the other detectives I've read ever do and gives a lecture on locked room mysteries directly to the reader. The idea of the fourth wall being directly breached in 1935 is quite astounding, and rather profound. The speech itself feels rather out of place, and not only because of that meta-awareness, but rather because this is not exactly a locked room mystery, but really only pretends to be. It is actually a supposedly supernatural or magical murder which is solved in the most simple of ways once you realise the truth of it all. There aren't that many climaxes or revelations that are more pleasing in their simplicity, and it seems to have been something unique to Carr. He was a puzzle man.

The Dr Gideon Fell stories aren't easy to obtain in print any more and I read this on Kindle, but that's not how I first experienced this story. If we journey back in time a younger Oliver listened to a Radio 4 dramatisation of 'The Hollow Man', featuring the sumptuously voiced British national treasure Sir Donald Sinden. As far as I know you can't listen to it anymore and it's a shame as he did wonderfully. No-one else could have harrumphed in the required manner! If only the Radio 4 dramatised archive could be accessed for such things like this: It would be an amazing thing. There's a version of 'The Murders In The Rue Morgue' in that archive I would love to find and purchase forever more. Come on, BBC, there has to be a way! I'd collect the whole little series of Dr Fells you produced and a mass more!

Moving back to the origin of this piece, I can recommend this book highly to people who appreciate mysteries from that Golden Age. Dickson Carr was underrated then and is seemingly forgotten now but there is material there that is well worth perusing. There are ways and they are legal.

O.