Your Xarium is a modern version of a flying carpet, witch's broom, or red shoes. The interesting part is how your story will reveal your belief systems. The first thing I noticed is that you set the stage for one group to be permitted to travel and another that is not permitted. Within your story there will no doubt be a good/bad dichotomy relating good to travellers and the belief acceptance ability. Disbeleivers will become your antagonists. This is a very well tried story line almost primeaval.
The story model should have an audience, Star Trek verged on the ludicrous very often and adopted old story lines over and over with no real complaints. Certain stories always seem to work because they seem to appeal directly to some hard wired core of humanity. I have often wondered if there is a limited capacity for stories in our brains. Once we have heard them all we just dress up the characters in the latest fashions and dialects. Perhaps every real event is measured against some version of a story we inherited as children. If the comparison is favourable then we accept if not then we reject reality in favour of our flawed memories. I have upon occasion drank too much beer and watched Zombie flicks. I always wondered why it was so hard to decipher the story line if I returned from a break. It seems Zombie movies have a structure that permits Good people to employ the nastiest weapons and tactics on the STRANGER. That story line uses a disease or whatever to separate two groups and then begin the mayhem. The once human Zombies are clearly no longer entitled to any consideration by the Normal Human beings. This story line shows up all the time and regardless of changes in social consciousness the story that strangers are expendable persists. This story line is not ancient I can not recall any such in the thousand and One Nights. Even in Odyseus the sailors turned into pigs were not completely dehumanized. The old west dime novels began to include some of these ideas between Good and Bad; Cowboys and Indians. I wonder if this ever happened to other cultures ? A lot of modern fiction fails to discern the Good from the Bad through actions but rather through Icons. White hats versus Black Hats. If you don't know the rules ahead of time there is no way to discern the moral story. Perhaps Miller's story will include extended earlobes as a mark of Goodness or finger length ratios? Perhaps something as trivial as genitalia will separate the good from the bad. A lot of action flicks have the heroes behave in a manner inseperable from the evil doers. This is interesting since this basically implies that Good and Bad are not attributes earned through action but rather as arbitrary assignments from some authority. King David appears as quite a ruthless character but his assignment saves him from rebuke, though his actions are dispicable at times. As a writer you will arbitrarily assign Good qualities to the travellers and your readers will accept your proposition without question? Yet if presented with a health care reform bill they will fight to the bitter end. If it was this easy to get something into a reader's brain why have teachers of calculus never figured it out? Out of curiosity why would such travellers be welcome when they just drop in on others? This seems to suggest that travellers being Good do not have to get permission to invade other realms. Perhaps that is the core of the new belief system, Good people get all the special entitlements. The Bad people live in squallor because they are bad by definition. Sorry , about my line of inquiry, Magic and I don't get along too well as you can see. Dr.Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky Ph.D.(Civil Eng.), M.Sc.(Mech.Eng.), M.Sc.(Biology) 120-1053 Beaverhill Blvd. Winnipeg, Manitoba CANADA R2J 3R2 (204) 2548321 Phone/Fax <mailto:vbur...@shaw.ca> vbur...@shaw.ca -----Original Message----- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of peggy miller Sent: April 29, 2010 12:08 PM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: [FRIAM] vol 82, 30 I quote Roger Critchlow: "I guess I find sloppiness to be an indicator of sloppiness. If you can script the sun and moon to do something they've never done, who's to say what other photogenic impossibilities have slipped into your story? Clearly, if the laws of physics do not constrain your storytelling why should the facts of history, prehistory, or archaeology give you any pause? " In defense of storytelling that ventures into the impossible as we know it, I believe that using the edges of complexity and emergence theory, along with spiritual/energy/daoist laws, one can present concepts that skirt reality, but remain in the mind's ability to envision. In my unpublished novel, Of Coins, Toadplates and Pestles, I present the future existence of a meteroroid fallout here on earth due to an actual over-a-billion year old Pluto encounter with other universe matter. It took that long for the spewed material from Pluto to enter our atmosphere and small amounts fall onto earth (not completely out of reality so far) -- I then present that material, I call xarium, to have energetic qualities that help redirect our energy meridians positively and negatively. (various gems and stones have impacts on our energy -- already known, so not out of reality) Certain parts of the xarium, when held, can take some humans -- those with ability to allow energy into their being, thus transporting on it more easily -- to other worlds/dimensions. This ties into discussions provoked by "vision quests", spiritwalking, and other concepts of spiritual worlds and existence of other simultaneous worlds. A story? yes. But still posing concepts worth thinking about, and trying to make links between known, current physical laws, matter, energy and where those links, connected to the spiritual world, could/might take us. I find this worthy of discussion. Some don't. That is fine. But pushing the envelope between physics, matter, spiritual, energy and dimensional discussion is worthwhile, I think. Peggy Miller
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
