Complexity and the Limits of Imagination

I’ve harped on these themes before, but what the heck. It’s only opinionating but I like it.

Two items intertwined in my mind to form the double helix of this thread. One is time travel, the other is an atheist’s conversion to Catholicism. What they both have in common are the twin titles of this post: Complexity, and the Limits of Imagination.

I’ve been guilty many times of indulging in the fantasy of time travel, and have written some stories in the genre, knowing full well how absurd an idea it is, but unable to resist and usually unwilling to look too closely into it. I came across the notion recently (I wish I could remember where, and link to it) about how “time” not only does not exist, but cannot possibly exist. What we have is not “time” as we know it, but an infinity of seemingly concurrent changes taking place around us constantly. All you really need to do is look outside. Let’s assume you can see a tree, and on that tree there are leaves (jjust budding out now, as it’s the beginning of springtime in your clime, let us say). Those leaves are each in their own state – at the moment – and are changing their state, growing, living, fading, dying as they do through the seasons. Now to “go back in time”, each of those leaves would have to revert to the state they were in at that supposed “time”. That’s just one tree. Seriously, that tree not only houses leaves, but bark and trunk and branches, and all of those are made up of atoms, molecules, protons, neutrons, all the way down the line. Each of the subatomic particles forming each of those atoms would need to revert the QUANTUM state they were in at that so-called “time”. Quantum being the operative word, because by definition that state CANNOT BE KNOWN at that level. Add the other trees, the weeds, plants and flowers in your neighborhood, and build up from there the entire world, solar system, galaxy, universe and so on. Of course we can’t even begin to do that. We can’t even begin to imagine the basic elements of that one tree! We might think we can imagine, but even the hardiest imaginer would have to confess, sooner or later, that infinity is hard to count up to. So, while the idea of time travel is fun, it’s also ridiculous. Every “moment” is already Humpty Dumpty, and can already not be put back together again, because it never is together in the first place.

Just because our imaginations are limited does not mean that the thing(s) we’re trying to imagine do not exist. This is perhaps the best argument in favor of the potential existence of God. “It could happen!” (shrug). Who knows? Who can say? A science fiction writer had a near-death experience followed by a conversion experience which led him to find God and start a heated debate on his blog wherein he and atheists engage in dispute. Now, lots of people have conversion experiences, sometimes accompanying crises and sometimes not, and there’s really no reason by one person’s experience should be taken as any sort of proof of anything by anybody else. One of his main arguments reminds me of Niezsche’s warning that “life is no argument, for the conditions of life could include error.” This man says: “You are also implying that the human race, all of whom believe in gods, ghosts, magic and miracles of one sort or another, except for that exquisitely tiny minority of persons who are consistent atheists, just so happened to have all made the same lapse of judgment in the matter of paramount and foundational importance in their lives, and continue to do so”. I wonder if he really wants to include ghosts and magic in the same category as God, but doesn’t a lot of it come down to the limits and restrictions of the human imagination? Base any argument on “what most people believe” and you’ll come perilously close to awarding the definition of “greatness” as being “Justin Bieber”. It’s not a “lapse of judgment” to believe in something. It may just be the way the human mind works. It’s useful. As far as I know, there has never been any independent evidence presented – that is, by a species other than humans. Does any other species of creature in the universe believe in God or is it a human invention? I would be very interested to know what parrots believe in – if faith is of any use to them – or any other creature of this planet, for that matter. I cling to the quaint notion that humans are animals of Earth, sharing most of the same DNA as many other animals, as well as the same habits (eating, sleeping, waking, breathing, dreaming, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, reproducing and raising our young … stuff like that). It could be that failing to believe in God is a limit of imagination on my part. Or, on the contrary, taking everything you cannot conceive of or understand and assigning it to some one big bucket called God could also be a fail. I’m just going to say, along with Dirty Harry, that “a man’s got to know his limitations”, and leave it at that.

Superiority Complex

I find I keep circling back around to the theory of the Singularity because it has such speculative potential. This is the idea that soon enough artificial intelligence will be invented that is superior to human intelligence, and thereafter those creations will have no use for humans and will wipe us all out. This idea has been most clearly depicted in the film The Terminator. One contradiction of this storyline is that these so-called “superior” intelligences aren’t superior at all – they are in fact the same, especially in their resort to violence as a solution to whatever problem they face. A truly superior intelligence might find a better way!

When we look at the superior intelligences among our own species, it’s true that some of them do spend their time designing weapons. It’s how we ended up with nukes, after all, but far more of them work on other subjects in the realms of science and medicine, including computer science and biotechnology. I’m going to climb out on a limb here and speculate that a superior artificial intelligence would not inherit this fascination or drive for blood and gore and physical domination (being virtual creatures rather than flesh-and-blood, or, if you prefer, brick-and-mortar). If they do want to wipe us out, there are other ways. Bio-engineering, for one.

Walter Tevis‘ great book “Mockingbird” speculated that these intelligences would come to the conclusion that the human race did not even want to exist, hence its invention of artificial beings to service them, so they went ahead and sterilized our species. Now that’s a superior intelligence, if perhaps misguided. That kind of speculation is far more imaginative than the mere replication of world of warcraft by other means. It doesn’t make for a compelling motion picture, however, which is apparently why that book never did get made into a movie.

One thing some smart people work on is marketing (!), shaping the consumer into the perfect customer. Perhaps a future artificial intelligence might also focus on creating a better user experience for themselves, and engineer us along the lines of its ideal user. This is the bio-engineered germ of an idea I find growing right now in “Prisoners of Perfection” …

Recommended: Tesla’s Secret by Carla Herrera

It is well-known that Nikola Tesla was an astoundingly brilliant inventor-engineer-scientist whose true life story is quite fascinating and well-worth reading about. He is also a great character for fiction, especially science fiction, as it’s easy to believe him to be capable of anything, After all, he was decades ahead in many ways, including his concept of a global wireless broadband network. Who knows what incredible gadgets he may have tinkered with and left behind in some basement somewhere? That is where this short story, Tesla’s Secret, by Carla Herrera, begins. A woman and her daughter come across such a device in a hotel whose owner wants nothing to do with the crappy-looking ancient machine. Messing around with it, they accidentally find it to be a sort of seance generator, able to bring back the spirit and form of dead people, but only for a brief period, a few minutes at most. I love what Carla does with this idea. Naturally, the first thing you think of is, who to bring back to talk to? The mother and daughter have very different ideas, and their disagreements and mutual disapprovals make for a very funny and entertaining story. The nature of the machine itself, its  limitations and side effects, are also interesting. Available on Smashwords and highly recommended!

Interview with Misha Burnett, author of “Catskinner’s Book”

I’m very pleased to present this interview with Misha Burnett, the author of the intriguing and exciting ‘Catskinner’s Book’:

One of the things that impressed me about Catskinner’s Book is how it is an interesting amalgamation of a number of ideas, such as the tattoo-binding of a demon/alien to a human infant, the “walk-ins” concept of aliens on earth, a kind of schizophrenic experience of having two minds in one body, a sort of interstellar gang warfare, the uncomfortable relationship between parasite and host, a rather complex and uncertain sexuality and the “lone gunman” aspect of the professional hit man among others. What was the starting point, the original idea, and when and how did these other aspects, in so far as they were conscious and deliberate, come into play?

The starting point was James and Catskinner. I wanted to tell a story from the viewpoint of someone who was dissociative, who had multiple distinct identities. Realistic fiction that features dissociation tends to focus on the early trauma that caused it, and I didn’t want James to be seen as a victim of his upbringing—I didn’t want to tell the story of what was done to him, I wanted to tell the story of what he did. So I fictionalized it. By writing Catskinner as something truly alien I was able to concentrate on how James dealt with the present, instead of dwelling on the past.

The relationship between the outsiders and the human race was largely inspired by William Burroughs’ Nova Express novels. Fans of Burroughs’ work will notice quite of number of references, but fortunately it’s not necessary to pick up on them to follow the story. The basic idea that I lifted from Burroughs was that the Earth is host to alien intelligences which are essentially carrion feeders—they sow chaos and discord in order to feed on the energy released by suffering.

So I didn’t want a galactic empire or anything organized. This is an invasion of carpetbaggers, flim-flam artists who move in to take advantage of the gullible rubes for a quick profit. What’s more, they lie—they lie about themselves, about the other Outsiders, about everything. The heart of my cosmology is in Alice’s speech in the bowling alley, when she tells James, “They have been influencing human history for thousand of years, starting wars, inspiring all sorts of atrocities for their own purposes, and we don’t even know for certain what they are.” (Which is why I used that quote for the back cover of the print edition.)

How I told the story was largely inspired by Phillip K. Dick, particularly works like A Maze Of Death and Time Out Of Joint, where the narrator doesn’t understand the rules of the world in which he finds himself. James is not a contemplative man, he’s not concerned with answering the cosmic questions, he just wants to get through the next day.

The physicality of the relationship between James and Godiva was partially inspired by Burroughs (and also by Samuel Delany, another author whom I feel has been woefully neglected by the mainstream) and partially my own sexuality. Without getting overly personal, I have always responded to another person as a person, and the gender of the person is pretty far down on my list of significant characteristics. Godiva’s physiology was my way of expressing that concept in a speculative context.

Much of the book, especially the various shoot-out scenes, are quite cinematic, and I wonder if you had that in mind when you were writing – how would these scenes develop if it were a movie? – or was that more unconscious and instinctive?

I am a product of my time. I grew up with movies, and the cinematic mindset has shaped me as a storyteller. I didn’t set out to write scenes to be filmed, but I did “see” much of the action as if I was watching it in a movie. I am a huge fan of the films of John Carpenter, and I’m sure that his style inspired the way I paced the action sequences. At times I saw James as Jack Burton from Big Trouble In Little China, in fact, a very simple, down to earth man suddenly confronted with the fantastic.

As far as Catskinner becoming a film—I certainly wouldn’t say no to the money. But I wouldn’t expect the film to follow the story of the book—they’d probably cast Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and make James a science teacher from Pittsburgh who decided to follow his lifelong dream of opening a bookstore in the inner city or something.

But, hey, that’s the movie business. Note to any producers who read this—I am so willing to sell out my art for cash. Just tell me who’s buying.

Catskinner’s “host” has a difficult relationship with his parasite. At times he seems resigned, at times he seems to glory in its capabilities, at times he seems frustrated by the whole thing. This relationship seemed the heart of the book and the most interesting part to me. Was there a time when the host tried to rebel or thought of rebelling, leading to, for example, a sort of “exorcism” attempt. I imagined there may have been a struggle at some point, perhaps in his youth?

James has certainly fought against Catskinner—fairly early in the book I allude to an incident where James actually threatens to kill himself because of Catskinner’s actions. However, James has never known what being without Catskinner would be like—he really can’t imagine it. He wants Catskinner to be more tractable and less randomly destructive, but he doesn’t want Catskinner to be gone. For good or ill they are two halves of the same organism. Even leaving out Catskinner’s unique physical abilities, James would be lost without him.

The book has received mostly very high ratings on Goodreads and, I expect, elsewhere as well. You must be gratified by that. I have a sense that indie authors such as yourself must play a long game. Your book(s) will not be going out of print and are not at the mercy of the old-fashioned publishing cycle. There are a lot of different ways of going about getting attention for the book, such as targeting particular readers through reading clubs or online specialty book sites, engaging in promotional events (blog tours, book giveaways, etc ..), producing and distributing video promos, and so on. How active have you been or intend to be, and what are some of the activities you’ve engaged in or considered?

Heh. I’m making it up as I go. I am currently featured on a site called “Story Cartel” (http://storycartel.com/ ) that allows authors to offer free downloads of e-books and giveaways of print copies to generate reviews. I also just joined a site called “Ozark Hellbenders” (http://ozarkshellbenders.weebly.com/ ) that is for authors of paranormal and horror fiction from the Ozarks region. (I grew up in Springfield, MO.)

I am also going to be at Archon, a local science fiction convention, this year, with a table of books (I should have Cannibal Hearts out by then.)

Personally, I believe that the best strategy for independent authors is to work together, to build word of mouth networks to promote each other’s works. When I find a book I like, I always check the author’s website and see who she or he recommends, and have found a lot of excellent books that way. I see author-created platforms for promotion springing up all over.

I personally have found that a combination of WordPress and Twitter seems to suit my own communication style. I am not by nature a social person, and so self-promotion is outside of my comfort zone, but it’s part of the business of being an author today. The days of living in a cabin in the woods and having a publisher do all the promotion for you are long gone—even for those who write for a traditional publishing house.

I liked the cover art for Catskinner’s Book and I noticed you’d mentioned having done it yourself. Can you share some of the tools and tricks you like to use? Do you do other artwork or just covers?

I started with an outstanding photograph, so the rest was easy. My partner, Susan (MzSusanB (http://mzsusanb.wordpress.com/ ) on WordPress) took that picture, and those are my hands. I did the text in Paint.Net, the font is Times New Roman with some extra stretching on the uprights.

Now that I have sort of set a theme, I used another picture that she took of my hands for the cover of Cannibal Hearts.

Oh, and any authors looking for a cover photograph are welcome to check out her Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/-susanb-) her work is available for licensing. Contact her for rates.

What, if anything, can you tell me about ‘Cannibal Hearts’, your current work in progress? Is it a sequel?

Yes, it is a sequel, the second of what I plan to be a series. It picks up about a year after the end of Catskinner’s Book. It’s a little different in scope, it opens with James and Godiva working as local bosses in the Outsider syndicate. It’s more of an ensemble cast, many of the characters from the first book and quite a few new ones. I feel that a sequel should offer the reader something different than the first work, a new story set in the same universe.

Consequently, while the first book dealt with James discovering the true nature of the world he (and the rest of humanity) lives in, this one is more concerned with the relationships between the modified humans and how they function while keeping their existence below the radar. There’s still conflict and action, and I am working to make it as fast moving and exciting as the first book, but it’s a different sort of story.

I feel that I have more freedom to explore the cosmology in this book. So much of Catskinner’s Book was concerned with simply setting up the sandbox, in Cannibal Hearts I get to really play in it.

Adopted Books

My thanks to the commenters on my previous post, wherein I said mean things about a beloved classic of science fiction, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. That book had been recommended to my son by his sixth-grade teacher, a friend of mine whose taste in books has been generally very good, at least as far as sixth graders are concerned, and my son has been enjoying our reading of Ender’s Game to some extent, though he does chafe a bit at the cliche of cockroach-like aliens and perpetual intergalactic war. He likes the hero/genius/child, of course, and how he outwits, outplays and outlasts ™ the mean stupid bully child. But enough of that.

What I meant to jot down some thoughts about is how we, and by “we” I mean readers, all tend to have a set of books that we adopted, often at an early age. These books are almost pets, almost friends, and stay with us for life. Ender’s Game is one of these books for many people. I’ve had a number of such companions in my life, and regardless of their perceived “quality” or stature or fame they all have incalculable value to their “owners”.

Then there are the ones that got away. My mother was a librarian, so I spent a great deal of time in my youth in libraries, and at one point I was enamored with any kind of fictional sea-faring adventure. I still read Joseph Conrad and Jack London and Richard Dana and Herman Melville but back then the books I read were for kids or young adults, and I couldn’t find enough of them. They were full of terms like fo’c'sle and aft and bilge and jib, none of which meant anything at all to me, but the seas were rough and you could get washed overboard at any moment. There were no monsters in these books, no aliens, nothing inhuman but the ocean itself and the first mate, who was always dreadful.

I cannot remember the authors or titles of any of those long-ago library books. When I look into it I recognize nothing of what I find. The names and words are long since gone. I’m pretty certain, though, that if I found them again, I would be stunned at how simple and probably silly they were.

I went through a fairly long period of reading science fiction (never had much use for fantasy or magic except in fairy tales) but then it stopped appealing to me, almost all at once, in my mid-twenties, which is now some decades ago. I still enjoy some science-fictiony elements in more speculative fiction, but flat-out world-building with fake languages, too many limbs and unpronounceable names is beyond my scope for now. I’d rather make fun of such stuff, which I’m doing a little of in my current story (The Lemon Thief’s Ex-Wife’s Third Cousin) wherein one of the characters works for a newspaper, translating headlines into non-existent languages because you  never know. Sometimes we adopt genres as well as books and authors. I guess I think of science fiction as a sort of pet rock, pretty to look at, and sometimes even amazing. Sea-faring adventures, now there’s a genre that’s pretty much come and gone.

(somehow I’m reminded here of one of the tidbits from Bookstore Lore: The Stupidest Questions Ever Asked in a Bookstore. A person comes into the bookstore and asks “where are your non-fiction books?” The snotty clerk (ahem) says, “well, you see that sign over there that says ‘fiction’? “Yes,” the unwitting customer replies. “Everywhere else,” says the rude clerk, “is non-fiction.” – Naturally, the customer was looking for a book on serial killers. In America, “non-fiction” translates almost always into “Serial Killers”.

Review: Catskinner’s Book by Misha Burnett

Reviews say as much about the reviewer as about their subject. Reviewers bring to bear all of their previous experiences and attitudes, their perspectives depending on their personal history and current state, the tastes and preferences of their friends, their families, their generation, their social background, time and place, and so on. All of which is merely an introduction to this particular review, which is as much about my response to the book as about the book itself.

On reflection, it occurred to me that my experience of “Catskinner’s Book” by Misha Burnett, is similar to my experience of the movie “The Matrix”. The main similarities in the works themselves is that they deal with the theme of ‘aliens among us’, and there is a unique protagonist, a chosen one of sorts. The way the hero of Catskinner’s Book was “chosen” is closer to the way the infant of “Rosemary’s Baby” was “chosen”. Catskinner, like The Matrix, features a number of striking concepts such as distinctive representations of a ‘hive mind’ in humans. Catskinner also has a main female character of considerable surprises. The book is as much horror as science-fiction.

The writing in Catskinner is bold and deft and hooks you right in from the start. That was enough to carry me along for quite a while, but … and I’m sorry to include a ‘but’ at this point … like The Matrix, there was one element that drove me out of the story and left me on the sidelines, letting the rest go by. This has everything to do with me, in my current state, and the tidal wave of excessive violence that’s currently pervading our culture (and has been for some time, witness The Matrix!). I’m talking about long, extended scenes of carnage and mayhem, all of them both unlikely and ‘fantastic’ in the imaginary sense (Neo with machine guns in the marble corridor forever) (Batman and the Joker in the tunnel) (The goblin massacre in The Hobbit) (I could go on and on with such examples). I’m not sure what the attraction is, but surely there is one, and we are seeing more and more of them acted out in our theaters and schools and shopping malls – not just random killings, but sprees all dressed up in appropriate costumes and dramatically ready for the cameras. Perhaps it’s because I started to read this book shortly after the Newttown tragedies, or maybe I’ve just had enough of it for one lifetime, but it leaves me colder all the time. I can’t follow the stories anymore after encountering these prolonged bloodbaths.

All of which does not indicate that you, the reader of this review, may not be able to look past that, or may even enjoy these passages. It’s curious. I didn’t mind the main character being a paid assassin. It’s what he was created for, in a sense, and it matches the overall plot, which is a sort of gangland-rivalry-from-outer-space. It just seems to me that this kind of thing can be done, and used to be done, with a lot less shattered glass, a lot fewer explosions, and somewhat less incredible stunts and feats of physical prowess. I recently watched the old Sergio Leone – Clint Eastwood classic, “For a Few Dollars More”, and there is a scene where Clint has to climb over  a wall to sneak into the bad guy’s compound. The stunt man actually climbs over the wall, slowly, with difficulty, like a human being actually would, and comes down on the other side landing hard, a bit scratched and bruised as well. Nowadays a single leap and it’s up and over and down, no worries, as if we were all composed of computer-generated graphics these days. All of which is to say that I’d like a bit more realism in my fantasy fiction! Crazy, I know.

Cover Art: Renegade Robot

While biking around Christchurch I’ve been taking lots of photos of the city in its present state of near total instability, with the idea that some of these photos are going to be useful if not inspirational in the future. This brick block of a building is the only thing left standing on Wilmer Street between Montreal and Durham. I have no idea what it is or was used for, and I’m so curious what will happen to it, and that utterly ruined block, over time. Must return to Christchurch  someday!

The robot in this cover was hurriedly put together by my son after I gave him a home school assignment, and he couldn’t wait to get back to his Minecraft tutorial videos. I did modify the drawing a bit, then tweaked its opacity and then merged the grain of the layer into the brick building to give the idea of the robot “hiding in plain sight”. In the book, the robot looks nothing like this. In fact it is tiny and green and communicates by spitting out text on a tickertape from its oral opening.

Renegade Robot, by the way, is an entertaining little story. It was lots of fun to write.

Too Many Books

Sometimes I do wish I had written fewer books. The ones I have written are all over the map and it’s always been very likely that people who like one of them will not like any of the others. A related problem is the unlikelihood of any random reader happening to pick out the one they might possibly like the most. A lot of hit or miss goes on with my books, I’m afraid.

That’s why it’s especially gratifying when every now and then the random reader picks one they do like, and then I find out about it on Amazon or Smashwords when they very kindly leave a review, like this one:

Orange Car With Stripes (Atheist Comic Sci-Fi Pulp Fiction)

 Lighthearted Satire October 27, 2012

The book has an interesting perspective towards those who think they are always the smartest ones in the room. The serious sci-fi reader might be disappointed, though. It’s more irony than science fiction. But light and enjoyable, none the less.

Orange Car With Stripes is one of those books I wrote which is so very unlikely to find its proper readers – the science fiction elements, as the reviewer notes, are very silly, and the central story is a satire about atheism – and atheists as a group of readers don’t usually come across this sort of thing. We’re far more used to being on the defensive and when people do make fun of us it’s usually with a great deal of hostility, whereas this is more of a friendly poke. There just isn’t a lot of atheist comic sci-fi pulp fiction, as far as I know, aside from Orange Car With Stripes and its sort-of-sequel Missy Tonight. These are books I very much enjoyed writing, but I’m certain they will never find more than a handful of receptive readers.

Recommended: Newt Run

Newt Run,a novel by Chad Inglis, is a fascinating story that grabbed and held my attention all the way through. This despite my usual aversion to longish novels (at least to those not written by Conrad or Dickens or Dostoevsky). As best as I can make out, the central fact of the novel is a convergence of more than one parallel universes, any or none of which may be considered “real”, though when you think about it, to anyone in a given universe, all others would have to be thought of as unreal, which may be the main conception behind the novel.

Numerous characters are interwoven among and into each other, sometimes sharing voices, faces, bits of memories, and bodies, as events conspire to complicate the relationships between these various worlds. Gateways, or holes, between the worlds are painted, built, constructed, attempted in different ways, but incompletely, incompetently and usually rather violently. Different interested parties are constantly in conflict and serve to complicate and interfere in each other’s plans to such an extent that none of them can ever succeed.

In the midst of this are people that can’t be seen, or can only be seen under certain circumstances, and a girl with a very special egg. My favorite bits are the narration by an old man at a bar, which is written with a wonderful sense of authorship.

Speaking of bars, there are far too many of those for my taste. As someone who doesn’t drink, and doesn’t like to hang around with people who do drink (or get high all the time), I got a little bored with all the alcohol in this book. To me, it was one of the two biggest weaknesses – the other being the all-too-common appearance of girls with “great legs” who are always willing to spread them for the protagonist. This touch of classic sci-fi could be edited out completely to great effect! For example, the Daphne/Pandora scenes would be better without the sex. Likewise, the drinking could be cut down on – always a good suggestion! Drunks are never as lucid or as quick on the trigger as these guys in this story are. Maybe two or three characters could abstain. Auld? Irbe? Anybody? I always say it’s never too late to improve a story. I’ve changed several of mine years later.

There’s a reason for all that, I’m sure, but just as there can be too much of a good thing (or in this book, too much “coffee and toast”, even though I’d much rather have that than all the whiskey that’s consumed), there is room for addition by subtraction here, and maybe some future editings could take that into consideration.

On the whole, the world of Newt Run is beautifully constructed – a town that shouldn’t exist and barely does, built on broken half-assed steam technology (I loved this touch), full of miners and students and bars and coffee shops and buses and hockey rinks and pits down deep in the mines. There are many mysteries here, in a place that came as fully alive for me as an Edward Hopper painting. Recommended.

Recommended: Two, by Carla Herrera

“Two”, by Carla Herrera, available now from Smashwords

What if there were a secret society guiding the affairs of mankind? Such a myth has long attracted the popular mind, from the Freemasons and their mysterious symbols adorning American currency, to the Rosicrucians guarding the hidden family of the cross-surviving Christ, to the Trilateral Commission, that conspiracy of businessmen and politicians who control and own the world. The notion has appealed to writers as diverse as Balzac and Lovecraft, and has wormed its way into Birthers and Truthers and Kennedy assassination theorists, and even anti-vaccination-hippie-homeschooling cults. But what if there were, and what if this hidden group had succeeded so well it had transformed the woodland barbarians of Bavaria into the high tech civilization of today? Slowly, one step at a time, through the centuries, this cabal has guided mankind to its present lofty perch.

And now what? Where do you go once you reach the top? Having succeeded, perhaps beyond its wildest dreams, is this organization now obsolete, overcome by events, with nothing left to do but oversee its own dismantlement? What kind of bureaucracy would assent to such a course? Oh no, they could never be satisfied with their achievement if it meant spelling out their own imminent doom. They would want to keep tinkering, keep toying, keep pursuing some goal, any goal, as long as it meant perpetuating their own key roles. They might well become, by virtue of their own capability, no longer the greatest benefactor of humanity, but instead its greatest threat. Who but some among their own could stand in their way?

This compelling novel weaves a story previously unimagined, as far as I know, which is the greatest compliment I know – to see possibilities around the corner that have hardly been glimpsed before. Carla Herrera has a knack for doing just that. In ‘Two’ she has crafted a new legend-in-the-making, and I suspect its readers will be expecting more to come.