This week is another short update. I am planning a longer video on what I want to work on over the next few years but it won’t be out for another week at least.

Sometimes you start a project and it takes on a life of its own. One such project for me was the Triad World novels, which started off with the innocuous idea of telling a Huxley/Orwell style dystopian tale from the perspective of outsiders who stumbled upon the dystopia, rather than from the point of view of those who lived in the dystopia. This idea eventually became Schrodinger’s Book, a novel I started publishing here in March of 2018. This was long before I had the idea for the Roy Harper adventures or my current secret project, Burning Bright. I honestly expected the story to be one and done.

But about halfway through Schrodinger’s Book I had the idea for Martian Scriptures and I thought there might be something interesting to look at there. While I didn’t like Martian Scriptures as much as Schrodinger’s Book I did think it was a pretty decent story playing in the same general thematic area.

The problem was, by that point my narrative had lore. Which is to say there were rules and concepts that existed solely to describe the world which readers (and I, myself) were curious about and wanted to see carried through to their natural conclusion. While Schrodinger’s Book was built on the Huxley/Orwell foundation and Martian Scriptures was a similar look at the premise of Logan’s Run, one thing that had always bothered me about the dystopias I’d read was the question of sustainability. How are such complex societies built on such wildly inaccurate views of human nature to last for any length of time? What happens when reality comes into contact with the fictions these societies are founded on? What are the fault lines pressure will expose in them?

Fortunately, the lore of the Triad Worlds presented me with an excellent opportunity to explore that question, for there is no reality more pressing for Earth’s UNIGOV than the United Colonial Fleet. I just had to think about what kinds of contradictions outsiders would force on UNIGOV and work out what kind of story would be interesting to tell about said contradictions. It took a little longer than I thought it would but now we’re here.

I didn’t set out to write Schrodinger’s Book as a warning, so much as a thought experiment about how a slide into an Internet age despotism might look from the outside. I don’t write The Gospel According to Earth to seriously speculate on how an Internet age despot might be overthrown. Rather, I’m interested in how that despot might justify itself once in power. I want to examine what the good news UNIGOV offers to the cosmos is and how attempts to uphold that new world order will slowly crumble under their own weight.

I don’t think this is a prophecy, because I’m not sure any despot could as thoroughly and completely shape a society as the one we find in 1984, much less Schrodinger’s Book. The logistics are too difficult, for starters. But beyond that, the very delusions of utopia needed to create a dystopia put the leaders of such societies too out of touch with reality to truly wield the kind of power The Party or UNIGOV wield for any length of time. Which isn’t to say such delusional thinking isn’t frightening or dangerous. It’s just gong to destroy itself and everything it touches long before it can distort human nature to that extent, which in many ways strikes me as worse.

Regardless, the point of this tale is much the same as the point of any speculative fiction I write. It is to examine a wildly exaggerated situation and see if there are any insights into human nature which we can take away and perhaps apply to the more mundane, day to day situations we face.

And to entertain you. That is also important.

So it’s my hope that, as I wrap up the Triad World novels, you will find that the story entertains and applies. If you are fulfilled to any level beyond that, that’s just gravy.

Of course, The Gospel According to Earth is a sequel to two other stories, which you may have already gathered at this point. You can still read those stories here on this blog, by following the links below:

Schrodinger’s Book – https://natechenpublications.com/2018/03/16/schrodingers-book-introduction-and-chapter-one/

Martian Scriptures – https://natechenpublications.com/2020/05/01/martian-scriptures-introduction/

Like these previous tales, The Gospel According to Earth is a bit different from my typical fair in one important way. While I generally try to avoid profane or obscene language in my writing, these stories are exceptions. The goal is to try and portray real people in the realest ways possible, so I chose not to obscure coarse language in these stories. It’s an aesthetic choice I make for very particular reasons and I don’t try to go out of my way to fill the story with such language for shock value. I do put thought into the swearing in these stories.

However, I also don’t blame anyone who chooses to avoid such language in their entertainment. People have different standards concerning such language stemming from a host of different sources and that’s fine. This warning exists largely to help you evaluate whether this story will meet your standards or not. Please evaluate accordingly.

Our time with Martin Langley and the United Colonial Fleet is coming to an end but, for the moment, we still have a little more to spend with them. The strange things they’ve discovered on their return to the Homeworld haven’t all played out quite yet. Let’s join them for a little while longer, and see what they think of The Gospel According to Earth.

Talking about what I’m writing rather than the process of writing in this week’s vlog. YMMV.

Hello folks! Sorry this is late, blog upkeep has kind of slipped my mind this week. As is my usual habit, I’m taking a week off between essay writing and the beginning of a new fiction project. That project – The Gospel According to Earth – starts this coming Saturday! It’s the conclusion of the Triad Worlds novels and will probably run for the next six months or so. I hope you’re looking forward to it! See you then.

Uploading a little late due to faulty memory. Enjoy!

Writing vlog for the week follows up on plans, tries to set new ones. We’ll see how things go this time around.

Goals met? Goals set. That’s the grind in today’s writing vlog.

Talking a little about a new essay I added to my lineup, along with the weekly update.

Perspectives, narrative choices and prose in this week’s writing vlog!

There’s a longstanding tradition in the visual arts of trying to represent the invisible. Naoki Urosawa draws the feet and legs of people walking to represent a sense of purpose or determination. Bill Waterson drew uneven, exclamation mark-styled lines around his characters to represent excitement, surprise or anger. Superman is depicted like a strongman flexing every muscle at once to represent his power and resolute nature. These visual representations have been borrowed by many other visual artists in other mediums precisely because they are effective in their chosen goals. 

There is one area where these attempts to depict the invisible haven’t really found traction. Many illustrators have tried to depict music and its effect on those who hear it but so far there isn’t any one standout way to do it. One artist who has portrayed music with some success is Kazuya Machida, the author and artist of The Shiori Experience. 

The basic premise of The Shiori Experience is quite comedic. Shiori is a school music teacher who used to idolize her older brother, who was lead guitarist in a garage band. When Shiori’s brother tries to fund the production of his own album but gets ripped off his family is left in debt and he flees overseas to America to try and make his guitar legend there. Shiori gives up her love of rock and roll because her family turns on the medium. She still loves the guitar but she loves her family to the point she won’t push them by putting her love of rock and roll in front of them constantly. Until one night, at midnight on her 27^th birthday, she meets the ghost of Jimi Hendrix at a crossroads. Jimi haunts Shiori and imbues her with some of his legendary guitar skill. In exchange, she must become a musical legend before her 27^th year ends or she will join the 27 Club – the group of musicians who had the potential to change music forever but died at the age of 27. 

Jimi himself is a card carrying member of the club, of course. He hasn’t given up on creating new music so he’s returned to the mortal realm to find someone willing to make a deal with him. Shiori didn’t make a deal with him but he’s there for some reason and that means she has 365 days to become a rock legend or she’s doomed. There’s a lot of odd couple vibes to The Shiori Experience on top of the usual trials of a person reigniting their passion for a skill they let fall by the wayside for years. It’s a fun tale, although heavily reliant on tropes. 

But it’s the depiction of music on the comic page that really interests me. Manga has a long standing tradition of using visual metaphors in moments of strong emotional impact – crashing waves behind triumphant warriors, blooming flowers wreathing the objects of romantic affection, that kind of thing. Some of that is used in The Shiori Experience. For example, when a guitarist haunted by the ghost of Kurt Corbain meets Shiori and Hendrix the four of them engage in a guitar duel at an underground rock venue where their clashing riffs are depicted as waves crashing into each other. 

While this is very well trod ground in action manga, The Shiori Experience puts a new spin on it. The change from depicting a simple battle to a struggle between entertainers lets Machida recontextualize the metaphor. He does this by showing the waves sweeping the audience away. 

Many comics and manga try to show the input of music on the audience by illustrating their emotional reaction to it through expression or perhaps actions like dancing or crying. Machida shows the audience becoming a part of the metaphor. As the music surges between the dueling guitarists the audience swirls back and forth on the dance floor, caught in the maelstrom. It’s a brilliant use of established conventions in a new context to powerful effect. 

Machida’s use of visual storytelling doesn’t end there. When Shiori takes her band to a battle of the bands each song in their set is given a full, 38-40 page chapter to show us the impact of the band’s performance on the audience. It’s a very bold move, relying on purely visual storytelling to emphasize relationships between the performers and the audience. Two of the songs in Shiori’s set are classic rock songs, Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and The Monkee’s “Daydream Believer.” The other two are ‘original’ songs composed by Shiori and her band, songs we’ve never heard and have no canonical lyrics established in the manga. They exist only in our heads. Machida uses different approaches for each. 

The real songs are used to establish the rapport between the audience and the band, with the lyrics and the reactions to them showing how everyone in the venue is reacting in the same way. The only words in the chapters are the song lyrics – we get the rest entirely through expressions, motions and reactions. The two ‘original’ songs have no written words in their respective chapters at all. To get his point across in these chapters Machida relies even harder on visual language from action manga. 

The opening number uses what I call ‘team building’ metaphors, with the band member known as Prince (and clearly based on that Prince) leading the band in a song he composed to show off each of their strong points. As each one comes in we see the band building in a visual pyramid with the crowd surging towards the stage, reminiscent of tokusatsu costumed performers creating a dynamic pose as they make their entrances. If you’re not familiar with this style of Japanese storytelling, a small part of it has been imported under the brand Power Rangers. The language here is pretty simple: Shiori’s band is building to a high point. 

At the other end of the set, they perform “Jack In,” their other ‘original’ song. During this song Machida appropriates the visuals of ‘special attacks’ as often seen in battle manga. The audio input jack is a recurring visual metaphor in The Shiori Experience, used to symbolize the connection between Hendrix and Shiori, then later Shiori and her bandmates. But at this juncture we see audio jacks streaking from the stage and jacking into the heads and hearts of the audience as the music connects with them. 

This song is all about Shiori’s band versus the other bands they’re competing against. As the song builds to the climax of their set these audio jacks connect with the opposing band members in the audience, showing the moments they win over each of their rivals. Some are hit by the jacks right away, some even actively run into their paths while some drift around the venue until a particular moment in the music connects with then. One actively fights off connecting with the song, grabbing the jack sent his way and holding it in his hand until he relents and jacks in himself. Machida uses these metaphors because he doesn’t want this sequence to just be about the song or its effect on the audience. He wants to show the conflict between Shiori and her rivals, so he steals visuals from stories about physical conflict but adds just enough context to make it clear these are metaphors. 

It’s difficult to show something intangible in a visual medium. The Shiori Experience isn’t creating a definitive series of metaphors for music on the comic page like Superman or Waterson did. However Machida is innovating and working on the problem in ways few other artists are and that’s a great reason for anyone interested in visual storytelling to give it a look.