I was playing through TES III:Morrowind recently, and I came across three books in a necromancer dungeon: Darkest Darkness, Arkay the Enemy, and N’Gasta, Kvata, Kvakis.I remembered these from years ago, and was excited to see them again: these are necromantic books you can actually read in-game–they’re short, and they give you a bit of insight into the beliefs and ideologies of the black mages you’re going up against. My favorite was A Game at Dinner, which was a sort of epistolary novel from a spy to their dark lord.
I’m writing a new story about the necromancer Yute, who I spoke about in my last post about the psychopathic mind, and one of the main plot points of the story is his own manifesto, The Nokizi. The Nokizi is meant to be a book similar to Arkay the Enemy: something to be passed around and read by the initiated members of the necromancer community.
But ever since I first conceived Yute, I wanted his necromancy to be at odds with the popular ideas of the day–I imagined him as an unorthodox figure, a radical other necromancers would be wary of, like Malcolm X or Timothy Leary. As soon as I imagined him, he needed an establishment to rebel against.
The Nokizi is Yute’s critique on the current state of necromancy and the major figures whose work has influenced it. These figures include Amassad, Togorun, and Banasail, all three of whom have achieved a different kind of immortality and huge followings of acolytes. These three are sort of like Hindu gurus who promise their followers eternal life and enlightenment if they follow their teachings. Yute, meanwhile, is based off the Bodhidharma, the iconoclastic founder of Zen in China.
I imagined that Yute brought all of his new ideas before the gurus first, expecting to gain praise and recognition from the masters and cement his position as a new master. It would be a sort of “look at me, I found a new path that is undeniably better than all of yours, and now you must admit it.” Instead, he was laughed and jeered out of their temples and abodes and derided by all their students, one after another. Yute, not one to take humiliation well, devised his Nokizi as a critique of the establishment that rejected him, and a manifesto for his new method and philosophy.
The actual critique is a blend of mathematics, paradoxes, parables, German philosophy, and Rinzai Zen, with the goal of showing that 1) Amassad, Togorun, and Banasail are all going about immortality in the wrong way, 2) the current conception of time and the self are wrong, and 3) that immortality seekers should employ mathematics, not body-modification or other techniques, to achieve immortality.
At the very end of the Nokizi is an encrypted portion, along with the promise that anyone who solves the cipher will gain the secret to his new method. The idea is that, though the necromantic community rejected him before, he is willing to allow converts into his new method if they are clever enough. But it’s all a trick–the insanely complicated cipher encrypts only a bunch of gibberish and nursery rhymes, as a giant, spiteful fuck-you. “You had your chance to be my acolytes, and you laughed me down,” is Yute’s internal reasoning. “So I’ll show you what you’re missing, offer you my secrets, then laugh at you.”
This is Vol. 4 of the Occult Reading List, where I collect all the interesting stories and strange pieces of trivia I’ve picked up over the past week from books, articles, and webpages. Also included are the songs that have been on repeat for me this week. Guaranteed to make you more interesting at parties.
This is a special edition of the Reading List that deals with building a picture of a psychopathic mind. This is not the clinical definition of a psychopath, as defined by the DSM–this is the popular idea of a psychopath. I’m working on a new story that deals with a Mephistophelean character who’s a liar and master manipulator, and I wanted to delve into some material that could flesh out his mindset and worldview. I also asked my friend, Joel Clapp, to help compose a sketch of Yute based off the infamous photo of Charles Manson:
No one should romanticize real-life serial killers or cult leaders, but there’s something fascinating and deeply disturbing about delving into the mind of a psychopathic character. Trying to capture the essence of that sort of person ended up leading down interesting paths, especially ideas about the self, including Zen, Jungian archetypes, and German philosophy.
Reading the highlights of this book was like finding the Cliff’s Notes for American Psycho. Written in 1998 after observing the behavior of Hollywood’s power elite, the book is a apparently a big hit among celebrities, prison inmates, and corporate Machiavellian types, the kind that read The Art of War in order to get an edge in the boardroom. Some of the laws include things like “Court Attention at all Cost”, “Keep Others in Suspended Terror”, “Think as you like but Behave like others”, and the best one of all, “Assume Formlessness”.
Despite supposedly being a guide to the laws of power, the central tenets of the book revolve around the idea that appearances, not substance, are what really matter. You are who you appear to be, and your reputation is the most important thing you have. It really is a new Machiavellian handbook, and the worldview it espouses closely resembles nightmarish, uber-wealthyworld that Patrick Bateman inhabits in American Psycho.
Patrick Bateman is going to be an ongoing touchpoint for the reading in this week’s list, and the video above gives a great interpretation of his fictional character. As for the character of Yute, The 48 Laws of Power offers the bedrock for a master manipulator’s view of the world and his relationship to the world: everything is illusions, and the world is a zero-sum game that must be played every waking hour.
Everyone knows there’s a certain way to frame a conversation so that you’ll always win in the end. For police interrogators, the key is following certain techniques, like the Reid Technique, which consists of seven (sometimes nine) steps. All of it’s based on psychology and the mental stress of a guilty conscious (and imprisonment). At the same time, reading through the book made me realize just how much police offers can deceive you, trick you, and abuse your rights in order to get a confession–one passage essentially says “don’t remind a suspect of their Miranda rights against self-incrimination” and encourages the officer to keep the suspect away from a lawyer. It’s all about pressuring someone and manipulating their emotions to break down their will, which is disturbing.
At the same time, the methods and techniques in the book offer a good primer on how to structure dialogue and character dynamics in a story, especially when someone is being subtly (or overtly) pressed to reveal something they don’t want to. For the story I’m writing, it offered a body of knowledge to draw upon when trying to show that a character was an accomplished liar.
I read the first chapter of this book, titled “Schizoid character structure:
Encapsulated in ice”. I’ve never had any love for psychoanalysis in practice, but as storytelling inspiration, it’s a great resource. I actually came across the idea of the “schizoid” in Emmanuel Carrere’s biography of Philip K Dick:
“The source of all evil, he thought, was withdrawal in the self, into one’s shell—a symptom, in psychiatric terms, of schizophrenia…A schizoid thinks more he feels. His comprehension of the world and of himself is purely intellectual and abstract, his awareness an atomistic aggregation of a number of disparate elements that never cohere into an emotion or even truly into a real thought…”
This idea is expanded in the text of Matrix and Meaning:
“The schizoid patient experiences a terrifying emptiness, a nameless dread, an inner landscape unpopulated by human figures. She frequently turns to endless dreams and fantasies, which may be rich, symbolic, and mesmerizing. She may find solace in a well-developed intellect and develop an internal crystal palace in which she lives alone, safe but frozen. However, she may also find dangerous depths, unpredictability, and deadly horrors.”
It’s a fascinating idea, and good insight into what a twisted mind might look like. One of the most uncanny and frightening things about psychopaths or serial killers is that they appear to be normal people, but their minds often seem completely alien to “normal” people. It evokes the title of one of the most famous books on psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity by Hervey M. Cleckley.
This was an honest-to-god MA Philosophy thesis from the Universiteit van Amsterdam that I found online, published in 2009. It’s on Hegelian phenomenology, the most complicated, confusing, and absolutely unintuitive brand of German philosophy possible. I studied some of it college, and it turned out to be not as bad as I remembered, though it was still a labyrinth to read.
The central idea of the essay (and intersubjectivity) is that “the self only becomes fully self‐aware by seeing oneself through the eyes of another in mutual recognition…” Subject-object relationships are the big thing for Hegel, where the self is the “subject” and everything else is an “object.” The problem arises when the self tries to examine itself–who is the little voice in your head talking about your thoughts? Well, that must also be you. When you examine yourself, you make part of yourself into an observer and part of yourself into an object of observation, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to “get outside yourself” and see everything.
This is supposedly solved by viewing yourself from the perspective of another person–but, as the essay says, you can never understand anyone or anything except in your own terms:
“…Hegel’s interpretation, consciousness is never in direct relation to an object, but in relation to an object only in a self‐relation.”
If “man is the measure of all things,” then each person is their own measure of the world, and of themselves. When we see other people, we aren’t really seeing them, we’re seeing aspects of ourselves. Strangely enough, a great articulation of this idea comes from American Psycho again, in his monologue on Whitney Houston.
Hegel doesn’t seem to be too troubled by this infinite loop of the self seeing the world as reflections of itself, but it raises some terrifying questions, especially when it comes to the ego-driven world of the psychopath. The whole subject-object relationship Hegel puts forward reminds me of the 48 Laws of Power, and how much emphasis it puts on the self being totally dependent on other people–not just socially, but existentially.
Alone Down There by Modest Mouse
This is the song I’ve been listening to while writing this new draft with Yute. The lyrics fit the story scarily well, especially this one:
The Devil’s apprentice he gave me some credit He fed me a line and I’ll probably regret it
It speaks to the Mephistophelean nature of the character: the lyrics “fed me a line” can refer to both a line of credit, which is a great tool for putting someone in debt, and the line of a fishing hook, which catches someone in a trap. The lyrics “I don’t want you to be alone down there” makes me think the song is talking about Hell, and that the singer is trying to make sure he fills Hell with plenty of victims so they won’t be alone.
On top of that, the song’s lyrics are sung in a sort of seductive lilt, while the chorus is shouted, which makes it sound more abrasive, desperate. It sums up the story and the character well.
Alan Watts: The Void Pt 1
Zen is a constant inspiration for my writing and my worldbuilding. A lot of my stories start from ideas about self, illusions, reality, eternity, and the human relationship with the universe, even if those ideas aren’t explicitly brought up in the course of the plot. When thinking about the character of Yute, I realized that The 48 Laws of Power and Zen Buddhism both share a central tenet: formlessness, or the Void. The Zen idea of the self is mu, or emptiness, as explained in the video. There is no innate self, according to Zen, and the experience of realizing mu is the feeling of annihilation. Upon the annihilation of the self, one experiences enlightenment, which is the realization that one is not an identity–one is the universe.
So formlessness can be the birthplace of a manipulative, psychopathic mind that consumes and tricks people to further itself, like The 48 Laws of Power, or it can birth a mind that sees no division between itself and the rest of the universe, where any injuries it inflicts on others are really injuries to itself. This ties into intersubjectivity, and the idea that your sense of self is inseparable from those around you.
Patrick Bateman and the DAO of the Psycopath:
I think psychopathic characters, like Hannibal Lecter or Patrick Bateman, are fascinating because their internal world is so foreign and alien to other people that they end up functioning like broken mirrors on humanity. You get a sense of vertigo when you read them, like you’re looking through a window into another world. That’s the heart of the uncanny attraction, I think. But what makes them frightening, in an existential sense, is that it may be a thin line between ego-driven, manipulative madness (like Charles Manson) and transcendental enlightenment (like Zen Buddhism).
The difference, I think, is one’s perception of oneself and one’s relationship to the world, which is where phenomenology comes in. Hegel seems to say that we can only truly understand ourselves through the eyes of others, but can anyone really see into the essence of someone else? Can we even see into our own essence? As Patrick Bateman claims in the chilling ending monologue of American Psycho, the “inside” of people, the substance or essence, may be of no consequence–an absurdity.
According to the Hegelian view, the self is only beholden to the beliefs and bounds it submits itself to, and it decides what it should submit itself to. With nothing guiding the self but itself, self-defintion becomes an ouroboros–your definitions of the world and yourself may be completely incomprehensible and unintelligible to anyone else, and what you perceive as your “self” may be a bunch of incoherent babbling with nothing at its center and no meaning, even to you. Self-examination may be a futile exercise, since there’s nothing to know or understand that you didn’t already know on some level. This is what Bateman may be expressing when he says “I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”
So what is at the heart of a person? What makes their identity? Bateman says early in the movie:
“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable… I simply am not there.”
This would be a profound and positive realization for a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, but for anyone else, it’s absolutely alien. Of course Patrick has a self–who’s talking, if not Patrick Bateman? It’s a similar question to the one the Emperor of China asked Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism: “Who is speaking before me?” Bodhidharma’s answer was “I don’t know.”
If you’re a Zen Buddhist, having no self is the gateway to enlightenment. And there is a name for a person that comes back from the self-annihilation of Nirvana and tries to enlighten others: a Bodhisattva. It’s the highest good you can achieve in the Mahayana view of Buddhism, and it all starts with mu, the Void. But this sense of no-self, of emptiness in the soul, can lead to the opposite: someone who desires to inflict suffering and anguish on anyone and everyone, with no reason beyond the fact that there are no reasons not to:
“My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape.”
I think when anyone writes a “psychopath” character, they’re only making their best guess. But even if those characters are only simulacra of the minds they’re supposedly based on, they can still cause us to ask difficult questions about what it means to be a human. It’s unsettling that, of all questions, that one has never been settled.
This is not a blog about memes or internet culture. That being said, I spend a lot of time on the internet, and I think there comes a point where you have to try and make some sense out of all the obscure, insane, bizarre, offensive, absurd things you see. This is my attempt, spurred by watching Filthy Frank’s video, Meme Machine. Originally, this essay was a late-night, hour-long IM to a friend of mine. I hesitated to post this on the OTL, but there’s no other place to put it.
My God have mercy on all our souls.
— Chris
“You know, it’s interesting. Memes kind of represent a post-modern form of shared youth culture, but it keeps curling back in on itself as internet denizens like you and me begin to acknowledge and meta-critique the development, rise, and fall of memes. Marxists spoke at length about the “culture industry,” the system by which films, radio show, and celebrities are produced in a manner akin to consumer products; in internet memes, this whole process is sped up via viral sharing, so that a whole new piece of culture can attain global cultural status in one day.
But rather than passively consuming the memes, internet communities are extremely conscious of the rise of these culture products, as well as the cycle of critique, parody, counter-parody, and becoming an old, “classic” meme (like trollface). This kind of self-awareness (what the Marxists would call “consciousness”) inevitably goes where normal, “passive” mass culture does not–the recognition that all of these novel pieces of entertainment are ultimately just diversions to distract us from our unfulfilling lives. Maybe it’s unique to internet denizens and the otaku shut-in crowd, who are told by society that they’re wasting their lives in front of computers, but it’s the meme consumers and producers who are most conscious of the emptiness of their own brand of “mass culture” and consumerism.
Hence, the seemingly incongruous connection between Frank’s song about memes and the question: “Why has god abandoned us?” and the quiet cry “Help me.” This is an
acknowledgement by one of the chief internet culture producers that this whole system, of memes, is inexorably tied to an existential crisis in our youth culture and our post-industrial world–more than ever, the creativity and subjectivity of the world’s citizens is being expressed and shared, but, to our horror, it only expresses our collective id, rather than what Enlightenment philosophers would call “the human condition.” Memes, whose ridiculous, absurd origins and meanings can create huge shifts in culture overnight, are nothing more than the scribblings of an idiot.
“Meme Machine,” in the unique method of internet culture, takes a humorous, irreverent attitude toward internet culture itself, but at its core is the recognition, like Pagliacci the Clown, that memes cannot cure what memes have wrought. And like the punchline of the famous joke, it seems that Frank has realized that laughter and humor is the only response to “absurdity,” the boogeyman Kierkegaard and other existentialists identified as the chief enemy of the modern philosopher. The question becomes whether we take a step further and acknowledge Camus’ bold statement: that the only philosophical question worth pondering is suicide. Embracing memes, knowing that they are vacuous and without meaning, may be the modern “sickness unto death,” for surrendering to them signals despair. Memes, more than any piece of art, are an unfiltered glimpse into our collective consciousness, and the longer we gaze into them the more we see of ourselves, and of the abyss.”
I first heard about this book when reading through Philip K. Dick’s biography, I Am Alive and You Are Dead, which took its title from one of the more chilling lines in Ubik. It seemed to have everything I could ever want: existential crises, meditations on eternity, entropy, and the human spirit, and a mind-bending journey through an illusory world created in the dying psyches of twelve people.
But Ubik reads more like a rushed draft and a splatter chart than “One of Time’s 100 Best English-language Novels,” as my edition claims. So many different rules and plot strands are set up (including Pat Conley’s time-reversion ability, Runciter’s manifestations, and the eponymous Ubik) that seem to hint at a single, mind-blowing explanation, but everything that is built up falls apart about 50 pages later. The effect isn’t, as The Guardian claims, a “squishy” novel that defies explanation and evokes the malleability of reality; the result is book that fails to function as a story,or even a comment on stories.
The front cover blurb from Rolling Stone sums up the disconnect, I think, between the people who see Ubik as an avant-garde masterpiece and people like me, who think it’s a goddamn mess: Phillip K. Dick is “The most brilliant SF mind on any planet.” It doesn’t say anything about being a good writer or storyteller. Books like Ubik can get away with being absolutely incoherent by claiming to deal with big ideas. For all its foibles and shortcomings, Ubik can still claim that its telling a sci-fi story that deals with telepathy, eternity, reality, and the nature of life and death, counting on the sheer weight of those ideas to make it worthwhile.
This is a tough claim to assault because a lot of really brilliant experiments in literature and art fail. You can argue hypertext fiction and House of Leaves failed at their attempts at revolutionizing the format of the novel, but their attempt inspired other writers and maybe some readers to reassess what a story can do. The ideas and concepts they brought to the table, like non-linearity, ergodic literature, and multi-media storytelling, have value, just as Ubik has value in exploring the concepts of reality, life, and entropy. Some passages really stuck out to me:
“One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other, further, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay.
This is the same looming horror at entropy that was embodied in “kipple” in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. This passage sums up the apocalyptic, reality-destroying horror that waits for Joe Chip and his friends, evoked in the material decay of everything around them: milk, tape recorders, even elevators.
“But the old theory–didn’t Plato think that something survived the decline, something inner not able to decay? Maybe so, he thought. To be reborn again, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead says…Because in that case, we all can meet again. In, as in Winnie the Pooh, another part of the forest, where a boy and his bear will always be playing…a category, he though, imperishable. Like all of us. We will all wind up with Pooh, in a clearer, more durable new place.”
This reminds me of the poem Heaven by Patrick Phillips. It’s a surprisingly tender image of an afterlife, apart from all decay and the reality we know. It’s transcendental in the deepest sense of the word.
But none of it counterbalances the seemingly haphazard, half-baked, and frustrating plotting in the book. Good ideas might be able to salvage a badly written book in the eyes of critics and literary theorists, but no amount of avant-garde cred can make Ubik a passable read. The best experimental writers, the ones that deserve the highest praise, learn how to violate the rules of narrative and meaning within their stories and create a piece of fiction that has its own logic and its own intuitive way of reading it, like a dream.
Phillip K. Dick doesn’t accomplish this in Ubik. He sets up a world with a number of rules, but discards them one after another, until he discards everything. So there’s nothing to talk about and nothing to read in Ubik except its profound ideas and its profound failures. There’s no “vivid and continuous dream,” as John Gardner called it. So ironically enough, Ubik, a book about being immersed in a dream world that can’t be distinguished from reality,never tricked me into forgetting, even for a moment, that it was anything more than a bunch of words on a page, written by a man named Philip K. Dick.
I have a bad habit of reading, listening, and watching too many things at once, and at the end of every week I end up with a new list of fascinating things to check out. I thought it would be fun to share some of the stuff I’ve read and listened to in the past week, including some of the books and articles I’ve come across. I’ve also included the songs that have been on repeat in my head.
Reading this list is guaranteed to make you fun at parties.
Books
NON-FICTION: Zen Buddhism, Selected Writing of D.T. Suzuki, Edited by William Barrett
An interesting look at Zen Buddhism by one of the foremost writers and translators on the topic. So far, the introduction has drawn connections between Zen and Kierkegaard’s Knight of Infinite Resignation, which is really interesting. It’s also got some fun stories about Bodidharma, the founder of Chinese Buddhism, and his shenanigans. I spoke a bit about Bodidharma before, in my post about Terry Pratchett’s Rule One.
NON-FICTION: A Burglar’s Guide to The City, by Geoff Manaugh
This book started out with an interesting premise: burglars, by their nature, have an arcane knowledge and a unique mastery of their surroundings. With this knowledge, they can pull off seemingly impossible, or even supernatural, feats. Liminality is a key idea in this book, which mirrors a lot of studies in magic and the occult. However, like a lot of non-fiction topics written by academics, it ends up losing track of its thesis and instead indulges in whatever the author finds kind of neat. DNF
FICTION: Clarkesworld Year Six Anthology, Clarkesworld Magazine
Clarkesworld Magazine, one of my top three favorite short fiction markets. These are the same folks that published both my essays on fantasy (you can read them here and here). I just started reading their Year Six anthology, and I’m excited to see what kind of insane stuff they’ve got in store. I also sponsor these guys on Patreon, along with Menton3. JOIN THE CULT.
MANGA: Opus, Satoshi Kon
Despite the most disappointing ending of all time, I highly recommend OPUS by Satoshi Kon. It’s the INCEPTION of manga, with a manga artist, Chikara, getting pulled into his own manga, called Resonance. He meets his own main character, Satoko, and ends up breaking the news that her whole life is a manga, and he’s essentially God. At the heart of the meta-story is the quest to resolve the ending of the manga, which is yet unwritten. It’s a great piece of metafiction, and it pulled at my goddamn heartstrings more than I expected.
Articles and webpages:
Wikipedia: Bagua
The heart of the I-Ching, the same book of Chinese divination that fascinated Phillip K. Dick, is the bagua, or trigram. There are eight trigrams: earth, water, fire, water, thunder, mountain, lake, sky. Combined into 64 pairs, the I-Ching uses them to supposedly provide a map to all creation. In fact, Leibniz, the famous mathematician, thought the I-Ching’s use of binaries in the trigrams (each bagua is made of three broken or unbroken lines) could provide a way to express everything. And he was right: binary became the basis of all computing, with 1’s and 0’s expressing things as insanely complicated as weather patterns or the show Neon Genesis Evangelion. You can read my article about using binary in magic systems here.
I’m trying to figure out the basis of a system of magic that would use movement, rather than written symbols or spoken words, as its main component. Sort of like interpretive dance, or the bending in Avatar: The Last Airbender. The Five Animals is what I’m turning to for inspiration, as well as the Shaolin Luohan martial arts.
This is just really fucking cool: a martial arts discipline given by the aforementioned Zen founder, Bodidharma, to the legendary Shaolin monks. The Luohan forms would become the basis for all Shaolin martial arts, and have strong connections to Buddhism and enlightenment–the 18 skills are called the “arhat skills,” with “arhat” being the name for an enlightened person.
Songs:
Every Time We Say Goodbye by Annie Lennox
This is a beautiful, melancholy song. I came across it when I was reading V FOR VENDETTA: during one of the last chapters, when V is giving Evey a final tour of the Shadow Gallery just before his death, Evey plays a couple notes on the piano in the piano room, saying”‘How strange the change…from ma-jor to mi-nor’….no, I still can’t get that part right.” I finally googled those lyrics and found that they came from this song, which is fitting since the whole sequence in the book is essentially an extended goodbye from V.
Ticket to the Moon by ELO
This is another melancholy song. I came across it after listening for “Yours Truly, 2097”, also by ELO. I had an especially weird moment of synchronicity while walking to work one day–I was listening to this song when I came across a piece of graffiti on the sidewalk, saying “TO THE MOON.” This guy is a graffiti artist who tags in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and I’d see the tag before, but it was surreal to hear the song and see the marker pointing down the sidewalk. Even more surreal is that the phrase may be a reference to a famous Zen teaching, expressed below pretty succinctly in the picture below (right).
What is Real by Trevor Something
I love Trevor Something. I have two of his albums, including TREVOR SOMETHING DOES NOT EXIST, which has this song as its last track. The song opens with a piece of dialogue from the 1974 comic sci-fi film, DARK STAR: a scientist is speaking to a sentient bomb about the question of “what is real,” which culminates in the problem of the intellect and Cartesian doubt. Sprinkled in are quotes from The Matrix (“What is real? How do you define real?” etc.), which is actually just a verbatim quote of Alan Watts, the lecturer on Zen Buddhism, and haunting last piece of dialogue from the bomb in which it quotes Genesis. All of this is sandwiched in some really amazing 80’s synths.
Magic in fantasy, as I’ve said before, shouldn’t be a science. It shouldn’t be a palette-swapped form of electricity or physics, where mages carry out “experiments” like Isaac Newton (though he himself was apparently a big fan of alchemy). The reason is that magic, when approached like a science, brings up same reductionism that haunts modern people: if we’re all just chemical reactions in our brains, is there space for truth, or meaning, or wonder? Because those are the very things fantasy can explore like no other genre.
I think magic in fantasy should have rules. The way I conceive it, it should undergird the workings of nature and the world, similar to how Ursula LeGuin’s used taxonomy as magic. But when I imagine magic, there’s something transcendental about it that goes beyond science and materialism. How do you begin designing a system like that? It’s like making up a fictional branch of aeronautics. But that’s what’s so amazing about worldbuilding: you get to make the rules.
What follows is the basic building blocks for a magic system that I conceived back in 2014, combining the art of Buddhist mandalas, computer coding, and musical theory with metaphysics, astronomy, and trigonometry. This is, in the realest sense, a product of an occult triangle lab. One note, however: this is all hypothetical. I don’t have a degree in linguistics like Tolkien, or in graphology. To actually create the symbolic language I describe and to embed these kinds of patterns in it would be something akin to making a crossword puzzle out of an entire language. It would take years of careful construction. So maybe a long-term project for me.
But in the meantime…
Spell Maps, COMPUTER CODE and GEOMETRY
A couple years ago, I started to sketch out the beginnings of a written magic system for my fantasy world. I imagined putting together a bunch of symbols in a sequence that expresses what you want to happen, like you’d do with a line of computer code. But there is something inherently beautiful about how these symbols would fit together: if you deconstruct the interactions between the symbols, you would find that all the symbols could be grouped into discrete units, with the groups’ unity based around shared markings in their graphic composition (similar strokes and dots in the symbols) or the part of the spell they affect (such as binding or flight). These rows of symbols would form rectangular paragraphs, and these rectangles could be oriented to one another like building blocks to form geometric shapes, with each paragraph forming a side of the shape.
These shapes would be arranged into a “spell map,” a geometric representation of how the different parts of the spell work together. It would form a radial or symmetrical design based around a central polygonal figure, such as a square or hexagon. Arms extending from the central polygonal shape would represent the different aspects of the spell, and the smaller components of the arms would be based around their own geometric patterns, making a chain of hexagons, squares, triangles, and so on. So the patterns contained within the individual lines of magical code would eventually form spirals of meta-patterns.
A functioning, well-written spell would have perfect symmetry when all the symbols are arranged in this manner, so a mage writing a new spell could actually lay out their writing in a half-made spell map and figure out what to write next based on their knowledge of geometry and angles. They can also figure out where their spell is going wrong based on the symmetry of the design.
Spell Maps, Triangles, and Designa
The thing is, every polygon is made up of triangles. When you have a regular polygon, like a pentagon, you can subtract 2 from its number of sides and multiply that by 180 to get the sum of its internal angles. Why 180? Because that’s the sum of the angles in a triangle! If you’re trying to create huge, perfectly geometrical spiral designs, the key lies in the shapes that will work well with the central polygonal shape; linking together a hexagon and a pentagon will make for some crowded, chaotic spiral arms. Shapes made from the same sort of triangles that make up the central polygonal figure, on the other hand, might work to create perfect mandala-like designs.
Working with triangles as the basic building block of all shapes, you can figure out the angle measures of the “ideal” triangle for your central polygon (say, a hexagon, which is made up of equilateral triangles with angle measures of 60 degrees) and create a grid made entirely of those triangles. Using this grid, you can be assured that all shapes made from those triangles will have angles measures and lengths that will synch well together. If you’re a mage, it also means that you have all routes for the development of a new spell map.
But in practice, single-triangle grids may not contain all the triangles necessary to create perfect designs, especially if you want a mix of different shapes. You’ll need permutations of the right triangle, the equilateral triangle, and 30-60-90 triangle, with angles and lengths adjusted to fit the angle measures of your central polygonal figure to have all possible options. This means, to see all possible shapes, you should be working with three triangles grids superimposed on top of one another, calibrated to the right angle measures.
So that’s where things get complicated.
A book I picked up from The Strand is a great guide to this kind of geometrical drafting–it’s called Designa by Wooden Books, and it walks you through the history, drafting techniques, and mathematics behind different designs from all over the world, including Muslim religious patterns and Celtic knots. Woven into these patterns are symbolic meanings and symmetries, reflecting beliefs about the universe, nature, and God.
So there you have the first stage: the idea of a spell map, a meta-pattern that gives a geometric structure to a normally linear, code-like spell made of symbols. Like a computer system, it can be revised and troubleshot based on the patterns embedded in its operations. When it’s evoked, it casts the spell coded into it.
SPELL MAPS, MAGIC, and MUSIC
After looking at the triangular grids I’d made, I used the horizontal lines made naturally when you mirror two rows of triangles vertically to measure the size of a map, which would express its “magnitude”: the larger and more complex the spell, the more space on the grid it will require, and the greater its “magnitude,” since larger spells means using more lines of symbols. And that led to a new idea.
As I looked at the designs I’d made, I wondered what it would look like if I tried to reduce all of the symbols and patterns to binary, so that a spell could be fed through a punch card-computer, like UNIVAC. I also realized that the “magnitude lines” I’d drawn also imposed something like a musical staff on the whole design. It reminded me of Deadmau5 playing the Castlevania theme on a bunch of modular synthesizers, and the Black Midi series, especially this one, where the designs made by the notes end up looking like large spell map. I imagined playing cross-sections of a spell map like Black Midi, with every symbol being a note.
Music is made of patterns and mathematics, and the same kinds of waves that describe sound can apply to light, energy, and matter (I dove into sound waves and quantum mechanics in this post). In my sketches, I started to see how a given spell could be expressed as a song as well as a mandala-like graphical representation. And if you look back to wizards like Vainamoinen, spell-songs are exactly what mages used to change the world around them. It’s a really cool piece of synchronicity, and it’s one of the fascinating coincidences that pops up when you delve into this kind of worldbuilding.
Metaphysics, Spell Maps, and the Universe
But when I looked closer at my sketches, another pattern started to appear. I started to see how a spell map could also be a reflection of the symmetry of the universe, in the same way that Buddhist and Hindu mandalas supposedly reflect the order of all creation. In fact, the structure of a spell map looks like a universe of sorts: it’s a miniature galaxy, with spiral arms containing dozens of individual ‘solar systems’ (symbol-rows grouped around the center of a shape) containing sometimes hundreds of individual ‘worlds’ (symbols) and comprising thousands of ‘people’ (individual strokes that make up the symbols).
In my conception of this magic system, this is where magic crosses over from being a computer program and reveals its ties directly to metaphysics. Like a fractal, the pattern of the whole universe is expressed in miniature in the spell map, because magic is essentially a way to change the universe. And in this system, the way to change reality is to build a microcosm of the universe and rewrite it by hand. In this way, a spell map could also act as a kind of divination or scrying tool, like the I-Ching (a book that fascinated Phillip K. Dick to no end), reflecting the conditions of the world rather than changing it.
Conclusion
Great worldbuilding should work like an iceberg: 10% on the surface, 90% below the waterline. I think this is one of the reasons the worldbuilding in Dark Souls rakes in such unreal praise. There’s a sense that beneath the immediate information you’re given, there’s whole volumes of knowledge and secrets to learn and immerse yourself in. It’s the opposite reason people can’t get through Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion. But whether you’re revealing all of it or letting the reader unravel how everything fits together, I think the best way to accomplish that feeling of a vast, immersive world is to actually build it behind the scenes. I spoke about this before, but the small details are crucial to making fantasy work, and this is especially true when it comes to magic.
So if you’re a fantasy writer building a world from the ground up, explore everything. Everything feeds into everything else, the world is a frightening and wonderful place, and when you dig deep enough, triangles lie at the heart of everything.
This past week I finished I Am Alive and You Are Dead, a biography of Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the inspiration for Blade Runner) and The Man in the High Castle. Dick won the Hugo Award in 1963, and ended up being the namesake of his own sci-fi award. I’d read Do Androids years ago, and it’s one of the few sci-fi novels whose ending made me cry.
With Dick’s reputation, I expected a biography soaked in the zeitgeist of the 60’s, with all the drugs, revolutionary fervor, and avant-garde intellectual chops that characterized Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Leary, and the rest. Dick is part of the sci-fi canon, and canonical authors exist in a special limbo between our world and the Great Conversation of literature. So I expected a bloodless account of the ideas and influences of a great man.
But the book is not that.
The closest thing I can compare I Am Alive and You Are Dead to is a “walk-in,” where you are a co-inhabitant of Philip K. Dick’s mind. And the mind of Philip K. Dick is an existential and epistemological nightmare, a turbulent, labyrinthine house of mirrors where nothing is real. The most terrifying thing is that, as the book goes on, you learn that this is Dick’s normal operating procedure, from cradle to grave.
Madman or Mystic?
There have been all kinds of articles about Dick’s madness and eccentricities, hailing him as a mad mystic and visionary (including the recent follow-up article in PW for Kyle Arnold’s new 2016 biography), but the image of Dick portrayed in I Am Alive is perhaps closer to the human who lived and wrote and not the legend he became. It lays bear his self-indulgences, his immaturity, and his toxic string of relationships, where the casualties of his lust and boredom were often young women and his own children.
And as the book illustrates, Dick’s forays into “madness” and mysticism were always self-aware and self-reflexive–as he was experiencing hallucinations or alleged religious epiphanies, he was inspecting and analyzing them as someone who is aware that they might be products of chemicals or his own biases. No one was more skeptical of Dick’s legend and genius than Dick himself. While looking back on “Faith of Our Fathers,” his contribution to the self-professed cutting edge sci-fi anthology assembled by Harlan Ellison, Carrere describes his reaction as follows:
“‘Faith of Our Fathers’ is a horrific tale. While writing it, Phil felt a surge of pride. Reading it a year later, after the deaths of Jim Pike Jr. and Maren, he saw it differently. It was still horrific, but in a new and even more distressing way. All his tricks and hobbyhorses were on display: totalitarianism, the idios kosmo and the koinos kosmos, psychedelic drugs, Ultimate Reality, God. Here was the little world of Phillip K. Dick in one package.”
Dick was plagued with such Cartesian doubt that one of his chief anxieties was that he was not himself, but rather a doppleganger or someone who had replaced the real Dick, complete with false memories like Rachael in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Nothing was as it seemed. The Ultimate Reality, Dick’s ultimate object of contemplation, was always behind another layer of illusions, and there was no way to ever know if he had found it. For anyone else, these kinds of purely philosophical problems would be navel-gazing, something to ponder for an hour while looking out a window and then put aside to get down to the business to living. But according to Carrere, matters of reality, metaphysics, and perception were the operating questions of Phil’s life, forming the lens through which he viewed every aspect of his day-to-day life.
So you can see where the dueling claims of mystic and madman come from. But in truth (at least according to the book), both were stage roles that Dick played for the benefit of his observers, his ego, and his career. The “real” Dick, if there ever was such a thing, never found the inner tranquility or blissful ignorance that insanity or religious experience supposedly granted. He never transcended anything, never settled any of the questions that haunted him, and at the end of his life he realized that maybe all of his questioning and searching had led to less than nothing. Carrere characterizes Phil’s thoughts while working on one of his last projects:
“There’s nothing more pathetic than the mistrust of immediate reality by people who never stop splitting hairs over Ultimate Reality. They always think they’re getting to the bottom of things, whose surfaces they turn away from as unworthy of their attention; they end up never knowing the flesh of the world, the softness and resistance it offers to the touch. They manage to bypass their own lives.“
The dialectic conversation between Phil and his own alter ego, Horselover Fat, provides an even more (to me) horrifying image of Phil’s life: solipsism.
“Since the day you were born you’ve been confined to the labyrinth of your brain. What you’re hearing now, all you’ve ever heard, and you’ll ever hear are the magnetic tapes of your own voice being played back to you in closed-circuit transmission. Don’t kid yourself: that is exactly what you are hearing at this very moment. It’s your own voice that’s telling you this. You sometimes let yourself be fooled by it, because the voice wouldn’t have been able to stand itself all these years without learning how to fake other voices, to echo them, to ventriloquize so that you think you’re speaking with other people. The truth is that you’re alone in there, just as Palmer Eldritch is alone in the world that he has emptied of its substance whose inhabitants all bear his stigmata.”
Someone (including Kyle Arnold) might be tempted to sort through Phil’s chaotic, ouroboros-like life and attempt to relegate everything to symptoms. Dick was suffering from schizophrenia, Dick was suffering from anxiety, Dick was suffering from paranoia. From an early age he met with a psychiatrist regularly (I believe it was weekly), and one of the key drivers of his fiction was the abuse of prescription drugs. He experienced hallucinations and amnesia. All of the symptoms of any number of diagnoses are there.
But the key question for me is this: if Dick was mentally ill, where was the line between himself and his disease? Did his schizophrenia give birth to his fascination with the ideas of idios kosmos and koinos kosmos (the difference between personal reality and shared reality, which Phil delineates in stories like Time Out of Joint)? Did his paranoia cause his obsession with ultimate reality and truth? Was mental illness the unconscious wellspring for Philip K. Dick’s stories and the source of his unhappiness, or was it his own thinking? I don’t know. It’s a Phildickian question. Maybe that’s the ‘genius’ of it all, the kernel at the heart of what makes him such an interesting person to read about: the most important questions about PKD’s nature are the ones he helped to define. Selfhood, simulacra, reality, truth…it reminds me of a quote from another android: “Who are you? Who slips into my robot body and whispers to my ghost?”
I recommend I Am Alive And You Are Dead. I don’t know if it’s the truth, or even the seminal portrait of Phillip K. Dick and his writing, but I think it’s worth reading as a cautionary tale for writers who romanticize the hermit-genius and the madman, and as a window into one of the most interesting, infuriating minds in sci-fi.
If you want a taste of the story, I’ve included a short excerpt below, along with sketches from my friend Joel Clapp. Hypnotica is the story of dreamwrights, mages who use music to shape dreams into surreal raves, and the Yoshiwara, a ghost-city that exists at the boundaries of waking and sleeping. The sketches depict the setting of the story, a ruined city carved into the side of the mountain, named Ibiza. In the story, the protagonists, two narcomancers named GRIN and NO-FOOT, travel between Ibiza and its mirror reflection in the dream world, the Yoshiwara.
“The Yoshiwara is a dream city, and there are breeds of magicians here that only exist between sunset and sunrise. The most famous ones, the ones only the Yoshiwara can make, are the dreamwrights, who play their music for the ghosts and the dreamers, carrying their songs in their bones.
Each night, the flesh-and-blood bodies of dreamwrights fill the coma houses in Ibiza like stacks of wood, and their sleep-selves find their way to the other Ibiza, the one that exists in dreams. That mirror-city is the Yoshiwara, whose streets and buildings match the waking Ibiza only loosely. The Yoshiwara is where they make names for themselves.
These days in Ibiza, shrines and cults spring up around the celebrities, the dancers and the artists, and for a while their autographs are exchanged like gold for anything and everything. Invitations from the courts of the drug lords and architects flood in, and gold flows as freely as the liquor when they go out.
But standing over all the petty celebrities, towering like the ruined buildings of Ibiza, are the dreamwrights and their names. DEKAY. OZO. ENAF. Their fans paint buildings with their names in the middle of the night, writing love notes in twenty-foot-tall letters. Their fans carve their names onto tables, wooden joists, scaffolding, tattoo them across the skin, weave them into robes and scrawl them onto the margins of menus in tea houses. The popularity of dreamwrights is measured by the ubiquity of their name. But for every one that makes a name, a hundred wither away into addiction, and no one remembers them.”
Yesterday my new essay,Paradise Lost: A History of Fantasy and the Otherworld, was published online in the July Issue of the Hugo Award-winning Clarkesworld Magazine! This marks the culmination of a conversation that started four or five years ago, when I was standing in my driveway at night with my friend Joel Clapp.
We had just finished a game of D&D, and I was telling Joel about “the candlelit world,” a theory I had about what made the fantasy genre unique. I said that fantasy was defined by folktales and myths, which came from a world lit by candlelight. Humans lived within the flickering circle of their lights, and the great, unknown world loomed out in the dark. Looking up at the fifty-foot pine trees in the dark, I said there were two sides to that unknown world: horror and wonder. There were wondrous adventures to be had in the unknown, paradises to be found and treasures beyond imagination, but also nightmares, unspeakable horrors, and death.
I grew up in Washington State, surrounded by forests and the outdoors. There, the immensity of the world seems to hit home a lot harder than here in New York. The sheer vastness of it, the oldness of it, boggles the mind. There’s a sense that you could explore for years and never scratch the surface of it. It evokes Jon Krakaeur’s Into the Wild, but what I thought of when I looked out into the rolling dark forests were the stories in Time-Life’s Enchanted World series.
The 2013 article I wrote for Clarkesworld was titled The Candlelit World, spoke about myths and the woods, but it only spoke about the horror and darkness–its subtitle was The Dark Roots of Myth and Fantasy. It drew heavily on H.P. Lovecraft and his essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” and It was the first chance I got to speak about my view of fantasy. Now, three years later, I finally get to tell the other half.
Clarkesworld Magazine is one my favorite fantasy short fiction magazines, and I’m so excited to have another piece go out to their readers (as well as you!). If you get a chance, read some of their stories and donate to Neil Clark and his wonderful team on Patreon.
When I think of necromancers, I imagine a cross between a Zen Buddhist monk, an amateur surgeon, and a hardcore survivalist preparing for the end of the world. It’s not about raising an army of the dead and taking a kingdom, it’s about being the last man standing when the Sun falls out of the sky. It’s about living forever. This is someone with the apocalypse constantly on their mind, thinking of contingencies. That obsession with survival made me think of an astronaut’s space helmet, a kind of sealed, self-contained piece of headwear that could protect the skull and seal out dust, fire, and the vacuum of space.
I started to wonder what a survivalist necromancer’s helmet would like, so I drew on some of my favorite helmet designs from across all kinds of media, from Neon Genesis Evangelion and Elfen Lied to Daft Punk and TES III: Morrowind. The final product was appropriately macabre, frightening, and functional for someone bent on eating souls and living forever.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind: The Native Chuzei Bonemold Helm
(If you haven’t read my long-ass post about how Morrowind should be the gold standard for fantasy worldbuilding, read it here)
Morrowind’s Bonemold armor is so damn cool: crafted from bonemeal, the individual pieces of armor are molded in hard, light shapes, like the lacquered wooden armor of samurai. Each Dunmer House has its own style of armor, with their own custom helmets and shields, each reflecting their own unique character. House Redoran’s helmet had a shawl to keep out the dust and House Telvanni had some kind of insane squid helmet because they’re weird-ass wizards who live in mushrooms. But the single coolest helmet in the history of fantasy gaming is the Native Chuzei Bonemold Helm.
The swept-back design with the swooping crest on the back and lack of conventional eyeholes in favor of dual slits made it look intimidating, alien, and sort of like a grinning, demonic face. I loved this helmet, and I wanted to steal its design for any kind of helmet I made in the future.
Daft Punk: Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s helmet
I have an obsession with Daft Punk, especially their helmets. There’s something about the anonymity of masks that makes the wearer larger than life. My favorite version of Guy-Manuel’s helmet is still the one used in ELECTROMA.
When I was still in high school, I actually attempted to make Guy’s gold and black helmet from a skateboard helmet, a motorcycle visor, and a paintball mask:
I loved the helmet design so much that I wanted to incorporate in my stories, which is where Guy Manuel’s helmet merged with the Chuzei helm to create the helmets that the Elves in my stories wear:
Elves in my stories are the end-products of generations of the pursuit of immortality: humans warped and altered into a completely different species. Their helmets, like my initial astronaut helmet idea, allowed them to survive the vacuum of space, like the starfish-headed Old Ones in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. And like other human necromancers, survival was the ultimate priority.
The skull-hugging shape, smooth lines and lack of conventional eyeholes stuck with me in particular. But that changed when I saw…
Neon Genesis Evangelion: EVA Unit-01’s helmet
By fora on Deviant Art
Evangelion is my favorite piece of media, hands-down. Between the Kabbalah occultism, the Phillip K. Dick-inspired apocalyptica, the complex mathematics and existentialist philosophers snuck into the show, it is the Space Odyssey: 2001 of mindfucks. And they had some really cool robots.
There’s a rumor that Hideaki Anno, the creator of NGE, wanted the EVA units to be extremely complicated so that the famously aggressive Japanese toy industry wouldn’t be able to create action figures of them. In the end, we still got Evangelion canned bread.
The most beloved EVA unit, and my favorite, too, is Unit 01. It’s got a kind of kabuto helmet, and its giant, toothed jaws are both really cool and absolutely horrifying once it starts screaming and eating other EVA units.
Yeah, the EVAs are nightmarish homonculi made of human flesh and bone grafted onto mechanical parts, animated by trapped human souls with the capability for madness and rage. The reveal that EVA Unit 01’s helmet covers something approximating a metallic skull is one of the images from NGE that stuck with me. The teeth and jaw especially appealed to me.
Elfen Lied: Lucy’s helmet
Elfen Lied is the most violent, gory, and traumatic romantic comedy anime ever (only half-joking here). From the opening minutes of the first episode, a naked pre-pubescent girl sealed in a helmet from The Man in the Iron Mask starts vivisecting, decapitating, and ripping the literal hearts out of a team of security personnel in a juxtaposition of eroticism, innocence, and relentless, brutal gore.
And damn is that helmet cool.
Lucy’s helmet is relatively simple, both in its design and concept: round head and jaw piece sealed onto the skull to restrain a prisoner in a test facility. It looks suitably clinical, the kind of medical appliance you’d imagine would be in use in a telekinesis research facility. In Lucy’s case, wearing this helmet isn’t a choice–it’s forced onto her, as a means of control, as if they were trying to seal her skull in a container, like an airtight jar.
The Necromancer Helmet: THE GRINNING MAN
Building off the idea of “the crownless king,” the title I made for a necromancer who could survive decapitation, I wanted to create a helmet for a character who would keep their head sealed in a helmet like a safe. This would be Oroboro, the same necromancer mentioned in the Ergodica posts. From there, this character could actually substitute other people’s heads for their own, as a sort of voodoo: with possession of another person’s head, they could gain all of that person’s knowledge, speak in their voice, and communicate with their ghost. The idea emerged of a necromantic collector, someone who collects trophies from their dead enemies and binds their ghosts to his helmet by stealing their heads.
I imagined an eyeless helmet with a hinge on the front, so the entire thing could open like a pear of anguish, and a removable jaw.
I decided to describe the helmet to a friend of mine, Joel, who has done a lot of fantasy concept art in the past. This is what I told him:
“When you consume someone’s ghost or soul, you gain all of their memories, identity, and knowledge…he keeps the heads of people he values in his helmet, or their teeth embedded in it. The teeth are like quick-keys to call up the ghosts of those he wants to channel, and the head in the helmet is possessed. He’s supposed to be an abomination. The helmet and everything connected to it breaks every rule I could think of when it comes to magical morality…I’m not sure how I want the jaw mechanism to work–I was hoping you could help me figure that out. The goal of it is to be able to unhinge the jaw, so he can take abnormally large objects into himself, like a snake. As for the material, I was thinking of either iron or heavily pitted and varnished wood.”
After some back and forth about the lore behind the helmet, the magic and mechanisms, Joel produced this rough sketch, meant to depict an iron helmet:
Joel described his sketch like this: “I really liked the worked metal aspect around the teeth, like it’s been scratched or welded into shape to hold the teeth, so I ran with that. Tried to give it more of the welded look, it makes it look almost flesh while the rest of the helmet is obviously metal. I thought the concave shape around the teeth gave it a more unnatural look and gave the impression that you almost had to dig out some of the mask to find the teeth underneath.”
I loved Joel’s sketch, especially the teeth–they evoke the ravenous, all-consuming potential of the eyeless Langoliers from Stephen King’s story The Langoliers, as well as David Hine’s graphic novel, “The Man Who Laughs,” published by Self Made Hero, which was the inspiration for Batman’s Joker. I decided to dub this helmet “The Grinning Man.”
With Joel’s rough sketch showing how it all would fit together, I decided to do a sketch of my own based off Joel’s art, showing the complete helmet:
Conclusion
Necromancers can be a lot more than guys summoning skeletons. These are the people who are plumbing the depths of life and death, the decay of the body and the action of time, searching for the line between man and god, mortal and immortal. They can be horrifying in their own right, and they don’t even need zombies to get the job done. And they can look absolutely terrifying while doing it.
I first heard about this book when reading through Philip K. Dick’s biography, 
NON-FICTION: Zen Buddhism, Selected Writing of D.T. Suzuki, Edited by William Barrett
NON-FICTION: A Burglar’s Guide to The City, by Geoff Manaugh
FICTION: Clarkesworld Year Six Anthology, Clarkesworld Magazine
MANGA: Opus, Satoshi Kon
Wikipedia: Bagua
The Five Animals in Martial Arts
Luohan (Martial Arts)
This past week I finished I Am Alive and You Are Dead, a biography of Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the inspiration for Blade Runner) and The Man in the High Castle. Dick won the Hugo Award in 1963, and ended up being the namesake of his own sci-fi award. I’d read Do Androids years ago, and it’s one of the few sci-fi novels whose ending made me cry.
And 
