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      • Chapter 1: Mission
      • Chapter 2: Lindsi
      • Chapter 3: Fusion
      • Chapter 4: Morning
      • Chapter 5: Meridian Park
      • Chapter 6: Filtration
      • Chapter 7: Explanation
      • Chapter 8: New Destination
      • Chapter 9: Solar Strip
      • Chapter 10: Power Imbalance
      • Chapter 11: Lock and Key
      • Chapter 12: Self-Determination
      • Chapter 13: Engineering
      • Chapter 14: Radiation Leak
      • Chapter 15: Shielding Patch
      • Chapter 16: Doubt
      • Chapter 17: Reactor Control
      • Chapter 18: Silent Success
      • Chapter 19: Need to Know
      • Chapter 20: Maintenance Entry
      • Chapter 21: Shards of Sight
      • Chapter 22: Nothing For It
      • Chapter 23: In Case of Emergency
      • Chapter 24: Sightlines
      • Chapter 25: Into the Unseen
      • Chapter 26: Escape to Nowhere
      • Chapter 27: Consequences
      • Chapter 28: Hard Vacuum
      • Chapter 29: Spacewalk
      • Chapter 30: Unanswered Questions
      • Chapter 31: Captain on Bridge
      • Chapter 32: Horizon Mission
      • Chapter 33: Answers
    • Mysteries Unite
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      • Grehstadt
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Distant Realms

~ A selection of tales from across the Multiverse! Travel via Waypoint to learn more…

Tag Archives: Philosophy

Temporal Morality

09 Fri Aug 2019

Posted by Metalwings in Philosophical Meanderings

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Philosophy, Thoughts

And moral temporality.

I passed – I can’t remember where, or I’d reference it – someone else’s Twitter discussion about whether or not people’s attitudes should be forgiven because they lived in a past time, and whether or not that changes if they’re still alive. I then, apparently, continued to think about it for a while, and thus this post was born.

So: is being “a product of their time” a valid reason for a person’s (presumably currently out of favour with the speaker) opinions, moral or otherwise?

Well… it depends. Continue reading →

Well, Isn’t That Sweet

07 Thu Sep 2017

Posted by Metalwings in Philosophical Meanderings, Writing

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Important, News, Philosophy, Thoughts

I’m seeing more and more and more writers (they guest-post on Mr. Wendig’s blog at terribleminds.com, which I read) wondering how they can write “while the world burns”. And I’m glad they’re noticing, I really am, you have no idea.

But damn did it take you guys a long time and it being on your doorstep to notice.

I’m sure it’s nice to express your frustration and nice to feel like someone else feels that way and maybe get a bit of backslapping for your “oh god everything is shit” moment.

But too much of this and it’ll just be a circle-jerk. Nobody will do anything, they’ll all be too busy talking about how they have to do something.

If the world is burning then get a fire extinguisher.

If there’s genocide in Rwanda or torture in Russia then write a lot of politely worded very pointed letters to every diplomat you and Amnesty International can think of. (I was six. I was six and the world wasn’t as nice as it should have been, so I repeatedly told it to get better. It might even have helped.)

But waiting until there’s something less bad than genocide on your doorstep and then realising that maybe the world isn’t all sunshine and roses and then wanting to know how to go on alongside that?

You guys always were going on alongside it. You were (probably) there for the genocide. (I don’t know how old you are, but not being would make you pretty young.) But because you didn’t have a front row seat, it didn’t exist. You were there for the clusterfuck that was the invasion of Iraq. You were there for all the other atrocities that happened throughout my life, and that are still happening. People died every day, and still do, but the world wasn’t “burning” because you, personally, thought you were safe.

So I guess it just strikes me as a little self-centred. Which people are, and to an extent have to be, or we’d all forget to eat because we were doing more important things, and would starve. *Insert clip from Look Around You here.*

In fact, that’s about the right phrase. Look Around You. It’s always been this way.

It just wasn’t on your doorstep before.

So please, clear up your doorstep, and then whatever you do do not close your eyes and go back to thinking everything is okay. It’s not okay, it’s never been okay, things only get better if we work at it, if we stay aware of where the bad things are and then do something about them.

And yes, write books too. That’s important. Very important. Other minds and other viewpoints — if people don’t see those, the seeds are sown already.

Writers (of any stripe – book, film, comic, serial, you name it) share thoughts and ideas and strange new perspectives with the world. They make other people laugh and cry and think. Think things they never would have thought otherwise.

Now, as always, we need those ideas.

But don’t go complaining about how the world is worse and suddenly you can’t. It’s not worse, you just weren’t looking before. The rock is lifted. There’s a maggoty badger corpse down there, grinning at you with its half-decayed flesh hanging off the skull. But it was still there before, so… clear up the corpse, or write anyway, or clear it up and write anyway. (That’s what I do.)

Just don’t you dare claim it never existed before.

(But I am very, very glad that you’ve finally noticed it. Now pass me that shovel, because I think the tail’s fallen off.)

Convergence: Black and Silver Seas

14 Wed Sep 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Roleplay, Writing

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Books, Convergence, Philosophy, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Convergence the RPG now ran two weekends ago, and with many thanks to my wonderful players, who put up with my generalised panic at suddenly running a game entirely solo for more than twice the number of players I’ve ever handled alone before, it went great! Set a year or two after the book’s base timeframe, we followed the newly graduated chrononauts of 2368 as they were sent “back through time” to the Silversea Moonbase in 2149 to find out why disaster so nearly befell it on that 50th anniversary of its permanent habitation.

And there, they found what at least appeared to them to be evidence of a renegade time traveller… but this time, one who had no record whatsoever in Chronos’ vast temporal extent.

Now, Chronos is the incredibly complex supercomputer that permits the “time travel” of the chrononauts of the Temporal Institute. It has its own dedicated power plant, which is routinely taxed almost to its limits simply to send these intrepid adventurers “through” time. Chronos’ complex memory systems are also the only known way of preserving information from one timestate to another — and this is where all those quote marks come in, because they aren’t just air quotes or scare quotes, but reflect something much more fundamental.

(There follows a digression into the temporal mechanics of Convergence.)

Continue reading →

A Place of No Desire

18 Thu Feb 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Philosophical Meanderings, Writing

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Fantastic Multiverse, Philosophy, Thoughts

Once, more than half my life ago, a friend’s character entered a realm of contentment. My own, his best friend, and whose name I still bear in certain places, went after him to bring him back despite the risk, for it seemed that without question that place was a nightmare.

Why? Because our first friend, let us call him Fel, was not content because he had all that he needed, but rather because all that he wished for had been stripped away. And our second, who we shall call Breeze because that was his name once, years and years before he was given the one he now bears, went to that place after him.

Can you imagine the horror of it? To look into your dearest friend’s eyes, and see that he recognised you, and that you meant nothing to him? For that is what Breeze saw: recognition without emotion, without anything. They had risked death together countless times, fought side by side, journeyed between worlds – for this was in the framework of the Void – become closer than brothers, their bonds forged in fire and tested against all the worlds could throw at them, enduring to the point that Breeze would and did chase his friend beyond the bounds of death itself.

He spoke to him, pleaded with him. Fel’s memory was intact, but his mind was not. He could think and reason, but his emotion was replaced by an imposed contentment, his wishes not fulfilled but rather replaced. There was a way out of that realm, but its inhabitants would not take it simply because they were unable to wish to. To wish is to desire, to make an active choice is to desire: they were ghosts following ghost paths, hollow echoes of lives once lived. Breeze recounted their stories, and Fel was able to recall them with equal clarity, but he spoke of them with a sort of faintly fond disinterest, an unbelievable detachment. Even Breeze was beginning to feel it pressing down upon him, a smothering blanket making his memories worth less than they once had been, pressing him to surrender all that was of value and enter a state of no desire. He clung to his determination, but he could feel it eroding as each desperate minute passed. If he stayed too long, he, too, would be worn away.

Breeze took his friend to see the portal that would lead out of the realm. Fel came, perhaps because there was still some faint spark of loyalty in him that had not yet been extinguished, perhaps simply because refusal would have required him to desire to refuse. They stood on its edge and gazed in. Breeze asked him to come with him, begged him, called on every last memory of everything they had ever shared. The faintest light of emotion flickered for bare moments in Fel’s eyes, but I can’t remember now whether he was able even then to take a single step, or whether in the end Breeze pulled him in and fled that place forever with his friend, despite what he’d been told that meant.

Not half so long ago – but still three years now – I got, as one does, a leaflet through my door from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They’re quite sweet, really: anyone who’s trying to help a stranger gets good marks in my books, even if I don’t think they’re actually helping. They’re trying to do what they think is right, as I understand it, and I can appreciate that without having to agree that it is right. This particular leaflet I kept, unusually, because it both amazed and in some measure horrified me.

Let me explain, for at first glance, it was merely a promise of heaven, as so often held out. In pretty pastel colours, it asked if I wanted to awaken each morning with happy, positive thoughts (for a second, I actually thought it was from the local hypnotist!). Unfortunately, I don’t know where it is, because I’d like to quote it directly: instead, all I have right now is a record of a paraphrase I told to one of my friends. It told me in gentle and comforting words that if I were to join them, then when I died, I would pass into heaven, where all that had mattered to me before would be washed away, and I would feel only eternal peace and happiness.

I would not regret the loss of those who did not join me. I would not mourn the fate of the fallen. Indeed, my paraphrase suggests it at least implied strongly that I would forget them along with all that I had known and all that might have caused me pain. I would know only happiness, forever. This seemed, to me, like a horror, like one of those nightmares that lures you in and traps you with honey-sweet allure and only then reveals the full horror of what you have all unknowing done. I would not and will not give one iota of my life, of all that gives my life meaning, for a cloud of artificial fantasy.

I don’t remember particularly recalling it at the time, but what prompted me to make this post was the connection I see now between the fate Fel was so barely rescued from, and the promise held out in that leaflet. I wonder how others see Breeze’s actions? In their minds, did he pull his friend from a promised land of unparalleled splendour, instead of the horror that he and I perceived it to be? If my friend who played Fel had objected too much, I am sure he would not have been allowed to depart, yet I wonder now what my friend saw in Breeze’s actions. We assume those we know best think as we do, but sometimes we are wrong.

I hadn’t realised, until writing it out at last just now, how close this story sounds to the one about the two pilots that I told the other day. You’d think that I would, but that one was written from another direction, and it had never even occurred to me to draw a parallel to what I have been told was the other end of the spectrum. The story of the pilots is a story about the hell of purposelessness, of giving up, of accepting nothingness in place of life and letting your dreams wither and die. The story of Breeze and Fel is the story of a man who went to win his beloved friend back from the embrace of what he had been told was heaven. If I hadn’t happened to write them down in the same month, I would never have connected the two, even though it seems the only difference is the scenery.

And now, looking back at this new connection, I wonder at the parallel between this picture of a promised heaven, and my vision of a wasteland of despair. For the graveyard I depicted is the graveyard of dreams, and the lowest part of my life has not been the part where I felt the most pain, but the part where I risked becoming numb to it, where the world threatened to lose all meaning. It can be a kind of dreary contentment that is found there: a simple surrender into weariness of life that lets the days blur by, every one the same until ten years might pass without knowing it. Where any effort is twice or thrice the cost it once was, and what little might be gained by it seems meaningless.

Seen from this other angle, is not my vision of darkest hell at once converted to the so-called heaven that Fel found himself in? A place without desire, without love. With no fear – who can fear, with nothing to lose? – but also with no hope, nor even the ghost of hope? Where everything has been brought level, and what is seems ever unchangeable, without even the ember of a desire to change it?

(If any of you have any thoughts on this topic, please share them in the comments! I’d welcome the discussion.)

Continue reading →

The Price of Death When…

15 Mon Feb 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Behind the Scenes

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Philosophy, Thoughts

Doing the washing up, I put on Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-Earth, music for the Silmarillion. Contemplating just how hard to kill Middle-Earth’s elves are led me in turn to a question I keep facing in each new setting: what their deaths mean. What do other characters in any given world perceive? A tragedy, or merely a transition, or almost nothing at all? The wrong reaction can be jarring, if you think about it too much, and can make you wonder if the central conceit of a book isn’t, in fact, slightly mischaracterised after all…

Here, then, are some categories of death, going from the least horrible to the most… more or less. You might have your own order for a couple of them. Continue reading →

Time and Motion

30 Sat Jan 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Miscellaneous

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Philosophy, Thoughts

I actually wrote this post for the purpose of testing the typing ability of my shiny new tech, but now it exists (Also a touchscreen exists that I can actually get up to some speed on!) and so I might as well post it!

Continue reading →

Quicksand

25 Mon Jan 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Miscellaneous

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Philosophy, Thoughts

Quite some time back now, I was walking around a certain reservoir. I know this reservoir pretty well in all its moods, from overflowing to almost empty. I know the solid mud and the sticky mud, the shallow mud and the deep mud, where you can walk and where you can’t, where’s risky and where’s fine, what looks bad but has actually just been churned up by the geese. But this particular time, I was in a particularly adventurous mood, and it was exceptionally low. I went walking out across the flats: I do that a fair amount when the water is low. And I decided to cross one of the riverbeds on the bottom of the reservoir, which I have also done before, although not with that particular riverbed (there’s more than one of them down there).

Continue reading →

Vengeance?

15 Wed Apr 2015

Posted by Metalwings in Writing

≈ 3 Comments

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Philosophy, Question for you!, Thoughts

I read around a lot. In this specific instance, I often read the various ramblings at Chuck Wendig’s blog, Terribleminds. (I suggest you do too: it’s more interesting, and it updates more frequently!)

Today’s guest author was talking about fight scenes, and suggested that we all want revenge on someone, one way or another, so we quite like our vicarious vengeance. And that got me thinking, do we? Continue reading →

The Copernican Principle

04 Wed Mar 2015

Posted by Metalwings in Miscellaneous

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Philosophy, Thoughts

It’s been a while since I posted! Busy couple of weeks including a fair amount of epicness, so a good thing, but! I shouldn’t leave this place alone so long! For unrelated reasons, I was contemplating people, and how they act towards other people, and then I decided to ramble about it because why not subject the Internet to my inane opinions?

Yeah, you came here for the writing, didn’t you. More on that in the next post, when I promise to introduce Ashi and Arien. Or reintroduce them, if I introduced them before and forgot about it. That happens a lot. Continue reading →

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