A Story of Difficult Issues and Funny Thoughts

I have had ideas for a science fiction story for a long time. These ideas have changed very much since they began, but they have always been about dealing with the question of when violence is, not just justified, but admirable and glorious. I wanted to imagine a fictional future and story with everything I thought was cool. This included the large and small scale use of modern and futuristic weapons of war and also spy thriller Mission Impossible style adventures. I knew I should be hesitant to fantasize about killing people with the former, but monstrous inhuman antagonists would make the latter impossible.

All of my ideas for this fictional world and story are a result of attempting to imagine satisfying scenarios in which violence and underhanded tactics are used righteously, such that it would be a kind of epic fantasy with heroes fighting monsters and dark lords, but set in the relatively near future of the real world. It was only recently that I ever considered writing anything or that all these ideas were anything other than fantasies about what would be a cool movie which would never be made. Action scenes in a modern or futuristic setting have been done before and a written medium is not the best way to convey them, certainly not by me. Instead, the thing which makes my ideas here special is the attempt to contextualize such action in a truly comprehensive moral vision which other media do not have quite to my satisfaction. I hope to explain how my ideas for this have a potential to be a real contribution to speculative fiction.

I have found it difficult to discuss these ideas because it is impossible to avoid contentious political-adjacent issues which have been absolutely essential to the purpose and meaning of this potential story from the start. The moral judgments regarding who are the evil antagonists, against whom violence can be celebrated, in a story of large-scale human conflict, have direct implications for how people should view real world events, especially when I get to the next post when I explain how perspectives on present issues have informed my newest ideas. This is where in reality that I see events as exciting as any in fiction. Any attempt of mine to exclude such thoughts would have boring results.

Such discussions are unwelcome in some of the places I might share these ideas, but I believe my approach and conclusions are nuanced enough that they should not be offensive to any honest people. I also believe I will show useful new ways of thinking about issues which get to the heart of why they are contentious in the first place. By viewing all conflict, domestic and international, in terms of violence and potential violence, it becomes possible to have true empathy in these matters.

I also want to emphasize that I am not certain of any of my ideas for the worldbuilding, events, or characters. I want to discuss all of these ideas so that everything can be figured out before I even begin to consider writing anything, but I think what I have so far is quite interesting. This first post will focus on theoretical matters which might not be mentioned very much in any finished work, but they need to be understood so that my ideas for the actual story are not misinterpreted. Even as I explain all these ideas and as some might take issue with them, it should be remembered that I still just want a cool movie about shooting and exploding things and all of these ideas are subject to change so as to better serve that purpose. I freely admit my theoretical ideas are weird, and I am not trying to convince anyone of them, but only explain the potentially unique and interesting ideas which they have prompted.

Returning to the main point, violent criminals and terrorists, whom everyone can agree need to be defeated, are defeated easily. This would not be a glorious fight, but the eradication of pests. It is also possible such criminals may appear to be oppressed victims fighting for freedom. Instead, the challenge is imagining a believable evil empire of equal or greater power than the protagonists, against which the most epic weapons, such as strategic stealth bombers and nuclear powered warships are put to their greatest use.

This is not so simple, or rather I do not want it to be. It is difficult to put this all into words without oversimplifying it. Contriving some murderous tyrannical regime would simply be lazy. It would hardly be different from inhuman monsters. It would just be another way of avoiding the issue. I am perhaps trying to recreate World War Two in a futuristic setting by attempting to imagine a righteous crusade against an evil empire, but Hitler has already been defeated in reality and many times in fiction. Nazis are just criminals. They were quite literally convicted in a court of law.

There can be evil regimes, but, like criminals and terrorists, if it is obvious that they are evil, they are sure to be defeated eventually. A regime which is enduring and is thus a satisfying antagonist, would be one which does not appear evil and is at least good for the people it depends on, if no one else. More fundamentally for the purpose of fiction, portraying antagonists as evil and as justified targets of violence can be seen as a propagandistic attack against whatever real people they resemble or are related to. Certainly there are evil people in reality who are worthy of such attacks, but if they are associated with a nation or political movement, then they are motivated by good intentions or self-interest, rather than pure hostility. I feel there is something truly wrong about portraying the worst version of someone. In the next post, I will explain how it would be more constructive to instead show a future in which present conflicts have been resolved in the most mutually beneficial ways conceivable, and I will explain here how that will result in new conflicts. This is also how every faction can have a highly ambiguous relationship and resemblance to any present ones.

It seems as if every evil regime in fiction commits some atrocity which they could conceivably not have done and been no less successful. For example, some like to say the Galactic Empire in Star Wars was not bad and the rebels were terrorists, but when the former destroys a heavily populated planet for no good reason, and no reason at all apparent to the average person, rebellion became a matter of survival. The Empire became a gang of murderers who need to be killed before they kill you. It is, of course, not unrealistic that people make bad decisions which lead to their downfall by antagonizing others, but if they are maximally competent, they would minimize this, but then they would hardly be evil. Evil on the part of the powerful is nearly the same as incompetence, but incompetent antagonists are less satisfying for heroes to defeat.

Criminals and evil regimes can certainly win and be epic threats to their potential victims at particular times, but taking a long-term global view, justice tends to win as victims find allies and fight back. Again, I would not be particularly good at or have unique ideas for portraying the struggles which make that happen.

Inversely, imagining protagonists whom the reader does not need to have reservations about admiring is similarly problematic. If they are rebels, they may appear to be criminals or terrorists. If they are instead an established power, or become one after overthrowing a corrupt one, they may be seen as the evil empire instead, or at least one which the reader might not admire so enthusiastically. If the opposing side is not totally evil or totally good, then a full-scale war between them is a tragedy at best.

This demonstrates what I mean. The depiction of war machines put to great use is cool, but we all know they are products of a corrupt regime. If they were not being used against hostile alien robots, then there would be doubt about the morality of it all.

I understood all of this intuitively early on, even if I could not articulate it. I began to lose interest in imagining this story as I realized any believable great power would always be corrupt and there is no satisfying end to the struggles of a lesser power. It was not until after I started listening to libertarians in my search for the best approach to political matters, that I began to have new ideas. On one hand, they discussed how destructive and unjustified the military actions of the United States have been, further undermining the idea of admirable war-fighting by a great power. On the other hand, going further into anarcho-capitalism gave me a theoretical basis for understanding these paradoxes.

I can dismiss all of the pre-programmed responses to libertarianism because I never considered such ambiguous things as liberty or anarchy as necessarily the highest ideals, so they do not apply to anything I say here. My response to all the whining about neo-feudalism is “Yes. And?”. By instead viewing Austro-libertarian theory as a matter of conflict, aggression, and the creation of value, these paradoxes can be resolved by understanding power to be a matter of little more than having allies and resources. These are acquired through virtuous actions. Violence does not create power. It only steals or destroys that of other people. Violence also causes victims to defend themselves, find allies, and retaliate, when they can. For these reasons, it seems that cooperative mutually beneficial behavior is generally superior. Goodness inevitably wins as criminals are easily stopped by civilized men.

The problem is that power acquired through virtuous means can just as easily be used to steal and destroy, and that it is sure to be inherited by those who are less virtuous. Human antagonists, who are both evil and have well-established power, are parasites who consume the wealth created by civilization and turn it towards destruction and the further enslavement of the people, while those who are brave enough to resist, no matter how individually strong they are, are overwhelmed by the obedient masses.

An evil empire is 90% good. The more advanced and prosperous a civilization is, the more damage it can potentially cause. The more just a regime is, the more insidiously dangerous it can be. The more people benefit from an arrangement, the more difficult it is to change for the sake of the few who are victimized by it. For a different articulation of this paradox, read this, while understanding that I say “the system“ is not simply bad, as those who would do the kind of thing the author is famous for necessarily believe. “The system“ is just a result of the evolution towards mutually beneficial cooperation which also feeds parasites by creating wealth and power.

Understanding this paradox makes it possible to resolve all disagreements in political thought. Power is fundamentally good as it is required for any purpose and it is always possible for for to be earned justly and there is always an extent to which it has been, so my conclusions are right-wing, to use such a simplistic term, but the eternal certainty of the eventual misuse of power means its accumulation is always a potential threat, so there is also validity in leftist views, but the accumulation of power is nearly the definition of civilization and life, and life is dangerous. This, along with Robert Conquest’s first law, mean there can be no such as a truly leftist power center. There are only right-wing ones which weaponize leftism against enemies. When I discuss more concrete ideas for what the conflicts in the story could look like in the next post, I will explain how the left/right divide will not exist in this fictional future in any recognizable form. This is all to say that my story and setting may be similar to, but the opposite of “grimdark“ ones with no good guys. There may instead be no obvious bad guys openly doing evil, but there would still be an epic fight.

When people argue about the merits of capitalism, Christianity, or Western civilization, there are often appeals to the success and power associated with those things. The obvious objection is that such success is not inherently good or not how they should be judged, but here I can say how they actually can be a result of moral superiority. As I explain in the next post that every major faction, including the antagonistic ones, in my fictional future will be capitalist, Christian, and Western to varying extents, it should be understood that I do not intend for this to be a leftist attack on those three things, if for no other reason than that those are just absolutely tiresome, but with the reasoning here, those three are the things which can accumulate power so as to be a threat and feed parasites. Those who are directly opposed to any of those three things will be tragic characters destined to fail rather than true antagonists, and they will include some whom no leftist would identify with.

Since I am perhaps trying to imagine epic fantasy set in the real world, I might have a thought about what the equivalents of Sauron and orcs are in reality for my purposes. The latter is only the elvish name for goblins, despite what monsters of that name are portrayed as in fantasy since Tolkien. His orcs are not large and strong. They are not particularly unintelligent. They are weak cowardly slaves of industrial society. With these thoughts, The Last Ringbearer hardly contradicts Tolkien.

All people are orcs to varying degrees and in different ways. They become specialized in unnatural niches as everything which makes them sovereign, from armed protection to the production of basic needs is outsourced to other people and even other nations. All people are made into interdependent units totally subject to political and economic forces, which can serve them well, until they do not. Such forces, rather than particular people, could be what semi-divine beings such as Sauron and Morgoth represent. Perhaps the best exemplification of all this are the world wars of the 20th century. The empires of Europe, most advanced and prosperous to exist to that time, led both their soldiers and civilians to mass slaughter. In hindsight, those who died should have regarded their own governments as enemies of themselves and their civilization as much as the ones they were formally at war against.

All of this is to say there really is no perfect solution to this problem of imagining admirable large-scale violence using modern weapons. The powers which can make use of advanced warplanes and warships are certain to be parasites or host them. To say that any people are like orcs is not satisfying for the purpose of being proud of the violence done to them. The enemies who warrant the use of such weapons are sure to not be totally criminal. The question is not whether goodness will win, but which people are successful in civilizational conflict, but destroying people in a zero-sum fight is not universally admirable, especially when those people have some relation to real ones in the present.

However, there could still be ideal end for protagonists to seek even if their means are tragically imperfect. The most heroic fight conceivable is against, not just aggression, tyranny, or oppression, but against orcishness. The minimum of what is mutually beneficial is not enough. Basic libertarian principle is not enough to prevent the misuse of accumulated power by parasites. Any victory against a parasitic regime is temporary as the power which supersedes it is sure to fall to the same tendencies as soon as the will to resist them falters. Such a victory would still be admirable, but I believe what makes my ideas special is the attempt to imagine a direct fight against the forces which result in parasitism and zero-sum conflict by building a different kind of empire, an anti-empire perhaps, designed from its foundation on maximizing the virtue and self-sufficiency of its people, instead of making them weak and dependent.

I am able to conceive of such an ideal arrangement because anarcho-capitalists have already begun to do so in the form of insurance-based defense agencies. When I thought about what they would look like in reality, I finally had a new approach for dealing with the problem of the admirable use of violence. Whatever it looks like in concrete realistic terms, I find an insurance provider to be a theoretical economic model for the ideal regime which directs toward good ends the potentially morally problematic actions of any great power, such as violence and deception.

This resolves the paradox by which the division of labor makes the efficient production of goods possible, but makes people dependent and creates opportunities for parasites. Sovereignty itself can be considered an economic good which can be efficiently produced by a corporation in the business of ensuring protection and putting a non-arbitrary cost on being dependent by both guiding people in defending themselves and coordinating large-scale action among them as they attempt to lower the cost of insurance against violence. This is how it can be seen that the progress of civilization is good in itself.

This would be an infinitely scalable, perhaps international nationalist and global localist, empire built on a model of self-sacrifice with incentives correctly aligned and which those with any kind of libertarian-adjacent view can believe in and be proud to fight for, rather than just see as a lesser evil. It could manage the training and deployment of the kind of Jedi-like wizard-knights important in the earlier iterations of the story (more on that later).

I want to answer some possible reactions to this by pointing out that fringe political ideologies in well-respected science-fiction is very much precedented. I have just recently remembered that I have read The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin and that during the entire time, I could not believe it was not addressed at all how the society of Anarres deals with crime. I will not listen to a single word from anyone who has a problem with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, but finds validity in a work influenced by Emma Goldman.

However, my intent is not to create some speculative writing about a different way of organizing society, but one of heroic adventures. This idea should improve the story by defining what protagonists fight for, not distract from it. That being said, if this were to be done successfully, it would resolve a contradiction between Austrian theory and libertarian rhetoric. Anarchy, meaning “no rulers“, means no action as far as rhetoric, which includes storytelling, is concerned. Saying that everything will be solved, if government were to get out of the way, does not work, especially if that means getting rid of all government. Someone actually needs to do the solving and that is who the attention should be on, and that is who will effectively be the government in people’s minds.

I have previously written in more specific terms about how this serves my purposes in a paywalled post, but even with that, there is still a challenge in imagining this happening in an at all natural, believable, and uncontrived way which does not come off as some bizarre utopian fantasy born of a fringe theory which has nothing to do with reality. I will explain some of how I could try to make this work in the next post, but that is beside the point of the ideas I want to focus on for exploring what would happen if the paradox I describe here were solved through whatever fortuitous, providential, and apocalyptic series of events is required. For this reason, it does not matter exactly what the perfect empire looks like, only that it come to be somehow.

In earlier iterations of the story, I thought there could be a later era in which the utopian world becomes capable of interstellar travel, resulting in a Star Trek-like setting. I later wanted to create a setting for a D&D(Pathfinder first edition, actually) campaign and somehow make it exist in the same reality as the rest of my world. My idea was that a great crisis causes civilization on at least one planet to regress to a medieval-ish state with most records of the past lost.

Back when I never thought anything could possibly come of these fantasies, I always had fun imagining that they exist in the same reality as other fictional universes. As silly as this sounds, It all began as a Harry Potter fanfiction (I was twelve) in which there was an evil wizard like Voldemort, but the opposite. He was an egalitarian who did not hate muggles and combined magic with modern weapons in order to conquer the world. Even back then, I understood this paradox before I could articulate it.

I abandoned all these kinds of ideas until I read Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and saw that the timeline of its setting was coincidentally similar to mine, being a medieval-ish world in the far future after the destruction of a lasting global utopia. I have had fun imagining that my story might be a different turning in the infinitely repeating cycle of ages of the Wheel of Time, either long before or long after the events of Robert Jordan’s series.

This similarity is not such an amazing coincidence, thinking about it now. If I can imagine what is ultimately good and how that can win, I can try to imagine it winning totally, but it would be boring if that were to last forever, so there needs to be a new crisis later on, but it would be different from Robert Jordan’s world. The idea that different turnings of the Wheel can be at all different from one another is something which many fans might not like now that it is being used to justify the terrible Amazon Prime show, but I want to explain the interesting thoughts which have resulted from this thinking about the implications of this.

The relatively near-future era of my story, which I focus on as everything about it would need to be decided upon before anything about the later eras, would be the transition from the First Age to the Second Age, also called the Age of Legends. As far as I know, Robert Jordan did not explain how this happened in his timeline in any detail, but one thing which seems clear is that this is when some people gained the ability to channel the One Power, making the advanced civilization possible.

While, in the earlier iterations, my fictional future would similarly feature the emergence of a magical ability in the form of a kind of telepathy, the lasting utopia in my timeline would instead be a result of getting politics and economics right, in one way or another. Politics and economics, along with technology, are magical spiritual phenomena. Much of it is dark. Seemingly innocuous public and private policies unknown to most people have insidious unintuitive far-reaching consequences. Propaganda is enchantment spells, banking is alchemy, war is mass human sacrifice to metaphysical entities. This all changes when reliable counterspells are invented. This is why I like the idea of a “wizard-knight“ as the ideal hero in this story whether or not it will feature any fantasy magic.

Rather than trying to crudely combine science-fiction and fantasy elements or make the magical scientific as some recent fiction does, I would present the realistic and scientific as magical. No one will shoot fireballs like in D&D, but grenades would accomplish the same thing. Magic is what makes it possible for grenades to exist, not just the technology, but the politics and economics which causes a civilization to produce them.

When considering how wizards, magi, or wisemen seem have the role of kingmakers in fiction and history, perhaps another way to think of the theoretical model of an insurance-based defense agency is as a corporation in the business of providing the service of wizardry at a price affordable for any nation and community, not just the greatest empires. This is also where it can be seen that such a future would not appear utopian for a long time, but would be characterized by the most advanced form of dangerous liberty in which the temptations offered by occult power are ever-present, resulting in more conflicts for stories. This way, anti-empire does not need to be seen as simply a good thing which is imperative to achieve in reality, but is just something that might happen at some point.

Returning to the main point, the end of the Age of Legends in Robert Jordan’s timeline shows, and my articulation of the paradox of the relationship between righteousness and power predicts the eventual result of an end to large-scale parasitism and endless mutually beneficial progress. Such unimaginably great power, wealth, and knowledge is accumulated that their misuse would result in the possibility of a disaster far greater than any other, such as the release of the Dark One and the subsequent Breaking of the World which begins the Third Age. Over a long enough period of time, this is guaranteed, even if entirely by accident. Perfectly preventing the misuse of power may just delay all the evil which would have occurred during that time otherwise, so that it instead happens all at once. Those who predict this might say that it means it is not worth trying to end parasitism.

Yet, preventing the misuse of power is still a good thing to do. This order would be built by people doing the right thing, by defeating criminals and parasites, and by helping each other in the most profound ways. It would be absurd to say that doing the opposite is better. Even so, this ideal solution actually does not solve the paradox and overcome the imperfect nature of humanity. The misuse of power can always be prevented for a time. This would just be when it happens to be prevented for a particularly long period on a particularly large scale.

Additional thoughts result from me having fun considering how other fictional timelines such as those of the Lord of the Rings, Dune, and the Cosmere also parallel that of the Wheel of Time series and each other. Only the first of those gives an idea of what the end of the First Age might look like, so the Silmarillion is where I would look for parallels in my ideas (The world wars of the 20th century were the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. The founding of the anti-empire is the creation of Numenor). The God Emperor of Dune may give an idea of what the end of the Fourth Age looks like. Its similarity to Mistborn seen in the first few pages raises the possibility of multiple separate worlds each having their own cycles, their own Wheels of Time, which sometimes converge.

While it is fun to find parallels, and this could be a way to decide some things in my story when there is a lack of better ideas, I would still not want any mention of the content of another author’s work in any finished product of mine. I could go on and on about all the issues related to the Wheel of Time, but the main one here is the implications of an unknowably old universe with an infinite future in which everything can be taken to its ultimate conclusion. The idea of the Wheel of Time can be mostly put aside as events identical to past ones are certain to occur by pure coincidence. The matter of when ages begin and end, and of whether any series of events are similar enough to be considered the same, but in different turnings, can be arbitrary and subjective. The Wheel of Time may be a highly simplified model of what was understood during the Age of Legends, now remembered in Hinduism during the present age (I imagine a better model is something like a fractal spiral of spirals).

Perhaps over an infinite period of time, anything is possible, including events which appear to be the beginning of time. The universe can change in any number of ways, making it possible for these very different fictional worlds to exist in the same reality. The interesting question is how much of this change in the universe is artificial. Perhaps there is no limit to the power of productive human civilization to transform the environment to its needs. Perhaps fundamental aspects of reality can be changed through the use of immense accumulated knowledge and power. The One Power in the Wheel of Time series may be an artificial design created during a long-forgotten past age, perhaps a different Age of Legends defined by even greater accomplishments, and rediscovered at the beginning of the Age of Legends of Robert Jordan’s timeline.

It can be seen in reality how technological, political, and economic forces change environments and cultures. In this fantasy in which I try to consider this happening on a universe-wide scale over extremely long time periods, human action may be the driving force of reality. Perhaps this is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. There is an extent to which humans can be like God and make whatever they want to be true, but there is an order to how power is acquired and can be used and the results will not be what anyone expects.

Much could be said about the matter of reconciling all this with any traditional theological doctrine. This kind of thing would need to be addressed in order for the story to be fully thought out, but I will only say a few things here. By imagining the events which drive the progression of ages to all be intentionally or unintentionally human-caused, there would be a different way of thinking about the creationism debate.

Some challenge the generally accepted scientific view of the history and future of the universe. Additionally, it could be interesting to imagine a fictional reality in which the truth is different, but for now, I will only discuss things in terms of the generally accepted secular scientific view because I think I understand it well enough. If this currently accepted scientific view turns out to be incorrect, then this could be a fictional reality in which it is true, or becomes true in the unimaginably distant future or was true in the the unimaginably distant past, after or before the universe has been recreated. I will go with whatever makes for the most interesting story.

In this unknowably old universe I imagine, life and civilization would have existed before the Big Bang. If the extinction of all life resulting from the universe collapsing into a single point were caused by the humans living then, then the Big Bang, abiogenesis, and evolution over billions of years would be a glorious story of creation improbably reasserting itself despite the worst sin imaginable. This story is not complete. Science predicts the heat death of the universe, but it does not account for the potential of human civilization to acquire the power and knowledge which make it possible to prevent this.

However, some who understand all this might not want this miracle to happen. Some might see an infinite future as a futile existence. They may have found a way to perceive what they would believe are their past and maybe future lives, perhaps through the kind of telepathy in the earlier iterations of the story, and found they continuously made the same mistakes and suffered the same misfortunes.

Everything anyone builds will be turned to evil. Everything will be destroyed and forgotten. All struggles only result in later generations needing to repeat them. This can be seen in recorded history and predicted to continue on a cosmological timescale for as long as creatures capable of willful action exist. The inevitable accumulation of power will make it possible to create immense horrors which last far longer than they would naturally before they collapse due to people’s tendency to want what is better. This may look like a tyrannical regime in the present reality, but on this cosmic scale, the entire universe may be turned into hell by an extremely advanced civilization. There is no resolution to this endless suffering except the total and permanent extinction of all life.

I now have a motivation for why someone for why someone in a position of great power would choose to do evil with full competence and rationality, unimpaired by such vices as hatred or greed. There can be criminals, tyrants, fanatics of any destructive ideology or cult, and any other more normal antagonist in my story, but those holding power behind the scenes, who make it difficult to defeat them and will sabotage mutually beneficial solutions, will be executing a plan they believe will bring an end to the futile cycle. I will refer to these secretive antagonists as darkfriends, the word from the Wheel of Time series as their motivation would be similar to that of Ishamael.

In order to ensure that the power to prevent the heat death of the universe is not discovered and used for that purpose, it is not enough to kill all humans; intelligent life may evolve on earth again. It is not enough to destroy all life on earth; life may arise elsewhere in the universe, if it has not already. Instead, human civilization must advance so that it can conquer the universe while being totally controlled by darkfriends, so that they can destroy all other potential civilizations and limit that of humans.

The darkfriends would need to maintain an impossible balance over an extremely long period of time. They would need to build a parasitic system which keeps people weak and complacent, so that their control is maintained and the progress of knowledge is limited, but they also need to cultivate the competence needed for their goals and to prevent the system from collapsing, meaning there will always be potential for rebellion. Yet, it is still conceivable that evil can win totally and permanently by ensuring the heat death of the universe. Even if this is truly impossible, the darkfriends will do massive damage which may define an entire age, causing suffering which in turn leads some to believe in their cause.

The extent to which the darkfriends understand what they are trying to do is impossible is the extent they believe themselves to be the admirable heroes as they choose the most difficult task imaginable and dare to seek total victory against God and nature.

In this reality I have imagined, the truth of the beginning paragraph of the Call of Cthulhu can be seen:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Dissociated knowledge will be pieced together. Political and economic theory regarding the creation of power, new evidence regarding the history and future of the universe discovered in this fictional future, and perhaps ways of understanding theology all show the frightful position of humanity as the driving force of reality with a near infinite potential to recreate the universe for better or worse.

However, this is the opposite of the Lovecraftian cosmicist reality. It is only during such anomalous times as when the universe is recovering from total collapse that it appears humans are insignificant creatures on one planet in an immense void. Yet, the truth that humans, being made in the image of God, gain an infinite power to damn themselves and others by doing what is right is infinitely more terrible. Being insignificant absolves one of all responsibility.

There can be eldritch entities of great power, but they are either artificial creations, perhaps left over from a previous age, or are simply a kind of person with the same fundamental nature as humans. Either can be overcome through sufficient competence, but those who do so will become such eldritch powers from the perspective of those who do not. Consider what Europeans were to native Americans during their initial contact.

In any case, referring to my potential story, which still needs a name, as “the anti-Lovecraftian epic” gives me the convenient acronym TALE.

Some will go mad and decide all life must end in order to escape the cycle of accumulation and misuse of power. Most instead flee from the light of this possibility. Leftists, as well as the reactionary right assert that power is not created through either or both virtue and mutually beneficial exchange. Science, as well as basic logic, show that the universe is not infinitely old. The perceptions yielded by such extraordinary means as telepathy are surely just hallucinations. The immediately apparent contradictions with traditional doctrines are heretical.

A few will find a narrow path of sanity when confronted with this proposition and see that it is one of a beautiful and merciful reality. By holding on to traditional beliefs and investigating the evidence a little further to discover more than than what was known in the world of the Wheel of Time series, at least during the Third Age, they may find that, despite the endlessly repeated horrors and universe-wide resets, reality is infinitely progressing towards something great with each cycle, and there is nothing to do, except participate in that progress. There does not need to be a theoretically perfect solution, such as anti-empire, for there to be admirable action. Likewise, such ideal solutions are still worth pursuing even if they lead to new problems.

These are the theories which will underlie the more concrete ideas for the setting and events of the story. None of this needs to be explained in any finished work, but it is needed to properly understand the meaning of it all. I will explain that setting and the general course of events in the next post, but it will probably be paywalled, since those will be ideas I do not want to be stolen.