Image: Volgariver
Eunice and Franklin have spent years building the world of the Passionate Pantheon. Thousands of hours spent on video chats and at tables in restaurants and scattered through the comments of hundreds of Google Docs pages. And of all the fictional universes in all the genres across space and time, it’s the one place both of us would most like to live.
There are a lot of reasons we both feel this way, but they might not be the ones you’d expect.
The sex is the one that would spring to most people’s minds first. It is erotica, after all. Sounds like fun, right? Franklin in particular likes the idea of some of the darker sexual scenarios in the even-numbered books (he would absolutely get into the cage with Lanissae from Unyielding Devotion, though it took a while and some gentle teasing from Eunice to admit that)…
…but the sex is not the most compelling part of the world.
The most compelling part of the world, for both of us, is the sense of joy and wonder at beauty that permeates every part of the society of the City. Love of beauty is hard-wired into the City’s DNA. Everything about the City, from the architecture to the landscaping to the smallest details of everyday tools, is designed for beauty—but it’s not an institutional beauty, a top-down design aesthetic mandated from above. There’s an enormous diversity in tastes and aesthetics. Beauty is personal, not social. Beauty is in the eye of the creator, and the City offers plenty of space for those who wish to create.
When we talk about beauty in the real world, we often have a tacit assumption that beauty only matters for durable things, expensive things: architecture, art, monuments, forests, cars, whatever. It signifies value, often monetary value.
Beauty has a value all of its own, to a child of the City. Beauty as an intrinsic good is so deeply embedded in the life of the City that it extends even to the most ephemeral of items and experiences (and maybe paradoxically, the very act of living such extraordinarily long lives is what leads the residents of the City to embrace the ephemeral).
Tikil returned her bow. “Thank you for your hospitality.” She presented Avia with a small, glittering box made of thin plates of gold, edged with polished wood and inlaid with bands of copper, silver, cobalt, and platinum. “For you.”
Avia bowed again. “Thank you.” She set it on the newly-created table. The cloud of mechanical gnats scurried out of her way. “Please make yourself at home. This is Tomash. Would you like some tea?”
“Thank you, that sounds lovely.”
[…] Avia picked up the gold box Tikil had given her. Inside, a tiny dome-shaped confection, barely as wide as her thumb, nestled on a small cushion. A shiny round berry topped the tiny layer cake, with bands of pink, white, red, blue, and brown separated by thin glittering lines. Avia placed it in her mouth. A complex mixture of tastes, sweet and tart and spicy, flitted across her tongue.
The sensation started as a warm gentle glow that enveloped her body. She felt a faint whisper against her skin, like a hand caressing her shoulders. A shiver ran down her back. She felt something warm and soft, like fine fur, wrap itself around her. A cool breeze touched her face, bringing with it the faint scent of pine trees and flowers. The wind passed, the feeling of fur against her body faded, and the faintest whisper touched her lips, like the ghost of a kiss. “Mm, that was wonderful,” she said as the sensations faded. “I like the kiss at the end. What a wonderful touch.”
“Thank you,” Tikil said.
Avia dropped the box into the Provider. Its edges flared blue as it disintegrated into dust. The black rectangle flipped closed. A soft chime sounded. “You have visitors.”
All things, even things intended to be used once and discarded, are designed to be beautiful. Intentional. Extraordinary, even. What to the City would be the equivalent of a cardboard box would to us be an item of such beauty it would be passed down as a family heirloom.
Of course, this love of beauty is a luxury. Frank Lloyd Wright famously, if cynically, observed, “art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.” Honestly, he’s not wrong.
But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? The City is a post-scarcity society. There is no want, no starvation. Everyone in the City has all their basic – and more than basic – needs provided, all the time. Even people who live outside the comfort of the City arguably have a higher standard of living than the vast majority of people in our society do, or did historically.
There’s a thread that runs through modern discourse about post-scarcity Utopias that sounds a bit like sour grapes: If you don’t have to struggle and labor just to meet your basic needs, then life becomes meaningless. If you don’t have to fight to stay alive, you don’t have any purpose in living. If you can live for as long as you choose, even if that means centuries, then your life becomes empty, devoid of merit.
With all due respect to those who make this argument: That’s utter bollocks. It’s the sort of nonsense one might advocate when one lives a life that is, to quote Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (In the City, the time before is referred to as the age of darkness, and with good reason.)
Why should long life necessarily be an empty life? At what point does this happen? Can a life of seventy years be rich, but a life of a hundred and twenty years abruptly becomes barren of meaning? No? How about a hundred and sixty? Two hundred and twenty? At what point do you shift from “my life has meaning” to “my life is empty”? Would those who lived in times where the average lifespan was half what it is now have considered their lives to have more meaning than you or I?
How much struggle do you need to have to prove that you have meaning? If you’re born to a billionaire family, you will experience no physical want and no starvation; you need not work at anything you don’t choose to. Is your life devoid of meaning if your parents are billionaires? What about multimillionaires? What about if they have half a million dollars in the bank? What level of want is necessary to give you purpose?
When you look at the arguments in favor of “privation means meaning,” really look at them, it’s obvious the idea is bunk. It’s a religious concept that was promoted historically to keep those at the poorest levels of society from rebelling. Heaven has merely been replaced by meaning. We still haven’t found our way to a version of meaning that is focused on the here-and-now, on the uplifting of our fellow beings, on empathy and care and joy as valid in themselves.
For people in the City, meaning and purpose are individual, just like beauty. And honestly, while it may be true that art for art’s sake is the philosophy of the well-fed, it’s also true that art for art’s sake is just as valid a purpose as any other. And it certainly creates culture that emphasises being present and living, connected to the world around you.
Forget Star Wars or Star Trek or Stargate. Much as we love the stars, the world we want to live in is the world of the City. The sex sounds like fun, but the love of beauty is the real draw