Author: Franklin Veaux

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

We haven’t updated the blog in a while, as we’ve been completely buried under other writing projects. However, a question came up on another site recently about inventing an entirely new language for fiction. Since this is something that’s on our minds right now—we’re about a third away through wirting the fifth Passionate Pantheon book, in which psycholinguistics plays a key role (the protagonist is interested in linguistics and anthropology), we thought it might be appropriate here.

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Do you need to worry about coming up with an entire new language for your fantasy or science fiction world? You can, sure, if you’re a linguist, or a conlanger, or someone else with an interest in language.

Should you do this? For the most part, your audience probably won’t care.

I think it’s good to know how the language in your setting works. Language is important. But unless you’re JRR Tolkien, who wrote his stories essentially (at least at first) as a way to give the languages he invented a context and a history, every moment you spend creating a language is a moment you, well, aren’t writing.

Now, Eunice and I are both language nerds, so we know a huge amount about the language of the City in the Passionate Pantheon novels…most of which will never appear in the novels themselves.

For example, we know the language is tonal. We know the language started as a pidgin of several pan-Asian languages thousands of years ago. We know that in the time the novel is set, there are no extant Romance or Romance-derived languages left.

Eunice invented a brilliant writing system for the language fo the City. It’s both phonetic and ideographic; the language has thousands of written symbols, each of which represents a word, and each of which also represents a sound. Since the number of ideographs is far larger than the number of phonemes, each spoken sound can be represented by one of hundreds of different ideographs.

So a piece of text can be read two ways: phonetically or ideographically, with the ideographs that are used to spell each word informing the meaning of the word.

That means you can write a piece of text ideographically, like Chinese. Or you can also write it phonetically, with any given word spelled in literally hundreds or thousands of different ways.

Eunice also invented a completely brilliant, breathtakingly beautiful system for teaching children to read and write: “story wheels.” These are short fables or parables, written phonetically in circles with each line of the fable written like the spokes of a wheel. Children play a game where they change the meaning of the story by changing the characters that spell each phonetic word, so the phonetic words retain the same meaning and pronunciation but the context changes.

Some information about the language does appear in the books, where it’s relevant. For example, the protagonist in the fifth book is fascinated by language, history, and anthropology, and that’s part of the book’s plot. (In one scene, she gets distracted on her way to a sex party by a conversation on anthropology, because who among us hasn’t had that experience, amirite?)

There’s a scene in the book where she plays a game with her childhood drone on the evening before she takes her first adult name, and loses her drone forever:

The drone accompanied her to her room, where it hovered silently as if it didn’t know what to say. She sat on the edge of the bed with her knees drawn up to her chest. At last it said, “Would you like to go to sleep?”

“No,” she said. “After tomorrow, I’ll still be able to see my parents, but I will never see you again. I would like to spend a last few moments with you.”

The drone bobbed up and down in a nod. “What would you like to do, little mouse?”

“I want—” She stopped herself from saying I want things to be different. I want this not to be the end. The unspoken words hung heavy between them. “I want to spend time with you.”

On an unseen signal from the drone, the lights dimmed. The projector in the drone’s nose glowed. A circle floated in the air in front of it, divided into sectors by glowing green lines, every sector filled with graceful calligraphy. She leaned forward. “I haven’t seen this one before.”

“It’s a new story I’ve been working on,” the drone said “I call it The Stars that Sang.”

“Were you thinking of me when you wrote it?”

“Yes.” The drone dipped. “Do you want to play?”

“Yes!” She studied the wheel for a while, reading the flowing script over and over. “Okay. Fourth line, change the spelling of ‘space’ from ‘vast lonely deep despair’ to…um…” She frowned in thought. “‘Open heavenly wide distant.’”

“Mm, interesting,” the drone said. The floating wheel changed, the calligraphic characters rippling into new shapes. “I’m surprised you didn’t start with line two, ‘night.’”

She shook her head. “Too obvious.”

“Okay, now you’ve changed the sentiment of the opening, where do you go from here? You’ve taken away the emotional contrast between the opening and the closing.”

“Hang on, I’m not done yet!” She stuck her tongue out at the drone. “Line seven. Change the spelling of ‘silent’ from ‘calm peaceful waiting sunset together’ to ‘heart hangs awkward tense breathless.’”

The glyphs changed. The drone tilted sideways, considering the new story. “You’ve left the story the same but changed the meaning entirely.”

She rubbed her hands together. “I’m just getting started. Eighth quadrant. What if we change the spelling of ‘music’ from ‘sweet light joyous exultation soaring’ to ‘sweet sorrow regret past haunting’?”

They stayed up until well into the night, writing and rewriting the drone’s story, until by the time her eyes grew heavy it had changed in meaning many times even though the words remained essentially the same. Eventually, she crawled beneath the covers, still fully dressed. The drone pulled the covers over her with a set of long, jointed manipulators that unfolded from its body. “Sweet dreams, little mouse,” it said.

“It still sucks,” she said.

“I know.”

But as for actually making the language? To the extent someone might speak or write it? Oh hell no. Only one tiny fragment of the language exists:

She stared at the night sky for a while, watching the stars twinkle beyond the shield. The larger moon glowed through wispy clouds just above the wall. After a time, she said, “Will you sing me a song?”

“Of course. What would you like to hear?”

“Sing me the song about the mouse in the moonlight.”

The drone floated higher. “As you wish.” Its voice changed, softening, becoming deeper as it sang.

Lahr Airiîthnē, na elerē, hauieira so vanawya elle
Lahr Airiîthnē, ye olowē, ramatriyá allanyo té hwell
Fandirhî håo on kyio noyinniara
Ran Apla, ye Apla, in méie jhonaíra
Lahr Airiîthnē, na elerē, vanasaya etra tun nos esserentiália

She closed her eyes as the song unfolded, pretending for just a moment that her naming ceremony was still off in some distant future, with endless days of play still stretching out before her. As the drone sang, she pictured the story wheel behind her eyes, the lines of the story arranged like spokes, each line both a word and a sentence.

The drone’s voice faded away at the end of the song. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “It’s not right,” she said.

“Right does not mean painless. This is necessary,” the drone said. “The little mouse has grown into a strong, beautiful person. I came to you to help guide you to this place. Now your path is entirely up to you. It’s time for you to step into yourself.”

We know enough about what the language sounds like, and the rules that are used to put words together, to do that much, but no way in hell are we ever going to create a whole language!