Tentatively scheduled for the August issue of Paranoia Magazine is an article I wrote on the conspiracy surrounding Edgar Allan Poe's death. As the editors, Al Hidel and Joan d'Arc have been kind enough to accept my article I feel I can return the favor by linking them here:
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/
I recently ditched cable television for satellite for various reasons unimportant here, but during the transition, for a brief period, I had both. Being by nature experimental and curious I decided to fiddle around with the two systems, and hooked my satellite up to the cable box, then fed the results directly into my television. At first nothing happened, so I switched around channels, played with the settings of the television, and finally reinstalled my old UHF antennae. I was rewarded with a news station, CN3.
I had seen CNN before, and MSNBC, and even the (ugh) Fox News, but CN3 was new to me, even as it felt vaguely familiar. The news was ordinary enough, but I didn’t recognize the newscasters or the various public figures being mentioned. Suddenly, with a rush of familiarity, I saw the President of the United States, a black man, President Palmer.
At first I became convinced that I had tapped into some weird reality show based on Keiffer Sutherland’s 24. On that show Keiffer plays Jack Bauer, a counter-terrorism agent who worked for a black president named David Palmer. The president I saw on my irregularly configured television wasn’t that President Palmer, but his brother, Wayne Palmer, who, as far as I know, isn’t the President in current 24 continuity, so I think my glimpse into what I can only assume to be an alternate reality, is in someway ahead of the television shows we’re watching here.
I left the CN3 on for quite a while, afraid to mess with the delicate tunings that allowed me this glimpse into another reality, but eventually, bored with the simple news and opinion programs of an Earth that wasn’t my own, I tentatively switched channels, knowing that I may never again stumble onto such a thing again. Instead, I hit pay dirt.
It was Friday night, just before midnight, and I had tuned into NBS, and the show I was watching was Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Not the drama from NBC about a fictional Saturday Night Live-like television show starring Matthew Perry, but the actual late night sketch comedy show starring Tom Jeter, Harriet Hayes and Simon Stiles. My favorite sketch was “Peripheral Vision Man.”
What followed after that was a marathon 48-hour session of channel surfing through alternate realities. I caught sight of things both extraordinary and mundane: UBS, yet another network, with its litany of odd yet similar news and cop shows; an entire network devoted to animated pornography, done in The Simpsons style called The Top Hat Channel; The Omnicom Corporation’s show Truman II, detailing the life of a man who didn’t know he was the star of a television show; Network 23, which seemed to be broadcasting news and entertainment from a dystopian version of our own world and hosted by Max Headroom; a scary show in which men were hunted for sport on a network called ICS.
On WHHZ, channel 9, I caught an all muppet television channel, all the news, all the shows, all the commercials were performed by muppets. There are few things more disturbing than muppet on muppet crime.
Kid reporter Billy Batson reported the news of a supercrime being perpetrated by Dr. Sivana in Fawcet City on KWHZ. And on Cable 54 I was temporarily hypnotized into believing that the alien creatures who live among us are actually human.
IBC, two of them, both running yet more horrible network shows. Global News Network, covering the events of the Christian Rapture that occurred on their world, while over on KGEB they were covering yet another Martian Invasion of that world. BBC 12 was covering the artifact found on the moon and the recent voyage to Jupiter by astronaut David Bowman.
In short, I was allowed a glimpse of what television would be like on other worlds. It should have been an amazing and eye-opening experience, but it was similar to the first time I found myself in England watching British television. Over here, my exposure to British television had always been the best stuff, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Doctor Who and Fawlty Towers. Over there, I learned that British television, like are own, is 99% crap, and the reason we saw the best stuff in the United States was because it was the best stuff.
My view of television from other worlds was filled with shows both extraordinary and mundane, but in the end, it was still just television, and when the cable company finally cut off the signal and the unique arrangement of satellite, UHF and cable that allowed me a glimpse into these other worlds ended, I had still wasted two days of my life watching television.
In terms of Marvel Comics, an alternate reality is formed when a momentous event, in which two outcomes are possible, occurs, and both events happen, causing the time stream to split into two realities. Imagine JFK not killed that fateful day in Dallas, what would our history be like? Marvel did a long running series on this concept, called What If…? Marvel concentrates on such subjects as “What if Spider-Man had joined the Fantastic Four?” or “What if Phoenix hadn’t died?”
In the context of what I call literary archeology, we run into alternate realities all the time. For instance, if I watch a movie, such as Time After Time in which Jack the Ripper steals H.G. Wells’ time machine and escapes into the future, how do I reconcile that with the comic From Hell, by Alan Moore, in which Jack the Ripper is a very different person who succumbs to a stroke? I could get very fancy, and come up with all sorts of justifications that torture the stories into a form amenable to reconciliation, or I could just assume that the two stories occur in alternate realities or timelines.
What I’m going to try to do here is pinpoint an exact moment in time when a momentous occurrence spawned two equally valid timelines, both of which we are capable of experiencing in literature. The universe in question is Neverland, the realm of Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, of Captain Hook and Wendy.
Since the story Peter Pan has charmed millions world wide, and is well known, I will give the briefest of synopsis here. Suffice it to say that Wendy and her brothers are taken by the mysterious Peter Pan, a flying boy who will never grow up, to Neverland, a fairy realm of Pirates and American Indians, Fairies and Mermaids. Peter’s arch nemesis is Captain Hook, a pirate who lost his hand to a ferocious crocodile years before.
Since J.M. Barrie’s story was printed there have been many attempts at sequels and prequels, all attempting to be part of the larger Peter Pan continuity. One branch of prequeling and sequeling takes as it’s major starting point not so much the book and play by Barrie, but the movie by Disney. This branch of sequels has introduced some weird and unusual crossovers.
This Captain Hook, when defeated by Peter Pan, apparently survives the crocodile, and becomes a semi regular character in the Scrooge McDuck universe, a nemesis of Moby Duck who appeared in dozens of comics. That Hook’s ship is capable of sailing from Earth to Neverland and to otherworlds such as Duck World is strongly hinted at in this series. This same universe crossing power allows Captain Hook to pilot his ship into the Kingdom Hearts video game universe. This is not to say that the Disney Hook doesn’t still menace Peter, in Return to Neverland (2002) he does just that. But along the way he becomes a caricature of himself, appearing as a stock villain in shows such as House of Mouse.
The Disney Peter Pan universe also incorporates the Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson prequels, Peter and the Starcatchers and Peter and the Shadow Thieves, because these books are part of the Disney Books imprints. But these books contain little that can be contradicted in the non-Disney Peter Pan universe, so they can be thought of as occuring before the split in the timeline.
More recently Disney has released a series of books about the fairies of Neverland, centering on Tinker Bell and her friends called Disney Fairies. All this is part of the Disney universe. again though the split in the timeline would have little impact on the fairy culture of Neverland, so these books, with small ommissions, can easily be incorporated into any Peter Pan continuity.
The other major timeline was continued from the original play and book by the recent “authorized” sequel Peter Pan in Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean. I don’t want to give too much away, but Captain Hook has an entirely different fate in this book. Because this sequel relies on the book and not the Disney film, it frees the characters from the onus of being related in some way to the Disney Universe, and allows the inclusion of other works that might be considered prequels and sequels to Peter Pan that Disney might considered too violent , too adult, or not marketable enough. Let's face it, Disney has chosen to explore the world of Tinker Bell for it's commercial value, not for whatever insight may be gained from understanding fairy cultures.
J.V. Hart (who wrote the terrible film Hook, a sequel to Peter Pan) wrote one such prequel, Capt. Hook, which details Hooks days at Eton College, sort of an origin story for the captain. The interesting thing about prequels is that we can assume that at least some of the events are common to both universes, Captain Hook becomes Captain Hook the same way in both the Disney and the non-Disney Peter Pan universes.
The non-Disney universe can utilize events from Peter Pan and the Pirates, a well-regarded Fox Kids television series for which Tim Curry won an Emmy as Captain Hook. The non-Disney Peter Pan continuity can use any number of sequels, authorized or not, up to and including Alan Moore’s pornographic graphic novel Lost Girls.
So I promised to find a moment in time where the two universes diverge, and I think I’ve found it. The key difference between the Disney Captain Hook and the non-Disney Captain Hook is that the Disney Hook has a hook for his left hand, the non-Disney Hook has a hook for his right hand.
I maintain that Hook is originally left-handed. Imagine the battle against the crocodile, in which Hook is defending himself, and loses his right hand to the croc. He is now a left-handed swordsman, and strides forth to fight Peter Pan in the book. In another universe Captain Hook loses his left hand, and this right-handed Captain Hook is featured in the Disney movie. If a person loses his favored hand, it can take months or even years to learn to effectively use the non-favored hand. The Disney Hook would therefore be less confident of his sword fighting abilities, more cowardly in disposition, and more keen on trickery than the non-Disney Hook, who lost his non-favored hand, retained his swordsman virtuosity and added to his fearsome armament a razor sharp hook for a right hand. This Hook would be the brave, scary and formidable opponent of the original book and other non-Disney spin-offs.
The Disney Hook maintains an important ability, the ability to pilot his ship to other universes (such as the Scrooge McDuck Universe or the Kingdom Hearts universe.) This Hook might some day crash through the barrier that separates the timelines and somehow meet his left handed self. He will face a harsher, more confident version of himself. If they were to somehow come to blows, I have no doubt the non-Disney Hook would utterly destroy his weaker, mirror twin, the Disney Hook. If they teamed up though, they might well be unstoppable.
I've been thinking a lot about Edgar Allen Poe recently, not his writing per se, or even his life as such. Due to a weird coincidence I've read two mystery novels released in the last three months both of which treat the historical character of Poe as a character in the story.
Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow was the
first I read, and though Poe is dead at the beginning of the tale, it's
the investigation into his murder that propels the plot along. As
the main character investigates the crime he realizes that his skills
are not up to the task, and so he begins a search for the historical
model of Poe's detective character Dupin, finding not one but two
models for the character, who then compete to solve the murder.
The second novel I read is Louis Bayard's Pale Blue Eye, which I'll grant being an ever so slightly superior novel by dint of the last ninety pages, which manage to throw everything you've read up to that point into question, leaving the reader almost dizzy as the author answers all the questions you didn't think to ask, and wraps up every plot point as perfectly as you can imagine. In this novel Poe is a young cadet at West Point, and he teams up with a detective who we are to surmise, may be the model for his character Dupin. I read a review a while back about both these books, and the reviewer said something I totally agree with. The wonder is not that two mystery novels would come out utilizing elements from Poe's life as their basis, but that they would both be so excellent.
Well, this got me thinking about Poe as a character, and I remembered the children's author Avi did a book, The Man Who Was Poe, in which Poe is enlisted by a young man to investigate a murder. Suddenly, Edgar Allen Poe is shaping into an amateur detective, a 19th century Angela Lansbury. And as the father of the modern detective novel (Dupin is the literary basis of most all detectives to follow, even Sherlock Holmes himself admits this) this makes sense, in weird, literary way.
But wait, I read a lot, and I remembered another novel that featured Poe as Detective, and after a little research, I found out that there were four. At least. Harold Schechter is a well known true crime writer, who has wwritten extensively on serial killers and spree killers and the like. It turns out he's written a series known as the Edgar Allen Poe Mysteries. The Hum Bug, Nevermore, The Mask of the Red Death, and most recently, The Tell-Tale Corpse. In Nevermore Poe is teamed up with Davy Crockett, the famous frontiersman and congressman, to solve a series of grisly murders. Suddenly, Poe is a very busy sleuth indeed.
If Poe is the father of modern detective fiction then a case can be made for Poe as father of science fiction as well. If he could have adventures as detective could he not also have adventures as a science fictional hero? It turns out he can. In a recent episode of The Venture Brothers, a cartoon series on the late night Adult Swim area of the Cartoon Network, Edgar Allen Poe is drawn into a ludicris time travel adventure involving mummies and Caligula. At one point Dean Venture wonders if the stress of these adventures might not make Poe crazy.
Then I find out about Rudy Rucker's The Hollow Earth. I haven't read it yet, it's to be reprinted by Monkey Brain books soon though. In this book Poe teams up with a young boy, a dog and a freed black slave to journey to Antarctica and into the hollow earth, following the path laid out in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and later evolved by HP Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness.
Other snippets of info rise in my thoughts. In the Illuminati Trilogy it is mentioned that writers of weird tales, Poe, Bierce, Lovecraft etc. seem to die early or mysteriously. A sinister plot is alluded to. Poe's stories are adapted into other piece's of weird fiction, Erik, the "Phantom of the Opera" uses The Mask of the Red Death as a theme during one of his rare public appearances.
So what does this all add up to? It adds up to me looking for more information on Edgar Allen Poe, writer, detective, adventurer, and time traveller. This new Poe, discovered in works of "fiction" is much more interesting than the one commonly depicted in his biographies. When a real person enters the realm of fiction with such force, it changes the way we look at both history, fiction and legend.
Today is L. Frank Baum's birthday. If he were alive he'd be 150. The creator of The Wizard of Oz, Baum is arguably the biggest influence on my writing life, not only in what he wrote, but in how he went about it. During his life he was, and did, many things: artist, business man, family man, rich man, and poor man. He was never afraid to experiment with what life offered, and never afraid of failure. He looked to a future of better things, and believed in little things like equality, art, and children.
There are worse role models.
Check out this great Jack Chick parody tract over at the blog "Rockstar Ramblings." I loved it so much I couldn't help writing a little comment about it. I love those old Jack Chick christian comics, and have quite a collection of them.
"...the Translation of Homer, published by George Chapman in the reigns of Q. Elizabeth and K. James, is one of the greatest treasures the English language has to boast." -William Godwin
It took me some time to get my hands on this translation of the Batrachomyomachia, but it was well worth the effort. Though the translation lacks the charm of some of the later translations (which translate the humorous names of the Frog and Mouse combatants in such a way as to preserve the humor) it is never the less a terrific effort and possibly the first one to appear in English.
Read George Chapman's Batrachomyomachia (1624)
As an added attraction, the copy I borrowed from the library contained a reproduction of an engraving by William Pass, which contains the earliest illustration from the story I have ever seen.
In the course of researching one of my obsessions, the Batrachomyomachia, an ancient Greek manuscript formerly attributed to Homer but actually of unknown provenance, I stumbled across this facinating adaptation of the story by George Martin and illustrated by Fred Gwynne. The same Fred Gwynne who played Herman Munster in The Munsters and the judge in My Cousin Vinnie.
The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice
Fictional Reality/Real Fiction
Steve Ahlquist 9/30/2004
A text can be anything; writing, movie, comic, news report, web column or anything else that tells us a story. Whenever we approach a text we do so with the intent of discerning whether the story told by the text is true or not. This is true even when we approach a text we know to be fictional. We are searching for inherent truths, and a sense of verisimilitude. The truth value, or historical validity, of a text is often thought to be a binary proposition. It’s either “true” or it isn’t. By “true” we mean either it fits into what we consider the historical consensus, or it does not. I would argue that this point of view is overly simplistic and unhelpful.
The historical consensus is our timeline, and it contains all the things that have ever happened since time began. As a species, we use tools such as science and history to piece together our understanding of the timeline, and in so doing we hope to reach a consensus. For instance, and using examples only from the history of the United States, Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon; Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Boothe; and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. These are three facts, widely accepted as true, and they have all become part of our consensual history.
Historians have several methods for figuring out what is probably true about history, and what is probably not. Belief in the claims of history, as in science, are always conditional, as newly discovered facts can possibly alter our understanding of the past. In each of the cases above there are many clues upon which to base each claim. There are, depending on when the event took place, newspapers, diaries, birth and death certificates, photographs, videos, archeological evidence and artifacts. Each of these clues point to the fact of an event happening. When enough clues point towards the historicity of an event, historians become more or less convinced of the event’s reality. The event is considered to have happened, and the claim that the event happened is considered to be conditionally “true.”
When historians search far back in time, they often have less and less sources upon which to rely. For a long time Homer’s epics the Iliad and the Odyssey were the only historical sources upon which the truth of the Trojan War could be judged. It was thought by many modern scholars that Homer’s stories were simply in the vein of Hesiod, who told elaborate tales of the Greek Gods and their ceaseless interference in the lives of men. When the ruins of the actual Troy were found, we had a second, archeological clue as to the existence of Troy, (as well as the fact that Homer was the basis by which Troy was ultimately discovered, lending greater credence to his texts.) It was through this kind of corroboration that Troy emerged from myth and entered history.
Historians are also storytellers, and part of the reason they do the work they do is to teach us; not only about our past, but about how our past shaped us today. In that sense historians are no different from other dramatists, save that they claim that their stories are true, part of a verifiable, historical consensus, and not just “made up.” Creators of fictional texts use their stories to teach us about ourselves in much the same way as historians, though their techniques can obviously vary. Some of these writers do as much or even more research than a historian to ground their narrative in reality, trying to give their fiction more verisimilitude. Usually, if done well enough, the only way a casual reader can tell the difference between history and historical fiction is because most fiction has a wealth of detail unavailable to historians, and because fiction usually has a structure that makes the story flow and come to some sort of satisfying conclusion.
Many historians will employ fiction as a device to better tell their story. You may read the text of a conversation in a historical narrative. Such a conversation may be unheard and unreported by any witnesses, but you can be confident that such a conversation did take place, not with the exact words utilized by the historian, but close enough in spirit to be “true” in the sense that it imparts only knowledge that would further your understanding of the events described. This fictional conversation can therefore be considered a kind of non-fiction. Many documentary filmmakers use reenactments, and though we know that there is no film of Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence, we have no reason to doubt that the film we are watching is depicting the event very much as it would have looked. Entertainments and historical reenactments have long informed and entertained audiences. Shakespeare’s plays are divided into Comedies, Tragedies, and Histories. His Histories, such as Richard III or the “Henry” plays are written with a definite bias. They are not history in the sense that they are historically accurate from our point of view, they are history as it needed to be told given the politics of Elizabethan England.
Which brings us to another point. Both novelists and historians (actually all creators of text), are liable at times to stray from the historical record. Sometimes it’s simply via omission. Did Ghengis Khan have six toes? Was Hitler a vegetarian? Does it matter, if we are talking about their military strategies? Does it matter if we are talking about their family life? It is impossible to give every single fact of a situation. Suppose that during the Cuban Missile Crisis JFK was momentarily distracted by a mosquito bite. Does anybody know this? As it happens, I just made it up. Did it somehow affect his decisions that fateful day? Does it matter? Our knowledge of the timeline is always incomplete, and errors of omission are unavoidable.
Other times the strict historical timeline is strayed from because we are attempting to understand motives. Why did Napoleon invade Russia, knowing as he did that such an invasion was doomed to fail? Was it Hubris? Syphilis? Stupidity? When creators of text attempt to describe what characters are thinking, or their motivations for certain actions, they try to understand these by drawing upon as much information as possible regarding a characters actions, speech and other evidence, and then try to divine motives and thought processes from these. It’s an imperfect process and many historical controversies are argued passionately by two equally informed experts debating the value, merit and meaning of all the available historical clues. Our knowledge of the timeline is dependent upon evidence, and informed by our inferences and deductions.
Another aspect of historical validity often taken for granted is what I might call our threshold of belief. A story about George Washington’s flying horse is dismissed out of hand as ridiculous, or at the very least highly fictionalized and definitely not part of our consensus historical record. But many people believe in things that are just as fantastic. Many people believe that Jesus could walk on water, or Moses that parted the Red Sea. Despite the fact that the only source for these kinds of claims is an ancient collection of texts of questionable provenance, these claims are taken as, well, gospel. Many of the people who wholeheartedly and unquestionably believe in Noah’s Ark will deride ancient and modern religions filled with figures like Valkeries and Ganesh.
This religiously biased historicity isn’t the only fantastic thing people are willing to believe. Today people believe in the powers of John Edwards to speak to the dead, UFOs, Big Foot, and guardian angels, just to mention a few. There are people who believe that people can be judged by the color of their skin, that the Jews control a global banking system, and that the United States is the Great Satan. Some people deny that Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, and still others deny the fact of the holocaust. Clearly, for these people, history is a different kind of exercise. Our understanding of the consensus timeline must perforce contain only those claims provable through science and reason, not faith and belief.
So it becomes clear that not all historical claims are equally valid, and that as a historian (or novelist, or any creator of text that purports to be in some way “true”) it is important to have some sort of skeptical take on these types of fringe issues and conspiracy theories. That isn’t to say that there isn’t possibly some truth to some of these claims, but these claims, until proven true scientifically and historically, must be regarded as outside the mainstream historical consensus reality. They are simply not part of our timeline.
It starts to become clear then that in talking about what constitutes a historical text, I’ve begun sketching out the qualities of a consensus meta-text. From the point of view of a literary archeologist then, I have begun to define the “timeline.” The timeline is the ordered list of all things that have actually been proven to have happened in history. The timeline is different from reality in that:
a. It is a hypothetical construct. No one could actually compose a perfect, all inclusive document encompassing everything ever proved to have happened in history.
b. The timeline cannot contain any reality that no one knows of or can’t prove. It can’t tell us the names of every person killed in the city of Pompeii, and apparently it can’t tell us with absolute certainty who killed JFK.
The timeline is inherently a fiction, but one that cleaves itself as closely to reality as our minds and science can take us. It is what I call Fictional Reality, Level One. Most well-researched historical books are contained within this level. It is a meta-text because all researchers who purport to do history contribute to it. Their texts become pieces of a greater textual tapestry. When we think of history, we seldom think of reality, we instead rely on this construct, an ultimately useful but inherently flawed and somewhat accurate fiction.
Fictional Reality, Level Two is but one step away, memegraphically speaking. A creator of texts may step into the gaps of history, and construct a story that in no way violates the timeline. Such a story would in every detail weave itself into the timeline as though the author had first hand knowledge of all the events. There is no way to prove the events didn’t happen, save for the author’s acknowledgement that they made it all up. There are thousands upon thousands of such texts. Examples may include The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone and The Little House on the Prairie. These stories fit neatly into the timeline, filling in some of the gaps in the historical record.
Fictional Reality, Level Three is another step. In this level, we are cleaving closely to the timeline, and in fact we are not violating the timeline in any major way, but many of the characters and events have been fictionalized. Think of a television show, like Law and Order. The show is set in New York City, which is real. Crimes happen, as they often do in New York. The cops get involved, catch a suspect and turn him over to the District Attorney, which is what cops are supposed to do. The D.A. prosecutes the crime and if all goes well the guilty party goes to Rykers Island, a real prison. If you travel to New York, you will find cops, D.A.’s and Rykers, but you won’t find the Law and Order cops working homicide, none of the D.A.’s are real, none of the suspects are real, and none of the victims are real. You could check the non-validity of an episode of Law and Order with a couple of phone calls, or even read the disclaimer at the shows end, that says that the episode is not based on any persons living or dead. The show is “ripped from today’s headlines” and entirely believable, but it’s fiction, and not historical fiction.
This type of story does not violate the timeline it cleaves to. It bends the timeline a little, but it tries as hard as possible not to break it in a way that detracts from the believability pf the story. Some authors are so good at this type of fictional reality that the fiction they construct is often thought to be historically true. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon are two fictional constructs often thought to be part of the timeline. As far as I know, they are not. Not all creations from level three are easy to disprove, and the harder they are to disprove the closer these constructs move to level two. In general, if it cleaves itself to the timeline but isn’t true, then it’s Level Three.
Level Four is tricky. It’s similar to Level Three in that it sticks closely to the established timeline. Level four has an extra layer of unreality to it, in that the laws of science and/or the nature of the supernatural is in some way different from our own, allowing the inclusion of such things as ghosts, vampires, UFO’s, robots, time travel etc. Level Four reality accepts these types of things as real, and incorporates them into our timeline. One famous example of this is the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. A real person, Vlad Dracul comes from Transylvania to England in a plot to conquer what was, at the time, the mightiest empire on the earth. Stoker adds to history the idea that Dracula is a supernatural being, and sets the novel firmly in the real world. A more recent example is the television series The X-Files, which is set very much in the real world with (mostly) real locations.
It’s at this level that the idea of “suspension of disbelief” becomes important. If you can’t get your mind around the concepts presented at this level of fictional reality, you’ll never understand what comes next. It’s a little sad, but extreme skeptics, realists and literal minded people sometimes have trouble understanding reality at this level. One might say that these people have trouble suspending their disbelief, or that they have no sense of fun.
Sadder though, may be those at the opposite side. Many people live inside a Level Four fictional reality, believing in the day-to-day existence of Big Foot, or that they have been abducted by UFOs. I would also suggest that people who fervently believe in the literal truth of the Bible, or the Koran, are also living in a Level Four fictional reality. A lot of time and energy is expended trying to prove the existence of some aspect of fourth level fictional realities, and so far to no avail.
So far we’ve been through four levels of reality, and the one thing all these levels have in common is that they all have pretensions to being a part of our timeline and in some sense “true.” The next level of reality (Level Five) is less interested in such pretensions. At this level the timeline is still recognizable as similar to our own, but there are enough glaring differences to allow us to know that it is not our world. For instance, the popular television shows The West Wing and 24 both feature characters that are present day United States Presidents, neither of whom are mentioned in any history book. These shows have entirely fictionalized aspects of history, but the world is still our world, still based in our real world history and mores.
In 24, Jack Bauer is a fictional agent for CTU, the Counter-Terrorism Unit, a fictional arm of the government, an agency well known in the fictional world he inhabits. Jack works for President Palmer, a black man elected to the position of United States President, (which as we know, happens all the time.) In one episode an atomic bomb is detonated outside Los Angeles, in another the President is attacked with a biological weapon. Clearly, this is not our world, and it’s a world that pushes the threshold of what is possible, but it is a very possible world, not too different from our own, and recognizably familiar.
Which brings us to Level Six. This level is yet another step from the established timeline, the prime reality. In this level we get all the reality of our world, combined with all sorts of unreality from our imaginations. In this world, not too different from our own, there are vampires and super-heroes, alien invasions and ancient tales of Middle Earth. Marvel Comics (for the most part) is set in a world at this level, as is the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its companion show Angel. The stories by Robert E. Howard about Conan and the stories by H. P. Lovecraft concerning the Cthulhu Mythos all can be considered Level Six. The world as we know it is never completely changed in these stories, but fictional elements abound, and fantastic events can become commonplace.
Level Six is also the last level that can be conveniently said to be real, or based on actual events. An argument could be made, for instance, that the previously mentioned Jack Bauer is based on a real government agent, combating real domestic terrorism. Sure, an atomic bomb didn’t go off outside Los Angeles in real life, but that’s just artistic license, the writers took the reality an extra step. In reality Jack Bauer may have deactivated the bomb, or something more mundane might have happened. Level Six might have the additional implausibility of Vampires and humanoid robots, but underlying “real life” realities might explain what we are seeing.
This idea of rationalizing a text to better fit the main timeline is an old one, and it’s an idea I want to return to in a later essay. Let’s just say for now that techniques for rationalizing supernatural events into the real world were developed quickly after the development of texts. As a species we always want to suspend our disbelief, even in the face of contradictory evidence. If an event doesn’t fit our beliefs, we are quick to mold the event into something that does.
Leaving verifiable historic reality behind allows us to explore Level Seven, the level of alternate history and hard science fiction, especially science fiction that concerns the future. In alternate history a creator ponders some sort of “What If?” scenario and then moves history forward from there. What If…the south had won the American civil war? What If…Napoleon had been victorious at Waterloo? These explorations of alternate timelines leave our timeline behind completely, the world becomes different from our own, a nuclear wasteland, perhaps, or a steam-punk utopia. Some historians dabble in “What If?” type speculation, trying to bring new understandings of history through their explorations of “counterfactual history.”
Though at first blush fiction concerning the future seems to occupy a different area of meme space from fiction concerning alternate history, upon further reflection we realize that they are actually one and the same. The only difference is when we begin to depart from our established historical timeline. The alternate historian picks a point in our past, and departs from there. The futurist starts from right now, or as close to the present as possible to begin the departure. Fiction set in the far future is assumed to share a common history with our own, even in those cases where our own history is so distant as to be almost unimportant to the protagonists of the future.
Text at this level of reality include The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick, Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove, the movie Blade Runner, and possibly television series like Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Firefly. I say possibly because we’re getting into a shade of difference here. In the case of hard sci-fi or alternative history we are taking what is known, and making guesses as to what will be, or could be, or could have been. When we start talking about alien races, we are hazarding guesses far outside our ability to “predict.” No one knows what forms alien life may take, and any attempt to describe it becomes fantasy. Vulcans, Klingons, and Romulans have no basis in our timeline, in our history, or in our reality.
For that matter, many science-fiction conventions are so far removed from possibility that they at best border on or at worst are actually fantasy. Faster-than-light travel is still thought to be a physical impossibility, or at best it’s an extreme-case hypothetical possibility. Even Artificial Intelligence seems a long way off, though I admit it seems more likely than Warp Speed.
Which brings up an interesting point that I’d like to explore via an example. When Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon I want to assume that he didn’t know that firing the rocket from a large canon would kill the occupants. As time passed and more was learned about the realities of space travel, the technical aspects of the book, scientifically accurate at the time of the writing became known to be based on inaccurate assumptions. Slowly, over time, more and more of the book would theoretically fall out of Level Seven and into Level Eight, a realm of fantasy and worlds that never were and never could be.
Is such a text to be reevaluated every time something new is learned? Do texts shift position as more is learned and understood about the Level One fictional timeline? One curious way of preventing a text from shifting levels is to go back to the text and reinterpret what is there, or to add details as needed to make the text fit in with our new perceptions of reality. For instance, we might decide that the astronauts of Verne’s work had special seats that allowed them to withstand the forces of inertia. Though not much exists in the text to support such a theory, the existence of such chairs is obvious from the fact that the astronauts weren’t spattered like jelly on the back wall of the vehicle’s cockpit.
Using such continuity altering tools may be a slippery slope, however. The temptation to take a text not at face value, but as a piece to be shaped to fit in a larger mosaic of texts is too much for many people to bear. Wold-Newtonians, for example, enjoy scouring media and retrofitting what they find there to fit into their peculiar, Level Four reality. I will talk more of continuity and the tools we use to shape it in a later work. Right now, it’s time to understand Level Eight.
Level Eight is the second to last level of fictional reality. At this level all pretenses as to actual time, space and possibility are dropped. Many things are recognizable, of course, but the worlds presented are fantasy, with no relation to our timeline. A text may start with the phrase, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” but that kind of information doesn’t exactly nail down the text in time and space. Watching the humans in Star Wars run isn’t exactly like watching a historical epic. It’s a fantasy.
Fantasies at this level have their own internal logic, and though they may contain some real world touch points, they are not hampered by real world logic. Faster-than-light travel or magic may exist. Bizarre aliens or ferocious dragons may be fought or befriended. Texts at this level may also be similar to Level Seven stories in that they talk of alternate histories or science fictional futures, but many of the elements conjured into the tales have no basis in reality. Since we have no clues as to how aliens might look, we are completely leaving reality behind, and making it up. This applies to the aliens of Poul Anderson’s classic novel The High Crusade as well as the aliens of Star Trek.
The last level of fictional reality, Level Nine, is most baffling, but merely the next logical step on our journey. At this level the logic of the universe violates not only real world logic and all the conventions of all the levels, but is also free to violate it’s own internal logic. Hence, in The Simpsons it is possible for the city of Springfield, a city established to be in the United States of America, to be proven, over the course of the show’s episodes, to not be in any of the nation’s fifty states.
Sometimes continuity is followed, as in the cases of Millhouse’s parent’s divorce, Apu’s marriage and children, or the death of Maude Flanders. Other times the continuity of the series is deliberately violated, and as Matt Groening made clear at the 2004 San Diego Comic-Con this continuity violation is done to both tweak observant viewers and for humorous effect.
Many cartoons flaunt reality in this way. The Cartoon Network has created Adult Swim, late night programming that is nothing but incongruous, non-continuity-driven shows, like Aqua-Teen Hunger Force, Sea Lab 2021 and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. Level Nine shows are both the easiest and the hardest shows to understand. In one sense the make no claim on you other than to simply entertain, but in another way the shows set out to deliberately baffle your sense of continuity.
Beyond Level Nine it’s hard to imagine what could be left. I can hypothesize a Level Ten, but such a text would, by definition, be completely incomprehensible, and perhaps in some fashion be unrecognizable as text. Perhaps a nonsense poem, or some piece of found art might qualify. There is a magazine, called Found, that simply reproduces bits of writing and printing discarded and then discovered. The objects exist strangely detached from the timeline, inviting us to fill in the reasons for the objects existence. These objects are detached as they are, become the noise in the signal, the sand in the bathing suit. It is independent, iconoclastic and unfathomable.
But I may be going too far here. We are at Level Ten, by definition incomprehensible. Were I to comprehend it, define it better, then I would be introducing by default the next level, Level Eleven, which by definition would be truly incomprehensible. I will leave it for now at ten, ten levels of reality that demark all of fiction and non-fiction, in fact all text.
I invite commentary and criticism. Indeed, I would hope that this paper will be torn apart and argued and defended and re-imagined in a more thorough form. I invite suggestions of texts that may or may not fit into my levels. And I present this idea as a tool, a means by which to judge texts. I’ve hinted herein that literary archeologists might be able to use this tool as a way of figuring out just how radically a text must be altered to fit into a new meta-text, such as Wold-Newtonry. I also think the scale could be used for judging the strength and relativism of cross-continuity cross-overs.
Just a thought.
Here's a link to an Inter/Review Chris Reilly and I did for the Pulse with Brian Sendlebach. The concept of the Inter/Review is that Chris and I would review a comic, then insert questions throughout, that the comics creator could then answer. The comic creator could also feel free to comment on our comments, creating a dynamic, fun review/interview. Unfortunately, Chris and I couldn't manage it for long.
