Author Q & A

True Fiction & the Philosophy
of the Future:

Conversations with the Author

Q: What life experience inspired these books?

>| Other people’s lives and experiences played a greater role than my own. I think the most overrated maxim we've gotten from philosophy is “Know Thyself.” To my mind I am the least interesting person in the universe, and what I know about me is already TMI.

The short answer is simple: I became a bookworm, a data sponge, to learn more about how others see the world.

Q: What sort of books led you to write the OC?

>| Travelogues, my favorite fare, closely followed by philosophical and historical studies, and science-fiction/fantasy novels.

You know utopian literature or speculative/science fiction started out in a travelogue format? Some examples include

Euhemerus, Sacred History (4th century BC)
Iambulus, Island of the Sun (2nd century BC)
Lucian’s True Story, about a 2nd century (AD) journey to the Moon
The Medieval One Thousand and One Nights
More’s Utopia
Kepler's Somnium
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
Voltaire’s Le Micromégas, involving two aliens, a Sirian and a Saturnian, who explore our solar system before coming to Earth)
the works of Jules Verne

Even the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Hindu Ramayana (“Rama’s Journey”) are essentially travelogues interspersed with science fiction elements. To say nothing of the ancient Greek tales populated by automata, robotic servants, female androids like the Golden Maidens, mechanical warriors, and bronze giants. Classics like Jason and the Argonauts, or the works of Homer and Hesiod have set this early speculative trend. (By the way, Hesiod’s Pandora was not born but "manufactured" by the blacksmith Hephaestus.)

Q: Is reading about other people’s voyages preferable to travelling yourself?

>| I love both. My favorite activity is reading on the road. Nothing beats the joy of immersing yourself in an old travelogue while exploring lands and cultures that are off the beaten track or outright forgotten. I love meeting the fascinating people who live there and who are kind enough to gift me with their stories. The kindness of strangers always manages to restore my faith in humanity.

Travelling is what convinced me that this could still become the best of worlds. Provided that we listen to, and learn from, each other. There are so many unbelievably interesting cultures out there, and I thought it was high time to rediscover ourselves. This, in part, remains the goal of the OC, especially Book One, Masks of God. Despite the horrors of history, and the senseless cruelty of a few misguided egomaniacs, this is actually not such a bad place—if we take care of it and of ourselves.

What’s wrong with making the world fall in love with itself again?

Q: You said that this, in part, is the goal of the OC. What is the other part?

>| Preventing ourselves from screwing up. Book Two, Soul Engineer, shows what happens if, by misremembering our past, we approach the future with wrong expectations, making us mess up our present.

Darko Suvin, the eminent literary philosopher, said that science fiction “has always been wedded to a hope of finding in the unknown the ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence, or other aspect of the Supreme Good (or to a fear of and revulsion from its contrary).”

Well, how do we explore the Unknown? The only means available to us is what we call the “thought experiment.” It’s a tool common to both philosophy and science fiction.

All thought-experiments begin with the question, “What If?"

The OC represents the sum of the philosophical "What Ifs" I’ve been asking myself regarding humankind’s advancement, from its earliest states to the present, if only to gauge: what comes next? My approach is based on a new branch of philosophy devoted to an exploration of the future.

The only way to determine what comes next is by getting the past right.

As a scholar, I am forced to consider history as it is taught as largely fictitious—fiction interspersed with a modicum of facts. My goal is to recover some of the lost or forgotten morsels of truth, and to enlarge them if possible. That's why I call my genre "True Fiction”—since I'm not brazen enough to call it “truth."

The OC seeks to offer a travelogue of humanity’s development, not just historically but also intellectually, to answer questions like:

“How did we get where we are?”

"How did we come to believe what we believe?”

“Why do we have certain traditions?”

“What are the most fundamental beliefs that are shared by everyone?”

And above all:

“Who are we?" (When all is said and done?) Vs. “Who do we think we are?"

Q: Is the OC real to you? If so, how?

>| If the question is whether I consider the OC’s overall philosophical construct as factual or real, I can only repeat that I have focused on subjects that provided the most fuel for my thought experiments: life, death, the question of soul, afterlife, even reincarnation and (intellectual) immortality, forgetting vs. remembering, the preservation of Self and identity—each one of us considered both as mortal and in the Ideal—while also taking on such weighty subjects as living in Plato’s Cave . . . as in: whether our take on existence is the result of propaganda or a simulation (not the computer-driven kind). Finally, there is the question of humanity's end: Do we achieve godhood, or wind up in the dustbin of entropy? Or will we kill ourselves off before getting anywhere? Such as, for instance, reaching at least Level II on the Kardashev Scale of advanced civilizations?

Q: What topic in the OC is most important to you?

>| What fascinates me most is the question of personhood. What makes a person a person? Is it sufficient to have someone believe in their own personhood, or do the rest of us have to consent? And what about non-biological entities? Since we are on a trajectory where organic aspects of being a person are increasingly replaced with artificial ones.

What legal standings or protections would artificial persons have if/when the day comes? Would they be treated as second-class citizens, at least initially? What about the genetically enhanced? Would they be considered human or something else? More human than human? Or superhuman?

And how about clones? Who owns them? Do they belong to their originals, or to the labs that created them, or just to themselves, like the rest of us? Would they be regarded as family, in the manner of children, or more akin to siblings—like identical twins? Or are they merely things, possessions, organ banks to supply their originals with body parts?

And how will the great religions treat clones? Would people who are cloned be granted a soul by the clergy, and if not, why not?

Would artificial people—whether enhanced, replicated, cloned, simulated, or entirely digitized or virtualized—require saving, just like the rest of us, or are they our saviors in the end? Our long-anticipated messiahs? Or even our better Selves? Questions like that are what the OC series was conceived to address.

For me, as a speculative writer, the above listed possibilities are neither objects of belief nor non-belief. They represent age-old moral and ethical dilemmas—questions bordering on the existential that we have been asking ourselves in one form or another since the dawn of time. I do believe that we will be forced to answer them sooner than we think.

Q: If the world of the OC is real, would you be a First Self or a Second Self?

>| Each one of us is both, a First and Second Self. The limited, physically adjusted, part of us resides “here,” presently, for the purpose of operating a somewhat fragile human body—which is a temporary thing, hence subject to the Arrow of Time.

Accordingly, the amount of inherent knowledge available to us is quite limited. The rest we make up by accumulating useful memories. All we have to do is to undergo the kind of experiences that, in the final analysis, help us carry out our overall mission “down here.”

The other part of us—the all-knowing, all remembering, non-physical IDEAL version of us—resides in the First World, our erstwhile home. Teachings maintaining some version of a purported “duality" of our existence can be traced as far back as the earliest forms of Zoroastrianism—ca. 1,600 BC. Meaning the theology that encompasses our existential "twofoldness" was anticipated already by the oldest organized religion known to us, which in some form or another influenced all the ones that came after.

Moreover, a much older conception of duality—of the physical world versus a spiritual one—was already part and parcel of shamanistic belief and practice, including all belief systems that were based upon “animism," which postulates a "supernatural reality" beyond our natural realm. From the former emerges a universal essence or soul whose purpose is to animate, as in, “to give life" to things.

Thus, the question is not whether the two-world structure depicted in the OC is real or not. Its only purpose is to provide the reader with an intellectual [speculative] model: one that can faithfully represent a summation of humanity's original, still prevailing, “double-world” belief system or systems—no matter what we like to call them today.

Duality has been the key, from the Sumerians to the Egyptians and the Zoroastrians, followed by the Vedic people, Hinduism, etc., to the Greeks and Romans, and finally to us. All pluralism is based on dualism.

There has always been some conception of the IDEAL available to us—an IDEAL which exists somewhere else, even though people don't necessarily agree on where or when that IDEAL is to be found, i.e., in the past or the future, outside or inside the universe, etc.

It is for this reason that I excluded such divisive details from Mask of God's mythological chapter “The Tale of Two Worlds”—also because I would have had to take sides in regard to religion and belief, something I abhor doing. The purpose of the OC is to unite, not to divide. Thus, I kept within the Tale of Two Worlds largely what most people seem to agree on, in one form or another. If there are discrepancies to be found, they are only cosmetic or interpretative, such as whether we should refer to such an ideal place as the "Pearly Gates" or "Nirvana," "Heaven," or "Hyper-Ourania,” Greek for “beyond the Heavens.” (“Hyperourania" or the "Hyperouranian Chronicles" was one of the original titles of the series, but it was too much of a mouthful, and so I shortened it to the Ouranian Chronicles.)

Q: What do you most want the reader to get from the OC?

>| An understanding of what it really means to be human. For this endeavor to succeed, however, we must overcome a critical paradox: We cannot carry out a truly dialectical examination of ourselves—as in, what we are vs. what we are not—because there are no other self-aware non-human entities around for comparison. That could change if we ever make (official) contact with extraterrestrial intelligences, but until then, how could we scrutinize ourselves with alien eyes? While at the same time maintaining a deeply human comprehension of who we are? That is our dilemma.

I tried to solve this problem by creating Kayin the Ariole, the central character of the OC. To understand his role in the series I have to bring up Darko Suvin again (the SF philosopher). Suvin isolated a literary device that separates science fiction from other literary genres. He calls it a “novum”—“a strange newness”—meaning a novel or innovative element/factor pivotal to the plot. This could be time travel, aliens, psychic abilities, AI, utopian/dystopian societies, strange worlds, alternative realities, etc.

Kayin is the OC’s novum, and as such he solves the above paradox because he embodies it. Kayin is both the most alien of beings—given that his memory and identity survive the death of his body—but also the most human of humans since he has been everyone at one point or another: a member of every race, color, creed, culture, caste, social rank, sexual identity, gender, and orientation. By having his recollections span the last 13,000 years of humankind’s development—going all the way back to Göbekli Tepe, the cradle of civilization and possibly of organized religion—I have made him in effect the memory of the world.

Conceiving him in this way, as a “recollection mutant” as it were, has been a most rewarding thought experiment. I have learned so much about humankind, as well as myself, simply by getting to look through his eyes. Of course, for extremist ideologues of whatever stripe—those who trade in conflict, discord, and social grievance—Kayin is possibly the most dangerous fictional character ever invented. (Read the book to find out why.)

Rewarding also because seeing the world and our fellow citizens through Kayin’s eyes turns each one of us into the novum of our own story. Think about it: What is an individual if not the introduction of a new, indeed pivotal, element in the story of humankind—a sine qua non factor—without which the human tale would have a different ending? It is why every human being is not only precious but, indeed, irreplaceable. We are unique individuals, are we not? That’s what I have learned from Kayin.

I can already hear people protesting that “irreplaceable” claim . . . All I can say is try on the Kayin thought experiment for size. Walk a few chapters in his shoes and see whether the world begins to look a little different.

Q: Was there a defining moment when you first knew you would write the OC?

>| There were two factors, or moments, if you will. One of them was the need to write something, anything, after watching the movie Cloud Atlas—a feeling only strengthened when I re-read the book ten days later. I thought David Mitchell had gotten a lot of things right, especially the angle that reincarnation or transmigration of the soul is not necessarily a linear affair. That is to say, that the soul is not bound by temporal conventions, or the arrow of time.

Seriously: what would prevent a soul, a non-physical entity to begin with, from substantiating again, let’s say, hundreds of years in the past? Or to jump centuries into the future? Or to move up and down the time stream and choose any life to its liking? Or one in which it had some mission to carry out, or some wrong to set right?

This would have been a wonderful subject for Mitchell to expand upon, but regrettably he seemed to treat the topic rather timidly for my taste. So, as a philosopher, I felt compelled to take this thorniest issue he raised head on, and to come up with a convincing explanation of how it could work—including the mechanics behind a soul’s remembering and forgetting.

This kind of candid treatment of the subject is largely missing in belief systems that depend on transmigration, not only in Hinduism and Buddhism, let’s say, but also in Pythagoreanism, and the Gnostics, especially those who had practiced an early form of Christianity that included reincarnation. The Orphics, on the other hand, and Plato—who seems influenced by them in such matters—represent something of an exception, because they at least attempted to offer some explanation as to why an immortal entity, like the soul, is capable of having only mortal memories. In other words, of why the soul ends up forgetting everything in the afterlife—or at least the uninitiated soul.

I felt that the world had been waiting for a forthright treatment of this uncomfortable subject for more than 2,500 years. I decided to take a stab at it, also by showing that we know far more about this topic than we care (or dare?) to admit.

The other moment, and no doubt the most important one, was a personal exchange with the legendary Ray Bradbury, one of the giants of science fiction, who for reasons I could not fathom had contacted me after reading my academic book To Think Like God. To be honest I froze, mentally and intellectually, after receiving his first letter, in which he seemed to praise my work. Bradbury went on to relay a curious story about the writing of philosophical fiction. He described his personal encounter with Bertrand Russell, the pre-eminent father of analytic philosophy and the only philosopher to ever receive the Noble Prize in literature.

According to Bradbury, he was still a young man at the time—though he had begun to make himself a name as SF writer—when Russell contacted him out of the blue to invite him over for tea. Overawed, Bradbury made his way to Russell’s house, where he was greeted warmly by the venerable scholar and his wife. After a pleasant conversation, Russell let the cat out of the bag, saying he had written a philosophical science fiction story, or a book—I fail to remember which. In any case, Russell asked Bradbury to read it—from the point of view of a science fiction writer—and to give him his honest opinion about the work. Bradbury accepted, naturally, but after reading it, found himself faced with a terrible dilemma: "How do you tell a Noble Prize winner in literature that his is the worst book you’ve ever read?”

Sometime after our correspondence, Bradbury wrote a short story about the encounter, which he sent to me, of all people, to check out. He even asked me to review it. (It would eventually be published in Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars, 2005). I was frankly so scared that I wanted to decline, given that I'd been idolizing Bradbury since my youth. But he took everything with humor.

In the exchange that followed, Bradbury told me that he had never met a philosopher who could write fiction, though he had met novelists who were pretty good at tackling philosophical ideas. As he put it, the bottom line with Russell’s science fiction attempt was "too much philosophy and too little fiction." (Besides, he wasn’t impressed with the plot.)

As intimidated as I was by Bradbury’s challenge, I felt it was possible to pull it off, and I told him so. Perhaps this is why I wrote the entire series, three books, before offering it up for publication. To be the first philosopher to write a work of philosophical fiction worthy of Ray Bradbury’s standards is an insanely high bar. Very sadly, Ray died before I could send him the first draft, in the same year I began writing the OC (2012).

Q: What does the OC mean to you, personally?

>| Since I mentioned Ray Bradbury’s challenge, my most personal hope is just that he wouldn’t be disappointed with my efforts . . .

Otherwise, my wishes are simple: Most of all I sought to inform and to entertain. For all its high-minded trappings, the OC is a murder-mystery at heart. The main difference to a conventional whodunit novel is having the reader learn right away who the murderer is. The big unknown is the identity of the victim. To increase the suspense, each book recounts a different version of the crime, Rashomon style—or is it the same crime?

Q: If only one chapter of the OC could reach the public, which would it be?

>| Obviously from Book One, Masks of God, it would have to be the aforementioned "The Tale of Two Worlds." It contains the essence of everything I have gathered, after decades of studying philosophy, history, anthropology, and the great religions. The chapter attempts to provide an answer to the greatest question of all: Why did civilization suddenly start in this world when it did, as though out of nowhere, with people developing the necessary skills to live together peacefully—first in the hundreds, then in the thousands, and finally in the millions? Leading to the specialization of trades, and thus the emergence of artists, healers, builders, educators, merchants, administrators, caretakers, priests, guardians—all alongside the farmers, settlers, hunters, herders, and the like?

If we make it to the stars one day, we wouldn't have gotten there if it weren't for people learning how to get along, how to work for each other instead of for themselves, how to develop a sense of community and care for each other, how to have compassion, especially for the young, the weak, and the sick, and the desire to improve not only one’s own life but everyone else's.

In my view, this is the greatest miracle of all, the miracle that defines all of humankind, that makes us who we are, and also the best we can be. To give credit where credit is due, it is something every great religious leader has preached. Accordingly, this most critical of questions has preoccupied me throughout my life, almost to the point of obsession. It explains my deeply personal involvement with the Hopi People. It is also the reason why Sara and I founded the Institute for Comparative Ceremonial Studies, respectively, the Hyele Institute.

The “Tale of Two Worlds” encapsulates the Truth as I found it, culled and assimilated from thousands of books, numerous expeditions, and countless personal observations. It is why I wrote the “Tale” in a different style of prose, a blend of an almost biblical format and poetry, yet written simply enough to be read to a child.

As for Soul Engineer (Book Two, still forthcoming), without giving too much away, the chapter closest to my philosophical heart is “Falling Angels”—also because it recasts the Ouranian promise in a new light. Here is Kayin relaying this revelation as he heard it:

Your world is chaos, flux. Which is foreign to Us. Thus keep your origins in mind, Aoun Kayin. When you grant permanence to an event by witnessing and remembering, you are introducing a lastingness that is unknown to that realm. It comes from Us, from the First World. You are there to convey it. Why do you think we have equipped you with the rightful means to navigate the sea of possibilities, if not to solidify your surroundings sufficiently so that they can be known by Us all? The order you introduce to Unrest manifests itself as individual Nows—each an island of stability planted in flux. Yet your foreign world resists Our intrusions, washing away each Now as soon as it unfolds. For this reason, we have supplied you with the means to cheat the alien universe. Memory. The Nows it erases so promptly are nevertheless retained by you. Consider them pearls of lastingness that you are stringing together across the flux. The pearls come from us, for We reside in the Eternal Now, even if that now exists but for an instant where you are. Keep in mind, the reason your body finally succumbs to your world and dies is due to the latter’s unrelenting assault against permanence. Yet We are bringing you back just the same, time after time, without fail. No reason to despair.”

Finally, the last chapter in Brotherhood of Shadows (Book Three), “Sine Qua Non,” is the philosophical culmination of the series. It explains everything (at least for Kayin), especially why the last 13,000 years unfolded the way they did with all their ups and downs—while still landing on an up. The only quote I can offer without giving too much away is the motto of the chapter:

The history of a world must befit the Ideal if it is to lead to Us. No path can be inferior to the goal. For the Less than Ideal leads only to the Less than Ideal.

—Ouranian Maxim

The history of a world must befit the Ideal if it is to lead to Us. No path can be inferior to the goal. For the Less than Ideal leads only to the Less than Ideal. —Ouranian Maxim

Q: How would you describe the OC in one sentence?

>| —Cain, the Untold Story

—The Divine Conspiracy

—The World as a Memory Palace

—A tale to awaken our memories of a future past

—The Adventures of Zu, the Knowledge Creature

—Newsflash: The simulation we're living in is not computer based

—The genealogy of our otherworldly origins

—Dreaming is beyond time: A way to remember what you have yet to experience

—The OC reveals that in the great chain of being, we are the missing links

—An anthem for those who seek to pierce the mists of time and touch the heart of being

Q: Can you sum up the series in a few sentences?

>| Sure. Here are eleven ways in which one could summarize the OC in a few sentences:

1. What if the world is suffering from a terrible illness and humanity’s vices and excesses—war mongering, violence, poverty, slavery, and criminality—are merely the symptoms of the disease, not its causes? What if there is among us a secret group of select individuals capable of reversing what ails us? A group so secret that even its members are unaware they are part of it, and unaware of each other’s existence? The OC seeks to point to a possibly hidden truth behind such a "conspiracy of world saviors.”

2. What if Earth is a preparatory school for godhood? Based on the motto of the philosopher’s school in Harran: "He who searches for his true nature becomes god”? Have you matriculated yet? Have you enrolled?

3. Whatever happened to the Biblical Cain? Wasn’t he condemned to wander the Earth for millennia, rendered untouchable by the Mark of God, but cursed with bearing witness to humanity’s crimes? The OC provides a window into the man’s soul and offers a new take on history through his eyes.

4. The story of Kayin: a man wrongly accused of killing his brother, hounded by borrowed memories, and forced to roam the world in search of a long lost (stolen?) love, without whom he wouldn’t exist. Though he dies like other humans, his recollections do not, being restored to him life after life for reasons he regards as a curse rather than a blessing. Will he ever find his love again?

5. The Ouranian Chronicles are an experiment blending classical philosophy, history, and hard science, with religious and cultural motifs within a semi-fictional format known as True Fiction. Variations of this way of writing go back to the ancient Sumerians and are referred to nowadays as "Naru literature." The genre is known for offering a first-person account of historical events, though not actually written by those who underwent them but by subsequent authors who simply assume an autobiographical point of view. Parts of the Bible are written in this manner, as are some of Plato’s dialogues.

6. The Ouranian Chronicles offer a novel attempt to make the future visible. The work uses the temporal past, or history in general, to reveal certain formative trends and patterns which other approaches have missed. Since we cannot speed up time, nor use a time machine, the only means we can rely on are those that increase our knowledge, and not just our beliefs. Welcome to a new brand of philosophy: the Philosophy of the Future.

7. The OC is an intellectual travelogue that traces our path from the long lost Göbekli Tepe culture to a far future in the Ideal. As we witness the rise of civilization, religion, philosophy, and science, we learn to overcome our present scourge—a scourge that will eventually be known as the "Storm Age."

8. The Ouranian Chronicles propose a new role for conscience. Namely, as a kind of overseer of one’s purpose in life. For every time a person thinks they are about to escape whatever their mission might be in this world, they find themselves bound to it stronger than ever.

9. Most of us want to be righteous. While we can't really explain why, we usually feel the need to do the right thing. We all have a conscience, together with the Free Will to ignore it. The OC asks: "Is this personal North Star provided to us by design?" If the answer is yes, then who might be behind the plan, and why?

10. The OC relays a mysterious truth: universes are reality engines that are, by necessity, self-contained. However, for the generated result of the engines to gain permanence—and therefore, actual existence—its experiences must be shared . . . and remembered.

11. As the OC tries to show, without recourse to our personal recollections, we have no way of sustaining our identity, much less of preserving our unique Sense of Self—and consequently, the knowledge of our exceptional purpose in life. This lesson is the most important of all: We must defend the integrity of our memories at all costs, since they are our Achilles’ heel as individuals. Without them, we couldn’t accomplish what we came here for.

Q: Do you have a final thought you'd like to close on?

>| Yes and thank you for the opportunity. What I most hope the reader will get out of the OC is a renewed sense of the fact that . . . this is a strangely beautiful planet. And that the more you look at it with strange, indeed alien eyes, the more beautiful it becomes.

The Real Life Origins of The OC

Author's LOG