Shadowmagick

The Problem of Evil explored by The A-Men dystopian cyberpunk novels

“Humans cause evil by wanting to triumph over evil in the quest for immortality”
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death.

When I discovered the writings of Ernest Becker, I knew that I had found the deep core of why I had written The A-Men trilogy (The A-Men, The A-Men Return and Forever A-Men).

In the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil is the question of how to explain evil if there exists a deity that is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Some philosophers have claimed that the existences of such a god and of evil are logically incompatible or unlikely. Some responses include the arguments that true free will cannot exist without the possibility of evil, that humans cannot understand God, that suffering is necessary for spiritual growth or evil is the consequence of a fallen world. Others contend that God is not omnibenevolent.

For D’Alessandro (and others…) pursuit of immortality, Forever A-Men is the revealing of his master plan, and of why he does evil in the name of science and progress. As the speaker at the opening of the novel says:
“Forget all that you have heard about supreme deities being omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent. You see, I can make a rock so big I can’t even lift it, but while I have the ability to do absolutely anything where I am, I can do absolutely nothing where you are. Even though I transcend the physical universe, I still work through its physical laws. I have the power to perform acts of moral goodness, to make whatever I command to be morally good, yet still evil persists.
“Still the one named Maleore persists.
“The fly in God’s ointment.
“So what is the last truth? It is this: everything that has a beginning has an end. Even me. I stand within this sacred point in space-time at which the rules of ordinary physics do not apply. It has been my life-dream to reach this place, yet when I did I achieved not singularity, but duality. And the two must become one. So unless you listen, understand and act on what I have to tell you, that time will be soon. That future will be the present. That present will be past. That past will create the future.
“Ah, the crippling humiliation of being ineffable and still having to get peasants to do my bidding.
“So don’t ignore this message. These days it’s excruciatingly difficult to get anyone even to listen to me, let alone remember or act on what I say. And no one ever, never ever writes it down.
“I am the message in the machine. I am the Amen.”

THE A-MEN AUDIOBOOK: Now Available on CDBaby and iTunes!

In addition to the dramatised version of the first novel, CDBaby and iTunes now have an audiobook version of The A-Men. With voices of: John Trevillian as The Nowhereman, Jack Luceno as D'Alessandro, Leah Frederick as Pure, Katie Dehnart as 23rdxenturyboy and Joseph Andrade as Rafaele Juarez D'Alessandro/Forevermore/XEs.

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey as applied to The A-Men trilogy

Though I did not exactly model Jack’s journey in The A-Men trilogy on Campbell’s seminal work, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, I was acutely aware that this neopunk scifi would disguise an epic-style journey of self-discovery through the eyes of a broken man and his connection with the fantastical. For example: it is not coincidence that Jack’s real world father is named Seth Campbell Malorian. Now that the trilogy is completed, I wanted to plot this classic story arc to the books to illustrate the path that The Nowhereman tarvels through the course of the three novels.

STAGE #1: Call to Adventure
Novel: The A-Men
Jack wakes with no memory (the first of several awakenings) into an alien world – and finds that he is part of a military group in a strange ship. Immediately he sets on the quest of discovering who he is.

STAGE #2: Supernatural aid
Novel: The A-Men
Behind Jack’s journey is the voice of Nathaniel Glass (D’Alessandro) who guides our protagonist by way of three almost magical devices: the faerie tale book of Forevermore, his voice over jack’s internal communication equipment (Amtech Headman) and by interacting with the electronic and virtual worlds through which Jack travels.

STAGE #3: Threshold Guardian (s)
Novel: The A-Men
The Threshold Guardian's job is to ensure the protagonist is worthy of passing the threshold, and thus they act as part of the tests the protagonist must face in the journey. Here Jack encounters Esther who acts as his conduit back into the real world and connects him with his mission. She also is the one who aids him in piecing together his life, both here and later in the book by providing the means to access his personal files and date from the Stream.

STAGE #4: Threshold (beginning of transformation)
Novel: End of The A-Men
By the end of the first novel, Jack is presented with Esther’s speech about his ability to be god and how the job of any messiah is to show that the only person able to save oneself *is* one’s self.

STAGE #5: Challenges and Temptations
Novel: The A-Men Return
The second novel is a hotbed of challenges and temptations for Jack. Being a lone resident in Dead City he is exposed to the need to survive at all costs. He is in a constant state of risk, and with the appearance in his life of Esther and Susie, is emotionally forced to change and grow.

STAGE #6: Revelation
Novel: The A-Men Return
Jack’s vulnerability on the subject of the faerie tale world of Forevermore and his quest to find the island where Death never treads, leads him to discover that it has been D’Alessandro’s desire to control the world he set out to create. Far too late, Jack discovers that, simplistically put, his focus should have been the people and not the place.

STAGE #7: Abyss: death and rebirth
Novel: End of The A-Men Return and start of Forever A-Men
The eventual descent into the darkness of the freezing ocean is a stark image of falling into life’s abyss, yet after this, Jack awakens in the land of Forevermore as the godking of Nowhereland. Now he can begin his atonement and redemption.

STAGE #8: Transformation
Novel: Forever A-Men
After this moment of death and rebirth, Jack is retrained in the new laws and lores of the faerie tale world made real. This is his travel in the Otherworld, a time when he begins to question the reality of Dead City and the earlier adventures.

STAGE #9: Atonement
Novel: Forever A-Men
Jack’s battle with the forces of both the Amen (God) and the fayking Maleore (Devil) are played out to conclusion. Jack becomes hero of his own world.

STAGE #10: Return (Gift of the Goddess)
Novel: Forever A-Men
Jack returns to the known world, while Nathaniel’s deposition, allows Esther to become the goddess of Forevermore, and the maternal replacing the paternal and all-masculine completes the balancing cycle.

Discovering the faerie tale symbology of The A-Men (II)

The fairy tale represents extremely well the inner workings of the human psyche. Erikson, in his model of the human life-cycle, suggests that the ideal human being develops through what he calls “phase-specific psychosocial crises” if he achieves the ideal goals of each phase in succession. These crises in their sequence are:

• First, basic trust

• Second, autonomy

• Third, initiative

• Fourth, industry

• Fifth, identity

Having solved these, one becomes ready for true intimacy with the other. In The A-Men, I wanted to have at the back of the story the hero's journey --- or monomyth.This term first came into use in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949) Joseph Campbell's seminal work of comparative mythology. In this publication, Campbell discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world mythologies. While speculative fiction is packed chock full with hero's journey's (especially seen in fantasy epics), I felt that in a fractured scifi future the need for identity would be even more acutely needed than now.

Readers are starting to comment about the references (some more obvious than others) of the fairy tale elements in the trilogy, and with Forever A-Men catapulting us into the pages of Jack's storybook, Forevermore, in March 2012 I thought it was good time to revisit some of these.

The Big Sleep

Many faerie tale heroes at some point fall into sleep  or are reborn. Each waking is seen as attaining a new level of awareness, maturity and understanding. In the first book, Jack literally wakes to a new life, and there are several mentions of his passing between the two worlds --- of the real and the simulation --- through the conduit of sleep.

The Sleeping Beauty is the classic link here. In original tale there were twelve good faeries and one evil one, making the 13 months into which the lunar cycle was divided. In The A-Men the number thirteen also plays a part; the thirteen kingdoms of Forevermore mirroring the thirteen macrocorporations of near-space (twelve and one controlling force, XEs – the evil queen of the storyline).

The Power of Three

In The A-Men every aspect is triple-layered. Words are repeated three times, hero's fail twice to succeed a third time, or succeed twice and then fail.... and this is a very old storytelling device. Take for example Snow White. In the sotry, the maiden goes through the escaping of three deaths:

• First death her laces are bound too tight

• Second death is the poisoned comb

• Third death is the poisoned apple.

Then, during her time in the glass coffin she is visited by three birds:

• First bird is the owl (symbolising wisdom)

• Second bird is the raven (symbolising mature consciousness)

• Third bird is the dove (symbolising love)

In this way is she reborn. But the underlying story here is that before the ‘happy’ life can begin, the evil and destructive aspects of our personality must be brought under control. This is, of course, supremely true of Jack who must learn that just by cutting out his past he cannot also cut out the bad part of himself; he must overcome it.

Who Wants To Live Forever?

Fairy tales, unlike every other form of literature, direct the child to discover his identity and calling, and also suggest what experiences are needed to develop his character further. Fairy tales intimate that a rewarding, good life is within one’s reach despite adversity – but only if one does not shy away from the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity. They also state that if one finds true adult love, the fairy story tells us, one doesn’t wish for eternal life.

At the start of the Jack is obviously a man without love --- either for himself or from those around him --- and so his dream and the dream of his character in the fairy tale book is for immortality. Only by discovering Pure and her love (instead of hankering after the 'motherly' role Esther plays for him in the first two books) can he realise that nothing is forever and that is what makes life rich.

From what these particular tales imply about man’s despair, hopes and methods of overcoming tribulations, he can discover not only a way out of his distress but also a way to find himself, as the hero of the story did. The unrealistic nature of these tales is an important device, because it makes obvious that fairy tales concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner processes taking place in an individual. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the name emphasises the role of fairies in them, because in most no faeries appear.

Darkly bred: creating The Nowhereman’s Pater Noster in The A-Men

The Pater Noster (commonly known to all as The Lord’s Prayer) is central to Christian worship. In the New Testament it appears in two forms: in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the discourse on ostentation in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Gospel of Luke which records Jesus being approached by one of his disciples with a request to teach them to pray as John taught his disciples.

I knew that I wanted to rewrite the Pater Noster for Jack, to illustrate his interpretation of the words originally translated for him by Esther from her native Tok Pisin. By the second novel, we finally get to hear the entire prayer, shuted up to the night skies from the top of the Phoenix Tower. So I had to rewrite it to encompass the Nowhereman tropes:

Pater Noster
Our father, Who art in Heaven: Hallowed be thy name!
Hey father, you up in Heaven? Hallo, hear your name…

Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven!
Your time has come. You will be undone in Hell as you are in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.
Forgive me my ways; I am darkly bred.

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.
Forgive me for being such an ass pain, and I’ll forgive you for being such a pain in the ass against us.

And lead us not into temptation and deliver us from the Evil One!
You led me to damnation. You delivered me to the evil ones.

For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory. Forever and ever: Amen.
Now I want your kingdom, your power and your glory. Forever and ever: Amen.

The A-Men: Pure's devil tattoo

I knew that I wanted Jack and Susie to get tattoos when they met and fell for each other. It seemed a perfect expression of juvenility for the young lovers. For Pure her tattoo always had to be something quite wicked, and while I was looking for different ideas I found this devil one:

From The A-Men: "And also now we have our tattoos. Kinda makes things official.
I have these angel wings on my left arm. Up on the bicep. Set around a flaming golden ring. Ring of eternity. Wings of immortality. Right from the Jack O’Nowhere tale. Ain’t that just so crispy?
She has this devil that snakes over her shoulder. It’s scaly tail curling around her left tit. The barbed end, hers. All red and white and black."

The tree uniting five elements

The tree unites all four elements, as does every plant. In addition, the fifth element of Spirit lives in all trees too. The process of communicating with these devas, faeries or nature spirits is to understand how to become sensitive to them. One theory behind the idea that there is a faerie/nature spirit realm is that there exist two parallel streams of evolution on earth: one which progresses from mineral, through plant and animal to human level; and another, which is distinct and separate which progresses from elemental, through elfin to the angelic level. The preliminary elemental level includes those beings that we have come to term gnomes and dwarves (earth elementals), undines and water-sprites (water elementals), sylphs (air elementals) and salamanders (fire elementals).

In Ireland at Newgrange, the same symbol is engraved as the triple spiral, depicting the joining of the forces of the sun (Fire) working through Earth, Water and Air to create new life.

Discovering the faerie tale symbology of The A-Men

While on the surface The A-Men reads as a tough, intense, Dystopian science fiction novel, beneath the surface lie two threads:

• Immortality (represented by the book of Forevermore)
The power of legend through story.

• Belief (represented by the power of Shadowmagick)
The power of enlightenment through faith in one’s self.

Both these topics link back to the central themes of faerie (fairy) tales, of mere mortals rising to greatness and how faith/belief triumph over all. As Jack Zipes writes in When Dreams Came True, “There are fairy tale elements in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and ... in many of William Shakespeare plays”. Here are some more of the motifs placed within the novels:

(i) After his memory wipe, the protagonist gives himself the name ‘Jack’. This harks back to many titles of tales and also sets up the central character as displaying the signs of the fool stereotype who is usually humble, simple, naïve, untainted, and believes in miracles.

(ii) The ship upon which Jack awakens is called the XSS Scheherazade, harking to the female storyteller in the One Thousand and One Nights.

(iii) The first person Jack meets is Sergeant Esther Alesha Rose. The name and imagery of the rose in faerie tales occurs in Beauty And The Beast, Snow-White and Rose-Red, and many others. The rose symbolises the symbol of love, which survives through the thorny briars, and is the motivating force of the whole tale.

(iv) D’Alessandro is the wizard in the tower, manipulating from afar. Or in the scene where The A-Men dig him from the rubble we have him as the Wizard of Oz with the other characters listening to him from behind a screen, before a great contraption – representing Dorothy, her dog, the tinman, scarecrow and cowardly lion.

(v) Pure’s link with the faerie tale world is that of the story from which she chooses her name. Lucille represents Pure Red (who will become corrupted) while she is Pure White (able to be her own saviour).

(vi) Elliott and Benjamin are the transformation animal figures; one a feral street brat, the other half man and half dog (wolf) and link in with such stories as The Musicians of Bremen and related folk tales. Their role is the same as the rude mechanicals in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Read more at: Trevillian.com

To be continued…

Understanding the energy of food

One of the main sources of nourishment comes from the food we eat. As a general rule, the more processed the food, the more artificial ingredients it contains, the less fresh it is, and the less energy it contains. Some guidance notes to developing a more healthy diet are:

- Less may be more: gaining more energy is not necessarily dependant upon increasing the range of food we eat, but more in changing what we eat. We should leave the table with room for more.

- Follow your instincts and intuition: we should let our feelings toward which foods are good for us take precidence over what others feel; everyone has different needs.

- Eat in silence: derive more benefit from food by focusing on the experience, rather than eating while doing something else.

- Breathe deeply when you eat: when you eat, be conscious of your breathing. Feel the interaction of the air you inhale with the food you eat.

- Do not underestimate the power of awareness: you can increase your energy just by keeping a conscious awareness of instinctual acts (such as eating, walking, breathing, etc.)

- Seek counsel if you feel help is needed: pay attention to your nutrition and digestive system.

Visualising life

I find it important every once in a while to review my goals and the way ahead. I have always been someone who has ever been very conscious of the path that I am treading. I see my life broken up into three stages:

• The first phase (between my birth and roughly my twenty-fifth birthday) was that of the Bard
• The second phase (twenty-six to fifty) was the way of the Shaman
• The third and last phase (fifty-one to seventy-five) is that of the Wizard

The first stage I was writing, novels, poems, songs and learning about the Celtic bards, myths, peoples and places. During my middle phase, I have taken two Native American shamanistic courses, and see the Ovates course as part of a similar teaching – that of communing and divining with the other world. I have also undertaken the building of Talliston, twenty-five years to turn an ordinary house into something extraordinary. That phase will end in five years, and then I will go travelling, and start the final phase. In a time when most of my friends spend more time looking back than they do forward, the future holds a lot of excitement for me.