The Origin of "Hemegohm’s Tendril"

This article is part of an on-going series intended to clarify and expand upon elements of the dystopian novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism and its sequel Hemegohm’s Tendril.

---

The title Hemegohm’s Tendril is an anagram. I’ve debated for years whether or not to tell anyone this—but there it is. From the expression’s first appearance in chapter 67 of the novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism, to Horim Fildsbel’s final vision in the sky above Emcast in the story "The Gulf of the Architect," little is truly established about what it is, what it wants, or why it may—or may not—exist. That is the point, however. By design, there must be something very large and mysterious hanging above the heads of every character—in both the novel and the short fiction cycle.

The Shimmerism novel and short stories have all emerged from bouts of automatic writing, usually after story elements manifested in a state of half-sleep or within a dream. Though the term "automatic writing" itself seems a bit cringe-worthy, I can’t negate the fact that a lot of what has emerged has come from a wholly subconscious source.

Simon Shadow employs the use of an artificial intelligence program during the creation of his “sacred book” (as part of the process of creating and registering his new religion; see chapter 16 of the novel). He later employs an algorithm to extract the two most frequently used words within the body of every single religious work throughout the colonized worlds: golden and shimmering, and thus generates the title of his work: “The Golden Shimmer.” The title itself is a nod to the golden mean in philosophy (Simon exists in a dystopian realm, and his writings are aimed squarely at the World Order’s excesses), as well as the golden ratio in mathematics and even the concept of the golden age—or in this case, the lack thereof.

As previously noted, the novel was published in March, 2001, and the expression “Hemegohms Tendril” (lacking the apostrophe) manifested in October of 2004. I woke up with it stuck in my head, and I immediately knew it described the Tigris spider problem in the novel. When I had the chance to update the novel in November of 2004, I decided to add the expression to Ren Pello’s dialogue in chapter 67, primarily because the idea of the Hemegohm as a hyper-dimensional species parasitic to humans was already in play, though unnamed. The expression had also begun to influence the novel’s sequel, which I subsequently abandoned (for the better) after a strange event linked to a set of Scrabble tiles, wholly inspired by Rosemary's Baby.

I had collected the expression’s tiles from the bag—hemegohmstendtril—and then I stirred the tiles around on my desk. Almost immediately, I formed the word THE. The G tile was close by, and just adjacent was the O tile. It took only a matter of seconds for me to pull together GOLDEN. The other letters were in disarray, but the two M tiles stood out. I placed them together, and all that remained were the S, H, I, E, and R tiles. You can probably do the rest. Just as I did.

I now understood this would be the title of whatever followed The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism (it turned out to be an eBook). Admittedly, there are other anagrams within the novel, all meticulously and quite consciously crafted. Yet this anagram—Hemegohm’s Tendril—came from a very mysterious place—a realm which over the subsequent eight years bestowed a fully-formed trio of stories in much the same way.

---

In the UK or Australia? Just click!

---

Literary Vacuum: 9/11 and Art

This article is part of an on-going series intended to clarify and expand upon elements of the dystopian novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism and its sequel Hemegohm’s Tendril.

---

The novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism was published on March 24th, 2001. Here's a small excerpt (from page 370):

Another cloud of fire erupted and seconds later the explosive sound reached them, thundering past. The ground trembled slightly and a secondary blast shook the city. Jakren’s mouth was hanging wide and Horim, crossing his arms, smiled thinly. Lorick became frantic, urging the Children to pray—to kneel and pray, kneel and pray.

The tallest spire, at the center of the City, collapsed spectacularly.

Wern, wiping his face, had moved next to Horim.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Fucking great,” said Horim, disgusted, his head shaking. “Just fucking great.”

Jakren heard Horim’s words but he couldn’t react. His eyes were drawn to another fiery blast. The City’s center was in flames and smaller explosions were erupting outwards. He tried to rationalize why his faith would be tested in such a way; why the City of a Thousand Faiths—his goal, his mission, his object of faith—would be taken away the moment it was won. His thoughts brought him little and he recalled his vision—an angry Didrio, a disgusted Chearkin. He thought of consulting the Analecta, to dig his failure out of it, but his eyes now watched the destruction with a morbid fascination; he found he could not move.

The City was splintered by another blast, rife with finality; Jakren’s hopes—the few that remained—dissipated in unison with its cloud of fire.

I remember thinking that the Too Soon rule would apply to 9/11 for a long time. We wouldn't be able to crack jokes about it for years, if not decades. Not that anyone would want to. But jokes are inherently creative, aren't they? They're filters. Jokes generate new perspectives on ideas or events that otherwise wouldn't naturally arise in the populace, so they do have value.

Speaking of jokes, on 9/11/01, I was out of work. In April of that year, I'd been laid off during the dot.com crash, which had hit Austin, TX pretty hard. I had only just arrived there when less than a year later I was heading back to Phoenix. That was fine, however. A stroke of luck, in a way. Before my unceremonious removal, I had discovered that the CEO of the company I worked for was a truly delusional religious fanatic, who often diverted company funds to smuggle Bibles into China. He was very concerned when news of my novel's publication came to his attention. I was brought to his office for a one-on-one, which was odd to say the least, considering I was just the graphics/Web design guy. It became pretty obvious to me that he was nuts, so I let him have it (and by that I mean I was honest and pulled no punches when it came to my views on religion). The dot.com crash was likely the perfect cover for him to press the eject button on my cube (disclosure: no 9/11 post would be complete without a conspiracy theory).

So I parachuted back to Phoenix. I found a decent apartment and got on with my life. Each morning, throughout the summer, I'd wake up, listen to some NPR, and then scour the internet for a job. On 9/11, however, NPR had changed. The tone was new, chilling—quite unlike anything I'd ever heard on the radio in my lifetime.

I couldn't afford television. Not even basic cable. So all I had was the radio. I sat in my dim apartment and listened. And I noticed something strange going on in the corner, by the door. My novel had been published in March, 2001. The initial batch was over there, stacked against the wall, but in two piles of equal height. Two small towers of books, focused on religious fanaticism in the year 2167.

The passage at the top of this post—and so many others throughout the novel—haunted me. They made it difficult to market the work, since at its heart, the novel was a satire. It was just one big long joke. A monumental reductio ad absurdum. I had broken the Too Soon rule by way of a literary causality violation.

I've always been personally opposed to religion in all its forms, but I wondered where the idea of attacking the financial center of a city had come from in my novel. Had it been the WTC bombing in 1993 that had planted the seed? That was my first interpretation. Had an unconscious thought process deconstructed that event? Secretly wondered why it had failed, thus generating the aerial attack scenario? Or was such a scenario simply a natural outgrowth of an imagined future where military hardware was freely available to protagonists and antagonists alike?

The narrative in the novel had been impacted by real-world events before. In 1993, ironically, the original ending of the novel had to be thrown out—not because of the WTC attack—but because of what happened in Waco, TX with David Koresh and his followers. Reality had run away with that ending, more or less, and I had to jettison the last third of the book (Simon Shadow and his few remaining followers had barricaded themselves within the Shimmerite Temple, surrounded by UGMC forces; a sudden attack by the Unholy Mass complicated and confused the situation, resulting in a massive firestorm). So perhaps it was fitting that I beat 9/11's religious fanatics to the punch. More or less, again. And though it may seem like less, the build-up to that moment on page 370 had been in play since the first page of the novel.

The end result, however, was that the book just wasn't good enough to find its way in a post-9/11 world. It generated no new insights. Or if it did, they remained mostly invisible. The satire was diluted and destroyed by the true reality of our world, yet I'm not sure this kind of victimization has any right to be displayed. It's Too Soon, after all. But 9/11 affected Art, and I'm not sure we even know how deeply. Regardless, the only way to truly process 9/11 is through art, and it is happening all around us. The 9/11 Memorial is such an expression. But the processing has been happening all along, since the morning of 9/12/01, in fact.

Religious fanatics attacked the twin towers of the World Trade Center, but they hit us in so many other smaller ways, too. Those two stacks of books against my wall, for instance. That evening I slowly dismantled that scene and created a small wide square of books in the corner. My little cat Inchworm jumped within the space immediately, and she played in and around the structure for months to come, chasing toy mice, as I slowly gave away copies of the work; it had become an impossible sell: "A novel about religious fanatics? Already? As if I'm in the mood for that!"

Is there a point to all of this? Probably not. The trials and tribulations of a novel lost in a literary vacuum aren't very interesting. But 9/11 was an attack on human expression on multiple levels, so rather than let these memories fade and die, I figured I'd leave them here, probably Too Soon.

One decade down.

Many more to go.

Literary Vacuum: A Tremulous Light

This article is part of an on-going series intended to clarify and expand upon elements of the dystopian novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism and its sequel Hemegohm’s Tendril.

---

The history of our species is littered with instances of colonialism. One of the earliest inspirations for The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism was the computer game M.U.L.E. by Ozark Softscape, published in 1983 for the Atari 800 personal computer. While nearly perfect in execution and tone, it was M.U.L.E.'s archetypal background theme that bestowed the game's true power. Primarily an echo of "colonization sci-fi" such as Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, and Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, the game casts you in the role of a lone colonist trying to survive the economic uncertainties of colonial existence. In a typical game of M.U.L.E., bad things happened to good colonists; good things happened to those who didn't deserve it; you might go hungry in the wake of a pest attack on your food supply, while rival colonists hoarded food and let it rot, rather than sell it to you, lest you get ahead. By the end of the game, however, players often pulled themselves together for the greater good of the colony. A strong colony became a destination for traders, where all the colonists did well (a victory); a failed colony became a lonely place, on few, if any, trade routes (a loss).

Having played M.U.L.E. countless times, colonialism often resonated in my thoughts as I grew older; it created a lens through which I looked at the world. It became a catalyst for thought and a microcosmic mirror.

On our planet, the dominant form of life is microscopic. Bacteria and viruses may not truly be aware of our civilization, but they do shape it. They have colonized our species like we might colonize a planet. They dominate our bodies. They intervene in our behaviors, just as dominant human cultures exert political, economic, and cultural control over weaker human cultures. Unlike viruses or bacteria, however, our species has mastered the art of influence, both in terms of military power and economics. Where those two forces meet, you find the choking bacteria-like bloom of religion, thriving, spreading.

In The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism, the world's most powerful governmental systems have aligned themselves into a single entity, known as the World Order. The narrative's speculative premise is that our planet will be faced with an overpopulation crisis, made worse by runaway environmental degradation. In the face of this global crisis, a new ideology emerges that legitimizes an overt form of population control; the promise is societal cohesion and protection, but the World Order is steeped in religiosity. It is essentially a values-based system, and while scientific discoveries ultimately allow humanity to colonize distant planets, the World Order's will to control remains ascendant. Humanity submits to it through a form of natural selection (i.e., dissent equals death); though the World Order's corporate spirituality is riddled with incorrect causal associations and invasive dehumanizing practices, submission becomes essential for humanity's continued existence. To do otherwise risks our end.

Shimmerism, the fictional religion, is born on the fringe of the World Order, where its ability to control begins to fray. Shimmerism renounces the patternicity of bureaucracy in favor of the noise and chaos of free thought. Shimmerism sits in diametric opposition to the World Order and its tenets, and so it isn't really a religion at all. It is only cast in such a light because of the World Order's dominance. Survival of the fittest comes to the forefront; The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism is about what happens when harboring irrational beliefs becomes a survival strategy. It paints a picture of what the world would be like if modern religions actually got what they wanted: a timid, quivering civilization steeped in weird beliefs; a societal dead-end, where cause and effect are merely opinions; essentially, a world where humanity's evolved necessity to believe nonweird things is viewed more as a religion than not.

Literary Vacuum: Jettison the Onion

This article is part of an on-going series intended to clarify and expand upon elements of the dystopian novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism and its sequel Hemegohm’s Tendril.

---

Problem: When attempting to think one's way out of the wet paper bag of religion, unless you're hopelessly devout (in which case you'll stay in the bag), any given exit will be seen as an attack on the bag itself, and thus, against anyone who is religious.

Thus, we glimpse the terrible beauty of religion. Unbelievers, surrounded by the thoughtless undead (the intellectually complacent, e.g., believers), come to realize that the very act of thinking critically about a particular religion is interpreted as a form of discrimination. Of course, this has everything to do with the weakness of religious thought, which appears to be devoid of logic and reason; its rhetorical power, however, lies in its delivery of a comforting disconnection from the true mystery of the universe. Believers subscribe to a convenient origin story that absolves them from learning; it shields them from the fear associated with an uncaring, disinterested universe. Religion nullifies the sublime fact that no one currently alive will ever have all the answers, and it tells them "You know enough. There is no need to learn anything more." And that is all religious folk really want: an answer to everything, gift-wrapped, with ribbons held aloft by soothing cherubim. And so the believer is caught in an unwavering dance, maintaining a position of diametric opposition from the unbeliever. It's an easy maneuver. Where religion is moral, critical thought is not. Where religion is divine, and thus, infallible, reason and logic are unimportant and ignored (in that order). No debate. No discussion. Religion simply doesn't handle criticism very well. It's a black and white system, with no tolerance for shades of gray.

So given this abrasive societal fabric (and minus the problematic debate on how to tell if someone can actually think critically or not, wherein unbelievers leverage something called evidence to make a point, and believers reject evidence altogether), how could anyone hope to write a science fiction novel that views religion with an adverse eye? At least not without instantly being dismissed as either pointless by those gifted with an ability to think critically (unbelievers), or condemned by those who lack such an ability (believers)?

That was the question that drove the construction of The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism. There are so many layers:

Onion Peelings

The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General at the Expense of the Particular, quoth FRATER PERDURABO, and laughed.
But those disciples nearest to him wept, seeing the Universal Sorrow.
Those next to them laughed, seeing the Universal Joke.
Below these certain disciples wept.
Then certain laughed.
Others next wept.
Others next laughed.
Next others wept.
Next others laughed.
Last came those that wept because they could not see the Joke, and those that laughed lest they should be thought not to see the Joke, and thought it safe to act like FRATER PERDURABO.
But though FRATER PERDURABO laughed openly, He also at the same time wept secretly; and in Himself He neither laughed nor wept. Nor did He mean what He said.


- The Book of Lies, Aleister Crowley

On, off. One, zero. Odd, even. Binary. And in the end, the idea that mystery trumps any expression of itself. Words are inadequate. So the problem of writing a science fiction novel that deals with the evolution of religion became even greater. Ultimately, the safety net of structure became my refuge; structure is one of the great conceits of religious thought: that all of this has happened before, and will happen again, like a vast machine, chained to repetition. We are born in one state of spiritual alignment, and must spend our lives attempting to alter it, to save or better ourselves in the hereafter.

On the largest scale, The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism has many machines - cranes, if you will - and on those cranes are hung gods, like lights in a tree. Modern readers, or perhaps literary critics who can't get enough Aristotle, view the use of a deus ex machina ("god from a machine") with suspicion, even derision. I can see why. Such a device - the sudden appearance of an unlikely character or event that resolves a bad situation - can instantly dissipate the nebulous contract between reader and author, rendering the author as unreliable or untrustworthy. I have to admit, however, that a deus ex machina is great fun. And at least when writing about the foibles of religious thought, perfectly necessary and indispensable. The most important aspect of it all, however, is the machine itself. The crane. Simon Shadow, the main protagonist, moves through his tale as if fated to do so, despite his freedom. The United Galactic Marines Corps, orbiting the planet Reetar, exerts power over those below it, including Simon, literally and indirectly, accidentally and with hidden purpose. On the far side of the planet, the Children of Chearkin (a group of pious refugees suffering from an anachronistic hangover caused by their long transit to Reetar in hibernation), wander the desert, desperately seeking a fabled city of scripture. That they triumphantly reach the colony the moment it's destroyed has everything to do with the tension between fate (theological determinism) and free will.

Ultimately, The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism is about three distinct story threads unknowingly colliding; miraculous resolutions come to pass, but even greater problems manifest with gods and machines. In the end, nothing changes; lives are nothing more than programmed outcomes, and that's just how a majority of religions want it to be. Believers know what's to come; disbelievers do not. Why can't the former accept the latter? That's the question at the very heart of The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism. As far as I can tell, there's no answer, at least as long as religion plays such a monumental role in the lives of organisms on this planet. There was hope that people could laugh openly at these characters and situations, but at the same time perceive the innate sadness of it all. But like Crowley's onion, each successive layer (e.g., viewpoint) counteracts the next. Belief. Disbelief. Belief. So what do we find when we reach the core? I'm still not sure there is one. In fact, finding the center isn't important at all. The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism suggests our best option is to simply jettison the onion. Dump it in the airlock and move on as a species. As George Carlin would say: "I can dream, can't I?" And if I have to use a couple dozen deus ex machina moments to do so, that's no more (and a lot less) than religion has done for the past two thousand years.

Literary Vacuum: Religion in Science Fiction

This article is part of an on-going series intended to clarify and expand upon elements of the dystopian novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism and its sequel Hemegohm’s Tendril.

---

The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism is a complex speculation on what will constitute the religious experience in the year 2167. It extrapolates on current trends, some of which have actually come to pass ("megachurch") and posits others that hopefully will never manifest. Religion as a topic, especially in science fiction, represents a massive philosophical challenge. In my view, religion can and will take on any form over time (primarily because of its wholly human origins). Before someone takes issue with this statement, let me clarify the foundation of that stance: I accept that true divinity (whatever that may be) is beyond words. It is beyond expression. The most astute religious thinkers in our time accept that organized religion is, by definition, incomplete; the modern experience of "the divine" merely gestures toward an overarching mystery, while cementing the adherent in place with familiar concepts and visualizations (both metaphorical and physical, e.g., god-of-your-choice dashboard figurines, lenticular saints with eyes that follow the follower, the retardation of "Christian metal" as a music genre, etc).

My view is that true religious experience is something completely inward, and has nothing to do with groups, churches, or society (spirituality in group form is neither spiritual nor truly religious within the pages of The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism). In my own experience, the only thing I can liken "true divinity" to is the experience of love. And I don't mean puppy love or love at first sight or something Lennon sang about. I mean the kind of transcendent place that two people can find themselves in that generates an output that is more than the sum of its inputs. Admittedly, this is rooted in my own understanding of pair-bonding, but if you've experienced this (a marriage that really works, for instance), you'll understand. If not, don't take issue. My point here is not to debate true divinity. I felt I needed to clarify certain positions in an effort to support what comes next.

Though a satire, The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism deals with the following ideas: the clash of evolved (or derived) philosophies; the future potentialities - both positive and negative - of highly synthesized drugs; and ultimately, the transcendence of the limitations of human sense perception (the five senses) and the impact of what may lie “beyond.”

You can see how these topics dovetail with age-old religious concepts, both in the traditional sense, and the shamanic. The conflicts in the narrative flow from religion's use as an engine of commerce and galactic expansion in the year 2167. Religion is so infinitely splintered in the future, that it has become much like the way people in our current society get their news: from a source that solely supports their world view. Of course, being a satire, the protagonist (Simon Shadow) is clearly an anti-hero, and some horrible things happen both to him, and to those around him. No one world view can become dominant within the construct of the society in 2167. Society itself (ruled by the "World Order" in the novel) acts as the engine that allows the infinity of religious experience to begin with, and it is all rigorously controlled; it is authoritarian and very governmental. This speculation points to the evil of corporations, themselves abstract entities existing solely to maximize profits and minimize responsibility to the individual (thank you, Ambrose Bierce). In his book Why Religion Matters, religious scholar Huston Smith leveraged the idea that religion, or the religious experience, is shaped within a tunnel of "influences." Imagine one wall is occupied by the media. Imagine the other walls represent education, law, and science. As religion passes through this tunnel, it is transformed by these forces. In The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism, I speculate on the evolution of such a structure. Instead of media, law, education, and science forming the walls of the tunnel, with religion passing through, it is the individual who moves towards the light at the end, surrounded by religion, business, law, and politics (science being innate to the individual). Those four forces comprise what I have termed the "World Order" - which essentially ascends to total societal control in the face of global crisis.

Religion in science fiction is not as common as you would think. When it appears, it is often used as a broad stroke in the background, but religion as a primary theme does occur. Think of the philosophical underpinnings of Frank Herbert's Dune series, or of how religion is presented in some of Robert Heinlein's work. To really take on the topic in a singular way is rare (a good example is Walter M. Miller Jr's A Canticle for Leibowitz). This might have more to do with the fact that if not done properly, dealing with religion in a novel is tedious for the reader. Finding yourself mired in a miasma of fictional spirituality is no different that being a human alive in the 21st century, surrounded by religions of every flavor, all in direct competition with each other. Religions often lack a true connection to modern societies; and being abstractions of an ineffable experience (e.g., the experience of the divine), they exist as anachronisms. As a subject for a writer to take on, however, religion can be overwhelming. The writer inevitably asks "What do I really know about this?" (as a cosmicist, it certainly weighed heavily on me). What I came to realize was that the question itself is a very natural response to the varieties of religious experience within all societies, both modern and ancient. The awareness of a multitude of axioms, scattered like puzzle pieces on the living room floor of every society, quickly overwhelms. It can make the writer feel as if they are not truly informed - as if they do not know enough to write with authority. Writers are often told to "write what you know" - so how can anyone write with any semblance of fairness about a topic so vast, so ancient, and so wholly convoluted? In my case, though I started the novel in 1989, it was not finished until 2001. I spent a majority of that time reading books on the topic, and talking to people of different faiths (admittedly, when I encountered them naturally, in the wild).

Ultimately, my solution was to take a page from religion's play book. To deal effectively with religion in science fiction I was forced to embrace what religion does best, in the broadest sense: mystery. As you approach an experience of the divine it just seems to accelerate away from you; there are no answers. Unfortunately, by claiming, as most modern religions do, that they have all the answers, mystery itself is trumped, and thus, wholly wasted. In writing The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism, mystery had to retain its power, so I planted it within the fertile (and draconian) policies of the World Order. Religion in the year 2167 has been transformed into an incomprehensible engine of commerce. It is against this backdrop that the speculative power of science fiction can go to work; embracing mystery absolves readers from the frustration of trying to acclimate to yet another incomplete approach to the divine, and lets them focus on the story itself.

Literary Vacuum: Symbolic Anachronism

This article is part of an on-going series intended to clarify and expand upon elements of the dystopian novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism and its sequel Hemegohm’s Tendril.

---

Many of the characters in this novel are forced, out of necessity, to use a form of public communication terminal (e.g., a pay phone) to communicate, but the concept itself seems very anachronistic for the year 2167. Recently, I re-read Frederik Pohl's novel Gateway; he won some major awards for this one, and understandably so. The narrative is a juggernaut. The very premise itself is enough to push you to the next page (prospectors taking potentially one-way rides into deep space in misunderstood alien star-ships, with the promise of untold wealth should the ship manage to make it back to the Gateway artifact); but when you read this novel now, you find references to magnetic storage media; to cassette decks and "books on tape." While in 1976 this idea simply blended in, a modern reader finds it highly anachronistic. Here you have a story taking place far in Earth's future, yet you find references to decidedly "ancient" technology by 2007's standards.

The novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism is like a recursive parable. There are many symbols in play. When I first started writing, I found myself perpetually frustrated by prevailing science fiction concepts, foremost among them all, the idea of the "communicator" (think Star Trek). Back in 1989, pervasive cell phone usage was nonexistent. There wasn't even a market. Even so, in terms of constructing a story, the concept of instantaneous personal communication was having a limiting effect on dramatic tension. If the police, for instance, were merely a simple call way, the writerly hoops I was forced to jump through to create tension became unwieldy. To use an example from a different medium, I find myself cringing when a film's director is compelled to show me an extreme closeup of the protagonist's phone's "no bars" display.

So I took Simon Shadow's communicator away. I got rid of the communication satellites ringing this new planet. I put him in a wilderness, which was appropriate for the story itself. These characters, whether on the planet's surface or in orbiting battleships, are all living on a frontier. Furthermore, the planet they have left behind was one of such profound religious control (both of thought, action, and expression) that it seemed reasonable that there might also be a limiting of the individual's ability to communicate, even in a distant colony. On an overpopulated Earth, in the year 2167, life is controlled. On the periphery of human expansion, however, the symptoms of this control are still evident. People have moved beyond the solar system, but they are still citizens of Earth. They are living in a controlled variation of the society that they've left behind; such is the power of the World Order, the worldwide theocratic construct that has risen to dominate a besieged population. When Simon Shadow is taken to the desert to die at the hand's of his oppressors, he can't call for help. Public terminals used for communication litter the colony, but in the deep desert, he is alone, and the ability to communicate is out of reach. Even if he had a way to call for help, the colony police force is merely an extension of the World Order's will, intended solely to protect the business of religion.

The effect of this concept on the reader, however, is debatable. I am not sure if this hurts the narrative or improves it, or if it simply exists in a mutable, ever-changing "sphere of anachronism." The concept is powerful, however. Jumping back to films, recall the image of Mia Farrow hiding in a phone booth in Rosemary's Baby, paranoid, terrified, desperate to make contact with her doctor. The power of that scene is negated in modern society, where six-year-olds have calling plans. The onus is now on writers to craft equivalents of such tension. It is difficult, however, when the default is to show the closeup of "no bars." In The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism, an indirect form of tension is achieved by limiting the characters ability to communicate. The prevalence of public communication devices also suggests that the World Order may, in fact, be watching, even across the light years. Does it feel anachronistic? It does. But it is also symbolic, and within The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism, anachronism itself is a symbol. The suggestion is that religion, in all of its forms, when placed within the context of a modern society, is wholly anachronistic.