It takes a lot, and I mean a lot, for me to appreciate and, between us on this Forum (but I would never admit it aloud in real life) actually enjoy, the continued relationship between France and Algeria ITTL. Congratulations on making a reality, the saying (attributed to I-do-not-remember-whom) "Algeria and France are not two countries, but more like one and a half."
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Literary interlude: The castle between the worlds
Paul K. Daniels, The Rubaiyat of Shahrzad Esfahani (New York: Putnam, 1957)
The fiacre sped north along the Imperial Highway, and Lawrence, displeased, fought sleep. There were no villages here – none were allowed within three miles of the road – and the view of the savanna was interrupted by high fences. There wasn’t much to see anyway: blighted land baked by unforgiving sun, dry rivers, and to the west, a faint glow where the city of Sokoto had once been.
“Bloody foolishness, to send me through howling desert to more howling desert, chasing some Whitehall bastard’s bad dream…”
“Talking to yourself again?”
Lawrence looked round at the man who’d spoken. That was another of his annoyances.
“To be forced to keep company with a bloody Frog who, for reasons known only to God, insists on pretending he’s not a spy…”
“Ah, but if I weren’t here, who’d listen to you complain? Surely not your poor driver. He’s long since learned never to hear anything a white man says, unless it’s an order.”
“Why do you think I need anyone to listen at all, Luc? Maybe it just gives me pleasure to complain about my lot.”
“That’s an existential question, isn’t it? If there were no Frogs around, could you still complain about being made to keep company with one?”
“Believe me, Luc, I’ll complain about you long after you’ve ceased to oppress me with your presence.”
“Why imagine such sorrow as parting? Maybe the Germans will drop their bombs while we’re still here, and we can spend eternity as mingled specks of dust.”
Lawrence wanted, as never before, to drive his fist into Luc’s smirking face, but he had his orders. “That’s what we should be doing! Stopping the bloody Brats! And instead we’re on our way to the Sahara looking for a Persian poet that no one ever heard of. Bugger it, Luc, don’t you wonder what the hell we’re doing out here?”
The other man, opaque behind mustache and beard and folds of flesh, regarded Lawrence for a long moment. “My government has its secrets,” he said, no longer even pretending to be a businessman looking for ranching land. “It keeps them from me, as yours does, and it’s no more wise to question the Quai d’Orsay than it is to question Whitehall. If I don’t care to end up in the Seine, it’s best for me to say little. But I hear things. This is all connected to the Germans, and the Turks with them. Maybe even the Japs. There’s something tied up in this that has all of them frightened, so shouldn’t we find out what it is?”
Lawrence exhaled. “Maybe. But what makes you think we’ll actually find…”
Whatever he’d planned to say was cut off as the fiacre made a sharp turn across a ditch at the roadside. The bloody driver – Babatunde, isn’t it? – will suffer for that, Lawrence thought, but he realized even then that the turnoff was poorly lit, and anyone might have missed it. If Babatunde was as tired as he was, the man could hardly be blamed. I’ll sleep on it, and see what I think in the morning.
They had turned onto a road which soon became a high street where the lighting was better. The town the high street served was a small one – this far north, all settlements within the road fences were small – and this late, the stores were all closed. There were lights in the police barracks and patrols outside, but few others were abroad: drunkards who didn’t have the sense to get home, a few natives clutching their permits on the way to whatever errand they’d been sent on. This time of night, that might not spare them trouble, but few of their masters were likely to care.
At length they pulled up to a hotel. Lawrence was surprised to see that it had been a mosque once. The government didn’t like to remind anyone of who had originally built these towns and roads, especially not around here where the word Malê was still remembered. Maybe the people here felt secure enough in victory that they believed a visible reminder of it would be more effective than pretending it had never been otherwise: if so, the more fools they.
He made a note to do something about that when he returned to Lagos – if he ever returned from this fool’s errand – but for the time being, it was a welcome haven. He walked through the front door while Babatunde went to park the car, and took care of the formalities while Luc looked on scowling. He knew why, and he wasn’t happy about it himself – the air was thick with smoke and chemicals, and the hotel’s air-conditioning system was a very imperfect filter – but once more, there was nothing to be done about it now.
“Dinner in the room in half an hour,” he said, taking the keys.
“Very good, sir. A girl?” The clerk noticed Luc. “Two?”
“Ask if we can have three,” Luc stage-whispered.
“No,” answered Lawrence firmly. Not while they were carrying that damned Esfahani book. “Just dinner.”
“Very good,” the clerk said again, retreating to a house phone where he could place the order.
A moment later, they were in the room – a plain one, but it would serve – and Lawrence opened his valise and laid out his clothes. The book was beneath them: narrow, cheaply bound, with a vaguely Arabic design on a green cover. He was drawn to it somehow, as he’d been since he’d been given this assignment. Why a collection of doggerel about some other world would do that, he didn’t know. Maybe that was what had the great powers all up in arms.
“No,” he muttered. “It’s not the book, it’s the author.” But it wasn’t just that either. There seemed to be something different, and out of place, every time he opened the bloody thing. Try now, for instance: he reached down and turned to a random page, and looked to the first verse that greeted him. This one was ordinary enough, the beginning of a war between the United States and Mexico in the thirties:
The ones after that were in sequence, detailing the nations’ thirst for the Rio Grande’s waters, the blood and treasure spilled to control them, the Earth Children’s coup and the harsh rule of its council of pastors. But then the one after that:
What sense did that make? It didn’t seem part of the same story; it was a jarring change from battle and politics and the heavy hand of the Ecological Age’s early years. And it had nothing to do with the Gaia-inflected faiths that were common in Esfahani's world by the fifties, or any of the other religions described in the book…
“Our Esfahani is a cabalist.”
Lawrence turned, startled, to see Luc standing behind him. “What gives you that idea?”
“Ah, my rosbif friend, haven’t you studied? The four worlds? The divine presence at the highest, becoming more scattered as it passes down to the worlds of action?”
The intuition, from a man no more Jewish than Lawrence, was as startling as the man’s sudden presence had been. “Esfahani… a Persian name. What would she be doing rummaging through Jewish worlds?”
“The Muslims have them too,” Luc answered. “But yes, there is still much that is a mystery. We are still in Yetzirah, we haven’t passed through to Atzilut. But if we did…”
Suddenly Luc was no longer speaking but reciting.
“More cabalism?”
“If the Mohammedans practice it, yes,” Luc said, but suddenly Lawrence realized something else.
“That’s not from the book. Is it?” He took it in hand and flipped through pages desperately, hoping to find the words, but they didn’t appear, as he’d known they wouldn’t.
“This is a joke of some kind, isn’t it? Don’t tell me you’re Esfahani.”
“Maybe, someplace, I am.”
“Look, this isn’t the time or the…” All at once, Lawrence had an intuition of his own – from where, he could never tell. “In another of the seven worlds, do you mean? And this is the one you desire?” He couldn’t believe he was saying that, but Luc’s words seemed to be leading nowhere else, and in a poorly lit room in the remote north, the thought was terrifying rather than ridiculous. He had known Luc was no businessman, for all his affected coarseness and acquisitiveness, but now he seemed not even to be a spy.
“Desire? Here? No, I haven’t found that. We are still in Yetzirah, after all.
“Maybe the answer is in another verse,” came a third voice.
It was Babatunde, standing in the door, and Lawrence noticed him for the first time in the years he’d served as driver. He was a man of five and forty, stocky, graying, with a workman’s set to his muscles, but what Lawrence noticed was the eyes. African eyes knew not to betray feeling when whites were present. These had that, and more.
That wasn’t from the book either. Did that mean both of them were…
No, that way lay madness. “Shut your mouth, you bloody kaffir,” Lawrence said, desperately trying to recover himself. “Hang up these clothes, and if I hear another word from you, you’ll suffer for it.”
“No, I don’t think there’ll be any of that.”
Lawrence began to call for the hotel security, but realized suddenly that the room had changed. There were words on the walls: words written in florid Arabic calligraphy. There was no longer a bed, only a mat and cushions on the floor. Both Luc and Babatunde were wearing different clothes. And the air… there was something different even about that.
“Did you think you could make a world such as yours,” Babatunde went on, “and that God would do nothing about it? Freedom is the divine essence: did you think it wouldn’t find a way to penetrate where it is not? If not from that world, then from another.”
“Still in Yetzirah,” said Luc. “Drawn not to the world we desire, but the one where we are an active force. Books, men and women, intuition welling from the soul…”
“Stories,” Babatunde answered. “Shahrzad, the storyteller. They come too. And now… we have brought something back.”
Lawrence looked at the book in his hands – that, at least, remained the same. But when he looked up, he faced a pistol. Then he faced two.
“There are other verses you haven’t learned. Verses in which you will take part. On your own world, and on this.”
Babatunde motioned with his pistol, pointing to the doorway. Lawrence began walking, as if in a dream. There was something on the other side, and he was terrified of what it might be.
Paul K. Daniels, The Rubaiyat of Shahrzad Esfahani (New York: Putnam, 1957)
Paul Killian Daniels (1926-98), widely recognized as one of the premier American writers of experimental speculative fiction, was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to a small merchant family that had stayed in the state after the Civil War. When he was five years old, the family dry-goods store failed, and his father took a job with the state police. For the next decade, Daniels followed his father’s barracks assignments from one part of South Carolina to another, usually in the lowlands and on one occasion in Gullah country.
During this period, Daniels became familiar with lowland folklore – something he would later credit with inspiring his interest in storytelling – and also encountered Sufi mysticism. The occult, especially in medieval Islam and Judaism, would become a lifelong fascination: Ismaili and cabalistic notions of parallel worlds would be a recurring theme in his works, as would contemplation of the nature of time and reality. As early as high school, Daniels had begun to write speculative essays on the connections between the physical world, conscious thought, and what he called the “inner imagination,” and also to question linear concepts of time.
At the age of eighteen, Daniels followed his father into the police, but grew disillusioned with the job and resigned two years later. He had a succession of odd jobs in various parts of the country, including a season of shrimp-boat work in Louisiana and a year on the Sequoyah oil fields, before ending up in Oregon as a clerk for an insurance company. He would live there the rest of his life, through four marriages, three children, and battles with disability and chronic disease.
Daniels sold his first short story – The Shepherds Knew Not, a doomed romance between a medieval herder and an ephemeral mountain spirit from another age – in 1952, and thereafter wrote full-time. He tried his hand at several genres including horror, occult fiction and modern realism, writing a series of unsuccessful mainstream novels, before settling on the speculative fiction that would mark the rest of his career.
The Rubaiyat of Shahrzad Esfahani (1957) was Daniels’ first commercially successful novel and also his first major work of speculative fiction. As always in Daniels’ mature work, it is in part an exploration of Jewish and Islamic mystical themes, and contains elements of police procedure, political intrigue and anarchism that would be explored more fully in later novels such as Time, You Thief (1965) and Youth’s Sweet Delight Refusing (1972). But it is most famous as a mirror of the world’s anxieties during the late 1950s: an unprecedented number of great powers, each with the ability to devastate the world and held in check by a new and untested international system. Esfahani is a window into what such a world might be like if it were lawless – a fear that still haunted many in the wake of the Great Asian War – and is also a treatise on the ecological concerns that were rising to prominence at this time.
The novel is set in a counterfactual history in which the 1897 assassination attempt on Emperor Napoleon V succeeds, leading to a far-right coup and the fall of Jules Verne’s peace government. Shortly afterward, the United States, wary of the imbalance of power that might result from a total defeat of the FAR alliance, enters the Great War, resulting in the conflict lasting eighteen months longer than it actually did and bleeding the combatant nations white.
In the chaos of the postwar years, governments reminiscent of Britain’s Imperial Party take hold in all the great powers; the United States falls victim to a second civil war and is partitioned between Britain, Germany, Japan and several petty buffer states. The powers go on to fight constant battles for supremacy with ever-shifting alliances and use extreme brutality to quell the stirrings of colonial independence that had emerged during the Great War. By the time of the story, the world is divided between several empires, all armed with fission bombs (which have been used on numerous occasions, including colonial warfare) and fighting endless proxy wars and border conflicts. The colonial populations not fortunate enough to be designated as buffers are subjugated, and the world is in a state of environmental disaster.
The novel is told from the viewpoints of several characters in the former United States, India and West Africa who lead separate but interconnected lives. There are overtones of imperial intrigue and the threat of atomic holocaust, but the central plotline involves the search for Shahrzad Esfahani, the pseudonymous author of a verse collection entitled Wilderness is Paradise Enow. This is a collection of cryptic quatrains which together portray an alternate world – or possibly several alternate worlds – in which the French emperor survived the assassination attempt. This world is wilder and less industrialized due to the influence of radical environmental groups (hence the title) and is portrayed sometimes as utopian and sometimes as rather dystopian, but even at its worst is preferable to the world of the story.
The great powers are inexplicably afraid of Esfahani, and have sent agents to various locations where she is rumored to be, including the Rockies, the mountains of precariously-neutral Iran, and the remote Sahara. How she can be in several places at one time is unexplained, but there are suggestions that she may in fact be more than one person or even the nucleus of a movement, and the characters are increasingly drawn into a quest to learn who she really is and what the true meaning of Wilderness is Paradise Enow might be.
Ultimately, it is revealed that the world in which the characters live might not be the real one. This conclusion is controversial, but flows naturally from the novel’s occult roots, and also arises from the Abacarist mysticism that pervades the later chapters, with its focus on the penetrating powers of freedom and justice and their role in the divine ordering of worlds. Whether the characters are indeed living in a parallel or unreal world is, however, never explicitly stated - the possibility that otherworldly scenes might be dreams or hallucinations is left open - and it may be that their sense of their history’s unreality is itself a product of the inner imagination.
Several of the central themes come together late in the novel, in which British West African colonial administrator Lawrence Walsh discovers that his traveling companions may not be all they appear…
During this period, Daniels became familiar with lowland folklore – something he would later credit with inspiring his interest in storytelling – and also encountered Sufi mysticism. The occult, especially in medieval Islam and Judaism, would become a lifelong fascination: Ismaili and cabalistic notions of parallel worlds would be a recurring theme in his works, as would contemplation of the nature of time and reality. As early as high school, Daniels had begun to write speculative essays on the connections between the physical world, conscious thought, and what he called the “inner imagination,” and also to question linear concepts of time.
At the age of eighteen, Daniels followed his father into the police, but grew disillusioned with the job and resigned two years later. He had a succession of odd jobs in various parts of the country, including a season of shrimp-boat work in Louisiana and a year on the Sequoyah oil fields, before ending up in Oregon as a clerk for an insurance company. He would live there the rest of his life, through four marriages, three children, and battles with disability and chronic disease.
Daniels sold his first short story – The Shepherds Knew Not, a doomed romance between a medieval herder and an ephemeral mountain spirit from another age – in 1952, and thereafter wrote full-time. He tried his hand at several genres including horror, occult fiction and modern realism, writing a series of unsuccessful mainstream novels, before settling on the speculative fiction that would mark the rest of his career.
The Rubaiyat of Shahrzad Esfahani (1957) was Daniels’ first commercially successful novel and also his first major work of speculative fiction. As always in Daniels’ mature work, it is in part an exploration of Jewish and Islamic mystical themes, and contains elements of police procedure, political intrigue and anarchism that would be explored more fully in later novels such as Time, You Thief (1965) and Youth’s Sweet Delight Refusing (1972). But it is most famous as a mirror of the world’s anxieties during the late 1950s: an unprecedented number of great powers, each with the ability to devastate the world and held in check by a new and untested international system. Esfahani is a window into what such a world might be like if it were lawless – a fear that still haunted many in the wake of the Great Asian War – and is also a treatise on the ecological concerns that were rising to prominence at this time.
The novel is set in a counterfactual history in which the 1897 assassination attempt on Emperor Napoleon V succeeds, leading to a far-right coup and the fall of Jules Verne’s peace government. Shortly afterward, the United States, wary of the imbalance of power that might result from a total defeat of the FAR alliance, enters the Great War, resulting in the conflict lasting eighteen months longer than it actually did and bleeding the combatant nations white.
In the chaos of the postwar years, governments reminiscent of Britain’s Imperial Party take hold in all the great powers; the United States falls victim to a second civil war and is partitioned between Britain, Germany, Japan and several petty buffer states. The powers go on to fight constant battles for supremacy with ever-shifting alliances and use extreme brutality to quell the stirrings of colonial independence that had emerged during the Great War. By the time of the story, the world is divided between several empires, all armed with fission bombs (which have been used on numerous occasions, including colonial warfare) and fighting endless proxy wars and border conflicts. The colonial populations not fortunate enough to be designated as buffers are subjugated, and the world is in a state of environmental disaster.
The novel is told from the viewpoints of several characters in the former United States, India and West Africa who lead separate but interconnected lives. There are overtones of imperial intrigue and the threat of atomic holocaust, but the central plotline involves the search for Shahrzad Esfahani, the pseudonymous author of a verse collection entitled Wilderness is Paradise Enow. This is a collection of cryptic quatrains which together portray an alternate world – or possibly several alternate worlds – in which the French emperor survived the assassination attempt. This world is wilder and less industrialized due to the influence of radical environmental groups (hence the title) and is portrayed sometimes as utopian and sometimes as rather dystopian, but even at its worst is preferable to the world of the story.
The great powers are inexplicably afraid of Esfahani, and have sent agents to various locations where she is rumored to be, including the Rockies, the mountains of precariously-neutral Iran, and the remote Sahara. How she can be in several places at one time is unexplained, but there are suggestions that she may in fact be more than one person or even the nucleus of a movement, and the characters are increasingly drawn into a quest to learn who she really is and what the true meaning of Wilderness is Paradise Enow might be.
Ultimately, it is revealed that the world in which the characters live might not be the real one. This conclusion is controversial, but flows naturally from the novel’s occult roots, and also arises from the Abacarist mysticism that pervades the later chapters, with its focus on the penetrating powers of freedom and justice and their role in the divine ordering of worlds. Whether the characters are indeed living in a parallel or unreal world is, however, never explicitly stated - the possibility that otherworldly scenes might be dreams or hallucinations is left open - and it may be that their sense of their history’s unreality is itself a product of the inner imagination.
Several of the central themes come together late in the novel, in which British West African colonial administrator Lawrence Walsh discovers that his traveling companions may not be all they appear…
*******
The fiacre sped north along the Imperial Highway, and Lawrence, displeased, fought sleep. There were no villages here – none were allowed within three miles of the road – and the view of the savanna was interrupted by high fences. There wasn’t much to see anyway: blighted land baked by unforgiving sun, dry rivers, and to the west, a faint glow where the city of Sokoto had once been.
“Bloody foolishness, to send me through howling desert to more howling desert, chasing some Whitehall bastard’s bad dream…”
“Talking to yourself again?”
Lawrence looked round at the man who’d spoken. That was another of his annoyances.
“To be forced to keep company with a bloody Frog who, for reasons known only to God, insists on pretending he’s not a spy…”
“Ah, but if I weren’t here, who’d listen to you complain? Surely not your poor driver. He’s long since learned never to hear anything a white man says, unless it’s an order.”
“Why do you think I need anyone to listen at all, Luc? Maybe it just gives me pleasure to complain about my lot.”
“That’s an existential question, isn’t it? If there were no Frogs around, could you still complain about being made to keep company with one?”
“Believe me, Luc, I’ll complain about you long after you’ve ceased to oppress me with your presence.”
“Why imagine such sorrow as parting? Maybe the Germans will drop their bombs while we’re still here, and we can spend eternity as mingled specks of dust.”
Lawrence wanted, as never before, to drive his fist into Luc’s smirking face, but he had his orders. “That’s what we should be doing! Stopping the bloody Brats! And instead we’re on our way to the Sahara looking for a Persian poet that no one ever heard of. Bugger it, Luc, don’t you wonder what the hell we’re doing out here?”
The other man, opaque behind mustache and beard and folds of flesh, regarded Lawrence for a long moment. “My government has its secrets,” he said, no longer even pretending to be a businessman looking for ranching land. “It keeps them from me, as yours does, and it’s no more wise to question the Quai d’Orsay than it is to question Whitehall. If I don’t care to end up in the Seine, it’s best for me to say little. But I hear things. This is all connected to the Germans, and the Turks with them. Maybe even the Japs. There’s something tied up in this that has all of them frightened, so shouldn’t we find out what it is?”
Lawrence exhaled. “Maybe. But what makes you think we’ll actually find…”
Whatever he’d planned to say was cut off as the fiacre made a sharp turn across a ditch at the roadside. The bloody driver – Babatunde, isn’t it? – will suffer for that, Lawrence thought, but he realized even then that the turnoff was poorly lit, and anyone might have missed it. If Babatunde was as tired as he was, the man could hardly be blamed. I’ll sleep on it, and see what I think in the morning.
They had turned onto a road which soon became a high street where the lighting was better. The town the high street served was a small one – this far north, all settlements within the road fences were small – and this late, the stores were all closed. There were lights in the police barracks and patrols outside, but few others were abroad: drunkards who didn’t have the sense to get home, a few natives clutching their permits on the way to whatever errand they’d been sent on. This time of night, that might not spare them trouble, but few of their masters were likely to care.
At length they pulled up to a hotel. Lawrence was surprised to see that it had been a mosque once. The government didn’t like to remind anyone of who had originally built these towns and roads, especially not around here where the word Malê was still remembered. Maybe the people here felt secure enough in victory that they believed a visible reminder of it would be more effective than pretending it had never been otherwise: if so, the more fools they.
He made a note to do something about that when he returned to Lagos – if he ever returned from this fool’s errand – but for the time being, it was a welcome haven. He walked through the front door while Babatunde went to park the car, and took care of the formalities while Luc looked on scowling. He knew why, and he wasn’t happy about it himself – the air was thick with smoke and chemicals, and the hotel’s air-conditioning system was a very imperfect filter – but once more, there was nothing to be done about it now.
“Dinner in the room in half an hour,” he said, taking the keys.
“Very good, sir. A girl?” The clerk noticed Luc. “Two?”
“Ask if we can have three,” Luc stage-whispered.
“No,” answered Lawrence firmly. Not while they were carrying that damned Esfahani book. “Just dinner.”
“Very good,” the clerk said again, retreating to a house phone where he could place the order.
A moment later, they were in the room – a plain one, but it would serve – and Lawrence opened his valise and laid out his clothes. The book was beneath them: narrow, cheaply bound, with a vaguely Arabic design on a green cover. He was drawn to it somehow, as he’d been since he’d been given this assignment. Why a collection of doggerel about some other world would do that, he didn’t know. Maybe that was what had the great powers all up in arms.
“No,” he muttered. “It’s not the book, it’s the author.” But it wasn’t just that either. There seemed to be something different, and out of place, every time he opened the bloody thing. Try now, for instance: he reached down and turned to a random page, and looked to the first verse that greeted him. This one was ordinary enough, the beginning of a war between the United States and Mexico in the thirties:
Steel wings streak through northern skies at morning
Bringing dire messages of warning,
And in the cities, cries of dark despair
And hope, though it has almost died a-borning.
Bringing dire messages of warning,
And in the cities, cries of dark despair
And hope, though it has almost died a-borning.
The light from the Divinity descending
Through tiers of life, to each itself commending
Becomes diffuse and dim, and yet its beams
Are scattered now through portals never-ending!
Through tiers of life, to each itself commending
Becomes diffuse and dim, and yet its beams
Are scattered now through portals never-ending!
“Our Esfahani is a cabalist.”
Lawrence turned, startled, to see Luc standing behind him. “What gives you that idea?”
“Ah, my rosbif friend, haven’t you studied? The four worlds? The divine presence at the highest, becoming more scattered as it passes down to the worlds of action?”
The intuition, from a man no more Jewish than Lawrence, was as startling as the man’s sudden presence had been. “Esfahani… a Persian name. What would she be doing rummaging through Jewish worlds?”
“The Muslims have them too,” Luc answered. “But yes, there is still much that is a mystery. We are still in Yetzirah, we haven’t passed through to Atzilut. But if we did…”
Suddenly Luc was no longer speaking but reciting.
The rightly guided mind perceives entire
The seven worlds amid celestial fire
And through the spirit compassing them all,
Can find the one that mirrors his desire.
The seven worlds amid celestial fire
And through the spirit compassing them all,
Can find the one that mirrors his desire.
“If the Mohammedans practice it, yes,” Luc said, but suddenly Lawrence realized something else.
“That’s not from the book. Is it?” He took it in hand and flipped through pages desperately, hoping to find the words, but they didn’t appear, as he’d known they wouldn’t.
“This is a joke of some kind, isn’t it? Don’t tell me you’re Esfahani.”
“Maybe, someplace, I am.”
“Look, this isn’t the time or the…” All at once, Lawrence had an intuition of his own – from where, he could never tell. “In another of the seven worlds, do you mean? And this is the one you desire?” He couldn’t believe he was saying that, but Luc’s words seemed to be leading nowhere else, and in a poorly lit room in the remote north, the thought was terrifying rather than ridiculous. He had known Luc was no businessman, for all his affected coarseness and acquisitiveness, but now he seemed not even to be a spy.
“Desire? Here? No, I haven’t found that. We are still in Yetzirah, after all.
“Maybe the answer is in another verse,” came a third voice.
It was Babatunde, standing in the door, and Lawrence noticed him for the first time in the years he’d served as driver. He was a man of five and forty, stocky, graying, with a workman’s set to his muscles, but what Lawrence noticed was the eyes. African eyes knew not to betray feeling when whites were present. These had that, and more.
Tyrants build strong bulwarks to surround them
While freedom, self-propelled, flows all around them
And when it finds a breach, will enter in,
And fill the void with power that astounds them.
While freedom, self-propelled, flows all around them
And when it finds a breach, will enter in,
And fill the void with power that astounds them.
No, that way lay madness. “Shut your mouth, you bloody kaffir,” Lawrence said, desperately trying to recover himself. “Hang up these clothes, and if I hear another word from you, you’ll suffer for it.”
“No, I don’t think there’ll be any of that.”
Lawrence began to call for the hotel security, but realized suddenly that the room had changed. There were words on the walls: words written in florid Arabic calligraphy. There was no longer a bed, only a mat and cushions on the floor. Both Luc and Babatunde were wearing different clothes. And the air… there was something different even about that.
“Did you think you could make a world such as yours,” Babatunde went on, “and that God would do nothing about it? Freedom is the divine essence: did you think it wouldn’t find a way to penetrate where it is not? If not from that world, then from another.”
“Still in Yetzirah,” said Luc. “Drawn not to the world we desire, but the one where we are an active force. Books, men and women, intuition welling from the soul…”
“Stories,” Babatunde answered. “Shahrzad, the storyteller. They come too. And now… we have brought something back.”
Lawrence looked at the book in his hands – that, at least, remained the same. But when he looked up, he faced a pistol. Then he faced two.
“There are other verses you haven’t learned. Verses in which you will take part. On your own world, and on this.”
Babatunde motioned with his pistol, pointing to the doorway. Lawrence began walking, as if in a dream. There was something on the other side, and he was terrified of what it might be.
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Got it.
Well, that cartoon is from 1911, when Persia had already its modern borders, so I suppose the association was already there. Indeed, in a map from the era, it looks a lot like Russia is sitting on Persia, and Persia looks a lot like a cat (although Russia doesn't quite resemble a bear).
You see, this is what I mean by a "cup half full" world! (Not Iran looking like a cat, I'm talking about the literary excerpt!
) Daniels looks to me like an ATL Philip K. Dick--well, maybe he isn't, maybe the whole SF genre of this timeline is more focused on ATLs and less on rocket ships, so an author dealing in uncertain realities would stand out less. But to us, offered it as a sample, it resembles something by Dick. Sort of. Upon reading the description by Jonathan I immediately thought, OK this is the ATL book that sort of corresponds to The Man In the High Castle. And I suspect the fact the two authors, of our timeline and Jonathan's, have the same initials is not a coincidence.
But now compare the themes. We know the author does not live a staid and stodgy life--more dodgy than stodgy. He might be a lot like Phildick in fact. But still, the optimism of the timeline makes a different read; his audience will not sympathize with Lawrence (mostly they won't anyway) and the man's discomfiture will bring smiles to their faces, as it did mine. In TMITHC, the Nazi-Japanese victory world is an ugly dystopia--but one theme is, is it really worse, at bottom, than our own Allied Victory timeline? The mystery-McGuffin book of Dick's novel is about a third timeline, with an Allied victory but one where the Soviet Union somehow vanishes leaving the world torn by a rivalry between Britain and the USA--the Brits keep Churchill on as PM and increasingly as dictator-for-life and this unity of command puts the British in a strong position. Or so we're told; Dick doesn't offer us any excerpts, just different people's paraphrases and opinions on the matter. There is a moment of relief and justice in the story--but it happens within the context of the ATL, not in the novel by "the man in the High Castle" (which ends, we are told, in nuclear war thanks to Churchill's unbending will) nor in a character's brief epiphany that our world, undreamed up in his, exists and might be the only real one (but the freeway overpasses that dominate the ATL San Francisco he sees strike him as not only hard evidence he is in another timeline for a few moments--but also, ugly as all hell)--rather this character, a Japanese bureaucrat in the Japanese-dominated Pacific States of America, denies the request, hitherto rubber-stamped, of the Gestapo to take custody of a PSA citizen determined to be Jewish. As he does so, it may be that the ATL is poised on the brink of thermonuclear holocaust anyhow in the wake of a Nazi succession crisis, so his moral action is perhaps merely symbolic--and is our world, with Dick publishing in the early '60s, one little bit better off in the end?
In Daniels's story on the other hand, the confidence that in the end justice and mercy must prevail is much less existential and forlorn.
Hollywood endings are realistic ITTL. Dick's novel actually fits with the theme of Daniels's, that justice and good permeates the universes--for the Japanese side of the Axis at any rate is clearly evolving from brutality toward a deeper moral sensibility. But is it too little, too late? In Dick's worlds the good is seen in brief glimpses and flashes, soon to be overwhelmed by pervasive corruption and failure.
Daniels's world is closer to the light; there it is darkness that looks like it might someday fail completely.
) Daniels looks to me like an ATL Philip K. Dick--well, maybe he isn't, maybe the whole SF genre of this timeline is more focused on ATLs and less on rocket ships, so an author dealing in uncertain realities would stand out less. But to us, offered it as a sample, it resembles something by Dick. Sort of. Upon reading the description by Jonathan I immediately thought, OK this is the ATL book that sort of corresponds to The Man In the High Castle. And I suspect the fact the two authors, of our timeline and Jonathan's, have the same initials is not a coincidence.But now compare the themes. We know the author does not live a staid and stodgy life--more dodgy than stodgy. He might be a lot like Phildick in fact. But still, the optimism of the timeline makes a different read; his audience will not sympathize with Lawrence (mostly they won't anyway
) and the man's discomfiture will bring smiles to their faces, as it did mine. In TMITHC, the Nazi-Japanese victory world is an ugly dystopia--but one theme is, is it really worse, at bottom, than our own Allied Victory timeline? The mystery-McGuffin book of Dick's novel is about a third timeline, with an Allied victory but one where the Soviet Union somehow vanishes leaving the world torn by a rivalry between Britain and the USA--the Brits keep Churchill on as PM and increasingly as dictator-for-life and this unity of command puts the British in a strong position. Or so we're told; Dick doesn't offer us any excerpts, just different people's paraphrases and opinions on the matter. There is a moment of relief and justice in the story--but it happens within the context of the ATL, not in the novel by "the man in the High Castle" (which ends, we are told, in nuclear war thanks to Churchill's unbending will) nor in a character's brief epiphany that our world, undreamed up in his, exists and might be the only real one (but the freeway overpasses that dominate the ATL San Francisco he sees strike him as not only hard evidence he is in another timeline for a few moments--but also, ugly as all hell)--rather this character, a Japanese bureaucrat in the Japanese-dominated Pacific States of America, denies the request, hitherto rubber-stamped, of the Gestapo to take custody of a PSA citizen determined to be Jewish. As he does so, it may be that the ATL is poised on the brink of thermonuclear holocaust anyhow in the wake of a Nazi succession crisis, so his moral action is perhaps merely symbolic--and is our world, with Dick publishing in the early '60s, one little bit better off in the end?In Daniels's story on the other hand, the confidence that in the end justice and mercy must prevail is much less existential and forlorn.
Hollywood endings are realistic ITTL. Dick's novel actually fits with the theme of Daniels's, that justice and good permeates the universes--for the Japanese side of the Axis at any rate is clearly evolving from brutality toward a deeper moral sensibility. But is it too little, too late? In Dick's worlds the good is seen in brief glimpses and flashes, soon to be overwhelmed by pervasive corruption and failure.
Daniels's world is closer to the light; there it is darkness that looks like it might someday fail completely.
That would be Étienne Balibar - "since 1962, France and Algeria have been two separate states, but they both constitute one-and-a-half nations." This is actually true (to an extent) of many former colonialists and colonies - Britain and India, for instance - but more so of Algeria and France, given the length of time that Algeria was a French possession, the extent of French settlement and cultural penetration, and latterly the extent of Algerian migration to France. I'm not sure that one and a half is the right figure - if I had to put a number on it, I'd say more like 1.9 - but I'd agree that it's less than two.
What happened in TTL, actually, is that the number did move closer to 1.5, with France recognizing Algerian citizenship rights after the Great War (and even fighting a civil war over it) and a Puerto Rico-size diaspora of Algerians growing up in France. By the independence era, there were too many connections for the Algerians to want to sever them altogether.
This isn't one of the standard "Algeria stays French" scenarios, though - neither a rump European-majority state nor Algerians magically becoming Frenchmen. TTL's Algeria has become something like OTL's French Polynesia, in which the Algerians are largely masters in their own house - which might lead still to some pied noir emigration, although most will stay.
If anything, TTL's science fiction world is even more focused on rocket ships, given the influence of futurist politics. I've mentioned that the term for science fiction in general is "planetary romance" (which is a term from OTL but which is used more broadly here).
Daniels is a Philip K. Dick analogue, albeit not a blood relation, and The Rubaiyat of Shahrzad Esfahani is indeed TTL's Man in the High Castle. Growing up where he did, Daniels would have been exposed to European and African as well as American science fiction, and would have absorbed magical realism from the latter, and of course came in contact with both traditional Sufi mysticism and its Abacarist offshoot.
There is a moment of relief and justice in [Dick's] story--but it happens within the context of the ATL, not in the novel by "the man in the High Castle" (which ends, we are told, in nuclear war thanks to Churchill's unbending will) nor in a character's brief epiphany that our world, undreamed up in his, exists and might be the only real one (but the freeway overpasses that dominate the ATL San Francisco he sees strike him as not only hard evidence he is in another timeline for a few moments--but also, ugly as all hell
In Daniels's story on the other hand, the confidence that in the end justice and mercy must prevail is much less existential and forlorn.
It isn't as certain as it may appear from this scene and the one that follows: as mentioned in the preface, the story will leave open the possibility that it was a dream. When Lawrence returns to his world (and yes, he is being taken to TTL's Sokoto), he won't be sure if what he experienced was real, although his sense of reality and political morality will be very much shaken. Some of that moral evolution - and that of Japan, which takes place along some of the same lines as in Dick's novel - will show itself later in the book.
But you're correct - in TTL, the anxiety of the late 1950s and early 60s is more "if this falls apart" than "if this goes on," and it is evidenced in Daniels' plot.
Other parts of the story are also peculiar to TTL - the world of the novel is multipolar, for instance, and the idea of only two empires facing off for world supremacy would seem bizarre. And much of the book's mysticism is explicitly Abacarist in nature - the idea that freedom is an integral part of the divine essence, and as such is an active and penetrating force whereas tyranny is closed and vulnerable. We've seen a great deal of practical Abacarism in TTL, but Paulo the Elder and Ibrahim being who they were, there's also an underlying mystical element.
There are a lot of "introduction to Kabbalah" sites online, although some are a bit cultish. I've never been into it a great deal myself - I've always looked at it more as part of the background of Jewish philosophy rather than the center, and there's a lot of it I just don't understand - but I'll look for a good introductory title this weekend.
Given the amount of preservation that has occurred in OTL, I'd imagine that TTL would see even more - faith traditions and philosophies are one of those things that are very hard to erase altogether.
I think the West is almost certainly going to be very Asian ITTL. Here we've never had a Chinese Exclusion Act, which means a lot more will come in the initial uncertainty of the Chinese state and economy prior to Ma, and perhaps many more during the Chinese-Russian War. Granted, IIRC, the overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants to the US before the Exclusion Act were single men. A decent portion will likely return home once they feel they have enough money, but the majority will stay and a very sizable number will find local wives rather than send for someone from home. I keep mentioning Chinese in San Francisco in my little rants about diverse America, because I think tat ITTL it's pretty much inevitable that Chinese will be the most analogous group to Latin Americans' ubiquity in OTL California.
While most groups in general will have isolated people and areas that hold onto language and culture from the Old Country, I think that the American consciousness will come to identify four/five main "big distinct minorities" in the country: African-Americans in the South, Native Americans in the Great Plains, Chinese-Americans on the West Coast, German-Americans in the North, and possibly (depending on demographic numbers with this new Mexico) Latinos in the Southwest. Each of these areas has a very distinct tradition and strong demographics supporting the minority's distinct cultural roots, whereas other groups are a bit more dispersed or (as with the Irish) easily assimilated outside of a few things.
That's exactly why I asked. There's too much of that new agey BS floating around. When it comes to Native and aspects of West African diaspora religions I know how to avoid and sort through the nonsesnse, but I know very little about Jewish and Islamic mysticism to do that more effectively. So thanks for guidance.
I really like that aspect of the ideology. Was this concept derived from the Qu'ran or more from French Revolutionary philosophies?
Sounds about right for me. I think there would still be an undertone of Mexican/Latin@ culture in Cali, particularly in the south, but it would play second fiddle to the Asian-American culture that would permeate. I could easily see the West Coast having a "Hawaiian" feel in regards to it being a Asian-immigrant plurality if not outright majority.
On the immigration to the United States issue: something I just realized is that New York is not going to be all that Jewish. That makes me sad in a way.
Something I wrote for my old guest update that was scrapped before the new one:
"It has been said that America is a melting pot. That cultures and beliefs come here, and are melted down to join their best elements with those of hundreds of others and create one blend that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I do not contest that we are greater together, as Americans. I do however argue that we are not a melting pot, where we must lose ourselves and our roots to create that American identity. We are a mosaic. Each culture and people stands by itself, a flash of singular and vibrant color even on its own, and together those shades create a masterpiece whose beauty shines like no other. We must do everything we can to preserve those unique shades of color in our nation, or the whole will lose more beauty with each piece misguidedly erased."
Zhi Ming Ni, Senator of California(F-L), 1960
I hadn't thought of Hawaii as an analogue but that seems right to me.
I like to imagine that the Christian Arab immigrants will be the ones to go to NY mostly. Just for a bit of irony.
"It has been said that America is a melting pot. That cultures and beliefs come here, and are melted down to join their best elements with those of hundreds of others and create one blend that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I do not contest that we are greater together, as Americans. I do however argue that we are not a melting pot, where we must lose ourselves and our roots to create that American identity. We are a mosaic. Each culture and people stands by itself, a flash of singular and vibrant color even on its own, and together those shades create a masterpiece whose beauty shines like no other. We must do everything we can to preserve those unique shades of color in our nation, or the whole will lose more beauty with each piece misguidedly erased."
Zhi Ming Ni, Senator of California(F-L), 1960
Probably. San Diego/Tijuana will be pretty Latino, I'd think. Maybe something like up to Los Angeles it's mostly Latino and from there into the Pacific NW it's dominantly Chinese? I don't know if there'd be a clear cultural divide, really.
I hadn't thought of Hawaii as an analogue but that seems right to me.
More than that? With the Gaucho and Argentinian successor republics drawing more Italian immigrants, it might not be that Italian either. Man, New York ITTL would be weird for OTL people.
I like to imagine that the Christian Arab immigrants will be the ones to go to NY mostly. Just for a bit of irony.
What about Italians in the Northeast? There would be a lot of Italian immigration in the 1880s, and while it would be interrupted by the war and the postwar era, economic conditions (especially in southern Italy) would reignite it in the 1910s, and ITTL it wouldn't stop after 1924. You mentioned the South American republics, and they would attract some of the emigrants who went to the United States IOTL, but their carrying capacity is limited and the US is still richer. I could see Connecticut, Rhode Island and parts of Massachusetts being very Italian ITTL, not to mention New York City where they might play the Jews' role as the largest and most culturally influential minority.
Other than that, your list sounds about right, and I do expect that Mexicans in the Southwest would be on it.
I think we're talking about a whole string of Vancouvers from San Diego to Seattle, with the southernmost ones having a Mexican/Spanish flavor (in San Diego, and possibly LA, a dominant one) along with everything else.
All right, let's crunch some numbers. ITTL, the wave of persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire began in 1878 (with the defeat in the Balkans) rather than the early 80s, meaning that mass Jewish emigration would begin a few years earlier. Between 1878 and 1893, rates of immigration to the United States would be roughly the same as the 1880s OTL - on the one hand, Salonika will draw off immigrants that might otherwise have come here, but on the other hand, the persecution in Russia is worse. Then, in 1893, the war would interrupt migration, and after the war, Jewish settlement in the United States would resume at a lower rate - many Jews died in battle who might otherwise emigrate, Russia is suddenly much better, and for Hungarian refugees, other destinations in western Europe, the Ottoman Empire and Latin America are attractive.
Page 4 of this article has statistics on Jewish immigration IOTL. We'll assume 25,000 immigrants a year between 1878 and 1893, for a total of 400,000. Then, none to speak of between 1893 and 1897, and maybe 15,000 to 20,000 annually between 1897 and 1920. So, more or less, 750,000 to 850,000 immigrants between 1878 and 1920 - call it 800,000 - rather than two million. Some of this might be made up for by post-1920 immigration - without the restrictive acts of 1921 and 1924, movement of Jews to the United States would decline gradually rather than being cut off all at once - but even if we assume another 200,000 between 1920 and 1950, that's still just half the number that came in OTL.
This is still enough to give New York a culturally significant Jewish population - I expect that it would still be the main port of entry, and Jewish immigrants would be concentrated there as in OTL. New York will still be a recognizably Jewish city. But Jews won't have the cachet of being the largest minority in the United States' largest city, and their influence on the city and country would be less. If someone in 1950 were asked to list the top Jewish cities of the world, New York would be in there, but it would come after Salonika, Berlin, Paris, Stamboul, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and maybe Amsterdam and/or Haifa.
For reasons stated above, I think there would still be a large Italian presence, maybe even a culturally dominant one. But I certainly agree that Balkan and Arab Christians would play a larger role, as would Hungarians - TTL's New York in the 1920s might already have large Hungarian, Serbian, Greek and Syrian/Lebanese neighborhoods.
You know, I really need to set a narrative in New York in the 1960s - maybe in my neighborhood of Kew Gardens, Queens, if I can figure out what happens to it ITTL.
TTL's civil rights amendment of 1919 has set a precedent for constitutionalizing these things, so that could well happen - maybe not during the "don't rock the boat" era of the 1940s and 50s, but certainly afterward.
It's part French Revolution and part Qadiri Sufism (which Usman dan Fodio followed, and which Paulo the Elder encountered when he married into the shehu's family), with the rest coming from Paulo's own ideas of the divine. If you want a one-sentence description of Abacarist mysticism, think of it is a rebuttal to O'Brien's vision of a boot stamping on a human face forever: with freedom part of the divine essence, a revolution will generate itself from the spirit even if the entire physical world has been made unfree. Paulo wouldn't have thought of this in terms of parallel worlds, which appear to have been more an Ismaili thing - he'd probably have conceived it in terms of a divine spark ignited in the human spirit - but others might have added that theme later, or maybe Daniels, with his eclectic occult background, added it on his own. In any event, there are few mystical notions more Abacarist than the idea that, if necessary, the divine presence will import a revolution from another world.
BTW, if anyone's curious about the geography of Daniels' alternate within an alternate, the world of Shahrzad Esfahani is divided between five and a half great powers: Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and a shrunken Ottoman Empire that barely survived the post-Great War shakeup and has been on a revanchist binge since it found the oil. Germany (which includes Austria and the Cisleithanian crown lands) picked up the Congo, the Portuguese African colonies, and Chile; Indochina is still French along with Brazil, Wallonia, part of northern Italy and the southern United States; the northeastern US and Argentina are British; the Horn of Africa, Yemen, Mongolia and half of China are Russian; Japan has the other half of China, Korea, the Philippines, the west coast of the United States, and a sphere of influence over the Andean republics. Minor powers and neutral buffers include the Iberian states (which kept their independence although not their colonies), the Netherlands (which stayed independent as a German client and even kept Indonesia as a cheap method of German power projection), Hungary, Romania, a rump southern Italian state, Greece, Persia and Afghanistan, Nepal, Mexico, Texas, the former Mountain West states, the Carolinas (which are transitional between French and British zones), and Haiti (which no one thought worth the trouble). The buffer states in eastern Europe, Asia and the Americas are free of direct imperial rule but are the scene of almost constant proxy fighting and intrigue.
As for Esfahani's world, that's an alternate of an alternate of an alternate, so it's a little too meta for me, but it's fair to say that pretty much all the large states have broken up.
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I hadn't really thought much of the Italians, mostly because I thought a much bigger number would be going to the Southern Cone and Gaucho Republics with their sheer mass of volunteers going to Italy. But if the carrying capacity is that much lower, then yes, Italians would be the main in the Northeast. There'd be a lot of Irish too, but unfortunately I don't see a revival of Irish Gaelic in the Northeast anytime soon, so that'll be more along the lines of OTL Irish heritage: Catholic, wearing green and being overly vocal about it all on Saint Patrick's day.
Some other smaller groups are, of course, the French in northern Maine and Cajun French in Louisiana(which I can't help but feel will be plugged into the Afro-Atlantic network and get a relatively larger number of Haitians for some reason), and Scandinavians in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Less geographically united groups that might have strong traditions in areas would include Catholic Slavs like the Poles and Croats in the Midwest, Arab Christians in cities to the east, and Hungarians wherever they end up. That looks rather Eurocentric, now that I look at that, but I think most mid to large scale immigrant populations from Africa, Latin America, and Asia will stick close to the Southeast, Southwest, and West Coast, respectively, out of a sense of greater strength of economic ties and potential profit as well as more ready acceptance.
Cool, someone took the words out of my digital mouth, in regards to Canadian immigration. It's something I've been thinking about since yesterday.
I just realised something: with no Disney and the subsequent OTL development of animation in America, the western world wouldn't think of animation as a kids-only medium ITTL, nor will the U.S have today's notion of animation being a (mostly) light-hearted affair.
Heck, there might even be an American version of Neon Genesis Evengelion! (Oh God, that could either be the best thing ever or the worst thing ever...)
Heck, there might even be an American version of Neon Genesis Evengelion! (Oh God, that could either be the best thing ever or the worst thing ever...
)