Neo Crossed with Willy Loman

I realized today that carrying some extra weight on my body as I do means I have a dark underbelly, and I realized that I find that appealing. It gives me another, mysterious, illicit dimension, makes me more complex and nuanced and alluring. A hidden dark side.

A found poem:

Then things get really weird,

dubious facts, rumors, and myths,

questionable knowledge, and an opportunity to dither about,

things that are vague, or only half understood.

Acknowledge that the solver is part of the problem,

computers can't do subjective mathematics,

collect people, try on different ways of being.

The gates of the chthonic cracking open.

Composed of phrases found in the rest of the post below.

Of course everyone has a hidden dark side, just only some of us also have a literal dark underbelly. But that's neither here nor there, just an easing into things.

As is common, I mentally divide my life into different periods or phases. The most explicit divide comes between my two marriages. I married young and we celebrated 15 anniversaries, plus the time together before and a bit after when we weren't married. I had a few years single, then feel like everything started over with my second marriage. Starting over from an apartment and minimal living with a new house, finally children of my own, different friends and socializing. I think of now as my "second life," distinct from my first one. And, probably as a defense mechanism, I think very little of my life that came before.

This second life started a little over ten years ago. Even the beginnings of it seem "a lifetime ago," so much has happened since. Today I am reflecting on something from that era, nine years ago.

It was the summer of 2013. I've been in the library business for long time now and have managed to go to quite a few professional conferences and gatherings. I haven't pursued major involvement in my professional organizations, but I've worked with others who have held office, been on the major award committees, and similar. My library tries to stay connected, and I've benefitted from that. My state library association, the Public Library Association, the first event advocating video games in libraries, and others. I've attended a middling amount; more than some, less than others.

The single biggest event I've been part of was the American Library Association Annual Conference in 2013. I went with an eye toward learning from the best in the business, getting new ideas for programs and services I could take back to my library system. I ended up spending much of my time in awe of all the big-name authors I had a chance to observe, hear, and meet. I even called my report on the experience: "My 2013 ALA Annual Conference Expe--Hey, Look! An Author! So Sparkly and Shiny . . . "

Somehow, one of the central themes of my experience became a lesser-known author named James Kennedy. He'd written one book, which I'd read and enjoyed, and I kept running into him over the course of the three-day weekend of events spread across downtown Chicago. Best of all, he seemed happy to keep bumping into me. The highlight for me was an evening social event when he even invited me to stick with him when I was worried I'd had my time and needed to move on: “I don’t know anyone else at this shindig, do you?” and I found myself with a new friend to hang out with for the evening. Most of the conference I felt out of my depth, a fanboy among celebrities, and he became an anchor that helped me feel I belonged.

I'm thinking about James Kennedy again today because I just finished reading his new book. It's an adult science fiction . . . I'd suppose you'd say "thriller." It's not something I typically would have noticed on the shelf or picked out to read, focusing on kids and teen books as I do, if I hadn't had that experience with him. I really liked his first book, a bizarre fantasy adventure for young teens, then met and liked him, and have been waiting for his next book ever since. He finally published that second book the end of last year. It's for adults, not something I'd normally read, but I decided I would anyway. I'm glad I did.

It's the kind of reading experience I usually share on this blog, the kind of book I want to note and preserve excerpts from. Then I started poking around and discovered I've never mentioned his first book here, which I consider a major oversight. So now I'm creating a whole post just to share my "James Kennedy experience."

Since it comes first chronologically--published in 2008, read, I think, in 2011--I'll start first with my review of The Order of Odd-Fish.

This is Jo. Please take care of her.

But beware.

This is a DANGEROUS baby.

Lily Larouche, famous actress, life of the party, and oddball, was missing for forty years. Then, thirteen years ago, she mysteriously woke in her dusty bed in her house dubbed the "ruby palace" with no memory of the missing forty years. In her washing machine was a crying baby with the above note attached.

Jo is now thirteen and used to life with her eccentric Aunt Lily, living in the desert and hanging out with Aunt Lily's peers. At her aunt's annual Christmas party, Jo notices a strange, fat Russian man in a uniform who seems to be hunting her. He introduces himself as Colonel Korsakov and says he has come to protect Jo. He's not sure what he is to protect her from, but his digestion has guided him faithfully for thirteen years and he trusts the mission it has sent him on this time as well. The next morning, after Korsakov has, in fact, saved Jo from a bit of peril--peril that he himself created--she meets his partner, Sefino, a giant, talking, upright cockroach with impeccable flair and style.

However, the black box that dropped out of the sky to assist Korsakov in saving Jo leads to all kinds of trouble. First, Aunt Lily, in one of her crazy fits, uses it to decapitate a friend, whose head flies around and tries to escape until they can recapture and reattach it. Then they are hunted by the evil Ken Kiang, whom Korsakov stole the box from, and get shot out of the sky as they flee him in Korsakov's airplane. Fortunately, they don't die after being downed in the ocean, but are swallowed by a huge fish. Momentous things happen in the fish's stomach before it vomits them up on a strange shore that is not of this world.

Then things get really weird.

I wish I could remember what review or recommendation led me to this book, because I have no idea why I checked it out or chose to read it. But I'm glad I did. It was imaginative, entertaining, adventurous, dark, and funny, both in alternating turns and simultaneously. Sometimes it became overwhelming and tedious and the characters and plot at times took a back seat to the absurdities, but not nearly so much as you might think from the brief description I've given. If you at all like the sound of what I've shared, I recommend delving in and giving this a try. Just beware the Belgian Prankster. And don't be surprised by the appearance of that evil Goddess, the All-Devouring Mother.

A few other specifics, both good and bad, saved until the end for their less essential nature. First, some things I loved:

Ken Kiang's motivation as the bad guy. He was a dynamic, genius millionaire with style and verve who had collected everything there was to collect and accomplished everything there was to accomplish, done ultimate good and more, until there was nothing to left to do and it all became tedium. So he set out to become evil as something new and unique.

Evil! Who was evil anymore? The world was full of clods who were convinced they were doing the right thing. And even if they happened to sin interestingly, there was always their tiresome guilt--their ludicrous repentances--their pathetic attempts to lead a "better life"--But pure, methodical evil--who did that anymore?

Also, the group of knights known as the Order of Odd-Fish, a central group in the story and with whom Jo finds a home. Their mission is to research an appendix to the abandoned project to write an encyclopedia of ALL knowledge.

"'It is an Appendix of dubious facts, rumors, and myths,'" recited Colonel Korsakov. "'A repository of questionable knowledge, and an opportunity to dither about.' That's from our charter," he said to Jo. "The bit about dithering is the most important. We are a society of ditherers." . . .

"I don't understand," said Jo. "Your Appendix is supposed to be unreliable?"

"Or useless," said Sir Oliver happily. "Unreliable or useless. We also print information that is out of date or contradictory. Though, I must stress, we never publish anything misleading." . . .

"There are many things in this world that we know a little bit about, but not enough to say we really know. Things that are vague, or only half understood. Or known once and then forgotten, or once thought to be true, and now thought false, but maybe they're really true, who knows? This stuff doesn't fit into the encyclopedia. It's too dubious. So we put it in our Appendix instead. Rumors, leads, myths, things that are maybe true, maybe not."

And all the headlines by newspaper the Eldritch Snitch use alliteration (Korsakov's Cowardly Cockroach Callowly Cringes, Cries in Catastrophic Combat), something I'm fond of and often catch myself unconsciously slipping into.

A couple of the best insult exchanges ever written. A quick bit of one:

"You are named Sleeping Bee," bellowed Zam-Zam, "but I shall wake you from your slumber and turn your own sting upon you, to pierce you with your own foolishness! Rivers shall run red with your blood, your name shall be cursed by generations, and your children shall be three feet tall, totally hairless, and perpetually drenched in their own stinking sweat! When I am finished with you, your body shall be torn asunder by five wild boars and buried in five ignominious places, each one more shameful than the last! I have spoken!" . . .

"Vile boaster! Just as I, Fumo, the Sleeping Bee, have defeated both Quafmaf, the Pigeon of the Moon, and Nixilpilfi, the Gerbil Who Does Not Know Mercy, so I shall dispatch you, Zam-Zam, to the realm of obloquy, and force to your lips the flagon of infamy! I have spoken!"

This quote:

People will put up with being terrified, but no one will tolerate being bored.

And this philosophy:

When I was young, I noticed that the more I wanted something, the less likely it was that I'd get it. Therefore, it stood to reason that the less I wanted something, the more likely it was that I'd get it. The lesson is clear: if I have a problem, I ignore it--but I ignore it in an advanced, sophisticated way. Sooner or later the problem usually solves itself.

As to the forewarned negatives, the first I think is best captured by a quote from another book: These kids are all trying so hard to be weird. I'm genuinely weird, so I can spot the effort a mile away. Thus my use of the word "tedious" in previously describing the book.

And this is arguably a negative, because it's a positive if you are wanting to prepare for the vocabulary portion of a standardized test or simply tend toward that style of writing yourself (as those of you familiar with my reviews will know I do), but you'll probably need to read this with a dictionary in the other hand and a plentiful supply of patience for the dense, at times grandiloquent, and convoluted writing. It's not a quick read.

That's what I put on Goodreads in 2011. I started rating books there in 2008, so I'm pretty sure those were my initial thoughts right after I read it. I know I've made reference to wanting to be part of a society of ditherers many times since.

As a best practice, since they pay our way and view it as work time, my library asks anyone they send to a conference to write a report to demonstrate their professional development and share relevant information with colleagues. After my ALA experience in 2013, I wrote a 21-page report. It had an annotated table of contents, internal links, and 5 thematic sections. I can't verify causality, but it was soon after that my library added a page limit to post-conference reports.

The section titles:

• Jaron Lanier vs. Michael Margolis: Visions of the Future
• The James Kennedy Thread
• Authors, Awards, and Speeches
• Disappointments
• Quick Hits

Here are a few screenshots followed by excerpts of the bits relevant to today's post.

From The James Kennedy Thread

Meet the Authors: James Kennedy (Random House Children's Books)

A couple of years ago I enjoyed a strange, obscure YA book called The Order of Odd-Fish by James Kennedy. Unlike the usual prophesied child who is destined to save the world, such as Harry Potter, this is about a girl expected to destroy the world and her efforts to reverse her fate. Kennedy hasn’t written anything since this 2008 debut—though I’d seen and enjoyed this delightfully demented video of his faux challenge to a faux Neil Gaiman over the Newbery in 2009, Part I and Part II, which made me think he’d be a fun guy to meet—so, assuming the line would be short, I decided to quickly drop in at his signing to tell him I enjoyed his book. I got a free paperback copy of the book—signed—and an invitation to his program a couple of hours later.

Conversation Starters: The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival

I have to admit with chagrin that I overlooked this in my initial planning, left it off my schedule of possible sessions to attend, and only made it due to a personal invitation from James Kennedy. I’m guessing, since the 90-Second Newbery has been around for a couple of years now, it’s even something that others have mentioned to me before and I’ve dismissed it as not interesting or relevant for unknown reasons. It ended up being one of the highlights of the conference for me and a major takeaway.

This was a small, informal session that consisted largely of screenings of many of the outstanding 90-second submissions, which is what it needed to be so we would understand the potential of the program. It was an excellent reminder that kids are bloody brilliant, and I was amused and impressed by the mini films they’ve created and submitted.  I haven’t had time yet, but very soon I plan to go to the website to spend hours watching the variety of material available.

In a nutshell, a few years ago James Kennedy helped some kids create a 90-second film version of A Wrinkle in Time and uploaded it to the internet (go watch it now; it won’t take but 90 seconds). It became a small sensation and encouraged others to do the same. The 90-Second Newbery was born, and he’s been accepting submissions and featuring them on his website ever since. He’s also started having events in auditoriums to screen them, with Newbery-winning authors and skits and all kinds of festivities. So far the festivals have taken place at New York, Chicago, Portland, Tacoma, blah, and blah, and he’d like to grow it into something that happens across the country annually.

This is exactly the type of program we have been moving toward recently. It encourages youth to not just consume media (the Newbery winners and honor books), but digest and react to them with original content. It makes them creators of content and participants in the literary community. I’m not quite sure what it will look like, but I want to start some kind of something at [my library] to encourage and support the youth of our community in creating their own films to submit. I’m thinking the website and this curriculum and teaching guide might be good places to start getting ideas to gel.

The 90-Second Newbery could also be a great opportunity for partnerships with schools, since it has definite curriculum connections. I’m sure we can find some teachers who might be interested in working with us. And, if we want to ultimately realize the potential of the program by celebrating youth as creators and participants, we should bring the festival to [my area]. This, I think, would definitely require partnerships (whether with schools, our neighboring public systems, or other) for budget and space (auditorium) issues. I think I’ll have to start pitching it to B and others to see what we can come up with.

Random House Children’s Books Award Dinner

I had to rush out of the 90-Second Newbery presentation as soon as it finished, because that left me with only 15 minutes to get to the Vordak the Incomprehensible signing (see below). Then I headed back to the hotel part of town and made my way to the hip Bin 36 for this by-invitation mingle event (thanks, T!), where I immediately felt intimidated. So imagine my excitement when I saw James Kennedy standing not too far into the crowd. I seized the opportunity to go ask him more about the 90-Second Newbery and what would be involved in bringing a screening to Kansas City. Of course, that meant working my way into the conversation he’d been having, which in effect meant I chased off Eric Rohmann to get my time with him (I later tracked Mr. Rohmann down to apologize and drop B’s name; he was at the conference especially for the 75th anniversary of the Caldecott, which B helped award to him in 2003). Once the business talk was completed I figured Mr. Kennedy would want to move on; instead, he said, a bit insecurely, “I don’t know anyone else at this shindig, do you?” and I found myself with a new friend to hang out with for the evening.

Over the course of the event I also had a short conversation with Brandon Sanderson about fantasy books (“I hesitate to introduce myself since I’ve yet to read any of your books, but you write exactly my favorite type of novel”) in which I had to admit I had given up on the Wheel of Time series halfway through, told Rachel Hartman how much I enjoyed Seraphina and Kadir Nelson how much I enjoy his work, met another new author or two whose names I can’t remember, and stood in very close proximity to Patricia MacLachlan, Cynthia Voigt, and Tamora Pierce.  I also ran into [colleagues].

YA Author Coffee Klatch

The next morning I attended the YA Author Coffee Klatch, in which attendees were spread throughout a large room at 38 tables, then 38 YA authors entered the room and each sat at one table. After 3-5 minutes, a whistle would blow and the authors would rotate to the next table in line.  In that fashion, each table was visited by 7-8 of the authors over the course of the event, getting a quick introduction and booktalk from each.

Guess who sat down at my table halfway through? That’s right, James Kennedy!  He not only gave a nice introduction to his book, The Order of Odd-Fish, but shared some great fan art that people have sent him. In addition, our table got to meet . . . 

Generation Us - Intergenerational Programs That Build Community

This session opened with a very cool video from the 90-Second Newbery film series and that program was identified as a prime example of an “intergenerational program that builds community.” (Watch the video here; it’s quite unexpectedly and awesomely done in the style of French New Wave and Wes Anderson.) It’s also the best practical, readily applicable session I attended during the conference. . . . 

I was never able to implement anything related to the 90-Second Newbery, much to my disappointment.

And, finally, the reason I am blogging today, my review of the long-awaited Dare to Know.

Wonderfully quirky, nerdy, and compelling.

The narrator is reflective, curious, self-conscious and insecure. He is also a washed-up former star of a fading industry, suffering a mid-life crisis and looking back on how he has gotten to where he is. It almost reads like an alternate reality autobiography, feeling confessional, personal, and true. And it features ruminations on math, science, death, ritual sacrifice, mysticism, and repeated use of the word "chthonic."

I have to admit, though, I was hooked from the moment I read the author bio on the back jacket flap.

James Kennedy is the author of The Order of Odd-Fish. Before becoming a writer, he was a computer programmer with a degree in physics and philosophy. Dare to Know is his first adult novel.

For one, I'm in the fairly small group of people who read and enjoyed The Order of Odd-Fish when it came out some 14 odd years ago and have been waiting for his sophomore effort since. Even more, I was thrilled by someone into writing, computer programming, physics, and philosophy. This, to me, is someone who wants to understand how things work--and why. And I wasn't disappointed, because this book's narrator is all of those things.

This reads a little bit like The Matrix. Well, it lives in The Matrix's neighborhood. The part without any action sequences or coolness, in the library, museum, and university district. Still, our character dwells on the edges of the code that determines reality. He has a special awareness that most people lack, a special talent to almost manipulate reality. And he is a struggling, lonely, bitter salesman in crisis. He's Neo crossed with Willy Loman.

What he sells is math. The math related to a recently-discovered particle called the thanaton, which determine the whens and hows of death. He calculates and sells people their death dates.

Everyone was shocked that thanatons behaved according to mathematics that were, for lack of a better term, subjective. Stettinger's breakthrough: to acknowledge that the solver was part of the problem. That is, when solving for the thanaton, both the problem and its solver changed--they changed each other, step by step, during the solving process. Even more unexpected: that you could only do subjective math by inventing your own subjective way. You had to construct your own version of the math, your own version of the algorithms, your own heuristics, even your own notation. That's why computers can't do subjective mathematics. It's why thanatons were resisted for so long by traditional mathematicians.

He spends some of the book explaining thanatons, their discovery, his interest, the growth and decline of his industry, the path of his career. He spends some of it remembering old friendships that were pivotal to his identity, and more on his misadventures in love and family. All the things that have brought him to his current moment.

Woven into those confessions are hints of terror, things that don't make sense, cracks in the system. He slowly parcels them out with marvelous plotting, building tension and momentum and vague, creeping dread until readers join him in feeling that there's something else, something more to thanatons than anyone knows. And that we're bound to find out.

I'm sure this book won't be for every reader. For me, with similar interests and manner of thinking, of a contemporary age to resonate with all the life-experience and pop-culture references, it was a perfect fit.

A sample:

To my surprise, Renard felt the same way. He said that music on the radio sometimes freaked him out, too, but for him it was the sleek, artificial eighties anthems that were haunted; to Renard those songs sounded reptilian, sinister, metallic; he remembered one time, late at night in bed listening to the radio, when Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer" came on, he had felt a chill at the lyric about seeing a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. Renard had no idea what a "deadhead sticker" was but it had sounded to him like a satanic emblem--and since the sticker was displayed on a Cadillac, that implied that even the wealthy were in on the satanism, that society's spiritual corruption went all the way to the top. Renard had also imagined the "little voice inside my head" referred to an actual voice that broke into the singer's consciousness, hissing behind his ear, Don't look back, you can never look back. So the question is, should you obey this demon voice or defy it? Should you actually look back? But wait, what if it's a deliberate taunt, what if the voice's intention is to goad you into looking back? In that case, you really mustn't look back, right? Like how Indiana Jones tells Marion not to look when they open the lost ark? Because maybe the deadhead sticker wants to do something worse than melt your face off, it wants to infect the world with its evil, and if you did turn around to look at the deadhead sticker on the Cadillac it would find its way into you, it would place its evil in you.

So don't look back.

Renard and I understood each other.

It was worth the wait.

A few more things from Dare to Know before I call this done. I really like this quote.

Do you fall in love with someone because you understand them? Not at nineteen. It's their otherness that draws you in. At nineteen you're collecting people. Trying on different ways of being.

And the bit about "The Boys of Summer" is the second half of a section I really liked, that I related to. Here's the whole bit.

For me the eighties meant a time of clean lines. Top 40 music sounded cleanly synthetic. Eight-bit computer games were constructed of sharp, neon pixels. Movies and TV shows got taken out of the hands of weird hippies and put in the hands of pros who knew how to please. Things that were meandering, bearded, shaggy, bloated, natural, organic: out. Things that were straightforward, lean, engineered: in. This was good. I hated the druggy, ugly seventies, or my child's-eye impression of it. Charles Manson looked like a Beatle to me. As a child, I felt like the devil walked the land in the seventies, because when I'd overhear adults talking seventies stuff, or see it in newspapers, it'd be about serial killers, or hundreds of people committing suicide using Kool-Aid or whatever, or drugged-up soldiers massacring villages, or Andy Warhol ghouls lurking in discos. Why were they acting like that? I felt lucky to come of age after America had flushed all that gnarly viciousness out of its system and bequeathed to me a world that was clean and safe and reasonable. I'm older now and realize that Sgt. Pepper is a fine album, and of course all kinds of worthwhile things happened in the seventies--and yes, I'm aware that I sound like I had been some weird reactionary child who read the National Review instead of Garfield, but I wasn't, not really, because just remember, a child has no political context, only an impressionable imagination, and to be fair, when Bob Dylan is demanding at you you over the radio that "Everybody must get stoned," it frankly sounds scary to a child, especially with Dylan's apparent nasal delight in the idea, with the creepily wheezing old-time harmonica, and you vaguely know that being "stoned" has to do with drugs, and know drugs are bad, but Bob Dylan is so maniacally insistent about it, why is he so invested in everybody getting stoned? Especially when he goes on to say, "They'll stone you when you" do this and that what does that even mean? If you don't get yourself stoned on Bob Dylan's fucking schedule, he'll send somebody to do it to you? These are your big heroes of the seventies--shaggy weirdos like Cheech and Chong, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles? You know who'd be a better hero? Pac-Man! Here's a hard-working guy who clocks in every day without complaint, who plays by the rules, and if a ghost kills him, he doesn't protest the system, man, he just gets himself born again.

I didn't say that to Renard in so many words. But when Renard asked me, "What are you afraid of?" it would've been stupid to say "I'm afraid of heights" or "I get nervous about public speaking." I wanted to say something particularly true about me so I said something similar to the above about not liking the Beatles and how I had broken my sisters' record on purpose.

To my surprise, Renard felt the same way. He said that music on the radio sometimes freaked him out, too, but for him it was the sleek, artificial eighties anthems that were haunted; to Renard those songs sounded reptilian, sinister, metallic; he remembered one time, late at night in bed listening to the radio, when Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer" came on, he had felt a chill at the lyric about seeing a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. Renard had no idea what a "deadhead sticker" was but it had sounded to him like a satanic emblem--and since the sticker was displayed on a Cadillac, that implied that even the wealthy were in on the satanism, that society's spiritual corruption went all the way to the top. Renard had also imagined the "little voice inside my head" referred to an actual voice that broke into the singer's consciousness, hissing behind his ear, Don't look back, you can never look back. So the question is, should you obey this demon voice or defy it? Should you actually look back? But wait, what if it's a deliberate taunt, what if the voice's intention is to goad you into looking back? In that case, you really mustn't look back, right? Like how Indiana Jones tells Marion not to look when they open the lost ark? Because maybe the deadhead sticker wants to do something worse than melt your face off, it wants to infect the world with its evil, and if you did turn around to look at the deadhead sticker on the Cadillac it would find its way into you, it would place its evil in you.

So don't look back.

Renard and I understood each other.

That's not quite the way I felt about things in the 80s, but it's not quite wrong either.

The narrator mocks these thoughts even as he reports them, but I actually quite like them.

But what about those scientists who are more like prophets, people who get transfigured into units and laws and elements?: Visionaries who don't stop at learning the little rules for everything and forcing themselves into what already exists, but who push further--who become shamans who create new rules?

Yes.

That was it.

Create. Not discover.

What if it actually worked like this, Kulkarni and I drunkenly speculated (and never did Kulkarni seem as Renard-ish to me as he did then): what if the reason that fundamental discoveries about the universe are so often accompanied by an aura of witchcraft, alchemy, supernatural noise--the gates of the chthonic cracking open--was because the act of theorizing the law somehow created the law?

Just like how a particle doesn't have a specific position or momentum until you measure it--just like how a death doesn't have a precise time and date until we calculate it--maybe even physical laws of the universe don't have a precise definition until they are defined?

That is, Newton didn't discover gravity--rather, through some extraordinary interaction between his mind and reality, Newton created gravity, and the universe rearranged itself to accommodate his concept, his newly minted law echoing backward and forward through space and time, restructuring reality. When Einstein revised Newton, space-time again literally changed, trembling with unearthly reverberations. Planck didn't merely discover quantum theory, but rather, Planck stood at the fulcrum between the known and the unknown, grappled with reality and won--and in that moment Planck inscribed new physical laws into the universe, laws that explained the world while opening the way for new phenomena that simply hadn't been possible before--phenomena that proceeded not according to laws that Planck discovered, but laws that he generated.

Such a metaphysically destabilizing act requires more than just human ingenuity. It demands mystic force. And not just anyone can rewrite the laws of the universe. Only through grueling mental submission to the physics, plus a jolt of supernatural energy, can one grasp the levers of reality for a moment and shift them. An opportunity that might occur only once in the lifetime of a genius. So it was, perhaps, for us.

In this reading, Stettinger didn't discover thanatons, but through a tremendous mental exertion, Stettinger summoned thanatons into existence. An act primed by and followed by supernatural momentum. Stettinger didn't merely learn something about the world; he birthed something new into it.

It might have happened more times than we would guess. The laws of physics might have been literally rewritten not only by Newtons and Einsteins, Bohrs and Feynmans, but countless anonymous others.

Nonsense, all of it, of course. Walking tipsily home from the train that night, though, I realized how the whole discussion only underscored how Erin was right. You can spend all your life studying the universe around you, but for what? So you can learn how to best deform yourself to fit into the machine more efficiently? How about instead of mutilating yourself to fit the world better, why not grasp those levers and change it?

The discussion made me think of Renard.

I felt the weird kid at my side as I walked home, an invisible Flickering Man accompanying me.

If the actual physics doesn't magically transform with world-changing new paradigms, at the very least our perceptions change enough to make it feel like it does. The act of observation changes the observer. That's a kind of magic.

I can't help but think, given different circumstances, we could have been friends for more than a weekend.