Writing is telling the story that someone else inspired—divine intuition or artistic influence—to someone else to read and enjoy. A crude messenger, the writer embarks his fragile skiff linking these two shores, navigating the treacherous waters of self-doubt and creation. Sunk by critics, hurled by the changing winds of imagination, worn down by the salt of uncompromising words, battered by lexical gale and condescending syntax. The path to a finished product, assuming a book could ever be considered finished, sinuous, mind-chattering, brain-damaging, nerve-eroding, often felt like the mental sculpting of a moving shape, monster or beauty, the relentless carving of sentences at each read, adding or removing, until the flow and curve seemed fluid enough. It is a less travelled road, nocturnal, full of wonder and terrors. The satisfaction of a word or a paragraph soon buried under self-deprecation. Unworthy of any literature and waste of precious time.
You start out of grown-up ignorance and childish curiosity and finish out of hopeful rage or unflinching desperation. To realise that the worst is to come, convince someone else of the value of the long and lonely odyssey you have been through. Eventually the source of love—or rage—that burned through you and ignited the first sparkles of writing keeps you afloat to face the coming storms of completion and, as if all had to be restarted, publishing.
This book is a syncretism, a melting pot of a variety of recent or old sources of inspiration and joy. Constelleanor is my own ark of ideas and beliefs. A boat I needed to launch, with the concern of it being too early, too superficial that it may pitifully sink in the port and never reach the open sea of literature and readers.
There is an undisguised link and homage to American Renaissance man Lewis Mumford. He belongs to the lineage of American thinkers that we need to rediscover and resuscitate now, if we are to develop new narratives and a better understanding of who we are and how we have been manipulated by ourselves. Ironically, Mumford considered science fiction as “essentially archaic and regressive” and dystopian by nature. Maybe, historians—which I am not—are best placed to write tales of our future. It is one of the book’s many interrogations.
