Practical Applications of Riemannian-Bishopian Dimensional Translations – Part 1

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,
Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

Dunwich is a very odd place.  First of all, you’ll notice that it does not appear on any map of New England.  And this is both an advantage and a disadvantage.  On the plus side it limits the amount of traffic that traverses its roads.  On the minus side it’s darn hard to enter and leave it.  For instance, there are no gas stations in Dunwich so whenever I need to fill up the old gas tank, I have to find a way out of town and find my way back in again afterward.  And it’s not a matter of just heading down any road until you reach the town limits.  Strictly speaking there are no limits.  If you travel on Aylesbury Pike past Sentinel Hill for about three hours you’ll come back to Sentinel Hill again.  And if you turn off at Whateley Lane and go for about two hours, you’ll notice a singularity in the middle of the road.  And if you get too close to it, you’ll be pulled in and find yourself in the alimentary canal of Yog Sothoth.  And that’s not a good place to be.  So, you can see that commuting is somewhat problematic.  But for all of the locals it’s really just an acquired skill that is taught from father to son.  It’s all a matter of geometry.  Einstein believed that our space time was a variety of non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian.  And it is.  However, Dunwich has a different geometry called Bishopian after the famous Dunwichian mathematician (or wizard) Septimus Bishop who measured the curvature of Dunwichian space and codified the equations for translating back and forth between the two universes.

The mathematics is too complex for most people without advanced training to follow.  On a practical level if you close your right eye and squint your left and slam down the accelerator just at the right location on the Dunwich side, you’ll reach normal space.  And from normal space if you close your left eye and squint with your right eye while slamming on the breaks you can return to Dunwichian space from some well-known anomalies.

For the most part this kind of travel is a routine.  But every once in a while, something seems to go wrong.  I was driving at night in a snow storm in Dunwich a few years back and I sneezed too hard and must have activated an anomaly.  When I blinked my eyes open again, it was broad daylight and obviously a summer day in some warm climate.  I found out I was in Tallahassee Florida and it was six months in the past.  And this caused all kinds of problems when I got back to Dunwich and ran into my earlier self, watching tv in my living room.  I had a devil of a time murdering my doppelganger and sinking him in the swamp.  He seemed to know all of my fighting tricks and just refused to die like a good sport.  Some people are like that.

Moving on to Something Better

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With millennial women writing articles called; “The Death of Millennial Feminism” and; “Millennial Feminism Is Undead” I guess the patriarchy and I really did win!  Does this mean all the girl bosses and Karens are going to put on their Handmaiden outfits and start making sandwiches for all of us?  Well, not exactly.

These people will always be the most annoying insufferable weirdos they’ve always been.  What it does mean is that they’re reaching their forties and they’ve realized that they’ve run out of time to have normal lives.  They’ve traded in the chance at love and family for lower middle management careers and mean tweets.  And, as it turns out, for women that’s a pretty hard pill to swallow.

Reading through the first article is pretty awful.  All the “body positivity” and “polyamory” nonsense that this crazy woman spouted did nothing to save her from ending up enormously fat and saddled with a husband who she had to allow to bring a normal weight woman into her bed as her way of sticking it to the patriarchy.  The just plain craziness of all the “everything is just a social construct so we can’t invent our own rules” is on exhibit here.  They talked themselves into believing that the differences between men and women were just tools of patriarchal oppression and now that those differences are becoming impossible to ignore, they are panicking.

And so, these articles are the admission of what has been going on for the last few years with the endless YouTube and TikTok videos of thirty something and forty something women shrieking their shocked anger that their thirty something and forty something male equivalents aren’t interested in marrying them or even dating them.  Some of these women do break down and cry.  And I find that sad.  But most of them are just angrily indignant that these men don’t know what they’re missing.  Now, those I find hilarious.  I’m guessing the sad ones are just the angry ones after a few more years of loneliness.  As it turns out the female biological clock isn’t a “social construct.”  It’s a ticking time bomb that every woman ignores at her peril.

So, here’s hoping that the millennial feminism actually is dead.  All it ever brought was anger, confusion and dysfunction into the world.  Let’s hope that the women of Gen Z learn something from their older female relatives that fought the patriarchy and lost their happiness doing it.  Maybe they can find a way to embrace the full reality of being a female human (a woman!) and learn to enjoy the rich heritage that our species has inherited from the biological world we were created within.  The war between men and women is a real thing.  It’s always existed and it always will.  But it’s also just the dance that goes along with sexual reproduction and the rules of our species.  Men are what they are because of their role in the family and so are women.  Sexuality and family are the most rewarding parts of being human.  Let’s hope feminism stays buried and we can move onto something better.

Thinking of Humor

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If you go through my entire book looking for moments of humor, I think there are fewer than ten.  And that is counting sarcasm as humor.  I’m guessing that in an adventure story that’s probably not unusual.  With a team of men that know each other pretty well, there will be a certain amount of banter which can be defined as humor.  But, I don’t feel like I’ve fallen below some critical thresh-hold of comedic content.

But, at the same time, I have to confess that comedy is one of the things I greatly enjoy in stories.  To my mind stories that do not have a certain amount of humor seem flat and lacking in interest.  And for that reason, I was recently wondering if I could introduce a character in my next book that is a “wise guy.”  And by wise guy I’m not thinking of the Good Fellas definition of an Italian American mobster as a wise guy.  I’m harking back to my childhood when every block had at least one guy who was the clown.  In my neighborhood we had a kid who today would equate most closely to an insult comic.  He was a mimic and he could find a way to mock anyone and everyone.  This often earned him at least a mild beating if the victims of his mockery pooled their strength to grapple him to the ground and pummel him until he shut up.  But it was almost as if he couldn’t help himself.  He was a slave to his craft.

Now I don’t intend to try and recreate that type of juvenile humor but I think I could make a character who doesn’t know when to shut up.  I’m guessing I’d have to do a lot of work editing the dialog from this character because obviously that’s the kind of thing that pretty easily can be taken too far.  As an example, look at the movie Dead Pool.  This character shoots an almost endless series of insulting jokes at every other character in range regardless of whether they’re friends or enemies.  For the most part it’s entertaining but at some points it can become wearisome.  So, I understand that doing comedy “right” is a matter of balance and skill.  And the other part of it is providing the “comic” with a foil; a straight man.  So Dead Pool needs the haplessly earnest Colossus as the butt of a lot of his jokes.  Building up a duo like that must be handled carefully so that these two characters can be more than caricatures.  And all of this mustn’t take away from the main action of the story but merely come off as the personalities of the characters involved.  It needs to seem organic to the relationship of the people involved.

Now after talking all that through, it seems like this would be a lot of work for not much gain to the story.  But for whatever reason, I’m excited by the idea.  Making the characters real seems to be as important to the writer as making the action exciting.  I’ve found myself actually caring for my make-believe people as if they were real.  Well, anyway, tonight I was thinking of humor.