Vormance

[Joseph T]

John:


> There's a sense in which the whole [Vormance] expedition and its  
> aftermath seem to exsist in their own, oddly discrete little  
> bubble. Certainly such a cataclysmic occurance (with all its modern  
> day overtones) would, you'd expect, have some kind of felt effect  
> on the rest of the novel's fictional world, but I don't think -  
> please someone check! - that the Vormance events are much mentioned  
> anywhere else in the book?
> So, maybe it occurs within yet another distinct fictional world?  
> And what could we say, with or without any certainty, that we know  
> about the relationships between these various worlds? Many ATD  
> reviews talk of 'parallel' worlds but that can't be right. Do they  
> not seem to brush up against one another, collide, overlap like  
> Venn diagrams, make incursions into one another?

> Tore:
It's a crucial issue you raise here, but also one that's very hard to  
speak of with any confidence, let alone certainty. The novel  
exhibits, in its own words, a "great ambiguity of Time and  
Space" (444), and there's a strong sense that the action takes place  
in not one, but several worlds. You're right that these worlds may  
not so much be understood as 'parallel' - rather they seem to be  
almost, but not quite congruent, like an image refracted through  
Iceland Spar. This brings us back to that wonderful dustjacket once  
again: On a casual glance the three layers of the title seem to  
constitute a simple shadow effect, but in reality, of course, they  
are ever so slightly different: almost, but not quite congruent, in  
fact.

I continue to see 3 distinct worlds with a sliding scale of  
interactions made possible by a certain flexibility of time, spirit  
and imagination.

The ground is  1)human history in all its bizarre and often neglected  
strangeness. I sense that part of the overall project is to recast  
what we call history to include what has been deliberately left out,  
and provide alternate causalities, sometimes more than one.

The main body of storytelling is 2)reasonably traditional  though  
highly imaginative fiction with lots of  drama, satire, jokes, sudden  
drop offs, unfinished beginnings( these last 2 are kinda weird and  
more like real life than fiction) talking lightning, divergent  
thoughts, poetic beauty etc. but always seated in and interacting in  
fictionalized but reasonably realistic ways with historical  
characters and events.

The 3rd world is the completely fictionalized, and mythologized world  
of the chums. At first it seems like the world of boys adventure  
books or  light Spielburg movies, but while living in a mythic space,  
the chums ask questions and fight among themselves, and every  
question they ask about their assigned hero roles, and the justice of  
what they are doing and accepting as normal is changing them . It is  
often as though Moses and Beowulf and Aladdin were traveling along  
through history with the rest of the planet and changing and  
reconsidering and learning new things and feeling bad for some of the  
trouble they started. Humans are always living with their myths and  
fictions and both evolve. Or devolve.

This 3rd self consciously fictional world is where time travel is  
most significant , probably because the creators of fiction play with  
time on a regular basis, and because imagination, memory  and myth  
transcend and bend the normal flow of time.

The more a character interacts with the chums fictional world the  
more estranged they seem to be from the social world and the closer  
to  realms of light, darkness, matter, and spirit: Merle, Lew,  
Hunter, Heino.





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