The stories in our skies
I was writing a simple scene for my science-fiction novel where a character looks up at the night sky. I stopped. I looked up with him and the sky was empty. Gemini, Orion, Polaris; these are our stories. This is a new world. What would I put in this character's sky? This question led me to an emerging theme of the novel: the power of naming and the importance of story and myth as a culture-making tool.
I believe that we are what we can remember. For individuals, this is our memory; for cultures, it is our story. In this novel, memory and culture are fundamentally data structures, graphs that map neural synapses and collective myths. As I explore the fight over these internal memories (whether through mystic meditation techniques or optogenetic intervention), I am seeing a very real and tangible way for larger conflicts between peoples to be illustrated against the night sky. The stars are there. All that remains is for a mind to draw a line between them, a people to tell a story. This isn't just about different cultures overlapping the same space; it's about competing claims on history. The great conflict of this world is the battle over data ownership and cultural memory: a battle over who gets to draw the lines between the stars.
This battle isn't new. This novel started from research on the French Wars of Religion, a conflict rooted in who defined truth and memory. It's profoundly saddening to see that same story lingering today. As a writer, I feel the weight of trying to capture a world defined by fragmentation and the desperate, necessary acts of resistance needed to assert one’s own story against a dominating power. The fight to draw those lines, even in a chaotic sky, is what matters.
Suggested reading (for me and for you)