Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

February 2008

"Formulating Decisions: Mysteries, Intuition and Knowledge"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Every good plot has a mystery thread, a suspense thread, a love story, comic relief, some action, a splash of angst for drama, and a touch of horror, divinity, grace and deviltry. Why? Because real life is like that – everything at once as in being "caught up in the affairs of Wizards."

To be plausible, a story has to have all the elements of life’s "affairs" including confrontation with the Unknown

Yet publishing divides stories into genres such as Mystery, Suspense, Romance, SF, Westerns, Horror, and Literature.

When I began writing professionally, I set out to write a novel from every genre in my Sime~Gen SF Universe, to demonstrate that SF is not a genre but Literature and houses all genres comfortably.

Putting the story in a space ship doesn’t make it SF. Putting a vampire in your story doesn’t make it fantasy or horror. Yet publishing insisted the background mattered more than the type of story.

Blake Snyder, in Save The Cat Goes To The Movies, (which I reviewed last month) has made my point for me by separating background from story and from structure, then factoring the field of all stories into 10 precise genres that have nothing to do with background and everything to do with the emotional payload the story delivers.

I have a hard time teaching writing students the difference between decoration and the operational components of a story. Snyder has captured the essence of that lesson.

But why do students of the Occult need that lesson?

Because, at the end of the Path to acquiring Power lies the test where you must stand as judge, jury, and executioner. You must decide someone else’s fate and thus your own.

You must learn the difference between fact, opinion, illusion, surmise, inference, and deduction. You must learn why two equally good people can look at the same data and come to different conclusions and different decisions.

You must learn how you derive conclusions from data and then apply those conclusions to make decisions using your own personal philosophy plus your Visualization of the Macrocosmic All. Read E. E. Smith’s Lensman Series for the definition. They are now available in e-book.

Today most of us have grown up on more TV and films than books or newspapers. Our notions of the shape of the world and the connections between motivations and actions are shaped by films and TV.

Writers structure scripts to facilitate the visual mode of story telling by relying on the Group Mind’s understanding of reality to fill in the gaps in the story.

Think about that. The structure of the world seen in films relies on the Group Mind’s notion of the structure of the world. But now, with Netflix, the Group Mind’s notion of the structure of the world is derived from film.

There’s a closed loop feeding on itself.

The upside of this situation is that story imbibing trains the imagination to venture safely onto the astral plane. But we have to live in 4-square reality.

Power users have to pass value judgments, determine the facts from high-spin TV "news", and exact penalties. Today, even a personal blog is an instrument of power that can shape Group Mind’s assumptions.

How many have watched a rerun of Columbo or Murder She Wrote and just known who the culprit was? You know, because you’ve discerned the pattern behind these scripts. But scripts are constructs – selected recreation of reality, not reality itself.

How many watched the O. J. Simpson murder trial, and just knew?

What do you use to "just know" hmmm?

Are you using that same kind of "knowledge" to evaluate the Presidential Candidates?

Intuition is the ability to see the invisible connections among events, to discern motivations, to see the shape of reality. Knowledge is often the conviction that what we intuit is real. How do we use that knowledge to make decisions?

Here is a novel that might show you something about yourself you haven’t seen before. Faye Kellerman’s latest in the Decker-Lazarus mysteries all of which I recommend highly, The Burnt House.

This is a typical detective mystery novel, and this time very light on the Jewish aspects of the detective’s home life, but very long on intuition as motivation. This depicts the kind of intuition that comes from studying Kabbalah, which Decker has been known to do.

A plane crashes into an apartment building and reveals a long-dead corpse along with the known victims. Meanwhile, one body is missing, a flight attendant who may or may not have been aboard the plane but hasn’t been heard from since the crash.

When the parents of the flight attendant present Decker with their hysterical and fantastic allegations that the flight attendant’s husband took the sudden, unexpected opportunity of the crash to murder his wife, Decker believes them on sheer intuition alone.

But he resists knowing – knowing anything! He assigns detectives, he spends department money wildly, he digs relentlessly, and turns up bits of facts that don’t fit any of the pictures in his mind. So he continually refuses to "know" anything. As a result, he eventually finds out what there is to know.

At one point he uses a half-remembered TV crime-reality show as a clue to how to identify a cindered corpse – which makes pretty good SF reading!

The mystery genre, from Sherlock onward, is famous for its razor sharp logic and piercing observations – and The Burnt House delivers on that promise. But it is a novel – it does lead the reader to the answer before the characters get there. The reason for that is to make the reader feel smart. That’s the essential payload of this genre – to enjoy walking through a world where you’re smarter than the smart guy.

This is a good exercise and can sharpen your mind and lead to spiritual journeys and insights but it doesn’t necessarily teach you to understand the reality you do live in.

Charlaine Harris gives us the 7^th in her Southern Vampire series, a take-off or send-up of the typical Vampire-Romance novels. They all have "Dead" in the title and star the same characters. This one is All Together Dead, a short Ace HC that is slated for paperback release in March 2008.

Sookie Stackhouse attends a gathering of vampires trying to hack out a treaty. Her loyalties and courage are tested as she solves mysteries of Vampire politics.

This novel is more of a pilot-episode script than it is a novel as the long setup grinds through suspense then bursts into visual action. Normal guys get made into superhero and super villain and pitted against each other. Decisions must be made on insufficient information, as in real life, so intuition plays its part.

In the end, one main P.O.V. character dies – but there are so many mixed up points of view that the death works, and sets up more sequels to come because Sookie saves one vampire and herself.

One of the great mysteries of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s planet Darkover lies in the Gifts, the psychic talents that run in the inbred Comyn families. In The Alton Gift, Deborah J. Ross tells a tale set after Terra once more abandons Darkover to its own resources. Trailman’s fever ravages the lands so that the Alton Gift must be combined with Terran science to produce a cure and save the world.

This novel is both a curious success – depicting one of the hardest decisions a Darkovan Comyn council can possibly face – and a disappointment because it lacks some of the mystique MZB enthralled us with.

Still, it is a visit with old friends, and a must-read for Darkover fans. For others, this novel all by itself doesn’t convey the horror of the decision the Comyn must make, which is as much emotional as fact-based.

Terran science and the philosophy behind science is anathema on Darkover – for a good reason, not the obvious one. MZB led us to the full realization of the reason through many novels, so I wouldn’t expect Ross to present the whole of it in one novel while also advancing the story arc.

The Alton Gift exemplifies what SF does better than any other genre. The SF genre is about The Unknown, The Unknowable, and the facing of the Unthinkable. The payload of SF for the reader is a new understanding of the structure of reality. But first you must know your current idea of the structure of reality.