Parallel Universe Theory

Thing I’ve been mulling over for a while: some really good YA fantasy novels of my childhood (Young Wizards - no one who knows me is surprised by this) really emphatically gave me tools to understand and dismantle my own “white supremacist delusion,” as Sonya Renee Taylor puts it. The construction of the cosmos in these books formed my worldview at a really early age. They have helped me, decades later, to believe deeply and truly in both my own ability to support and uphold Evil in all of its guises, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘nice’ I may inherently see myself to be - and my own power to dismantle Evil in all its guises, within myself, as well as in the world beyond myself.

I was watching this IG live video where Taylor powerfully explains how important it is to shift from seeing whiteness as something intrinsically ours to possess rather than as the result of a dehumanizing system that we can - and in fact are ethically called upon to - uproot. I understand Taylor to be saying that I, as a person assigned power by whiteness, have a duty to continually identify and reject the delusions of whiteness starting with myself. 

There’s an image Taylor uses, in this video, of searching inside of yourself for the spaces where this toxic ideology of whiteness has taken hold - and to find and uproot it. And immediately I saw a climactic moment from High Wizardry, one where Dairine has a realization about how intimately entropy has its hold upon her:

She stopped, as the answer rushed into her mind from the manual. Where entropy is, it said, there its creator also is, either directly or indirectly…

I’m a product of this universe, after all, she had said to the mobiles. It’s in me too…

Her heart turned over inside her as she came to know her enemy. Not a Darth Vader, striding in with a blood-burning light-sabre, not something outside to battle and cast down, but inside. Inside herself. Where it had always been, hiding, growing, waiting until the darkness was complete and its own darkness not noticeable any more. Her Enemy was wearing her clothes, and her heart, and there was only one way to get rid of It…

She was terrified. Yet this was the great thing, the thing that mattered […]

I’d hazard a guess that many of us have a primary conditioning to see evil precisely as “something outside to battle and cast down.” I say this about evil in general; I think it’s probably extra true for the ways that white people approach the evil of white supremacist delusion. I see it a lot with the teenagers that I now teach: the actively anti-racist white kids who really want to march, to have hard conversations with other people, to change laws, to show up at city hall meetings…and who don’t understand that, while those are all good and important things to be doing, if they are all you are doing, they will not be enough. They are all ways of seeing the problem as “something outside to battle and cast down” instead of as something that is LITERALLY “wearing [your] clothes, and [your] heart.”

The good news - also from High Wizardry - is the possibility of full and complete liberation on the other side of the recognition, and the reckoning that follows. The snatches of it glimpsed within this life, the work of widening the ground… The belief (which Duane’s world offered me, and which my Christianity never did) that even the one who dreamed Evil into being can be liberated and redeemed from it…and that that, and no less, is the scope of the work. 

(YW also taught me, perhaps most importantly of all, that this work is collective and done best when part of an ever-widening family / network / team.)

This is the fourth week of Red, White and Blue Stars Month!

This week’s entry: Types of Stars

http://typeslist.com/different-types-of-stars/

hologram: Saturn’s rings, photographed by Cassini, 18th January 2007.

Images taken as Cassini moves from one side of the ring plane to the other, neatly showing how the rings look in reflected and transmitted light (brighter and darker, respectively).

Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Animation: AgeOfDestruction.

The Wizards' Oath changes from novel to novel in the Young Wizards series. Do you think you'll ever have a final version of it, or do you see the Oath continuing to grow and change for as long as the series continues?

There won’t ever be a “final” version, no. Whenever the series ends (or its author does), there will always be an understanding that there would always have been versions of the Oath we’d simply never see (or have time to see).

It’s not so much an issue of the Oath itself changing. At the start of a wizardly career, it’s offered to each probationer in the form that will best express to them what their responsibility to the Universe, the One and the Powers that Be is going to look like, at least at the outset. It tends to be simple and clear to start with: people need to be certain about what they’re signing up for. But afterwards, Oaths can change and become more complex as their users change, and as their understandings of that responsibility grow.

There are versions of the Oath that have become very popular across cultures, across regions of a world, or sometimes even planet-wide or further, depending on the species. But everyone understands that each wizard has the right to restate the Oath for himself/herself/itself/whatevergenderself so that it best expresses that responsibility to minimize the growth / effects of entropy, including the most basic strictures: don’t end life if you can avoid it, don’t handle finite resources thoughtlessly, don’t interfere in working systems unless the system itself is under significant threat, don’t change things without permission / fix what’s not broken (a dual simplification/restatement of the Troptic Stipulation: see Tom’s discussion of it and other aspects of the Oath here).

But outside of that, there’s room for considerable elaboration. Some wizards over time evolve personal recensions of the Oath that are quite long. In fact mention is made in future-canon of a species somewhere a long way off whose entire wizardly practice consists in recitation of the Oath in one of its most involved and complex forms. They spend their whole lives, these wizards, in an ecstasy of expression that we’re not remotely equipped to understand… continually reminding the Universe how it’s meant to be cared for. They don’t actually do anything — or so it would seem to us at first (or second or tenth) glance. But our perception of the never-ending intervention that is their lives is necessarily limited by the (all-too-)human perception that to matter, you have to be doing stuff. As their species reckons things, they are the most recklessly active and adventurous wizards extant. And who are we to judge them as being otherwise? 

The above is just one of many worlds or other kinds of places (I think this gets mentioned in AWoM somewhere) where, in this mode or others, the Oath appears in forms that would make no sense whatsoever to a human. Yet these still fruitfully express the relationships of the species in question with the Powers and with the Universe they’re helping to take care of. And even when using what we consider one of the conventional local wordings, inside a human wizard’s head — over the course of their practice — images and concepts get attached to the mere words that are evocative of the interventions you’ve participated in, the lives you’ve saved, the friends you’ve lost, the causes you’ve won. In fact you could probably make a case that no matter how many times you repeat the words, even if they’re the same words, it is impossible for you ever to speak the same Oath twice. You are not the wizard you were a year ago, or three, or ten: or an hour ago, or five minutes back. You are in constant change, as is the Universe you serve (since you’re stuck inside Time together). Your work in that Universe changes you further, and your constant commitment and re-commitment — as itself manifested in the Oath — changes you further still. It’s all flux, from a wizard’s first breath to the last: and that’s as it should be.

So, no… no “final” versions of the Oath: not until the last quartz molecule stops vibrating. By which time, it’ll no longer be any problem of mine. :)

So You Want To Be a Wizard: All This for a Pen? and A White Hole Dies

Deep Wizardry: UNDER THE SEA/WITH YOU AND ME/AND YOU’RE GONNA DIIIIIE!

High Wizardry: I Wanna Be a Wizard Like My Big Sis! (Creates New Species)

A Wizard Abroad: So You Want to Learn About Irish...

At Ebooks Direct: Our Pride Month Bundle is 50% off!

Caution! These works contain: homosexuals, bisexuals, lesbians, pansexuals, asexuals, polyamorous folks, genderfluid humans and nonhumans, and two (or maybe three) varieties of queer magic-users, as well as gay science-users, wizards, and Dragons.

And they’ve all been there since 1979.

Welcome to one universe where whom you love and how your genders intersect is between you, your lover(s), and the Goddess. And another where wizards come in so many species and sexualities that getting sniffy about something as wildly variable as local sex and gender may well be seen as kind of provincial… when you’re just one more of a million kinds of humanity, and the serious question is: “Never mind the tentacles—do you think we can date?”

The Pride Month Bundle contains:

The Door Into Fire*

The Door Into Shadow*

The Door Into Sunset*

Tales of the Five #1: The Levin-Gad

Tales of the Five #2: The Landlady

Sirronde’s World #1: The Span

Sirronde’s World #3: Parting Gifts (SW #2 not yet written)

Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #1: Lior and the Sea

Additionally, it contains the Tales of the Middle Kingdoms novella, Overdue—available only at Ebooks Direct as a standalone purchase, in this collection, and in the whole-store “I Want Everything You’ve Got” collection.

And finally, from the Young Wizards universe, the Pride Month Bundle contains the matter-of-fact exit from the (contextual) closet of two of the best-loved characters in the series—Advisory wizards Tom Swale and Carl Romeo—on their first canonically-“out” (ad)venture as a couple:

Owl Be Home For Christmas

Click here to get the 2024 Pride Package!

(And if you've got one already, or aren't interested in the offer, would you consider reblogging for the attention of others? Please & thank you!)

UK friends: due to Brexit, we regret that we are no longer able to sell ebooks into Britain. Our apologies that this offer is therefore not valid in the UK.

*Gaylaxic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame winner

Finally! A black hole that you can visit and survive!

Want a trip through a black hole without having to experience that pesky death? You’re in luck. There’s a special kind of black hole that’s not just survivable, but might get you to another time, or another universe.

Black holes are, traditionally, the scariest things in the universe. Huge, mysterious, inescapable, they wander through the universe and eat everything that gets too close. “Too close” is defined by their event horizon. This is the point at which they go dark, because it requires so much energy to escape them that not even light can get away. Since not even a photon can cross the barrier, no event that happens inside the horizon can ever have an effect on people outside.

Unless, something very odd was going on in the center of the black hole. Most black holes spin - this is something that was discovered way back in the 1960s by physicist Roy Kerr. It wasn’t exactly a shock, because most of the material that collapses into a black hole was already spinning. Sometimes, however, the spin on Kerr black holes goes a little above and beyond. Ever spun a glass of water, or soda bottle, so that the liquid inside swirls? Sometimes, if you spin it enough, the liquid actually parts, leaving a clear center and a spinning ring of water around it. The same kind of thing can happen in Kerr black holes. Instead of a singularity at the center, there’s a ring. And you can go through the open portion of that ring without touching the gravitational crush.

What’s on the other side? A lot of people have wondered. Some people think that these kind of black holes might be our key to time travel. They might be wormholes that let us hop between different points of the universe. Or they might be portals to different universes entirely. First we’ll have to find a few, and then we’ll need a few volunteers to go through. Preferably ones that haven’t seen Event Horizon.

Top Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Second Image: Dana Berry/NASA

Via NASA, Astrophysics Spectator, Discovery.

Fuck personality tests. Who comes to your mind when I say "Michael"