I’ve begun The Templar Legacy which is yet another of the Da Vinci Code style books. And it occurs to me that flipping this attempt at subversion around would be a good idea.

Such books tend to start in the Middle Ages with some esoteric conflict between powerful men with the hero dying, but his secret is safe.

Now after this, there is a secret order which keeps the secret and a bad guy order which hunts for them. There is a lot of secret codes and symbology, and famous people in history are part of this conspiracy.

Gnostic gospels tend to be a large part of this as well with some highly questionable revisionist history.

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Now to flip this around:

Verser arrives in Middle Ages in prison with injured man with secret. Man takes him for an angel, and promises he kept the great secret. He’s delirious from being tortured. He gives hero item of secret worth. Its a cryptic key which will unlock the secrets of the ages.

Victim dies. Later prisonkeeper comes and sees dead man, and verser. He wonders where the verser came from but is willing to torture him as well. Verser dies somehow, perhaps in some sort of desperate escape attempt.

Verser comes back a couple worlds later in the modern contingency world of the preceding world. He finds a subtly disagreeable world….one advances through ranks toward the Ultimate Truth meanwhile doing all sorts of frequently degrading favors for your Teachers. Its like Frat Pledge Week for life, although not quite so blatant. And unless one reaches the 32nd level, one does not know one is truly Worthy, one only hopes one is worthy of entry into Paradise.

But each level tends to reveal truths that the previous level might have disagreed with. What starts at Level One through Five as a fairly decent and simple religion, by level twenty has mutated into something fairly awful, and by Level 32nd the Ultimate Truth is revealed–Its all a hoax. God is dead, miracles never happened, and the whole thing is a hoax to keep the fools content enough so they don’t kill themselves in despair. The Ultimate Enlightened Ones who are supposed to be assured of entrance into Heaven where all others are merely possible know that Heaven doesn’t exist.

But, but….there is a secret order….its symbols can be found in diver’s places, in public squares and in the keystones of buildings. Some of these symbols lead to secret truths, in part because the Crossbearers have been persecuted down through the ages with extreme venom. Whole countries have been overthrown to get at them. But they survive. It helps that they are frequently some of the brightest men of their time.

And they have a Truth. God lives, miracles are real, and anyone, not just the wise, can know with ease that they can enter into Glory as a gift. But this Truth is profoundly subversive, and so the Powers That Be have deliberately tried to suppress it for centuries.

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The other writer is Terry Brooks. He writes Shannara and the Knight and the Word series. He’s joining these two histories together. The Knight is a modern day warrior mage trying to hold off the end of the world. He’s going to fail. Shannara is the reborn world of magic after the end of the technological world.

Its quite an impressive intellectual feat in its way.

However, he’s started a bridging series where there are still Knights, and the Elves are moving into play. The world is falling apart as Demons and Once-Men assault anything Human, and put them in slave camps, and Freaks (transformed people who I think become the basis of the later Races of Shannara) run around. Human society has broken down, and most Humans live in large walled cities. Demons gather Armies and go smash these cities.

The Knight tries to tell the people to leave the cities and go into the country.

I don’t get this. You have a defensible position with organization. Granted you have a fixed position, but still…. And its not like Terry Brooks is not familar with the value of fixed defenses. One of his earliest of his many, many books is a wonderful tale of the onslaught of a possibly unstoppable army into layers and layers of defenses.

I think he’s trying to say City=Badness without actually coming out and saying it. Or ‘the old society must be completely destroyed in order for the new and better way to be born’ but you can’t sell people on that either.

In some ways it reminds me of the Tower of Babel. God wanted to destroy Earth’s culture as it was, and put something new in its place. It is instructive in this that two apparently equal forces, the Word and the Void are in contest. These are gods.

I find this type of thing to be a bit annoying. Perhaps its justified, but I usually dislike it when someone has an ulterior motive, a hidden agenda. Gods are allowed to do this, of course. But it seems that the deity should make a better arguement instead of a transparently false one….even ‘trust me, I’m smarter and wiser than you’ would be a decent arguement from the deity.

Of course, in some ways, the Knight does get that arguement, and perhaps one might say its merely his human failing that he does not pass it on to the people.

Its an interesting religion. Its not very evangelistic at all. There are a few chosen, and thats it. Otherwise, the Word acts in the quiet places of one’s heart. It doesn’t recruit worshippers, but it does want people to live according to its way. Problem is people have been deliberately choosing to go toward the Void for some time now.

I’m not sure what to think of this, and I suspect that that may be deliberate, or it could be that I am simply obtuse.

In any case, I can make a variant of this.

In this world of sin and sorrow, the righteous who put service to the Logres, to each other, and ultimately to themselves are few and far in between. Instead a false rationalism abounds, a rat race of pointless ambition is the highest goal of humanity, ethics are disdained as old-fashioned, and cowardice is enshrined as a virtue.

Madness and conspiracy are common parlance, but the only true conspiracy is the only one not mentioned.

It is understood that evolution has been punctuated, and occasionally accelerated by cosmic rays in past days. There have been times in the Earth’s pre-history where great bursts of cosmic radiation turned Earth into a wildly sped up evolutionary experiment.

So why not do this with Science?

The fact that its immoral to bombard fetuses with radiation is ignored, and shoved aside as irrelavent. And those who protest are ‘anti-science’ and ‘anti-progress’.

Other possibilities seem to be appearing in the human genome. It develops that the human gentetic structure is at least ten times more complicated than realized. And among other things, it holds the ability to alter itself to deal with radical changesin the environment. Most such changes are in teh children of a parent who suffered.

So ‘Alties’ are started to be rumored. Beings with inhuman visages, and strange powers are seen in dark alleys.

Meanwhile the children of the Ray Experiments are growing up in their State Orphanages. They have little love, and seem to need little. The experiment is judged a failure; its in reality far worse. In reality, they are a bunch of buddng sociopaths. In a good environment many of them could be saved, but in the orphanages managed by uncaring gov’t officials they develop their own society based on a currency of power abused.

There are a few heroes trying to build something that can survive the End of the World. Some of these dream dreams sent by God.

The corrupt cities with their present day only focus, and their love of consumerism, and hatred of true individuality and righteousness are like fat, diseased cows to the wolves of the Ray Experiments once the cohort is released. Its remarkable how quickly the great institutions in some cities folded. All it took was kneecapping three writers for the New York Times to decide to toe the line.

But things fell apart. The Rays were not deft enough to run the society on their own. So they didn’t mind too much when people fled ‘their benevolent rule’. It gave them an excuse to cut loose with Hunting Patrols.

At first these were Apache gunships. Later as technology failed, they were on horseback. But an organized patrol with weapons and skills was worth many times its number in fleeing refugees. It is a truism that most of the dead in a battle come when one side flees.

But some few fought back, they urged those in cities to fight back, and many did. The Rays were thrust outside the great cities which were now but a fifth of their old size.

This was okay for the Rays as well. They still needed a smaller society. They set up armies, and forced the ‘recruits’ to engage in diabolical practises in order to bind them to the new order. Then they sent their cannon fodder against the great cities.

Unfortunately, most of the cities were soft still. They fled, and were pursued and slaughtered.

A few fought back against the Rays. Some military forces held together. Some Alties formed the core of various groups, and with their powers they taught the Rays respect. Some of the Prophets developed small powers as well, and even some few developed Altie powers. But none of the Rays could get either. That was okay…they had learned what drugs to take to make themselves temporarily superhuman.

The war between the Logres and his poor pitiful counterfeit, the Power continues. No man, not even a Prophet knows the end.

Eric