The widening aperture

Moon­bound reads as fan­tasy in its opening chapters, but then the aper­ture widens, and it becomes sci­ence fiction, although the flavor of the fan­tastic persists: epic, archetypal, rich in sym­metry and resonance.

The widening aper­ture is at the book’s heart. It might be the reason I wrote it.

One of my favorite moves in sto­ry­telling is the pro­gres­sive dis­clo­sure of scale. It’s a cen­tral plea­sure of cer­tain fan­tasy novels and video games, in which the scope of the story steadily expands, from farmstead, to village, to countryside, to city, to capital, to con­ti­nent … and with every ratchet click, there’s a thrill — for a young reader, especially — as you realize what you thought was the whole world was just a pixel in a larger picture.

This is the expe­ri­ence of growing up.

There’s a classic video game, Final Fan­tasy II, released in 1991, that was, for me, as for­ma­tive as any book. The plot is dense and weird, basi­cally Shakespearean; there are polit­ical maneuvers, moral metamorphoses, wrenching sacrifices. Imagine: you’ve been playing this game for hours, scouring towns, solving puzzles, fighting monsters. You have guided your little bug-like avatars across an expan­sive map, one step at a time, tap-tap-tap on the Super Nin­tendo controller.

Then, you dis­cover an AIRSHIP.

You take off, rising into the Z-axis of the world, which you didn’t know had a Z-axis. The map shrinks beneath you, revealing that the com­plex land­scape you’ve been exploring rep­re­sents just one con­ti­nent among many, all floating in a scin­til­lating pix­e­lated ocean.

It was dizzying. It was thrilling!

There’s a par­allel between that feeling and the feeling I had, fif­teen years later, sit­ting in a dark audi­to­rium in San Fran­cisco for the Seminars About Long-Term Thinking, lis­tening to a geol­o­gist or a biol­o­gist dance across the epochs.

Whoa, space is bigger than I thought.

Whoa, time is longer than I realized.

Learning just how far scale can stretch, through space and time, has been impor­tant for me: intellectually, polit­ically, emotionally. I think scale is a useful, healthy, moti­vating thing for people to grapple with. I want these books to pro­vide that opportunity, and that challenge.

First published:  October 2023
Last updated: December 2024