This weekend, I am taking a break from philosophy. I decided to pick back up on what was supposed to be a novella. I just have to face the fact that my imagination runs the sequence of comfortable events in campy, fun, and oftentimes genre-based scenes. Other times, it dips unconsciously into the philosophical parts of my brain. This untitled work is about a young man from the slums of Senestra, a type of rust-belt fantasy city that mines the ore that powers airships of a mighty mage theocratic society. Think Akron Ohio, but without our level of technology, but in a fantasy setting. They mine lodestone there that powers the airships. Lodestone seeps into the groundwater, and it exposes people to magickal pollution. This saturation exposes the dim and oftentimes produces Elementalists. When the Allurian Empire finds such people, they are conscripted into the Noble Houses of Wizardfolk. The rarest are Sixers who are trained as magickal assassins.
So Strellum is forcefully recruited. His family is killed off and however much of a trope that is for an action hero to be unhinged I am trying to write what the cost of real combat is, a type of existential Batmaning. It’s all YA in a sense, and I am writing in the first-person perspective, which I have never done. A major theme of this work is a loss of innocence that is bred in violence but also it’s part of every single cultural representation of masculinity of my 1980s childhood. It’s in GI Joe, Transformers, He-Man, and even aspects of TMNT transform young teenagers into weapons. There’s a psychic cost to one’s personality that has to happen, and this cost is never truly paid by any of the turtles in TMNT. They keep their innocence as children to relate to the young men watching it, but such innocence is peeled away combat after combat. That’s why I think TMNT is the not realistic as far as the standards of good YA novels are concerned. The cost of violence is a lot. Innocence is shattered. Innocence is a luxury of a class that does not live in poverty.
Strellum is also enslaved to a life and power that did not choose him, and there’s a brewing undercurrent of Spartacus here, an anti-slavery ethos that emerges in Strellum very early in his “assassin career.” I did not expect this as I am writing him. Strellum is teaching me what it might mean to lose the innocence of childhood to systems of power that condemn the enslaved to do a Master Wizard’s bidding. Something close to Adorno mixed with militancy is emerging; it’s not Kingian at all, but something terrifyingly real based on an ethical desire to self-actualize and just how precious real freedom might be. Freedom is so precious that some might even kill for it, and there is no way around this truth
The Horizon and The Fringe 