#spock's world

[boophisburnhamae]

I knew already that pre-Reform Vulcan was somewhat similar to modern day Earth and that Surak wasn't like, writing out his teachings on scrolls or anything. But the description of him publishing his writings "on the nets" is taking me out. My man was a blogger. An influencer, even

[mycovenisasoongandroid]

[dduane]

Hello!

I love your books, especially Spock’s World (Kesh’s story is my favorite) and I was wondering if you could elaborate more on “the spear in the Other’s heart is the spear in your own, you are he”

I know it’s fairly self explanatory but I was wondering how you came up with it.

Hope you’re well!

It's a lovely question: so thank you.

And can I elaborate on where it came from?

No. I have no damn idea. (...I mean, ideas, yeah. But no certainty.)

(And why does this keep happening to writers? Because sometimes we produce something really good, and are then utterly unable to work out how it even happened. We not only have "black boxes:" we are "black boxes." ...I guess It's just our cross to bear.)

All I can tell you is that for many years before writing that book, I had been—and still am, on and off—immersing myself in the religious writings of various cultures, aware that I needed to broaden my own internal horizons. The Asian-originated traditions have always been favorites (possibly as I initially saw them as antithetical to the "western" ones in which I was raised). So in my teens and twenties I did a lot of reading in Buddhism, and Zen.

To me, at least, it was impossible to avoid noticing the overarching theme of compassion toward those slogging upward into consciousness of life's painful realities that presents itself, again and again, in those traditions. But that wasn't at the forefront of my thoughts while working on Spock's World. What I was thinking about, a lot, is how difficult it is to write from a place of (putative) enlightenment.

It's easy to write as if you're essentially morally debased. Evil is easy. C. S. Lewis gets into this a bit in the foreword to The Screwtape Letters: "The device of diabolical letters... would run away with itself for a thousand pages if you gave it its head," he says. But he despaired of ever being able to effectively flip this trope over; for the opposite style, told from the "archangelic" side—from the enlightened side—"would have to be part of the content: every sentence would have to smell of Heaven." And he was right. The Dark Side's all too easy to express. We've all got some of that. The other side of the Force, as it were, is a whole lot tougher to summon or evoke on demand... and it's too easy for it to sound forced, or false, when it pops out. So the best a writer heading toward this kind of goal can do is the "Fake It Till You Make It" approach: try to write as if you were enlightened. Who knows? Lightning may strike. If not, at least you did your best.

Which is what I had no choice but to do. I had pretty much locked myself into a situation where I was going to have to write a character (canonically) perceived by his own culture as enlightened. Therefore when I started wrestling with how to write Surak, after a while all I could do was stop the wrestling, and write it, and see what popped out. This I did.

I can no longer remember details about the point at which, while I was writing the section in which we get into Surak's head, that particular little three-line passage, that concentrated distillation of compassion, jumped out onto the paper and left me staring at it, gobsmacked. I recognized immediately that it was too potentially powerful a thing to just drop into the prose as some kind of wise old saw. It had to be proven by action: by Surak's own action. Then, after it had served its purpose there (and straight through the storyline of the book) it could be inserted, on its own, right up at the top of the book: the already-lit-and-sizzling fuse for the thematic underpinnings of the whole work.

What can I tell you? Sometimes you just get lucky. :)

Anyway: thanks again for asking.

[alternatefuturesao3]

DIANE, YOU CANNOT JUST SAY THIS ABOUT THE MOON.

[hauntedhousemd]

I like this page of Vulcan philosophy from Spock's World

[hermitmoss]

With great care, in an operation taking three days, they scooped the original genetic material out of the ovum, replaced it with the material they had tailored from Amanda, introduced the equivalent material from Sarek, closed the little cell up ... and waited. It sat thinking for about half an hour, and then divided. And divided again. And again. They did not cheer: they were Vulcans. But there was an insufferable air of satisfaction about the Parturitic Genetics lab for days.

— “Vulcan: Seven,” Spock's World

Sorel and Daniel are from The Vulcan Academy Murders and The IDIC Epidemic, where it is established they help Spock be safely brought to term. In my heart, they are married to each other.

[psybrepunk]

Can we take a moment to appreciate how good this Joseph Csatari jacket illustration is

[ghostofjupiter8]

I'm about halfway through reading Spock's World and..

Holy shit, I was not expecting T'Pring to be such an antagonist. Girl is so bitter she's trying to split up two whole planets to get revenge on her ex.

She's also very intent on taking Jim away from Spock as revenge for Spock 'taking away' Stonn from her, which is.. y'know