Afterword to the story collection A Trio of Outliers
Craig Chalquist
Chalquist.com/fiction
February 2026
Our outworn worldviews should be in hospice.
What kinds of storytelling might help us come
up with new guiding stories for our turbulent time?
When I started talking about “worldview therapy” some years back, it was assumed—perhaps because of my psychotherapy background—that I meant a kind of philosophical counseling. As useful as that can be, as my students and I have found over the years by doing it, I meant rather that our worldviews needed therapy, or even hospice, because, once vital but now exhausted, confining, mean, and rigid, they are often sicker than we who are stuck inside them.
If worldviews were characters asked to give an account of themselves (I might have to write a story about that), they would all start strong. Materialism, rebranded in science as physicalism, let us measure and build things; much of civilization’s growth depended on it. Consumerism nursed the economies that fed that growth. Big religion addressed lawlessness and wanton brutality with moral codes of personal responsibility. Scientism, a white-coated sibling of materialism, helped us win back our powers from monotheistic submission to religious authority. (The call to “obey” God always slides into a demand to obey God’s self-appointed representatives.)
Collective consciousness never rests. Whether we think of its movement as evolutionary, revolutionary, inertial, or “a chaotic pile of rubbish,” as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said about history, it moves. When worldviews do not move as well, they stagnate. Then we suffer their shadow sides: ecological destruction, greed and wealth disparity, imperialism, warfare, and hatred of anyone not white, male, and privileged.
The more a worldview breaks down, the more those immersed in it try to defend it. After all, a worldview is a partly personal and partly collective guiding story. With it, we make sense of nothing less than reality itself. It’s our half-conscious or unconscious map for telling us who we are, what are goals and values are, where we are heading in life, and what everything is about. Our very sense of purpose depends on it.
When our worldview map is out of date, we have three options: pretend it isn’t, revise it, or make a new map. The first involves fundamentalism and zealotry (intolerant absolutisms not by any means confined to religion), and the second a laudatory but usually futile attempt to change things from within the decaying institutes that raised us. The third requires sacrifice, self-honesty, courage, creativity, and a thirst for adventure.
Option Three also requires a capacity for stepping back from our current worldview and seeing it as a narrative. Few people want to do that. For them, their existential convictions, their lifestyle attitudes, their values, and their primary beliefs are reality.
This is why we need philosophy, not as an abstract mental game, but as a tool for standing back from and questioning our beliefs.
This is also why we need fiction. The more speculative, the better.
Speculative fiction in particular is wondrously post-belief. Fiction has no absolute Truths to pitch: those jealous, ponderous, capital-T Truths that make us fight each other over them. Clinging to supposedly absolute Truths ought perhaps to be considered a form of mental illness. The need for certainty is a trauma response, a defense against facing the fact that we live in an ever-changing universe, so strap in for the ride.
No one turns to fiction to seek absolute certainty about anything. Instead, the tales of fiction and fantasy, folklore and myth offer inspiring ideas, scenarios to ponder, doses of ancestral wisdom, and imaginative new ways to see ourselves.
In “A War Without End,” Ursula K. Le Guin offers this insight to writers of speculative fiction: “The important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live.”
Perhaps such storytelling can also serve for building a new worldview for our time, in a spirit of playful experimentation. As we go I’ll use my own work as an example, but with the understanding that any adequate new worldview (saga, mythology) would need to be collective, built not from the top down by one individual, but from the ground up by many.
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When I began to write the first stories of the Assembling Terrania Cycle, describing my own version of a mythology for our time was not my conscious agenda. After a series of dreams about writing speculative fiction (which includes science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism, by the way), I took a few tales I had written down just for fun and began to imagine them as part of a larger cycle.
This spurred more tales, and with them a question: What would humanity coming of age be like?
We clearly haven’t. In pockets, yes; as a species, no. So much of the violence, hatred, and chaos at large in the world can be understood from a developmental standpoint as immaturity. When I counseled groups of men arrested for domestic and other kinds of violence, I saw clearly what I had seen growing up: mature people don’t act like that. The chronically violent batterer, the narcissist, the exploiter and manipulator, the “business as usual” cynic, the chronic liar, the schemer, and others whose actions darken the world all have one thing in common: emotional regression. They never grew up. In indigenous terms, they never got initiated into psychological adulthood.
As a result, and due largely to the power of a regressive elite who control so much of human life now, much of our suffering—large (wars, racism, sexism, air and water pollution), moderate (traffic, high cost of living), and minor (being stuck waiting in phone trees)—has been normalized. It never should have been. Around the climate-ravaged world, many governments are run by people who wear adult bodies but behave, emotionally, like mentally ill adolescents or spoiled rich kids. We haven’t learned as a species how to keep the wrong kinds of people out of positions of power over the rest of us. And it’s killing us.
What if we did, though? This is the inquiry that fuels my writing, fiction and nonfiction. What would it take for us to grow up into maturity, wisdom, and responsibility? To become capable of building a world of abundance, fairness, equity, and hope?
One thing it wouldn’t take is heroes.
Joseph Campbell’s idealized picture notwithstanding, heroes don’t change a system, they defend it. Their go-it-alone hyper-individualism walls them off from other people. Furthermore, they need villains or monsters to fight with. It’s a package deal: where there is hero, there is villain. So Gotham City gets protected from the street criminals, but the political criminals carry on. To live in Metropolis, where Superman lives, is to expect crisis after crisis. Although Thor defends Asgard, it falls anyway. If you want things to change, don’t invite heroes.
Consider Lucas Murdock, the protagonist of my novel Soulmapper. He is right to resist being treated as a hero because he knows he isn’t one. What does he really want? At journey’s end, to be with his girlfriend, to write poems, to heal people, and to do a bit of undercover work on the side. And yet look at all the changes which follow in his wake. Entire communities reach a higher place because of him. His future wife Lucille Zhou, scientist and physician, founds an international institute to keep us all safe from potentially dangerous tech dumped without review on the market.
Lucas’s brother, Heartlander Simeon Mackenzie, is even less heroic, but his efforts help reunite a broken nation. Kay Bormanus assists the organization Lamplight by bearing witness to its founding mother’s struggles while conducting a secret investigation to root out a traitor. No heroes to be found in any of this—except ex-Marine Nigel Calvaire, who wisely knows his place and stays at his post. (Read “The Quest” for an account of this in his own words.)
Psychologically, the need for heroes is the need for a Super Mom or Super Dad to fly in and save us. It’s regressive. Real adults don’t need saviors, even when things are hard. What we need is to organize to save ourselves.
So a mythology or worldview adequate to our time—post-literalist, post-absolutist, and post-patriarchal—would emphasize collective action and responsibility, not heroic super-individuality. The world is what we make it, together. We the people.
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We have used thought to build so much that we forget how deeply rooted it is in imagination, which in many traditions is not just a skill or means of entertainment, but a way of knowing. The dissertation for my second PhD traced a tradition of imaginative gnosis (deep experiential knowing) from ancient Egypt through Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and other branches of what I called the Silver Tree of Gnosis. I also mentioned more than a dozen past and present philosophers who consider imagination foundational to human life and thought.
Part of why worldviews and mythologies wear out is because imagination drains out of them, leaving dry dogmas, literalisms, and canards in its wake.
Of course, imagination can also lead us astray. If we interpret the Philosopher’s Stone of alchemy as a being of imagination, then imagination itself warns us in the voice of Mercurius, “For healthful I can be, but also poisonous.” The great Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Arabi calls this “demonic imagination.” Paracelsus the physician-alchemist distinguishes between false and true imagination, as do many other philosophers.
What poisons imagination is when we exploit it. We might fancy that it goes awry when we let it out for too long, but that’s not the problem at all. Imagination will serve no master and brook no control; it is autonomous. If we treat it with open-hearted appreciation, it will whisper important wisdoms which we can apply to life; but if we force it to do our bidding, it can turn deadly, like a tiger imprisoned in a cage. (This, by the way, is why Tolkien didn’t like the Narnia tales of his friend C.S. Lewis. Too much Christian allegory; too much forcing of the imaginal realm serves the goals of the material one: in this case, Lewis’s belief system.)
In the Assembling Terrania Cycle, the world of imagination is called the Dreamvale. As in the Islamic gnosis of Suhrawardi, Ibn ‘Arabi, and Mulla Sadra, and as in the life and work of Jung, imagination is not just a human capability, but a realm with its own laws and customs. I got a lesson in this many years ago when I went to bed frustrated that my dreams wouldn’t speak clearly; a dream figure accused me of being the type of American who demands that everyone speak English. “In our realm,” he scolded as he turned into a turtle, “you must learn to speak our language”: that of images, symbols, puns, and metaphors. Figurative language, not linear.
The Dreamvale contains every fantasy and fiction, story and dream ever conceived as well as those not yet dreamed. They are arranged in Vales: Vale 221B Baker Street, Vale 23rd Century, Vale Fahrenheit 451, and so on. Intervale is where characters from different Vales can meet, although a mortal mind is required for them to do so. Thanks to the invention of the Dreamvale Exchange, human beings can speak directly to imaginal ones. They often talk to Firiel, a wise and knowledgeable Dreamvaler who usually shows up as a very short wizard bearing a gnarled staff.
Dreamvalers are bemused that Coagulants (we who live in the material realm) think we created them. Jung discovered the autonomy of imaginal figures when they began to talk back to him, criticize him, and tell him true things he didn’t consciously know. In my case, the characters in my stories often first appear as figures in fantasy or dream. Lucas, who was persistent, even showed up in the dreams of a former relationship partner. They come not for therapy, but because they want to be written about.
To serve our troubled time, any worldview, mythology, or “New Mythos” (P.J. Manney’s apt term) must include the autonomy of the imagination as well as room for what it can teach us. When respected, it has a lot to say about how we relate to one another and to the world we share—as when, on April 5, 1920—1920!—Jung wrote in his journal about a frightening dream in which “the climate becomes warmer,” initiating a global catastrophe that some of us will survive.
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It was dreams that led me onto the path of animism and to terrapsychology, which explores how the features of the world—not only seas, lands, and creatures but also roads, cities, and neighborhoods—show up inside us as fantasy or dream figures, moods, conflicts, or unexpected ideas. Although this dynamic is psychological, it lends support to the ancient idea that everything has a “within,” as Teilhard de Chardin put it, a spirit, soul, or subjectivity. Not that rocks think, but that everything comes forth as its own kind of presence intertwined with other presences (not mere objects). Philosophers call this “panpsychism” and “panexperientialism.” Uncolonized indigenous societies call it the way things naturally are. They participate in a Great Conversation we have become deaf to—until we learn again to listen to the things of the world.
Almost from the start, Lucas encounters this startling experience on his trip up El Camino Real reaching north through coastal California. Gradually, he begins to live in a world “in which things speak” (Jung), including redwood trees and squirrels and even, at points along the way, cities. It could very well be that part of the global ecological trouble we are in came about because we started to disparage nature and world as resources to mine and exploit. We lost our sense of them as vital entities with important matters to teach us.
Some years back, the ecologist Stephan Harding and I took a class from Schumacher College out on Dartmoor for a day. He taught about soils, geology, flora, and fauna; I handled the terrapsychological exercises. At one point, as we stood in a circle among ancient outcroppings of stone, I invited the group to reverse our normal sense of ourselves as witnessing the natural world as detached observers and instead consider ourselves seen by everything around us. At which point a big raven flew a circle directly over our heads, cawed once, and flew off. It was as though the place were saying hello to us.
A worldview adequate to the time would refuse the materialist-supremacist move of reducing these and similar experiences to human projections. We need to stop believing ourselves to be the center of everything. There is no center; solipsism is narcissism. We share the world with more millions of species of life than we’ve been able to catalog.
Isn’t experiencing all things as animate a kind of craziness? Yes, in a society whose most powerful groups strive to turn the entire planet into a giant shopping mall. Which of these is crazier: treasuring the world because it lives in you as an intricate weave of presences, or ruining the world because, unlike all our ancestors up until very recently, you think of things as dead, passive, or mute? That feels more like projection.
We might not understand how things can be animate, but by using methods from the humanities, including interpretation, narrative, dream work, conversation, and somatic experience, terrapsychology suggests that they are. So do many intact indigenous cultures. That feeling of being in the Great Conversation would add an Earth-honoring dimension to any new worldview.
Which also raises the question of spirituality.
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When Plato in the Timaeus calls the cosmos a “blessed god,” he isn’t just using a figure of speech. He’s also in good company. The world’s folklore is full of tales that attest to the presence of the sacred abroad in the natural world.
This is one reason why, in Heartlander, Simeon the philosopher holds nature spirituality as the original religion of humanity. Its expressions are manifold and vary with time and place, but—until historically recently, when monotheism arrived—all story the gods as inhabiting our realm, even when they are believed to live beyond it. But who or what are the gods?
Jung had some things to say about this. One was that, understood psychologically, a god is a dominant attitude, value, or style of being, as when someone arranges their life to revolve entirely around money in unconscious worship of the bull god on Wall Street. Jung joked that John Rockefeller was a very pious person. “Where a man is absolute, there you see his religion.” In finance, which for some is a field of interest and for others a life-consuming obsession, some of the terminology is religious: Invisible Hand, Angels, Donations, Grace Period, Witching Hour... Atheist or cleric, materialist or spiritualist, our actual and effective worship is in what we are taken over by, whatever our conscious beliefs. (I heard this week about a priest whose main occupation is exorcism. He believes Taylor Swift to be an instrument of Satan, and he goes to bed every night surrounded by rosemary. If he really wants to understand devil worship, all he needs is a mirror.)
Sometimes the dominant attitude, value, or style of being is not only personal or collective, but existential; or, in Jung’s terms, archetypal. That can be a confusing word; let’s simplify somewhat.
Take beauty, or as Jung and Plato would have it, Beauty. Standards of beauty vary, but the idea of beauty, the perception of it, is universal. Around the world, the goddesses of beauty—Venus, Aphrodite, Freya, Enya, Ninlil, Maeve, Oshun—are goddesses of seduction, connection, and involvement. Beauty invites our participation. As an archetypal motif, Beauty’s lure permeates the cosmos, from virtual particles finding each other in energetic bliss to the strong nuclear force binding matter together up to gravity moving galactic clusters throughout the eros-sculpted universe. So when Plutarch says the cosmos is an Aphrodite, we can appreciate that Beauty is a theme found everywhere. In other words, it is archetypal.
Of course, the problem is in determining exactly what is archetypal. There is a habit of naming something an archetype in order to valorize it: a hard binary distinction between “the” Masculine and “the” Feminine, for example, which actually seems more cultural. My own criterion is: Can I find it as a recurring theme in the natural world? Birth, Death, Growth, Initiation, Renewal, Resurrection, Trickster, Love, Beauty, Light, Dark, Conflict, Peace, and other repeating themes, for instance.
I mention this for two reasons. One is that, in animistic cultures, these primordial motifs or themes tend to be associated with gods. The other is that my Assembling Terrania Cycle features these basic aspects of existence as sentient, as living archetypes called the Powers. This is a natural extension of the animism discussed above. It was fun to play with etymologies and name them; Beauty appears in the tales as Aluere.
Another example. When we acknowledge that uneven lumps in the primal plasma cloud gave rise to stars and galaxies and us, that quantum activity is nonlocal and “spooky,” that at quantum levels classical laws give way to probabilities, that we don’t know what ninety-plus percent of reality is made of, that we can’t measure a particle’s position and speed simultaneously, and that the Standard Model of explanation for how the universe works breaks down inside black holes, as does time, we might be excused for wondering whether Trickster created the universe, like in so many ancient tales. What if the Trickster who rules the quantum realm, the Trickster in old myths, amusing day-to-day Trickster-themed mishaps, and the Tricksters in our comedy all reflect the same archetypal Trickster in action? In my fiction, they do.
The gods don’t vanish, they don new forms, as Jung and others have pointed out, and so do their mythological kindred as the Golem reappears as AI, the Titans are submerged again with Titanic and the Titan, the homunculus peers out of laboratory organoids, and angels return as UFOs. In my Cycle, thirty Powers create the cosmos, then oversee it as an experiment to encourage self-differentiating consciousness. Ours, for instance.
Experiencing the great themes of existence as compelling presences might lend earthly and cosmic spiritual context to a mythology in the making. After all, it’s not much of a mythology without gods, even trans-literal ones who want conversation rather than worship. A main developmental task is not to get stuck to them, as when moralizers lose their humanity to possession by the archetype of Justice, or materialists can’t separate enough from Magna Mater, or wisdom teachers fall into the corona-crowned black hole of the Savior. Fiction teaches that what can seem ethereal has practical implications.
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One of the parts of philosophy I like least—and I have a degree in it—is ethics; specifically, abstract ethics. Divert an oncoming trolley to save two people or ten: what would you do if given no other choices? Such thought experiments are seldom built around real-life dilemmas like: Pay my elderly mother’s rent, or starve? Who owns the trolley company?
Reading Carol Gilligan, the psychologist famous for emphasizing care over rules, was a relief and an affirmation. I was in college, and her writings offered a welcome departure from a behavioral psychology curriculum that left my soul unnourished. (It makes sense to me that she started out in the humanities.) She gave me a word that, to this day, resides at the heart of my ethical universe: care.
Something is terminally and even evilly wrong with worldviews that leave care out of account. They are like the bloodless financial projections of malignant corporations that weigh lawsuit costs versus making cars that don’t explode in accidents. “Well, that’s how it is in the real world.” No, that’s how it is among deciders devoid of conscience.
In my tales, the characters who stand up for others never lose their outrage. Ahana is outraged that prisons are euphemised into self-development retraining centers. Lozen is outraged that no one is reachable when you call an organization for help. Simeon is outraged that secret government agencies used his adoptive father to make neurological monsters. Outrage is important. When it comes from care, outrage makes for change.
Instead of playing mental games with principles and postulates, an ethic of care asks: Who is suffering unnecessarily, and how can we help them? Who has been pushed to the margins? How can we welcome them back into community? Where are the inequities, and how can we abolish them and make things fair?
An ethics of care can include humans while extending beyond us: how we treat animals, rivers, forests, our homeworld. I would add: how we treat the imaginal. When its figures surface, do we have any right to demand that they help us write better sitcoms? Plan a business park? Make bombs? If imagination wants to help, that’s one thing, but shouldn’t there be imaginal liberty?
Of course, an ethic of care only works if you care. The country in which I live promotes a lot of everyday psychopathy. An example would be firing hundreds or thousands of employees with an email. That is monstrous. It is also cowardly and utterly lacking in empathy. Imagine working thirty years for a company, only to receive an electronic notice that says: “We regret to inform you that your position has been eliminated.” Frank Herbert forsaw this: in The Dosadi Experiment, that is exactly how Keila Jedrik gets fired.
Today, to care is to resist the dehumanization of dehumanizing others. Caring should be part of any useful saga of our life together here.
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Stated positively, a mythology/worldview/saga for our time should honor the voices of traditionally silenced groups. Stated negatively, such a saga should aspire to being post-patriarchal.
Historically, patriarchy—a form of society in which men possess systemically rooted privileges and power that other people don’t—might begin as a trauma response to violence or exile. If so, it is a trauma response that got stuck. In “Devil’s Due,” the Trickster Kluni briefly recounts some of the history: pastoralists becoming raiders becoming armies, invaders, and empires, always ruled by ambitious warlords eager for power over others. Patriarchy is a system of hierarchical domination that feeds and grows itself like a cancer. Women have sometimes served as enablers of patriarchy even though it hurts them, but at bottom it’s a game for emotionally stunted men.
It’s important to know that patriarchal systems do not only target women. They also silence and oppress people of color, queer people, the disabled, and everyone else who does not fit hypermasculine standards of strength and purity. When patriarchy mixes with religion, then these standards wrap themselves in supposedly divine authority.
My tale “Enheduanna Claims Authorship” is set in a key period of patriarchy’s development. Sargon I has become the first true emperor by capturing Sumer while organizing the Akkadian Empire around 2334 BCE. Even while he does this, his daughter, the priestess Enheduanna, writes chants and prayers to the gods. At the end of one document, she dares to sign her name, becoming the first person in history to do so, an act with enormous ramifications.
In “Transdaimonic,” Sojourner Truth returns to life long enough to offer advice for dealing with an urgent spiritual crisis.
No patriarchal system has ever successfully silenced the voices of opposition, even when those voices come to expression indirectly. About the Gnostic Gospel of Mary, in which Mary Magdalene faces off against male disciples who reject her leadership, religious scholar Karen King highlights the text’s importance in how it contrasts Mary’s wisdom and intelligence with the stupidity and brutality of those who oppose her. When fighting oppression directly endangers lives, our stories can fight for us.
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Methexis is Plato’s term for how the divine world and the material world intertwine. The archetypal motif of Conjunction permeates a cosmos that looks less like a bunch of objects hurtling and bumping and more like a continually creative realm of entangled relationships.
A worldview or set of guiding stories informed by this truth will highlight interaction, interdependency, and co-arising involvement: in a word, participation.
For Richard Tarnas, the participatory paradigm represents a philosophical and cultural movement following those of modernism and postmodernism. We are not isolated subjects split off from the world, but active partners in how we interact with and know it. Becca Tarnas points out that one sees this participatory emphasis in Jung: an example is how Jung’s dreams and inner dialogues coincided with the events of his time. As terrapsychology has shown so often, our insides are also outside, and vice versa.
Asked for a mythic image of our time, Joseph Campbell suggested Earthrise, an image in which the old dualities of upper and lower, heaven and nature, fall away: “The Earth is in the heavens.” Astronauts who see Earth from orbit often describe the absence of borders, some of which are internal. Many beings, one planet floating in a cosmos of ever-unfolding creativity.
The Assembling Terrania Cycle describes the cosmos as a Tetraverse of interacting realms: Source, which gives birth to all; the Infrarealm of archetypal motifs (processes, remember, not things); the Dreamvale, or the imaginal realm; and the Coaguum, the material realm. What matters is not whether these literally exist—they are fictions!—but whether we can pick up the mood of interconnection between these various dimensions of the animate cosmos. Although Source emanates Infrarealm, which emanates Dreamvale, which emanates Coaguum, influences move in both directions continually. What we do here, for example, echoes elsewhere, as when Shafiya’s guitar redirects the energies of Radantia to nudge the artisan Power Smee into halting the Godscream epidemic in our realm: God as power source and leverage for healing.
The participatory turn has sometimes been linked with integral philosophies seeking to validate forms of knowing and being from many arenas of experience: not only the intellectual or empirical, but the somatic, emotional, intuitive, and spiritual as well. (The imaginal usually gets left out, but it could fit here, somewhere.) Efforts toward an integral theory of consciousness have gotten sidetracked by arguments over grids, levels, states, stages, and other color-coded categories attractive to the conceptualizing mind, but a key observation to emerge is that the more of ourselves we involve, the more we consciously participate in how fully we live on this planet with one another.
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To my mind, an adequate worldview would offer something worthwhile to strive for.
I was out walking one warm evening in Northern California wondering what might beckon if humanity lived long enough to come of age when two startling events occurred simultaneously.
The first was a science-fictionary word, “Terrania,” which I understood to mean a good society of planetary scope. It bubbled up in my imagination accompanied by images of abundance, justice, fairness, inclusion, and hope. Not utopia, which I don’t believe we are capable of, but somewhere desirable and safe to live. And fun.
The second occurrence was a meteor hissing over my head on its way to the Pacific Ocean. I had never been close enough to a meteor to hear its passage. A bright flare streaked off into the darkness. Magnificent.
Years were to pass before I got a start on the Assembling Terrania Cycle, but the ideas and the word waited until I was ready.
Although I believe we can build something like Terrania, it might take a while. Meanwhile, why not write about it? Darwish Sethos lives there (see the story “Vigilance”) and has conveyed some of what that is like. He feels lucky to be there, and he should. When fascists try to take over Terrania, they fail largely because its citizens already have what they want and need and have learned the hard lessons of the past. Terrania knows no sexism, racism, ableism, poverty, warfare, or lack of opportunity not because its citizens have birthed a utopia, but because they have outgrown what keeps these ills alive.
Although Terrania in my fiction has been influenced somewhat by various futuristic societies, the tech—which advances through the Cycle as decades become centuries—is the least impressive part, at least to me. Terrania works because it is governed by wise and mature leaders supported by active and responsible citizens. It works because it aspires to be what Martin Luther King Jr. named the Beloved Community of justice, inclusion, and love.
Inspiration matters more than we might realize. Our current efforts toward activism, action, and reform tend to underestimate its power. In 2017, I coined “enchantivism” to underline how some of us make lasting change not so much through shaming and blaming (do these ever change anything for long?), but by offering glimpses of the futures we would most desire. Yes, it’s necessary to keep up on what is going wrong, but some of us—me included—are more motivated by possibilities that pull from ahead instead of pushing from behind. To what do we aspire?
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I could have mentioned other elements to be included in a guiding mythology worthy of our attention. Collective celebration, performance, and art are important. In my novel Lamplighter, the last of a trilogy, a protest-festival called the Colors of Liberty spreads across the globe and takes such firm hold on the embodied imagination that it drives authoritarians from power. The revolution might not be televised, but it will certainly be danced to.
What else would a planetary mythology for our time require? A color scheme? (Terrania’s favors blue, green, and silver.) A symbol? Some years back I bought an image of Earth with Africa—where we all come from—in the front; on this I placed the motto, “Many Voices, One Earth.” Tales of Terrania Rising offers a creation story in fictional form.
What about a charter? My website contains a Declaration of Enchantment as well as the Terrania Charter, part of an accord signed on Earth Day (in “The Undaunted Dead”) to lead us into the future. We also have the Ten Lamps philosophy in a story by that name, in which the Lamps narrate their history. They also guide Lucas through his phases of difficult awakening.
What I most hope from all these efforts toward my own worldview therapy is that people who enjoy the stories will write more of them and carry them forward to a time when enough of us dream together to create a bit of heaven on Earth, because we can.