The Creator of Worlds in the Hallowed Land of What-If?

“To put it in words, to write it down,
That is walkin’ on hallowed ground,
But it’s my duty…I’m a missionary.”

–Depeche Mode

I think everyone has moments when they look at life, the world, governments, religions, or the fabric of reality itself and think – what if? I’ve mentioned before that I’m a great proponent of what-if stories, and recently I’ve thought some about how writers fit into the bigger picture. Scientists create new paradigms by looking at universal “truths” and daring to say…what if? When they do this with seriousness, and some authority, they become targets of ridicule, enmity, adulation and – if they are brilliant, correct, and able to prove their new insight in a way that their peers can neither refute nor view with blind eyes and maintain their own integrity, the world shifts. Thomas Kuhn told us many years ago that this is how science, and society, advance, and I believe, though he mostly aimed his comments at the scientific community, that the phenomenon reaches much deeper into the human psyche.

Kuhn said, in short, that the normal pattern of the world is that things go along on a relatively even keel for a certain amount of time, and then someone disrupts this by pronouncing that something universally believed to be true, is in fact, not. The natural reaction of mankind to such pronouncements can be traced through the lives of Socrates, Galileo, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Charles Darwin, to name a few. It doesn’t matter that the opposition, in most cases, is arguing an already lost cause. It doesn’t matter that they are frantically scrabbling to prove to the world that the new truth is not true, and the old truth – the one they’ve staked lives, careers, and reputations on is fading under a more intense light. It’s even more intense when religious or philosophical truths are in question, but it doesn’t relieve us of a fundamental responsibility. If we see a truth, or a possible truth, or the great “what if” smacks us up side the head and says HEY! – we have a responsibility to respond. Anything less than this lessens us and our possible influence on the world around us.

For the scientist, this is a life-changing experience. He may succeed, he may fail, but once launched on the great what-if sea, he’s never coming back to shore. If he recants he’s an impetuous fool. If he succeeds, he’s brilliant. If he loses faith in his own theories and discoveries, the fire is gone.

For a writer, though, the words “what if” are magic. We can launch onto that sea with impunity, build a world around hypotheses or theories or flights of outright wish-fulfilling fantasy, and when we’re done, we can write something else. The science fiction authors of the fifties and sixties, many of whom were also scientists, predicted, and in many cases planted the seeds of many technological developments we might still be waiting for without their words.

I don’t remember which author it was that wrote a novel (or series of novels?) in which the stories we write always become new worlds. The act of writing brings the words, and the images behind them, into being, and once they exist, their reality is substantial and actual on some plane, in some dimension, or in some different state of existence.

“In the beginning was the word.”

I think, over the course of years, words have been a continuous source of beginnings. My world revolves around patterns of thought, painted in words and presented to the world. The patterns connect at the what-ifs and diverge. Each time a question catches my attention it’s a new adventure.

At work I was learning about a new program being used to monitor time and attendance that is designed to record each fifteen minute segment of time during a single day so that the hours being expended could be broken down and billed more accurately. Alarms went off in my head, and I saw Harrison Ford walking through a high-tech building, having a conversation with someone and – at the same time – conversing with a headpiece or a receiver in his ear, recording each direction shift and each new action, the company watching their investment down to the second and multi-tasked communication an absolute necessity to sanity.

Another day I was sitting and talking about the drug use of athletes, the need they feel to take things to modify themselves to succeed, and the what if bug bit me hard. What if – in the future – we had “stock” and “modified” Olympics? What if the athletes of the “stock” class were becoming dinosaurs, taunted by their “peers” in the modified class…and a champion arose from those old-school ranks.

It’s endless, and the best stories, for me, leave me with whole new what if roads to travel once I’ve shared the author’s vision.

I don’t know if we create new worlds with our words, but I know we have the power to contribute to changes in the one we live in, the vision to make our changes real, if only in the mind, and the potential, over time, to see the word of creation mirrored in our own humble efforts and the changes they can bring about in reality as we know it.

A very wise man, Richard Feynman, once said that it’s imprecise to talk about “the laws of nature,” and that what we really operate with is “the currently accepted habits of nature,” which is an entirely different, and much more appealing world-view. In a world of laws, the “what ifs” of writers would be impotent, but if we muck about with those currently accepted habits? The sky is the limit, and we really can be heroes – or prophets.

And so?

Onward!

Written by David Wilson - Visit Website
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