Reflections on "Endling"

 I had such a good time writing about "Acorn, Honey, Fat, and Foxglove" that I thought I might start doing it for other stories as well. I've probably read more of Ian Creasey's story notes than I have his stories (he's a great writer, but the background is just as fascinating to me).

Today I want to write about the story "Endling" that's up at Phano.

I think there's something especially cool to discuss here, because it really shows how stories evolve if you let them (which is a trick I've only learned recently). 

 

First steps

 

So I was in South Africa visiting family over Dec/Jan 2024, and during that time I was mostly working on the story that would become "Casements" (Forthcoming with Zamashort) but I was a little tired of it, so I thought I'd try write a flash piece. I started thinking stuff up and hit on this ( wrote this on the 12th Dec 2024):

 

Story about a man who engaged in FTL travel – he left his planet as it is destroying itself – visiting any potentially habitable sites and seeing only the wreckage of worlds.

He lands on a new planet, one he hasn’t visited before, and looks for signs, then he sees it, the same mark that he has seen upon the surface of the last six or seven planets - some marking that’s inscrutable, but recognizable to him. Is it the mark of another traveller, someone like him who has left their home behind - is it mindless graffiti, some mark of judgement, a joke?

And yet, he is now getting a good sense of where the marks will be. In the placement of it, in the way it marks, typically, some beautiful vista from the largest cluster dwelling – city, underground cave system, etc. – he feels as though he knows this other mind, and by looking at the vistas together, they communicate through space and potentially time. 

A mark that has no meaning, and yet has all the meaning in the world.

 

This isn't the story I ended up writing, and I'm still pretty interested in exploring this idea, but that was what I set out to start writing.

 

Flash version

 

 Soon after (20th Dec '24) I start writing:

 

Coming out of mirror space feels nothing like jumping. It’s the word the engineers used so casually, so surely. That we jump-in here and jump-out there. They had no idea. 

 

By the 14th of Jan 2025 I have this opening paragraph, which has a lot of what's in the finished story already:

 

I fall awake several million kilometers from a blue-green planet, roughly twice the diameter of the one I once called home. The preliminary summary percolates up from those parts of me that don’t sleep through mirror-space. Signs of intentionality scar the surface of the planet - trenches and walls and vast polyhedra of stone, sand, and metals. Like all the others, it is quiet - whatever intelligence once inhabited these buildings is gone.

The universe is a graveyard

 

 Through the drafts you see the notion of coming to consciousness, the "other parts that don't sleep" and the idea that the "universe is a graveyard".

 

 By April 2025 I have, essentially, a complete flash story that has a lot of the beats of the final story. But, interestingly, no Chiang-Benatar meme complex and no Chipiri.

I think the flash version of the story is perfectly serviceable, but at this point I was really starting to like the whole vibe, and didn't want to leave my lonely pilot just yet. So I thought, rather than send it out to flash markets, can I expand it into a, 2000-3000 word story? (Spoiler: it ended up at about 5000 words, so, yes).

 

 

Feeding the flash to make it grow 

 

The problem was, though, that I couldn't just take what I'd written and just scale it up, it needed some more meat.

 

Since around 2012 I'd been playing with this idea of a girl who is the last human (as far as she can tell) and she's just spending her whole life going from empty town to empty town, burning libraries, because a version of David Benatar's antinatalist argument convinced humanity to wipe itself out (we can do that fine on our own, thank you very much). The idea was that she was burning the libraries because even if the exact argument itself never appeared in the stacks of books and archives, the raw material for the argument was there.

I'd never quite managed to make that idea work in any of the drafts I'd done, so I thought "ah, awesome, maybe my traveler could be doing something like this".

 

The idea of an infohazard isn't new, of course. My first experience with the idea was with Monty Python's Funniest Joke in the World. The most terrifying, for me as a kid, was the Twilight Zone episode "Need to know", which I watched with my Grandmother, after which she taunted me by telling me she had a secret she really needed to tell me (I picked up a vase of hers and promised I'd drop it if she came any closer).

 

 

But I've always liked the idea that David Benatar is genuinely arguing for us to get rid of ourselves, and if he found just the right set of premises, the argument would convince us. 

I named the idea the "Chiang-Benatar" meme complex specifically because of the ending of Ted Chiang's "Understand" (read it, maybe you'll see why).

 

So I set to integrating this into the text, which then ballooned to about 4.5x its initial size.

 

At this point I sent it out to some writers I really trust to just look at the construction site. They came back with great feedback, almost all of which I incorporated.

 

Why Lameck (again)? 

 

 So I've actually had a character named Lameck in one of my earlier stories - Ndakusuwa. Lameck was a friend I worked with in the 2000s who got me interested in the language ChiShona and the pre-colonial history of Zimbabwe. I didn't think I highlighted his name as well as I could've (good dude + the deep Biblical lore associated with it, etc.) so I was just "screw it, there's more than one Lameck, let's go".

 

This is very much a post-colonial story. Lameck (the character in the story) hails from the fictional New Mapungubwe, which I named after the actual ancient Kingdom of Mapungubwe. It was very important to me that the story itself shows someone from Africa, especially someone from rural northern SA, being the representative of humanity in the far future.

I tried to work in the regional and linguistic elements of the area (see Chipiri's name, the headings, the idioms, etc.). While I'm not as familiar with ChiShona and Zimbabwe as I am with, say, isiZulu and Kwazulu-Natal, I hope I did enough to acknowledge Zimbabwe's language and culture without it being seen as being simply some BS exoticism sprinkled on as "Afro-garnish".

 

The point of writing Africans as Africans (and, as an African), is political as much as anything. Make of the "Burn" (its geography) what you will, but I think it's the least far fetched part of this story.

  

Iteration and submission

 

At this point the story was mostly done, it had the shape of what you see. I sent it to the usual places for its quick rejections (places I send my stories to regardless of what they are) and then started thinking where I'd like to see it land.

 

I'd been aware of Phano for a bit, and I loved the look and feel of the magazine. I love that Amman Sabet, the Editor, does the illustrations (he is mightily talented), so I sent the story there.

My criteria for where I send stuff is often things like, do I like the look and feel of the place, the editorial vision, the people involved, the kinds of stories they put out. This is what got me to send this story to Amman so early in the process.

 

And, huzzah, they accepted it.

 

And, I'm glad they did, because (and I feel a little bad about this), I used the editing process to heavily revise parts of the story. Amman was there for it - encouraging me to do what I could to make the story stronger.

 

I'll give one example. There is a scene in the story set in Burkina Faso that was entirely absent in the draft Phano bought.

The original had a whole section that was very tell-y rather than show-y - it ended with this

 

Zenzo, was one of those. I’d been with him when he’d picked a fight with one of our commanding officers.
I’d tried to hold him as he staggered drunkenly toward her, fists raised, screaming at her about how it was all their big ideas, of nationhood, greed, pride that had destroyed our world.
She pulled a taser and within minutes he was fast asleep in the back of an MP cart.
He wasn’t court martialed, but was stood down for a week, remanded to his barracks. That’s where they found him, hanging from the rafters.
He had left me a note.
Lameck, I am sorry, my friend. To not have been born would be best, but at least I still have this.

Amman allowed me to completely jettison this entire section (it's pretty chunky) and replace it the the whole "stumbling on something really dark in a house" section - which, subsequently, when properly integrated, became symbolic of the larger dramatic/philosophical structure.

Thanks for being a mensch, Amman :)

 

 

Where to next?

 

 I don't actually think I'm done with Lameck and the mindships. I think there's actually something there I can develop further.

•  Are there any other mindships?
• What happens when/if Lameck finds a living advanced civilization
• What really happened back on Earth while Lameck was in sleep?
• Is Chipiri right in his assertion that the Chiang-Benatar meme complex is actually what he thinks it is (note, he can't be sure - it's possible it's something completely other).
• Is the decision to essentially erase other cultures the right one? Isn't Lameck potentially a moral monster?

 I'm very keen on exploring these and other questions further, I'll start playing around with all this and see what drops out.