Our fiction explores a complex, nonlinear narrative centered around a cluster of characters acting across multiple lifetimes and in multiple “worlds” or cosmoi all trying to understand what it means to be human and to realize that purpose.

The Desire to Be God

Plot

Strange mandalas and yantras begin appearing on critical national security networks. Relatively straightforward steganographic analysis resolves the images into a complex, multi-part manuscript. Some of the manuscript seems to consist of ancient philosophical and religious texts, but parts of it are heavily encrypted –even indecipherable– suggesting that they may conceal an important message …

Salvatore Albatini, the aging dean of Nizhoni College on the border of the Navajo Nation is suddenly dismissed without cause. Cleaning out his office he finds a copy of the same mandala sent from a mysterious address in Goa. As he begins to investigate the manuscript –and his own unexplained dismissal—he finds himself framed for the murder of a local postal inspector he engaged to help trace the manuscript –and then subjected to extraordinary rendition to a prison in Constanta, Romania.

Gloria Toadchine is an FBI Special Agent on leave and serving as Chief of Security at Nizhoni while she cares for her ailing father. She is also a former student and old friend of Salvatore. As she tries to figure out where he has been taken and why he was framed, she is asked to join a high level team code-named Minerva-1 which has been formed to investigate the manuscript. The inquiry leads the team into a complex web involving long-standing land disputes in the Sangre de Christo Mountains centering around access to beyul or hidden sacred valley, a secret revolutionary network called Agent Intellect, a Catholic traditionalist community, and the Russian intelligence services.

But this is just the beginning. One section of the manuscript contains fragments of the life story of a converso scholar from Palermo at the time of the Reconquista. His morisco financee is arrested and executed by the Inquisition and he flees, eventually become a disciple of a great Kaballist in Safed, on whose behalf he undertakes multiple missions creating safe-havens for Jews in Eastern Europe, investigating the slave trade in Africa, building relationships with scholars along the Silk Road, and eventually journeying to the Americas to warn –too late– of the impending Spanish Conquet. Others explore what appear to be alternate histories created by a young Mexica woman who, captured by the Spanish, combusts the universe during Mass, leading to a proliferation of competing timelines in at least one of which the European colonizers are defeated and the world is caught in a great conflict between India, China, and Dar-al-Islam, and in another of which a group of capitalist magnates attempts to ensure their immortality and divinization by implementing Frank Tipler’s Omega Point strategy –only to find that Capital is no longer something they own, but rather an emerging autonomous intelligence and the true ruler of the planet.

Themes

The Desire to Be God explores the structure of the universe, the ultimate nature of reality, the question of what it means to be human, and question of just how we can find meaning and joy in a universe in which what we desire most profoundly is impossible.

Characterization

The novel explores these themes through the development of an ensemble of characters representing diverse spiritual and political traditions who make up the teams investigating the twin mysteries. Specifically, it shows these characters running up against the limits of very different ways of being human, and being forced to find and develop new ways. The complex interplay between ideology and character (and thus spiritual development) is fundamental to the narrative, as is the interplay between both of these factors and the social structures in which we grow, develop, and eventually die. The narrative hints that we are connected with each other and with past and future “selves” through a process of which historic ideas of reincarnation, afterlives in various heavens and hells, and beatitude itself are just relatively clumsy approximations.

Worlds

The Desire to Be God takes place in our world –with the qualification that our world or cosmos is part of a larger complex of cosmoi which differ not only in their fundamental physical laws and constants, but in their degree of reality: of their approach to God or Being as such. The story introduces a many cosmoi/one universe cosmology and draws explicit connections between mythological and axial age cosmologies on the one hand and concepts drawn from the secular physical, biological, and social sciences on the other. The story is, similarly, a point of entry to a broader metanarrative which links our own history to alternative histories, all of which, like the cosmoi across which they play out, represent hierarchically ordered trajectories of approach to Being as such.

Form

As a result, The Desire to Be God crosses genre boundaries. The way in which it constructs its world places it somewhere between science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. Elements which, in a fantasy novel, would be treated as part of a magical system and which in a magical realist novel would simply be stated as matters of fact, without investigation or explanation, here form part of a “different science,” or rather difference sciences embedded in differing cultural realities. They are, furthermore investigated and engaged using secular scientific means and intelligence analysis, but also humanistic/interpretive and spiritual disciplines.

The plot, however, puts the novel on the boundary between murder mystery and political/espionage thriller. There is –or at least appears to be– a murder and there is a great deal of investigation of both that murder and the mystery of the manuscript, with multiple “detectives” whose approaches bring elements of the “master detective,” “politic procedural,” “cozy mystery,” and noir/supernatural mystery. But the investigation is ultimately controlled by the intelligence community and conducted with political rather than criminal justice ends in mind.

Finally, becauses the narrative contains a number of theoretical debates and the archive of manuscripts which is at its core includes at least one –the so called yhwh text of the Tien Shan Manuscript–it also at least shares a border with what has come to be called theory-fiction.