Solipsism = Zero Plus

A novel I've been working on for over about two (maybe even three?) years is now close to being "finished". There are little details left to work out but the characters have taken on a life of their own and the themes have have solidified.

It's a good feeling.

The novel is called Solipsism = Zero Plus. It's a story about finding and/or creating a community and what happens when one cannot. In some ways, it's a deconstruction of portal fantasy, although it didn't start out that way.

The book is weird. The structure is playful, the characters are numerous and unusual, and the scope is broad. It touches a lot of different topics besides community, including, but not limited to: the struggle to make art, plurality, unconventional relationships, riddles, and the existential horror of advertisements. 

I'd like to get it published traditionally if possible. If I cannot accomplish this, it will certainly be self published eventually. 

Anime Review: Horimiya

With its simple premise and surprisingly nuanced characters, Horimiya manages to be one of the few romance animes I actually tolerate. Horiyma doesn't go very deep into any of the themes it explores except for a few, but it shows an awareness of them. It is no mistake that the anime is an easy watch that nevertheless feels like it has substance. 

I rate this show highly but this review will be critical - out of love.

First plot. There's not much, it's very slice of life and that's fine.

Second, the themes. Obvious spoilers since I reveal how certain conflicts are resolved.

Horimiya explores ideas of being yourself and finding your friends.

Miyamura is tasked with crossing the gulf that has been widening between him and others since middle school. With Hori his social confidence grows - he figures out how to be himself around others, and realises that people do accept him. This ends up with him gaining quite a large friend group over the duration of the show.

Of course, Hori also has this challenge. Usually, she is very focused on her family but by the end of the show she has managed to incorporate her friends, especially Miyamura, into her life.

The side characters also have variations on this theme. Yoshikawa cannot ask for what she really wants, Iura has a different personality with his sister and with his friends, Sengoku only learnt to be the softer version of himself after falling for Remi.

Between these characters the theme of being yourself, becoming comfortable around others, is explored in an appreciable breadth but no great depth since these side stories often take up less than an episode. This is what I mean by the show has an awareness of how it's themes might be extended although it choses not to go too deep into most of them.

One theme that *is* explored in depth however is the fear of not being good enough for a relationship with people. Miyamura is oblivious to the fact Hori likes him at first because he is sure he's not a good match for her (in part, because he fears for her reputation), Sakura knows she is consider 'the beast' compared to her best friend Remi and this holds her back from expressing her feelings to her love interest. For a moment, Hori's younger brother is worried that he will lose his sister because she has a boyfriend. Tanihara is jealous that Shindo might like Miyamura more than him at first. Miyamura struggles with this repeatedly; he fears for a moment that he's not really a part of his friend group even if they hang out with him, and then he fears that Yanagi might steal the friends he had just found.

Every character's fear comes from a slightly different place, although most of these hinge on social expectations. Regardless, during each and every one of these examples the solution to the fear is obtained when one realises that *everyone* can be friends.

Hori doesn't lose her reputation; she and Miya create a tight-knit friend group. Sakura decides she is happy for Yoshikawa and Ishikawa when they end up together, Shindo assures Tanhihara that he is still his friend. Hori's younger brother is assured that he has *gained* someone in his life and not lost Hori. I could go on, but you get the idea. The show drives home the idea that the solution to the fear of social inferiority is that everyone can appreciate everyone.

This is wholesome and I am glad Horimiya is so consistent with this idea. However, the idea itself comes with some caveats that are not really touched on.

For instance, it takes two people to forge a connection. Every character in Horimiya is willing to forge connections with everyone else, even if the other person had hurt them in the past. A prime example is how quick Miya is forgive and forget the bullies who made his middle school life close to unbearable. Another is how Hori is able to be friends with Sengoku and Remi despite them exploiting her labour.

While this ease of forgiveness lends to the light and comfortable atmosphere, it creates a disconnect between how the world is and how Horimiya's world is. Maybe the idea is to show what could be if we were all like this. Maybe it's just meant to be escapism and this theme could not be brought in without ruining that.

Most other ideas are only explored in breadth. Such as discovering one's own way of experiencing sex, not just intimate relationships. Of course, we're now going to talk about Hori's kinks.

Hori's S&M interests, while not exactly wholesome and often toxic in how she pressures Miyamura, is actually a pretty good representation of how one starts to explore their kinks in a new relationship. It would be too much to expect Hori to know how to communicate about these things perfectly right off the bat. Yes it's not quite right that Miyamura is made to go along with it, or that he feels that if he doesn't, he could not be in a relationship with Hori, but these are genuine feelings that people often have when first entering relationships, especially ones that involve the intensity of kink.

Other reviews have claimed this is just the author inserting her kinks into the anime without thought. I think that is uncharitable, although I see where it comes from. There is no improvement in the way Hori expresses her desires throughout the anime and zero indication this is a bad thing apart from how it makes Miyamura feel. Ideally it would have been addressed, but this is of course a 13 episode anime. This could easily be rescued in a second season.

Another theme that definitely could have been explored in more detail is queer relationships.

Throughout Horimiya, the characters are trying to form meaningful connections with each other despite social pressures to like or not like certain people, or how to behave or not behave. The show does this really well in fact and it's one of my favourite things about it.

This is why the lack of queer relationships really bothers me be. Because they are consistently hinted, but all pairings in the end are male/female. Hori even finds it unpleasant to consider the fact that Miyamura might like guys. Queer relationships go excellently with the theme of loving someone as your real self. Also polyamorous relationships although I get that is a bigger ask since I've only ever seen one anime that had that. Sakura + Yoshikawa + Ishikawa would work really well, especially with the aforementioned idea of not being good enough and the consistent way the show cures it.

Lastly, let's talk about characters. Characters and themes are hard to untangle, but it is time to start discussing the characterisation in more detail which is one of the show's stronger points. Miyamura has the strongest characterisation (and the most distinct visual design to go with it); he begins lonely, and becomes sociable. But actually it's more nuanced than that; he interacts differently with every group of friends he has and his interactions with each group change over the course of the show. Impressively, this is done in a way consistent with Miyamura's internal logic. He is crude with his oldest friend, he is romantic and pining with Hori, is his polite and friendly with his new friends. As the show progresses he becomes bolder in interacting with Hori, more relaxed around new friends, and is consistent to his old ones.

The most powerful part of the whole show, I feel, is Miyamaru's reflections on his former isolation which is a shame because it only comes in bits and pieces; he comments on it himself in the final episodes, that he had been ignoring who he used to be. This makes sense; sometimes one's life changes and you have to adapt before you know what's happening. My favourite scene is when Miyamura contemplates what his life would be like if he hadn't met Hori; he is aware it was just a coincidence, of the fragility of his happiness.

Hori's character is the second most well developed, but is less overall emotional.

The side characters get much less development, which is to be expected for the constraints of 13 episodes. Within these constraints they do get their own little arcs though which serve to support the main themes of the show.

Overall, this show left me feeling cautiously hopeful about building relationships with others. It's not as easy as the show makes it out to be, but it certainly makes me feel like I could have something a bit like a close network of friends where everyone is generally comfortable around each other.

Oh and the animation is gorgeous too.

Story, Hypothesis, Theorem

I struggle to keep up with my many interests. I adore pure mathematics (functional analysis, PDEs, for a time even number theory) and I need to contribute to the scientific effort to combat ageing. Of course, if you're on this blog, you must know that I love fiction too, reading and writing. Fiction, science, and mathematics each hold a special place in my heart and each competes for the attention I have left after attending to life's necessities such as food, socialising, sleep and exercise. I fear that I have no time to devote to even one of these, never mind all.

This is one of the reasons I want to live forever: it feels like it would take a lifetime to become an expert in just one subfield of each of these areas and I cannot abandon any one of them because to do so would be to abandon myself. But recently I came across an idea that these things are not actually dissimilar and that what one experiences in one can in fact be applied to the others, especially if one is aware of exactly how they relate to each other.

"Event A implies Events B and C implies event D but only if event E." This is a verbal causal diagram (as popularised by Judea Pearl). This applies to fictional stories but also to science as mentioned in Judea's book "The Book of Why?".  I say that it also applies to mathematics in a sense, even though nothing 'causes' another thing, only that one arrives at truths by connecting them using logic.

Our brains are still causal machines and we apply causal and probabilistic reasoning even when a statement is certainly true or false. For instance, many mathematicians say it is 'likely' that the Riemann Hypothesis is true, but this is not really the same thing one means when they say it is 'likely' alien life exists. In the former case the mathematicians probably mean that based on their experience of similar problems it seems reasonable to them that it's true. It is probability in the Bayesian sense, a degree of belief. It is not the case that there are many possible words that could lead to the hypothesis being either false or true. It is either true in all possible worlds, or false in every one. 

Conversely, when it comes to alien life, one can still interpret this probability as frequentist. A sequence of effectively random events could lead to life being present on any given planet. The probability that there is no life is 1 - (probability there is life on no planet).

Of course this is not criticism of either approach; doing the best we can with our brains we have achieved remarkable progress in both science and mathematics. Some say the success of mathematics in physics is surprising, but I think that's more surprising is that our brains wired for causal inference can also be adept at mathematics which is not causal in the same sense. But this difference should be noted because it changes how we approach each subject.

In science one eliminates conditions systematically, and hopes that the hypothesized connections are really the connections that are there (or are sufficiently close so that the theory has the same utility). One does this by comparing examples where one believes the general theory applies: in physics, we can apply the theory of gravity to humans and Earth, Earth and the sun, blackholes and stars, ect. This is not in fact too dissimilar to what one does in mathematics; one creates a general theory (for instance of weak solutions to elliptic partial differential questions) and is only satisfied when the theory can deal with all examples which we believe are similar. Of course, our beliefs in what examples are similar or different may change according to the theory.

The difference is that with mathematics, one knows exactly when statements and ideas connect. Connections can be verified or falsified to 100% certainty (at least in elementary proofs). The difficultly comes in deriving these connections but once they are known they are certain. For example, I can use the idea that a (product of primes)+1 is not divisible by any primes in that product to show that there are infinitely many primes. If I, as I once did, believed that (product of primes)+1 is itself prime, I could falsify this idea quickly by noticing that 3*5+1=16. 

In science we do not eliminate, only make less plausible. That said, a lot of the same methods can be used to at least find plausible connections: inspired guessing, determining counterexamples, evaluating why those counterexamples fail and updating one's perceived connections. To find a couterexample, one needs to do an experiment (or find the work of someone else who has done an experiment) which is generally much harder to do.

But what of fiction? As I said at the start, stories are also built up of plausible connections. The difference is that one cannot make these more or less plausible, only conform more or less to one's intuition. By this I mean a story is not beholden on the rules of real life even if it is meant to be realistic; if you write a character whose only ambition in life is to own an ice-cream store, and that they stop at nothing, not even murder, to do this, I might say this character is unrealistic but what I really mean is that I don't believe real life people behave this way.

Similarly, this is the difference between good and bad plot twists. A good plot twist conforms to the readers intuition as it is developed, so that when it is revealed the reader is prepared to accept it. Conversely, a plot twist may be bad because it does not conform to the reader's intuition. They do not accept the premises or logic that lead to it, so it feels unsatisfying, as if someone is telling you a falsehood.

The magic of stories lies in their ability to both conform to their reader's intuitions and simultaneously draw unexpected conclusions from them. In this way, they expand the reader's world view. Consider Watchmen; it reaches the surprising conclusion "Superheros wouldn't actually be able to cope with their power and remain good people" but I don't find it surprising by the end of the film because it matches my intuition of what real people can be like.

While mathematics reveals definite truths, science reveals plausible truths, fiction reveals possible truths; not of the world as such, but about our own intuitions. This has to be the case because stories cannot be bound by the rules of our physical world or even mathematical logic. 

Each of these domains has key differences but they are part of a greater whole. By noticing these differences, I believe we (especially myself) can promote our understanding of the other domains using our understanding of one. Indeed by devoting time to all three, one can develop insights that might not otherwise be possible. That said, I still fear that I am destined to fail by spreading myself too thin by attempting to write novels, do pure mathematics, and solve the scientific problem of ageing, but now that I see all of these things as part of a greater whole I know the pursuit is worth it, and will not feel guilty for focusing on just one of these domains for a while.

The Prawn Song

Steps to be happy:

1. Be prawn
2. Chill at the bottom of the sea.

Similar to the memetic concept of "Return to Monke", The Prawn Song expresses a desire to remove oneself of humanity, although returning to the sea is perhaps a tad more extreme than anarcho-primitivism. 

I love this song. I love how it's so casual about abandoning humanity. Often stories and movies with the message "We live in a society" take themselves so seriously (i.e Joker 2019) but this song just puts itself in the headspace of "Okay, I'm done". The poppy, bubbly instrumentation and fun sound effects complement Orono Noguchi's deadpan expression and singing. The combination results in a feeling of "Okay, I'm happy inside but I don't need to show it any more because no-one's looking" and that's a kind of pure happiness I can abide by. 

After all, what is the feeling of happiness but an indicator that the world is as it should be? If you already know you're "happy just being a prawn" what need is there to express that to others or even to yourself?

The Absence of Honey

Looks like this is my debut! 

"As reality erodes, strange creatures, the nonentities, crawl through the gap between our world and nothingness. Their paradoxical existence is sustained by feeding on more solid reality and accelerates the coming of the end.

Lollipop Candi couldn't be happier. Their best friend and crush, Nikki Towers, is spending more time with them than ever before. It doesn't matter that this might only be because Nikki, who is determined not to end along with the world, needs Lollipop's ability to communicate with the nonentities. Lollipop is eager to be useful.

To savour their time with Nikki they record it. They record their plans, successes and failures, their unlikely alliances and the nonentities they meet together. They record their love for Nikki and feelings about the end. This is that record."

The Absence of Honey is my first novel. It's got a cast of unconventional characters (morally grey would be putting it lightly), a lot of surreal scenes, and is told from the perspective of a character with bizarre motivations and otherworldly powers. If any of that appeals to you, I implore you to give it a try.

Find the Absence of Honey here.

Excerpt 1: Inhabiting Fictional Worlds

I inspect the store in more detail. It’s packed, cluttered even; next to the clothes rack is a book case that extends the entire length of one wall, and although it is mostly filled with books, there is also a purple wig, a figurine of some white-haired anime character, and a cactus. In the back corner there is a metal bin filled with DVDs and children’s toys. Next to the bin, fish swim in a tank, flooded with blue light. I could go on. The place is such a mess I don’t know where to look, or what to focus on.

Except perhaps for the vending machine opposite the metal bin. I study it carefully, and find it stocked. I take a moment to read the list of items: rosewater, holywater, unholywater, beer, sheep’s blood, granola bars, and something called “psychiate”. I’m more surprised by the more ordinary items. There are ten kit-kat flavours, most of which seem plausible. There’s also “flammable” “fire,”, and “kraken”. I’m unsure if that one is of this place or of the world I knew.

As a reader, one of my favourite things about stories is what isn't fully shown. I love details that which hint at the full depth of the world beyond what the story is showing me. I know a book isn't the perfect medium for it, but that's what makes it even more impressive when an author creates the feeling that I'm inhabiting their world. I want to be given the impression that I can pick up any item no matter how irrelevant, and investigate it. If there is absolutely none of this it feels like the the book is all performance. In that case, there is nothing to reassure me there is no backstage and that all the objects in the book are not merely props.

Fictional worlds feels far richer when I'm convinced that every fictional book is itself more than just a prop. It's why I love Borges the Library of Babel, and enjoyed Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea. Both of these take the idea that there is more to this world, we do not see it only because there is so much and run with it.

I'm trying to do a lot with this piece of writing, but in particular I'm trying to invoke the sense that one is genuinely inhabiting a world. That no part of the world is off limits or incomplete. That the reader, if they so chose, could decide to stray from the protagonist entirely and investigate the place at their leisure. And, most importantly, that if they did this they would find world remains just as detailed.

Of course, books are static things so no reader could abandon the path the author laid out for them. As readers, we have to content ourselves with what we are shown and the glimpses of what lies beyond. As writers, we have a rather more tricky job: we must keep the story focused, but it can't appear isolated. The world the story moves through must be interesting, but what we're showing them must be the most interesting. The wordly details must hint at more, but not obscure what is relevant to the plot.

Getting this right for myself in this work is hard enough - getting it right for every reader is likely impossible. Still, I'm having a lot of fun writing this so there will likely be more of this in the future.

I Am The New God Impressions

cw: graphic imagery, murder, spoilers for I Am The New God

When I was younger, I had dreams about murder. They were both rare and unpleasant. They left me with a distinct feeling that lingered through the whole day and ruined my mood. It was a palpable, layered thing that demanded acknowledgment. Of course, that was the last thing I wanted to do so I let it fade and it always did. I certainly didn't engage with such fantasies during the day.

Nicole Cushing's I Am The New God captured that feeling perfectly. The novella took my eyes from my skull and made them watch the vilest parts of humanity. I can't say I enjoyed the experience, but it certainly caused a response. That feeling. 

Since it managed to capture it so well, I think I should do my best to describe it to you, so you understand what it was like reading this book. That feeling was scared: I was scared of myself, the unexplored landscape of the person I apparently was, a person who killed people. That feeling was liberated: few things are as taboo as the taking of life, and if society's collective weight couldn't stop me from doing that, what could it stop me from doing? That feeling was alone: I had forsaken society by breaking that rule, and so it had done the same to me. 

This is not how I imagine Greg Bryce, the novella's protagonist, felt exactly. I don't think he was ever scared of himself, and he lacked all remorse. Also, I think his loneliness was apparent before he murdered anyone, and his liberation was more directed towards his approaching godhood rather than disconnection from society. Of course, even if these elements presented themselves differently to how I would feel (thank god), they were still all there. It was lose enough to provoke a very uncomfortable familiarity.

The book has no filter when it comes to exploring this characters feelings and reactions, as off-putting as they are. I don’t think it would have worked if it held back. I understand myself better having read it, and although I’m still processing what I read, I don’t regret it.

I wonder: how similar are the feelings of murder to godhood?