Message changes for me at times while writing fiction, though typically I cast off from the shoreline unfurling intended themes. Sometimes I’m surprised at what emerges, but I don’t know that I’d write an extensive work without a basic notion of what my point will be. My current novel in draft, The Termite Vector, considers the significance of privacy in celebrating individuality, and it discusses society’s misplaced emphasis on celebrity as signaling success, even heroism.
Several social currents today in America grieve me. Voices broadcasting encourage minimizing thinking critically, as if it were too painful to ask of everyday citizens. The voices invite stopping being grateful and learning from failed efforts, too. How? By stressing that what you’ve received of benefit in life, you deserve, and conversely, if you haven’t received what you desire, it’s not your fault – oppression caused your discontent. And they emphasize that the optimal life is one minimizing friction (whether friction arises from personal struggles, interpersonal conflicts or social barriers.).Thinking critically can be painful. Stop making up your own mind. If you’ll quit deciding on your own, we’ll help you realize what you should believe – if you’ll give us undivided attention.
What is the source of growing focus on superheroes in visual media, beings possessed of gifts beyond acquisition by individual striving? (Reports lately are surfacing that some superhero narratives in fantasy movies will be recast, dead superheroes reappearing, resurrected. Consumers support immortality.) What’s behind growing appetites for virtual reality, emerging from “Lake Wobegon” notions of an ideal world where “all women are strong, all men are good-looking, and all children are above average?” It seems mere mortals (read: suckers) shoulder daily challenges that could be avoided. VR seems another vehicle designed to anesthetize ourselves from discomfort and disappointment – and lessons learnable from such experiences.
Fishbein, Ascending’s messages include that progress in individual development requires accepting friction’s burdens and their lessons, expressing gratitude and practicing intelligent skepticism. Much about contentment depends on the individual’s making up her own mind – demanding the right to decide (correctly or not) for oneself. Reaching homecoming (as the novel describes it) requires self-reflection, gratitude for gifts received and rejecting mantles of entitlement or victimhood. (I’m reminded recently of Dale Carnegie’s view that happiness results from wanting what you get.) I submit when you feel blessed and insist on thinking for yourself, you’ll reach the life well lived, a homecoming requiring coping with intermediate distress from friction. I think that is a theme well expressed by the stories of Aethon and those less fantastic, mortal characters “frictionalized” throughout the ages in Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land.