Day Five
Cosmic Fantasy Flash FictionThis making-of contains spoilers
In late January 2016, blog The Angry Hourglass used a picture of somebody reading a book on the beach for its weekly prompt.
Reading on the beach is something that always bewildered me. I mean, it is a beach, why would you read a book there, when you have a beach? This better be a really good book – or a really bad beach. Most authors will tell you about the beauty of books, I tell you right here nature surpasses it. Especially both primeval looking forests and sunny beaches.
So I needed to come up with a reason to read by the beach. The result is an unusual book that relates to the sea in content. I do not remember where I got the idea of the daily adjectives – David Shakes said it reminded him of The Dice Man, a major American novel I embarrassingly had not heard of ever before. It is really good, though. To me, the adjectives thing is not really the point of the story, it is just a way to get to the book.
“How to breathe underwater” in my mind actually works, though some have read it as the book taking its reader through drowning, which I guess does work as an interpretation. The original idea is a sort of benevolent version of an eldritch artifact. So, this really had a literary inspiration, but by the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic rather than The Dice Man.
In Roadside Picnic, aliens leave behind their trash after a visit to earth. Stemming from technology far beyond human understanding, humans called Stalkers recover those discarded pieces of alien technology and try to use them. Some of them are beneficial, some are neutral or incomprehensible, and some are dangerous all the way to lethal. Outside of this one story, objects like this are always dangerous if not to the body, then to the mind. H.P. Lovecraft mastered this with the way anything described as eldritch worked in his tales.
So, I created something that is as much beyond human comprehension as most eldritch artifacts are but is nevertheless beneficial to its user. The result is suitably weird.
January 2016
Available in:
How to Sing Butterflies
