This post mentions Nazi-adjacent ideology in a fictional context. I do not under any circumstances condone Nazism or any other form of supremacist ideology.
I’ve roughed out another chapter for Spiral Architect this weekend. We’ve got a staged suicide, Morgan using psionics against rifles (and then a quick swordfight), and a visitation from a malevolent angel. Morgan’s seen this angel before, but never quite managed to kill the fucker. He calls it “Clarence”, after the character from It’s a Wonderful Life. He does so in mockery, and because he suspects that if he were to ask this angel for its name it would insist that it is one of the famous angels, like Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, or Raphael. I also have Morgan projecting a shield to defend himself and Naomi against a hail of gunfire. He had done this before in a previous chapter, but I might change that to a more mundane stunt.
And I’ve introduced a faction of species supremacists called “Sonnenreich”, from the German for “sun empire”. They regard homo sapiens as the master race (unless you’re neurodiverse in some way), and other humanoid species (as well as artificial humans) as competitors threatening to crowd their idea of humanity off of dear old Spaceship Earth. In the popular imagination of my setting, Sonnenreich are basically neo-Nazis who have gotten over hating Jews and black people because at least they’re part of the same species.
They’re not wrong. However, the truth is much worse. The Sonnenreich adherents you see in the streets aren’t the real Sonnenreich, even if they adorn themselves with symbols resembling the sonnenrad (black sun) associated with Nazi occultism. They have no contact with the real Sonnenreich, who see them as nothing but useful idiots good for a bit of stochastic terrorism. The real Sonnenreich are basically rich technocrats and high-level public officials who see nothing wrong with slavery as long as it isn’t members of homo sapiens being enslaved. c Furthermore, the real Sonnenreich are not above making deals with people they regard as not their kind of human for mutual benefit. There is a leader of the devas (people who claim to have “congenital pseudofeline morphological disorder” (CPMD) to avoid admitting to being part of a different species) who would happily see his people defined in law as not human because recognizing them as having human rights would break his hold over them. He would not be able to summarily execute them for being asuras (artificial devas) if they step out of line; among the devas, the asuras they once created to fight on their behalf are not proscribed constructs.
This will all become relevant, because Morgan is going to have to deal with this bullshit because as one of the einherjar he will be treated as a proscribed construct and targeted for assassination. So will Naomi Bradleigh, because she’s one of the devas and has befriended Morgan instead of turning him in.
However, I may have written myself into a corner here. There’s a lot going on that I’m having trouble figuring out how to reveal because I’ve limited myself to Morgan Cooper’s viewpoint. I was able to reveal a lot of Morgan’s world in Without Bloodshed because his viewpoint was but one among many, and I was using a third-person limited viewpoint and using a scene break whenever I wanted to change viewpoints.
However, I do not want to just scrap what I’ve written so far and start from scratch. I’ve wasted too many years doing that shit. However, it’s very easy to get stuck and hard to get out of the rut. My wife Catherine helps when she can, but even her generous support often doesn’t feel like enough, and it’s not like I ever had much of a supportive writing community.
Then again, maybe I do have one and I’m just too fucking dense to see it or too proud to reach out and ask for help. Regardless, first-person might not be the right viewpoint for Spiral Architect I think that once I’ve finished this draft I’ll want to rewrite it in third-person close. And I might add other viewpoints to this draft as well. So this first draft will probably have first-person viewpoint chapters for Morgan and third-person close for everybody else’s scenes.
I’ll fix it in the next draft. I just want to squeeze this whole fucking turd out of my ass before I try polishing it, dammit.