The Ultimate Dreamer is planned as the first in a loose series (not saga, not chronicle, definitely not epic) of books set in a world that’s very similar to our own. While there will be some threads that run through several books, each novel should stand as a story on its own. You shouldn’t feel that you’ll need to read the last five before the latest one will make sense. However, they’ll all share the same general themes, which can best be summarised as “things that people believe in”. Stories that might explain how the world came to be the way that it is. There are nine broad types of belief that these books will keep returning to and all are present in one form or another in The Ultimate Dreamer.
The first is mythology and folklore - things that people used to believe but generally don’t any more. Creation myths that explain why the sun rises and sets (a giant dung beetle in case you didn’t know) and folk tales that explain those weird lights near the marsh. The Ultimate Dreamer has its own creation myth involving the Skentys but I’m not going to tell you any more about that just yet. You’ll have to wait for a future book. This book’s main interest is the folklore of fabulous beasts and specifically those that helped the ancients to explain those skeletons in the rocks. Long ago people found fossils and, without much knowledge to help them, had to come up with the best explanations they could. So giant reptilian things (scales sometimes leave fossil impressions) with long necks and tails or sharp claws and teeth became dragons, which is just another word for dinosaurs. Surely it wasn’t so unreasonable (at least not in the pursuit of a good story) to assume that such terrible lizards could breathe fire. Some even had wings. Being found in rock, they were sometimes next to deposits of precious stones or metals so the legends named them as guardians of treasure. When the not-quite-as-ancients discovered far off lands like Indonesia to be inhabited by monitor lizards they put things like “here be dragons” on the maps. But dragons weren’t the only creatures found in fossils. The Phelan University museum houses a gryphon skeleton. Gryphons (or griffins) had the head, wings and front legs of an eagle with the body, hind legs and tail of a lion. In her book The First Fossil Hunters, Adrienne Mayor proposed that gryphons were derived from the fossils of a dinosaur called Protoceratops, which was basically a small Triceratops without the horns. The beaked head could look like an eagle and the body could be mistaken for a lion. The bony collar had two large holes and was quite fragile so that a broken one might resemble two ears. Gryphons were also gold guardians and Proto-ceratops fossils were found by ancient gold miners in Mongolia and China. The novel’s other beast, the chimaera, may also be a Protoceratops if you think of the tail as serpentine and the collar as a lion’s mane. (Ancient gold miners didn’t study much anatomy.)
The second category is folklore too. And the third. As well as the origins of myths and legends I’m interested in how they might work if they were real. How could a dragon breathe fire? (Actually, I hadn’t planned to address that until I discovered the bombardier beetle, an insect whose defence mechanism is essentially lighting its own farts.) This idea is taken to slightly absurd lengths by my being over-literal about the fact that legend describes the chimaera (of which there was only one) as having the body of a she-goat. I therefore decided to make it an all-female species, resulting in us all learning more than we ever wanted to about greenfly and finally an explanation for why my mum always found a mysterious tenner in her coat pocket as she was leaving for church on a Sunday morning.
Myths and legends form the basis of all sorts of books, films, games and so on. Usually, they take a mix-and-match approach, with trolls from Norse mythology and centaurs from Greece working in the same branch of Sainsbury’s or whatever. I’ve nothing against this but I wanted a world that closely mirrored our own historically and geo-graphically, and that meant keeping different mythologies in their own regions. That’s why Lieutenant Mueller makes the point about the chimaera being far from its home in the Lycian marshes (now in southern Turkey).
Of course, we don’t believe in myths or folklore any more. Or do we? Loch Ness monster anyone? Bigfoot? Read your horoscope lately? We like to think that we’re much more enlightened and rational now but in truth we’re as superstitious as we ever were. We just use diff-erent names. Most of our UFO lore has actually been around for millennia but back then it was fairies or demons or gods. The classic alien abduction scenario where the abductee is immobilised in bed and probed by little grey men was attributed to demons called the succubus or the incubus (depending on the victim’s gender) in the Middle Ages and the ships themselves were said to be chariots of the gods thousands of years before that. We’ve just updated them and our modern world is still full of what we now call urban myths. One of the most famous inspired the March Cat. The Surrey puma stalked the Home Counties in the 1960s and inspired a handful of other “alien big cat” stories such as the Beast of Bodmin. Which turned out to be a leopardskin rug.
No hard evidence was ever found for any of them. Or for any other urban myth. But there’s a reason for that: it’s a cover-up! The military’s got all the UFOs and the Government’s working with the aliens. The moon landings were faked, pharmaceutical companies are suppressing the cure for cancer and the Royal Family are really giant lizards. Of course, conspiracies do happen. But the reason we know that is because they always get found out. Not with vague non-evidence made up by men in turquoise tracksuits but because real hard evidence comes to light and is passed around for people to examine. Massive global conspiracies are almost impossible to keep secret because the more people who know, the more likely one of them is to squeal. But conspiracy theorists don’t seem to appreciate the logic involved. In The Ultimate Dreamer, the university auth-orities suppress their findings about the fossil because the scientific and religious implications are too dangerous; but this seems to have a connection to something called Edict 37, a greater conspiracy that may go right to the top of the government.
Whatever Edict 37 is really about, it appears that no-one wants to upset the two major beliefs of the world: religion and science. Religion is very closely related to mythology and folklore. In fact, depending on your definition, mythology can be seen as the stories of a religion as opposed to its rituals. For clarity here, I’ve used the definition that myths are no longer believed while religions are current. Only a few basics have been revealed so far about the Empire’s religions but we know that, besides many local practices that essentially worship natural phenomena, there are two competing but closely related faiths, which may sound familiar. There’s also a darker side represented by the Castillian Inquisition. Exactly who the witch-finder represents is never made clear but he certainly represents a real historical phenomenon. Witch-hunts have existed all through history but reached hysterical proportions in the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, when perhaps thousands were executed (hanged, not burned) for being good with herbs, having schizo-phrenia or looking at their neighbour’s cow a bit funny. The most infamous examples were self-proclaimed Witchfinder General Matt-hew Hopkins and the Salem Witch Trials immortalised in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible.
Many would argue that science isn’t a belief at all but that’s because they use a rather narrow definition of the word “belief”, which in truth simply means “holding a premise to be true”. Science is a belief system that tests its ideas and relies on evidence rather than faith. We should be clear, though, that the difference between science and, say, religion isn’t that one is true and the other isn’t. That isn't a scientific approach at all. Take evolution. Many people insist that evolution is a fact but, as Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen explain in The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day, in science facts are, at best, provisional. Evolution isn’t a fact but a theory. The same people will baulk at this but that’s because they’re confusing the colloquial use of the word with its correct scientific one. A theory isn’t an untested idea - that’s a hypothesis. A theory is an argument or series of arguments, backed up by a body of evidence, which has been tested and not yet disproven. That last bit is important because that’s the essence of science right there. Nothing can ever be absolutely proven - it can just be backed up by evidence - but it can always be disproven and the true scientist is always willing to change his or her beliefs in the face of new evidence. For example, it used to be believed that atoms were the smallest possible form of matter. And then someone discovered (ie spotted an almost immeasurable anomaly and came up with a plausible explanation that hasn’t yet been disproved) that they could be divided into sub-atomic particles - protons, neutrons and electrons. And so that became not fact but scientific orthodoxy. Until some bugger came up with quantum, dividing the sub-atomic particles into even smaller ones such as quarks, mesons, positrons and so on. And even that’s changed as current scientific thinking (ie the most widely accepted belief) is that quantum is more about waves than particles. But back to evolution. It probably can’t ever be proven to be a fact. You can’t observe millions of years of evolution and even if you could there are always alternative explanations. But there’s a lot of evidence and most scientists accept it as the most likely explanation. In short it works like this. There are observations (marks on rock that look like bones), hypotheses that might account for them (they’re real bones fossilised by millions of years of geological action; if you arrange them in a certain order it looks like a progression), various pieces of evidence (geological strata, finches, Galapagos tortoises, peppered moths), leading to a theory and a scientific consensus. It may well be absolutely true. Or it could all unravel tomorrow. Atoms are no longer the smallest and the Earth is no longer the centre of the universe.
Before science, though, there was magic. In his essay Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination, Arthur C. Clarke postulated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (often known as Clarke’s third law). If you travelled back in time and took a mobile phone to the Middle Ages, most people would probably believe it contained a demon and burn you - sorry, hang you - as a witch. But magic played no small part in the development of modern science. Chemistry had its origins in alchemy and for centuries astronomy and astrology were indistinguishable. As with folklore, my interest for these books is in how magic might work if it were real and my yardstick is Clarke’s third law. The illusionism used by Adam and Malchus has more than a hint of smoke and mirrors and a resemblance to psychology and hypnosis. Some of it seems a bit more supernatural but perhaps it’s just advanced science that we don’t yet understand.
Finally there’s history. Again, you may dispute that history is a belief but, as Wolf says, history is written by the winners. Or by people who weren’t there or even alive at the time. And, like science, history changes as we discover new evidence or just change our minds. So Columbus didn’t discover America, the Inquisition didn’t really terrorise Europe and the Dark Ages probably never happened at all. We still have to choose what to believe. The Empire is loosely based on the historical Holy Roman Empire and the overlapping Habsburg dynasty. Contradicting my own rule on mythology, I’ve taken a slightly mix-and-match approach to history and thrown in Darwin and Dawkins all in the same Renaissance timeframe and I’ll probably do it again as I explore various historical periods or events that interest me.
The second book is already underway. It involves a strand of folklore with a surprising link to religion as well as a related urban myth that made a famous showman a lot of money. The science is more biological and the magic darker. The history’s much closer to home for me and there’s a historical conspiracy too. And those are all the clues you’re getting.
The first is mythology and folklore - things that people used to believe but generally don’t any more. Creation myths that explain why the sun rises and sets (a giant dung beetle in case you didn’t know) and folk tales that explain those weird lights near the marsh. The Ultimate Dreamer has its own creation myth involving the Skentys but I’m not going to tell you any more about that just yet. You’ll have to wait for a future book. This book’s main interest is the folklore of fabulous beasts and specifically those that helped the ancients to explain those skeletons in the rocks. Long ago people found fossils and, without much knowledge to help them, had to come up with the best explanations they could. So giant reptilian things (scales sometimes leave fossil impressions) with long necks and tails or sharp claws and teeth became dragons, which is just another word for dinosaurs. Surely it wasn’t so unreasonable (at least not in the pursuit of a good story) to assume that such terrible lizards could breathe fire. Some even had wings. Being found in rock, they were sometimes next to deposits of precious stones or metals so the legends named them as guardians of treasure. When the not-quite-as-ancients discovered far off lands like Indonesia to be inhabited by monitor lizards they put things like “here be dragons” on the maps. But dragons weren’t the only creatures found in fossils. The Phelan University museum houses a gryphon skeleton. Gryphons (or griffins) had the head, wings and front legs of an eagle with the body, hind legs and tail of a lion. In her book The First Fossil Hunters, Adrienne Mayor proposed that gryphons were derived from the fossils of a dinosaur called Protoceratops, which was basically a small Triceratops without the horns. The beaked head could look like an eagle and the body could be mistaken for a lion. The bony collar had two large holes and was quite fragile so that a broken one might resemble two ears. Gryphons were also gold guardians and Proto-ceratops fossils were found by ancient gold miners in Mongolia and China. The novel’s other beast, the chimaera, may also be a Protoceratops if you think of the tail as serpentine and the collar as a lion’s mane. (Ancient gold miners didn’t study much anatomy.)
The second category is folklore too. And the third. As well as the origins of myths and legends I’m interested in how they might work if they were real. How could a dragon breathe fire? (Actually, I hadn’t planned to address that until I discovered the bombardier beetle, an insect whose defence mechanism is essentially lighting its own farts.) This idea is taken to slightly absurd lengths by my being over-literal about the fact that legend describes the chimaera (of which there was only one) as having the body of a she-goat. I therefore decided to make it an all-female species, resulting in us all learning more than we ever wanted to about greenfly and finally an explanation for why my mum always found a mysterious tenner in her coat pocket as she was leaving for church on a Sunday morning.
Myths and legends form the basis of all sorts of books, films, games and so on. Usually, they take a mix-and-match approach, with trolls from Norse mythology and centaurs from Greece working in the same branch of Sainsbury’s or whatever. I’ve nothing against this but I wanted a world that closely mirrored our own historically and geo-graphically, and that meant keeping different mythologies in their own regions. That’s why Lieutenant Mueller makes the point about the chimaera being far from its home in the Lycian marshes (now in southern Turkey).
Of course, we don’t believe in myths or folklore any more. Or do we? Loch Ness monster anyone? Bigfoot? Read your horoscope lately? We like to think that we’re much more enlightened and rational now but in truth we’re as superstitious as we ever were. We just use diff-erent names. Most of our UFO lore has actually been around for millennia but back then it was fairies or demons or gods. The classic alien abduction scenario where the abductee is immobilised in bed and probed by little grey men was attributed to demons called the succubus or the incubus (depending on the victim’s gender) in the Middle Ages and the ships themselves were said to be chariots of the gods thousands of years before that. We’ve just updated them and our modern world is still full of what we now call urban myths. One of the most famous inspired the March Cat. The Surrey puma stalked the Home Counties in the 1960s and inspired a handful of other “alien big cat” stories such as the Beast of Bodmin. Which turned out to be a leopardskin rug.
No hard evidence was ever found for any of them. Or for any other urban myth. But there’s a reason for that: it’s a cover-up! The military’s got all the UFOs and the Government’s working with the aliens. The moon landings were faked, pharmaceutical companies are suppressing the cure for cancer and the Royal Family are really giant lizards. Of course, conspiracies do happen. But the reason we know that is because they always get found out. Not with vague non-evidence made up by men in turquoise tracksuits but because real hard evidence comes to light and is passed around for people to examine. Massive global conspiracies are almost impossible to keep secret because the more people who know, the more likely one of them is to squeal. But conspiracy theorists don’t seem to appreciate the logic involved. In The Ultimate Dreamer, the university auth-orities suppress their findings about the fossil because the scientific and religious implications are too dangerous; but this seems to have a connection to something called Edict 37, a greater conspiracy that may go right to the top of the government.
Whatever Edict 37 is really about, it appears that no-one wants to upset the two major beliefs of the world: religion and science. Religion is very closely related to mythology and folklore. In fact, depending on your definition, mythology can be seen as the stories of a religion as opposed to its rituals. For clarity here, I’ve used the definition that myths are no longer believed while religions are current. Only a few basics have been revealed so far about the Empire’s religions but we know that, besides many local practices that essentially worship natural phenomena, there are two competing but closely related faiths, which may sound familiar. There’s also a darker side represented by the Castillian Inquisition. Exactly who the witch-finder represents is never made clear but he certainly represents a real historical phenomenon. Witch-hunts have existed all through history but reached hysterical proportions in the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, when perhaps thousands were executed (hanged, not burned) for being good with herbs, having schizo-phrenia or looking at their neighbour’s cow a bit funny. The most infamous examples were self-proclaimed Witchfinder General Matt-hew Hopkins and the Salem Witch Trials immortalised in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible.
Many would argue that science isn’t a belief at all but that’s because they use a rather narrow definition of the word “belief”, which in truth simply means “holding a premise to be true”. Science is a belief system that tests its ideas and relies on evidence rather than faith. We should be clear, though, that the difference between science and, say, religion isn’t that one is true and the other isn’t. That isn't a scientific approach at all. Take evolution. Many people insist that evolution is a fact but, as Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen explain in The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day, in science facts are, at best, provisional. Evolution isn’t a fact but a theory. The same people will baulk at this but that’s because they’re confusing the colloquial use of the word with its correct scientific one. A theory isn’t an untested idea - that’s a hypothesis. A theory is an argument or series of arguments, backed up by a body of evidence, which has been tested and not yet disproven. That last bit is important because that’s the essence of science right there. Nothing can ever be absolutely proven - it can just be backed up by evidence - but it can always be disproven and the true scientist is always willing to change his or her beliefs in the face of new evidence. For example, it used to be believed that atoms were the smallest possible form of matter. And then someone discovered (ie spotted an almost immeasurable anomaly and came up with a plausible explanation that hasn’t yet been disproved) that they could be divided into sub-atomic particles - protons, neutrons and electrons. And so that became not fact but scientific orthodoxy. Until some bugger came up with quantum, dividing the sub-atomic particles into even smaller ones such as quarks, mesons, positrons and so on. And even that’s changed as current scientific thinking (ie the most widely accepted belief) is that quantum is more about waves than particles. But back to evolution. It probably can’t ever be proven to be a fact. You can’t observe millions of years of evolution and even if you could there are always alternative explanations. But there’s a lot of evidence and most scientists accept it as the most likely explanation. In short it works like this. There are observations (marks on rock that look like bones), hypotheses that might account for them (they’re real bones fossilised by millions of years of geological action; if you arrange them in a certain order it looks like a progression), various pieces of evidence (geological strata, finches, Galapagos tortoises, peppered moths), leading to a theory and a scientific consensus. It may well be absolutely true. Or it could all unravel tomorrow. Atoms are no longer the smallest and the Earth is no longer the centre of the universe.
Before science, though, there was magic. In his essay Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination, Arthur C. Clarke postulated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (often known as Clarke’s third law). If you travelled back in time and took a mobile phone to the Middle Ages, most people would probably believe it contained a demon and burn you - sorry, hang you - as a witch. But magic played no small part in the development of modern science. Chemistry had its origins in alchemy and for centuries astronomy and astrology were indistinguishable. As with folklore, my interest for these books is in how magic might work if it were real and my yardstick is Clarke’s third law. The illusionism used by Adam and Malchus has more than a hint of smoke and mirrors and a resemblance to psychology and hypnosis. Some of it seems a bit more supernatural but perhaps it’s just advanced science that we don’t yet understand.
Finally there’s history. Again, you may dispute that history is a belief but, as Wolf says, history is written by the winners. Or by people who weren’t there or even alive at the time. And, like science, history changes as we discover new evidence or just change our minds. So Columbus didn’t discover America, the Inquisition didn’t really terrorise Europe and the Dark Ages probably never happened at all. We still have to choose what to believe. The Empire is loosely based on the historical Holy Roman Empire and the overlapping Habsburg dynasty. Contradicting my own rule on mythology, I’ve taken a slightly mix-and-match approach to history and thrown in Darwin and Dawkins all in the same Renaissance timeframe and I’ll probably do it again as I explore various historical periods or events that interest me.
The second book is already underway. It involves a strand of folklore with a surprising link to religion as well as a related urban myth that made a famous showman a lot of money. The science is more biological and the magic darker. The history’s much closer to home for me and there’s a historical conspiracy too. And those are all the clues you’re getting.