Sunday, December 1, 2013

Chapter outline (semi-spoiler free)



CHAPTER 0 – The Origin of The User
CHAPTER 1 – Awakening
CHAPTER 2 – The Tunnel
CHAPTER 3 – Surfaced
CHAPTER 4 – The Tour Guide
CHAPTER 5 – Hull of Darkness
CHAPTER 6 – Swine Eat Swine 
CHAPTER 7 – Blame
CHAPTER 8 – Ville of Illusion 
CHAPTER 9 – Deflection 
CHAPTER 10 – Agony of the Cowards 
CHAPTER 11 – Ogres' Aisle
CHAPTER 12 – The Technophiles of Palladius  
CHAPTER 13 – Advice From the Orgiophant
CHAPTER 14 – Mortispolis 
CHAPTER 15 – Kiss of Cozenage 
CHAPTER 16 – Asylum, At Last


CHAPTER 0 – The Origin of The User

Thirty page exposition, detailing the mechanics of the game and Roy’s background, which led to the game’s creation.

CHAPTER 1 – Awakening

The narrative begins when Roy awakens in the real world for the first time in almost twenty years. Most of his memories have long since been washed away by drugs, conditioning, and detachment and he does not know where he is. A strange man appears, and releases him from his isolation chamber, then bluntly lays on him everything that has happened and tries to convince Roy to come with him. Roy denies all that he is being told until the man, Exxe, shows him a pocket mirror. Roy has a psychotic break at the sight of himself and tries to run, but the perimeter of the manor is sealed. Sees the outside world and fully disassociates back to Valcadis.


CHAPTER 2 – The Tunnel

[Valcadis flashover scene one. The same recurring dream: the storm, the vast misty ocean, the small boat, he all alone. Then the flames, all is burning. Roy awakens on a bed. An old man and two children attend to him. Tells Roy he is sick, fevered, perhaps caused by majick, also that many ominous things have been happening since the eclipse. Roy sees the eclipse from his bedside window. a golden sunset, with a black orb over half. “Ardora, I’m afraid I don’t know that person. I’m sorry. You can stay here until your well. My daughter will take you wherever you need to go.”]

With Roy unconscious, the hegira begins without his consent. Exxe pulls Roy on a dolly through the underground access tunnel, leading off the property. Roy wakes and is given medicine for his psychological issues, and becomes somewhat more receptive, as Exxe opts for rhetoric to convince him to cooperate. Questions are asked and answers are given. Largely a dialogue based chapter. The two build a modicum of rapport, and though still confused, Roy partially comes to accept the parameters of his new reality.

CHAPTER 3 – Surfaced


Chapter documents the two hour drive south from the manor into the city. Descriptions of the post-collapse world, and a history of the collapse. More dialogue between Roy and Exxe. The two run out of gas a few miles out of Brooklyn, and proceed on foot towards downtown, specifically, Roy’s father’s skyscraper to rendezvous on the roof with the man who will help them. The streets are mostly desolate besides a few scattered vagrants, but are guarded by drones, still operational from before the collapse. Inside the building, more stragglers, on drugs, sick, dying, mad. Most ignore them. They take the stairs to the top floor where a deranged man attacks Roy. Exxe tries to fight him off, but cannot, and another man rescues them. Enter….

CHAPTER 4 – The Tour Guide

[Valcadis flashover, scene two. The strange woman on horseback. The storm. The mission recalled. Ganzer, I’m going to end you.The augur’s prophecy: "Beware of illusions, you carry a curse."]

Roy awakens from his fugue state. He is lying on a mat of cloth, and overhears the conversation between Exxe and another man with a strange voice. It is the man who killed his attacker. Information is divulged. An introduction to Sinlis. Roy has immediate trust issues with their new partner. The three enter the sewers and began their descent into Nether York.

CHAPTER 5 - Hull of Darkness

The hull consists of the sewers under NYC. This area is a brink, a fringe to the subcities, a safe way to navigate away from the populated subway tunnels. Sinlis describes it as like a limbo into hell that only men of a certain degree of madness would ever dare cross. It is pitch black, and they follow Sinlis who can see thanks to cyberoptic implants. No infrastructure, no occupants. Still no definitive action. Sinlis talks, tells a little about his past, though oblique and vague. He also summarizes  the underground to his unacquainted partners. Groups are segregated, and these pocketed nations are referred to sectors, spread between four levels of depth, their populations referred to as sects. There are nine sectors in all, and though the cultures of each sect are unique in their psychosocial mutations, all have a shared leitmotif of extremes and insanity.  Many are dangerous, do not allow passersthrough. Luckily they are primitive and dysfunctional in ways that can be exploited as weakness and Sinlis, familiar with the sectors of the first three tiers, assures safe passages until that point. However, he admits he has not ventured deeper and confesses that he has always been too frightened to go into the deep, final tier. There are several points of entry, known as portals, from the hull into the undercities of Nether York, none of which are preferable to the others. Sinlis chooses one, that he infers is the least dangerous. They come to the entry hatch, and go down, entering...

CHAPTER 6 – Swine Eat Swine

Tier one of Nether York. The subways system, the lawless people. a long horizontal hell hall of chaos and cannibalism. “Light violence” as sinlis calls it. Intro to these people, dumb brutes with crude mechanical technologies who live mostly in anarchy around the corridor of the rail tracks. Kind of a nod to cheesy eighties post-apocalyptic films such as mad max, escape from new York, the warriors, etc, though a realized and realistic culture based on that. They observe violence, though do not encounter it towards them. People here seem to recognize  respectively avoid Sinlis. They proceed through this area to the next, where they encounter their first threats of many to come.

CHAPTER 7 – Blame

 [Valcadis flashover scene two, part two. The User follows a river upstream, which has turned to blood, and continues through a forest of yellow leaves, before arriving at a verdant woods home to hermetical creatures.]

Tier two. Sector of the arm (aka The Law). The entrance is guarded, and there is a fight between Sinlis and the four defenders. They move on and come to a chamber hall where many citizens have conglomerated for some kind of a speech. The man giving the speech is the judge, who is the supreme leader of the arm. After the speech there is an execution. The crowd disbands and the three hide in the shadows. Sinlis deduces that the only way to get through the heavily defended sector, is to take the judge hostage.  In stealth they follow the judge to his residence, and wait to attack later. The house is guarded by two large men. One is drawn out and killed quietly. Sinlis takes his clothes and helmet and motions for the other guard to come over, is killed then. Judge is with really old, but in good shape. He notices roy, that he is weak, scared, and having psyche issues. Begins to question and mess with his head. Sinlis beats the judge to silence, though he has already gotten to Roy.

The trio is near the outskirts when they are met by a new enemy: agile, armed technohumanoids called wraders, which have been dispatched by the arm to kill them. There are six of them, and each an ability that matches that of Sinlis. History of the wraders.  The three must work together to survive and get to the next sector. Roy is called into action and kills one. At the edge of the sector, Sinlis kills the judge before the trio barely escape the final two pursuing wraders, and enter…

CHAPTER 8 – Ville of Illusion

They seal the border entrance and are safe from threats. This sector is an abandoned city known as the the ville of illusion, what was once home to a sect of neurotics / artists – though now defunct culture that exist now only as archaeological ghosts, memories through portraits, really creepy ones, with books (illuminated manuscripts), thousands of pages, illustrated that have a chronicle of their lives before the collapse. Now there is only one man there, the reminders drove the rest of them crazy, some killed themselves, others fled and were killed, most joined other sectors. While there are no dangers, the place is very creepy, and unnerving especially to Roy, as the sector was constructed like a house of mirrors to mimick the old days above ground, before the collapse.

They come to a chapel, a kind of inner shrine of the past, where they encounter the sole survivor of this group. He is schizophrenic and engages Roy with crazy talk, that seems like a warning or prophecy. Sinlis kills him, but not before Roy’s sense of trust and reality is dislodged. That night they rest and Roy hears a whispering voice call him away from the camp. He lies and says he need sto pee, then follows it unto an artificial lake, where he is met by bloody schizo-mole man from before, who rants about set-ups and illusions, causing Roy to detach for a third time.


CHAPTER 9 – Deflection

 [Valcadis flashover, scene three. The storm has passed and the eclipse has waxed, covering nearly three fourths of the sun. Roy begins an ascent through the strange villages and up a mythical mountain of doom, following the trails of Ganzer, who has Ardora and clues suggest he seems to be taking her to play a part in some sacrifice. Enemies await in a mysterious forest. Ardora appears, or so it seems]

Exxe and Sinlis find Roy naked and unconscious, and Roy awakens with distrust and anger towards them. Believes they are not real or are using him. He leaves on his own. Exxe tries to stop him, but Sinlis says to let him go, that he will be back. This is a very introspective chapter, a psychological study on Roy’s current state of mind as well as his deepest subconscious fears, that will continue to be unearthed in later chapters. He wanders to the edge, where he hears terrible noises that frighten him and has no choice but to go back .

CHAPTER 10 – Agony of the Cowards

They head back in the opposite direction into a sect occupied by the fools or the cowards, a group of people who unknowingly migrated themselves into a corner and exist as passive prey for the surrounding predatory sects.  They live in a state of perpetual fear and mental foundering, almost in a state of paralysis. They live in hiding, and have little or no culture. They are raided and massacred by a group from the lower sect, who excavate their grottos and devour them in Saturn-esque gore. Though there was attempt made to avoid such a route, the sector has expanded, and they must cross into the territory of these golem like people. Enter...

CHAPTER 11 – Ogres' Aisle 

The third tier. Sector of the ogres, the freaks – omnivorous, psychologically mutated heathens. Mortal monsters whose evil is not systematic, but primal and regressive. Roy sees yet paralled horrors here. There are feasts of blood and it becomes aware that this sector is where the screams from before originated from. Humans, mostly from the sect of fools, are kept chained and imprisoned, where they are eaten. Much action ensues before a rockslide separates Roy from the group. Alone he is met again with the ghost of the schizo-mole man, and is jettisoned further towards insanity. Another very introspective/psychologically probing chapter into Roy. Leads into the lower third tier....


CHAPTER 12 – The Technophiles of Palladius

[Valcadis flashover, scene four. Nearing the summit, there is a blizzard and The User must take shelter. Afterwards, he comes upon fresh foot prints in the snow, and recognizes one pair as Ardora’s. They must be close. The User pushes on, following the footsteps to some strange mythical ruins on the mountain side, some sort of a temple. He is met by Ashlan, Ganzer’s ally, and must defeat him to pass.]

The sect of the technophiles or humanists who live peacefully in a remote, fortified pocket of the earth. They have much technology, and are passive and friendly, conservatively morally-grounded intellectuals. They offer medicine to sick travelers and safe haven, give details on the fourth tier. Sinlis has a strong disliking for these people, as they choose not to fight, but to isolate, and have sterilized their own population for ethical reasons. Roy still very confused and paranoid, remains in bed where he is taken care of, until Sinlis sparks trouble and they must leave, making way towards...


CHAPTER 13 – Advice From the Orgiophant

The fourth tier. The sector of the hedonists or sexus cultus. A nihilistic, though non-aggressive society based around carnal and chemical indulgence; an apex of high society, mostly female, who reside in the psychedelic-gothic, meticulously-labyrinthine pocket known as the chapel of flesh. Stained glass, neon-lit walls with genital textures, strange music. Roy begins to lose his mind as he wanders throughout the marble corridors of this decadent and surreal maze. He is requested to meet with the orgiophant, the conductor or queen of this sect, who apparently can help direct him. She gives him pleasure and empathy drugs to ease his anxiety, and they spend the evening talking. A final calm before the storm...

CHAPTER 14 – Mortispolis

[Valcadis flashover, scene five. The eclipse is total. A tower resembling the branch of a tree uproots into the sky. Demon-like creatures descend from the sky and attack The User as he nears the mountains summit and the base of the tower. He encounters several allies and nemeses from his history in the game, before beginning up the seemingly never ending stairs, where Ganzer is taking Ardora. ]

Sector of the lost, the logicians, the heretics. A bizarre cult of mask-donning, non-violent psychos. Take drugs regularly, a kind of mix between acid and meth, called information eaters, IE’s (pronounced ‘ease’), also dis-IEs. This bizarre culture has an occult religion based on entropy, death, decay, etc. Engage in  necromancy, alchemy, arcane practices and live in a horrifying network of chambers, with digital libraries filled with obscure existential and misanthropic-themed books, real and imagined, as well as 'rubicon rooms' for the purpose of committing suicide and transmogrification vessels, to journey spatially, to see through time, or even to see one's own end, though it is unsure if this actually works or is an effect of the IE's, Roy is almost convinced to engage in this ritual, but instead holds the hand of one of the apostles and he sees for him. The man becomes very frightened and silent before killing himself and saying a few words. Roy begins to slip into terror and insanity.

 CHAPTER 15 – Kiss of Cozenage

[Valcadis flashover scene six. The climax to the Roy's journey to find Ganzer and save Ardora.  Roy reaches a Babel-esque tower.  eclipse, the sacrifice, a final battle, where is she?]

Crossing the Acheron, the underground waterway between the fourth tier and beyond. On the other side, just prior to the asylum, a betrayal.

CHAPTER 16 – Asylum, At Last

The firth tier and final sector: the asylum. Occupied by the immortals, or demiurges,  old men resembling baby faced, paled, wrinkled, blush cheeked, little boys, mutilated by horrendous surgeries.  Humanity at its most exponential mutation of evil.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

FROM VALCADIA TO NETHER YORK: AN ESCAPE MIX TAPE

























01) Peter Davison - The Sage
02) Eno, Moebius, and Roedelius - Foreign Affairs
03) Zomes - Footpaths
04) Disasterpeace - Flow
05) Chris J. Hampton - Chrono Trigger New Zeal OC Remix
06) Mirror to Mirror - The Store
07) Claire Hamill - Icicle Rain
08) Akira Yamaoka - Nightmarish Waltz
09) Bluetech - First Came the Stars
10) Emancipator - Afterglow
11) Polysick - Loading...
12) Locust - I Became Overwhelmed
13) Mark Templeton - Sinking Heart
14) The Haxan Cloak - The Mirror Reflecting (part 2)
15) Roedelius - In Natura (Go Along)
16) Peter Broderick - Broken Patterns
17) Have a Nice Life - A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours..
18) Implodes - Bottom of a Well
19) Labradford - El Lago
20) Peter Davison - Glide VI




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Monday, November 18, 2013

A rough foreword and some additional notes on the composition

So as not to be misinterpreted, it may be best to begin with a preface and state explicitly that: I am not inherently against video games. To be anti-video game would also mean to be anti-literature, anti-film, anti-music, and anti-culture as well. I feel that gaming is a budding (if not currently corporatized)  art form that has a lot of potential to produce beautiful and transformative experiences never before imagined. I even play and enjoy certain games from time to time, though not as often or enthusiastically as in my youth. However, there is a given order of importance where necessity takes logical precedence over novelty – an order that today is commonly inverted.  Gaming is a form of entertainment and pleasure, and thus is no different from any other indulgence done in excess or to serve palliative, therapeutic purposes. This specifically is the problem I aim to elucidate.

Twisted Roots


       
    In the spectrum of all conceivable relativity, I had a ‘happy’ childhood. It is safe to say that life was pretty dang alright until around the age of ten when my parents separated and things took an undesired change. I remained with my mother, while my dad, conveniently out of work, did not pay child support. Within a few years my mother had exhausted all of her savings paying off legal fees from the prolonged divorce, and we had to relocate to a small down just south of the Oklahoma border where I could be taken care of by my aunt on work days (my mom was a flight attendant for American Airlines out of DFW), and where the living expenses were substantially cheaper. 
       Before, when my parents were still together, I was never allowed to play video games at home. My dad referred to them as “brain cancer,” and though my dad was mostly a very clever idiot, he would, from time to time, drop proverbs and epithets such as this that became ironic to me down the road, and so held some merit of wisdom (if outside of the context employed at the time).  While I did get to play games when visiting friends, it was permitted to have a console of my own, at least not until later on after the split.
       The Christmas after we moved (I think it was in ‘96 or ’97) my mom bought me a Nintendo 64 that came packaged with Mario 64. When I saw what had been hidden under the wrapping paper, I nearly wept with joy, and hugged and thanked my mom profusely. It took us an hour to figure out how to hook it up to the bulky Panasonic family TV, but we finally did, I got to play for a couple hours that Christmas night and it was thoroughly magical. One week and 120 stars later, I was forever changed. All the games I’d experienced prior had been 2D: Super Mario World, Mega Man X, Mortal Kombat, a slew of Genesis side-scrollers. Naturally, this new dimension- which was just as fun and surprisingly easy to control - blew my eleven or twelve year old mind, as I'm sure it did for many. I remember renting game after game from Blockbuster, eager for new releases and heartbroken when a sought title was checked out. Occasionally I’d even use my allowance from chores to buy games of particular interest: Star Fox 64, Goldeneye, Mario Kart 64, Banzo Kazooie, and so on. In the end I had a collection of probably forty cartridges, and given the sparse library the 64 had, I like to think that was pretty impressive.
     From there, I began collecting gaming magazines (Nintendo Power, EGM, Game Pro, Game Informer, and my favorite, GameFan), browsing gaming news sites and forums (thegia, planetgamecube, gaming-age), and more or less living inside game-related IRC chats. It was through this online subculture that I started gradually learning to separate what games were truly good ones - games with stirring atmospherics, compelling characters and stories, refined art and memorable music - from games that were, well, just kind of mediocre, fodder for entertainment. This conscientiousness of quality propelled my passion further and from that era on, I was officially a ‘hardcore’ gamer, as they are called.
       The first RPG I ever played was Chrono Trigger, admittedly on snes9x, a Super Nintendo emulator.  I was 15 at that time and to say that this adventure had a very, very profound effect on me would be an understatement. No, it was an out of body, almost religious experience, and I still to this day consider it to be one of the best games, if not the very best game, of all time. Through Chrono Trigger, I discovered Squaresoft in their golden era, and with this new adoration for jRPGs, I was more hardcore about interactive fantasy than ever. The seriousness had become obsession and retrospectively, looking at the circumstances of my life at that juncture, it is obvious why. Gaming was the perfect form of distraction for someone my age with my problems at the time.
       But then something happened in the early oughts, at the peak of my fanaticism. Over the course of a few years, around the demise of the Dreamcast, the industry changed and it seemed even my favorite companies had become concerned only with making a profit, as opposed to making magical transcendental experiences for those playing. Casual gamers began to outnumber the hardcore ones, and even in my sacred online communities, there was a noticeable conversion. People went from talking about games like ‘Oh, wow, that games great!’ to ‘Oh, wow, that game has great graphics.’ Even from a design standpoint, the visual appeal of newer games seemed bankrupt due to the rising popularity of the ‘filmified’ veneer of realism, which just looked silly then, and still looks silly today to some degree. Where once there was artistic stylization to account for hardware limitations, a majority of modern games brought to the 128bit table a splendidly dull array of explosions and polygonal breasts; booms and boobies with more sculpting and physics than whole environments within the same games. Structural composition had been substituted for superficial gloss, and any maven of the arts can tell you how wrong and arear such prioritizing is.  Though I didn't know why for a few years, this devolution really saddened me and once these trends had become standard procedure, my interest in games started to wane. 

Blinded by the Glow : Gamer Psychology (and the Absent Self-Awareness Of) 
           
         There’s many psychological-causal facets to consider about why people play games, why they enjoy them so much, or really just why there is such a gigantic user base for video games in general, but I don’t want to get into them in too much detail here. However, most of these attributors can be reduced to a lowest common denominator, and I’m sure every serious gamer plays games for at least one of two primary reasons. One, games offer experiences that aren’t possible in the mundane parameters of real life and two, they allow people to engage in a more preferable reality that is offered by the fantastic nature and simplicity of these created worlds. This is not revelatory. But whether it’s for the purpose of recreation or the purpose of escapism, the player is being distracted from his or her own life/self, and very few people actually realize how detrimental this can be given the framework of the modern world. We’ll get to that later. 
        Because of what is offered by the experience, I think anyone who is or has ever been a hardcore game-enthusiast, has probably - at some point - fantasized about how cool it would be to ‘live’ in a game world. Maybe only in the form of a daydream while you were in school or on the toilet or whatever, but I imagine a lot of people  dealing with problems at home or just middle or high school think, man, my life sucks, wouldn’t it be really great if I was in…. like, say… Hyrule or something, or were Link from Zelda, instead of Johnny Doe, who is skinny and has acne and gets stuffed into lockers [do kids even do that kind of thing anymore? Sadly, they did back in my school days]



















      When the “VR” “revolution” “happened,” it seemed like these kinds of fantasies might soon be possible. Though they never materialized, at least not as initially promised, the technology was always expanding and the possibility and demand remained present. Now it seems at long last that the VR movement is right around the corner, actually, not just out of wishful optimism. We are beginning to see tangible, functional augmented reality devices enter the market and similar systems offering complete virtual reality are in development. Assuming the civilization doesn’t collapse or self-destruct in the next few years, we will live to see it; virtual reality in the game-changing manifestation originally heralded way back when. Everyone is excited.

 But is this breakthrough a good thing? 

How Escape Came to Be

        In my late teens and early twenties, after losing the passion for gaming, I began reading and learning, and strangely found myself being more aware of how the world worked and how much that differed from what was ideal. I came to understand man’s paradoxical need for both security and heroism as it was: pretty much just as vital as food, air, or water. But knowing this didn’t really help my situation and kind of just made things worse. My own anxieties and depressions got pretty crazy, and that was around the time that I turned towards chemical escapism to get the solace of childhood that I could no longer derive from fictive imaginings. Essentially, I replaced rescuing digital damsels and saving the world from monstrous villains with cheap booze and a variety of narcotics, some legally prescribed, many not. I was amazed to find that drugs and alcohol were a highly effective 'solution' to my many, many problems....for a little bit. Half a decade passed by in a blur of desperation and bad decisions and in the end this lifestyle, as was portended by every voice of reason in my formative years, ruined my entire life. The person I once was was no more, and I spent the last three years rebuilding from the ground up. It was hell at first, but now I can look back and see it as an interesting transformation that has absolutely been for the better. Wisdom is indeed gained through folly. 
      It took a few months, but once I got sober and recovered from the after-effects of my indulgence, the idea came to me to write a book. It was to be this exaggerated, allegorical fantasy of the last five years of my life. That book was Escape. But I also had a desire to write a memoir, and since I was still immediately dealing with a lot of painful things, it seemed more appropriate and real to me to begin working on the latter.  This was in late summer of 2011 and I've been working on that project ever since. Up until only recently I was certain that that would be my first novel. But over the years my idea for Escape had grown too. I worked on it intermittently whenever I was inspired (or burnt out on detailing the chronological anatomy of my miseries), and the idea became a rough sketch. The ideas kept coming, and soon there was an outline and even chapters written, until a few months ago, when I realized that I had like half the damn book written and it would be a helluva lot easier to finish than the beastly tome which had previously been my primary focus. So I decided then to switch objectives and devote all my time and energy to finishing Escape. At present, the book is about 80% (4/5 of the chapters have been drafted) not including editing. I am very, very pleased with how it’s progressed and hopefully, a finished version should be available for people to read by early next year.

      The title "Escape" is a reference to a few different things. It is indeed a nod to the Escape sequence, programming vernacular used to execute commands (analogous to Roy's digital determinism), as well as an ode to a number of works with titular similarities, both fictional and non-fictional, that have served the foundation  for this book's conceptual and philosophical core, as well as my own. The most obvious allusion, however, is the central theme of escapism, or the practice of avoiding what is painful in reality. It is common defense mechanism that is done in a number of ways: by denying, rejecting, projecting, ignoring, obscuring the truth. It is something that has had a big influence on my life and something that I feel is the attributing cause for the social and political apathy possessed many young people today.
            Roy, the novel's subject and central character, is a game enthusiast like myself and many of you. But the key difference between he and us peasants, is that Roy actually has the means to finance his own whims, however absurd or unaffordable as they may seem to the average person. So when he has the "wouldn't it be cool if..." moment of existing in a video game universe full time, instead of sighing and going about his day, decides to pay a bunch of really experienced industry people a lot of his newly-inherited money to make it this private and permanent excursion possible.  His incentive isn’t really any different from the aforementioned reasons that anyone else plays video games or reads a fantasy novel, just a lot more radical and extreme. He too is dealing with existential ills stemming from issues of self-esteem. He too is subjected to the constant, rapid-fire bombardment of advertisements, persuaders, profiteers; their vanity, their veiled hatreds, the harassment, the deceit and the crippling burdens they impose. He too is victim to the innumerable oppressions at work and suffers the symptoms of this fascism – the hopeless, powerless, meaningless despair - broadcasted from innumerable external sources, big and small, material, corporeal, theoretical, from people, products, media, the multitude of forms of and faces of authority, all of it ambiguously layered like an infinitely coiled onion one tries in Sisyphean futility to peel, only to spend a lifetime in tears. 
       While certainly some of us are more sensitive and conscious to these conditions than others, and many are not affected at all, this is the current era, to which we and Roy belong. It’s an era that has seen a staggering rise in global unrest since the very moment the new millennium began. To a degree, there has always been unrest throughout human history, but because of the technological revolution the assimilation of psycho-social persuasion in the political arena, there are new anxieties, new restrictions, and new forms of alienation, which have never existed prior. Our era is distinct that the majority of the world participates in a kind of collective delusion, a capitalistic schizophrenia. Culture, once hallowed and fabulously diverse, has become a conglomerated Westernized monoculture, revolving around strips of paper. Even communities and families even seem to be disjointed and dividing, superseded by the larger telescopic national or global groups. Yet there is no camaraderie to be found there either, just an apparition of it. Many are too preoccupied to notice, but Roy, being isolated and without obligations, is susceptive and becomes compulsively aware. He feels not only alone, but also unable to subscribe to the conventional, orthodox routes for living that our world provides. Roy feels trapped. There is no role he can possibly play that will give him the value and meaning to his life promised to him in history, myth, and fiction, and this all-encompassing discontentedness is the catalyst for 'the game,' Roy's instrument for evacuation.
      Money can do many miracles, it cannot quell a deficiency of the soul, nor can it solve the human condition. Roy acknowledges the limitations of his financial power, but intuitively discovers a means to bypass his crisis by willfully changing his environment in a very drastic way. The end goal is simple: to permanently leave the mundane drudgery of the real world in exchange for a world which is ideal, light-hearted, and simple; a plane of existence where there is beauty in everything – even sadness – and where people are either virtuous or vicious, not the involuted, unpredictably mortal amalgamations of emotion that they are in actuality. It is in this kind of world that he believes he can find an adequate heroic role to play - one not limited to making money or building a family or traveling the globe under the guise of leisure - but rather a celestial ambition that will secure his purpose beyond infinity.
    But his reasoning is flawed and ostensible, missing critical factors. Most woes do stem from a destructive environment, yes.  This is true. Given the resources he has, the obvious conjecture would be in line with Roy's approach : simply replace the destructive setting for a productive one. True as well. But it is important to remember the things Roy did not consider: that the shape of any social environment is merely a consequential effect of politics and culture, causes which are interchangeably dominant depending on whether you believe first in the chicken or the egg. Going deeper, the primary source for the formation of all social environments is anthropologically indisputable: these occur on the individual level.  If enough individuals choose to avoidance and privatism over responsibility and cooperation, and there exist, simultaneously, vulturous types who are eager to exploit, to govern and to manipulate whole populations in whatever way deemed most efficient, we can see, speculatively, what will happen. In simpler terms: if you turn your back for long enough, you may very well come to find a knife in it. 
       We don’t need Orwell or Dick to imagine this type of scenario anymore, because it’s no longer speculative. It's been happening for decades, and if our eyes are open we can see with crystal clarity where it has taken us thus far. Escape deals with the era to come, the inevitable culmination of this neon, binary trajectory we are on, how the collision ahead will affect the future of humanity on an individual scale, and, how unimaginably terrifying this future might just be.  

Modus Operandi : On Clichés, Influences, and Theory

         In his published writings, composer and theorist, Theodore Adorno perceived and divided music into two categories:  serious and popular. This is a dualism that I feel can be apt beyond the connoted medium, and with respect to literature, I’ve done my best to bridge these two categories and make a work that is (hypothetically) profound and insightful, and simultaneously compelling and entertaining. Were this book to exist in its own pretentious, self-indulgent bubble, it would be accessible to only a few and that would be counter-intuitive to its purpose. On the contrary, the aim is to reach as many minds as possible, and this can only be done by achieving a certain balance.
        I’m sure some of you may have read a summary or synopsis and experienced some déjà vu. That’s perfectly understandable, and okay with me.  From a shallow perspective, there are indeed glaring commonalities with the narrative and settings from a lot of popular dystopian fiction. For example, the name Escape perpendicular to the location of New York City might evoke John Carpenter’s classic, Escape From New York. But despite any likenesses to this or a mountain of other books, movies, and games, all the contrivances are intended to be ironic and superficial - there is no pretense of “originality.” Instead, the narrative and setting will be the vehicle for the ideas presented, in a kind of pastiche-manner not dissimilar to how the dime novel served as the model for Wild at Heart.
       With a final name drop, I’d like to remind potential readers what Jim Jarmusch said about originality in film, as I feel it’s a another maxim that applies to most contemporary art forms. The quote I’m referring essentially says that just that nothing is original - everything’s been done and it’s what you do with it these ideas, how you blend them together to make something truly creative and unique. A lot of other great minds have echoed these sentiments, that here are only a certain number of possible things that can occur as drama. As Escape is meant to be hard science fiction, I wanted to choose from all the available possible scenarios the one which could be most empirically plausible, given the current sociopolitical situation. So instead of playing ironically with the cheese-ball eighties post-apocalyptic futurism, par for the course among genre kin, I wanted to construct a style is raw and grounded, with multidimensional characters who have real motives, real fears, and based on empirical psychology…. and that is where I hope the basis of this book’s “originality” lies.

Correlative Quotations

"Perhaps all we present-day people are something like slaves, ruled by an angry, whip-wielding, unrefined idea of the world."

-Robert Walser, Jacob von Guten


The world and society [] looked like this: life is completely confined and shackled. A kind of economic fatalism prevails; each individual, whether he resists or not, is assigned a specific role and with it his interests and his character. It makes no difference how this situation came about; it exists and no one can escape from it. [] Standardization is the end of the world. Somewhere perhaps, there is a little island in the pacific ocean that is still untouched, that has not been invaded by our anxiety.  How long could that last? Then that to would be a thing of the past.”

-Hugo Ball , Flight Out of Time

Significant changes in psychological atmosphere accompanied the economic development of capitalism. A spirit of restlessness began to pervade life toward the end of the middle ages. The concept of time in the modern sense began to develop. Minutes became valuable; a symptom of this new sense of time is the fact that in Nuremberg the clocks have been striking the quarter hours since the sixteen century.”
If the cause of the trouble were force, to ‘expropriate the expropriators’ would be enough. But if force did not establish domination of the master, then perhaps the slave is somehow in love with his own chains....a deeper psychological malady."

-Ernest Becker, Escape From Evil


“In bureaucratically organized and centralized industrialism, tastes are manipulated so that people consume maximally and in predictable and profitable directions. Their intelligence and character become standardized by the ever increasing role of tests which select the mediocre and unadventurous in preference to the original and daring.”
 “An increasing number of people are feeling confused about everything - work, politics, and morals - and, what is worse, they believe this very confusion to be a normal state of mind. They feel isolated, bewildered, and powerless; they do not experience life in terms of their own thoughts, emotions, and sense perceptions, but in terms of the experiences they are supposed to have. [So] there is an increasing number of people to whom everything they are doing seems futile. They are still under the spell of the slogans which preach faith in the secular paradise of success and glamour. But doubt, the fertile condition of all progress, has begun to beset them and has made them ready to ask what their real self-interest as human beings is.”

“The most effective method for weakening the child’s will is to arouse his sense of guilt. Once the will of the child has been broken, his sense of guilt is reinforced in still another way. He is dimly aware of his submission and defeat, and he must make sense of it. He cannot accept a puzzling and painful experience without trying to explain it. [] The child’s natural reaction to the pressure of parental authority is rebellion, which is the essence of Freud’s ‘Oedipus complex.’ [] The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis. They form a syndrome the most important features of which are the weakening of the self in which the feeling of “I am” is dulled and replaced by the experience of self as the sum total of others’ expectations.”

-Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man

“Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to ‘positive freedom’; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world. This second course never reunites him with the world in the way he was related to it before…”

-Ernest Becker, Escape From Evil

“What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious reasonings. We know that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same time we recognize in them, because of their harmony, the work of reasonable beings like ourselves. And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven’t been dreaming. It is this harmony, this quality, if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality we can ever know.”

-Robert Pirzig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Remove yourself as far as possible from the times in order to assess them. But do not lean so far out of the window that you fall out.”

-Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time