Spatiality Book 3 Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from the third book of my scifi/fantasy series Spatiality. It is drawn directly from my short story the "Memory Ruin," which served as the genesis of my entire saga. it is the most architectonic part of the book and synthesized my ideas of the intertwining of memory and space and its effect on the psyche.

He stopped in the fourth chamber and looked about, absorbing the disquieting sense of it.  He felt oddly small and disoriented within it, the large bulging space pushing against him on all sides. He felt constrained and suffocated. And yet they seemed somehow familiar to him. He felt as if he had seen something like them before. At the same time, he felt a sense of fear tied to a distant pain; he wasn’t certain what it meant.  The more he stared up at the surfaces around him, the more removed he felt from his consciousness. He felt as if his physical being was dissolving into the confines of the space.  There was an overwhelming sense of distancing from himself.  His own consciousness had begun to feel foreign to him.  He felt dislocated and confused, the fear becoming palpable. He felt himself half-stumbling, half-running from the ovoid chamber, desperately, as if in a panicked state. 

He rushed through twisting tunnel after twisting tunnel of decayed metal, through rooms of stone containing jagged, chaotic constructs forming spaces within spaces, breaking through the ceilings and walls.  He climbed stairs, barely clinging to their supports to narrow walkways and parapets and roof terraces.  He walked through rooms open to the sky, their roofs ruptured, but always there was the scabrous parasite of decayed metal plates partially enveloping the rupture. He entered vast spaces with huge pillars and great domes fractured and split, dazzling light falling onto great flagstone floors. There were rooms littered with debris, bits of wall, broken hulks of metal, their function he could not guess. He entered curved and jagged volumes of space clinging to the edge of another broken stone room, the edges of the spaces, silent tensions pushing against one another.  

He entered plazas and courtyards, their space suggested only by a broken statue or lone fragment of metal standing naked in the wan light. Spaces flowed into the next, room after room, one construct to the next, each suggesting or possessing a fragment of the next, all woven together. Sometimes smooth and seamless, sometimes jarring and violent.  All the while he carried out conversations with himself, trying to remember, trying to make sense of all that was happening to him. He didn’t even know if they were voiced aloud or not.  All he could hear was the silent echo of his footsteps, the creak of metal or the whistling of the wind through an opening. 

The loneliness and desolation of the place and the unnamed fear that lingered over him threatened to undo him altogether. The gap that was forming within him was as cold and empty as the spaces he now occupied.  As he struggled with these thoughts and feelings and the dislocating foreignness of his surroundings, his awareness erupted, blinding him with a burst of blue light. Everything around him seemed to become part of his consciousness, the thoughts melding with his senses.  

The walls, the surfaces, the space, the emptiness, the light, the colors, it all became vivid beyond all those senses.  His self was everywhere. He could feel it flowing inward and out, through everything around him.  It all began to enter his consciousness, down to the elemental frameworks. His self was becoming fused with the surrounding environment and it with him.  He could not perceive his own movement, or his own body. He knew he was moving; he was not in the same space, the same instance. His movement was continuous, instantaneous.  He could not perceive the empty space where his mind spoke to him.  It was now everywhere. 

And then there was a flicker of an image from within, cutting at him, then receding back.  He pushed it away, forcibly.  The flood of inputs and stimuli from the changing self surged back to fill the void where it attempted to inject itself.  And then there it was again, a fleeting image and, in its wake, a palpable sensory and emotional torrent.  Again he thrust it away.  He was so close.  He could almost perceive the strands of his awareness stretching outward past the confines of his surroundings, beyond what his eyes could see.  The perceptions continued to fill him, and they were all there, immediate, and continuous.  He felt as if his body could no longer contain this new self, as if it could tear through the confines of his flesh.  

And suddenly, piercing through all of this was an image, a memory.  It was so strong and achingly familiar. He collapsed to his knees, overwhelmed by the astonishing sharpness of it. It filled his mind, replacing that tantalizing, infinite awareness. 

Before him stood a sharp, jutting slab of basalt, a shining, smooth blackness piercing the edge of the space. The ceiling above dropped violently towards him, then receded sharply back up in draping folds of encrusted metal, folds upon folds, pushing outward from the walls into the space.  The remnants of the day's light cascaded into the space, delineating and rendering sharply the folds of the roof, revealing the network of cracks and lines in the broken black tile of the floor. He could see all of these forces colliding dynamically through the space, and resonating through him. 

And yet, there it was, layered across this perception, in a thickened veil of sensations.  It was a face, a gentle smiling face, a face he sensed he had come to know better than his own.  A face and a spirit he had left behind. But he couldn’t remember her no matter how much he tried. Staring into those eyes now, he felt a powerful sense of loss and he could feel tears forming and running down his cheeks. Suddenly he was overwhelmed with emptiness and despair at all that he had left behind. 

And now he felt blind, drifting in uncertainty. He got to his feet and wiped his dirty and tear-stained face. As he stood there he tried to remember her again, but could not even conjure up the image. Who was she, why did she feel so important to him? Why couldn’t he remember her? Here he stood in this vessel, this construct of space and matter, the forces that had brought him to this point were within him; they were a part of him. The complexity of these forces was beyond his grasp, and yet here he was. 

 He felt as if he couldn’t take another step forward or back. He was there, and it didn’t matter. His past was lost to him, carried in a distant, unknowable fibrous current of memory. This memory, this woman he wanted so much to remember, was all he had remaining to him. How could he go on? How could he continue? He wanted so much to remember her. He wanted to be with her. 

Exhausted and emotionally drained he collapsed against the black stone wall and stared listlessly into space. Then he lay down in the dust and went to sleep.

Cover Story

My cover for Spatiality began as a line of light.

I wanted a symbol or icon that would carry through all the books. I imagined a vivid slash slicing through the page like a blade. I imagined this as folded line, a line of light—an architectural gesture, enigmatic and ephemeral. It could be the edge of a structure or an aperture.

It also represents the fabric of space, the folding between space—the way that the Heliod manipulate space, make use of it, control it—exist within it.

The line is also a portal, a threshold or a rift.

The rift is the element that looms heavily over all the books; the rift the antagonist seeks to tear into space, to breach into another space, to free his brethren, to avenge their imprisonment.

It is also a line that both divides the characters from one another and at the same time binds them to each other, a demarcation of their fates.

Following the line of light, I imagined silhouettes etched into the stars.

I wanted to avoid direct representation. I wanted a shadow, an impression of the main characters without conveying exactly what they looked like. I deliberately eschewed that direct representation as I felt it would prevent the reader from imagining them themselves. Again, I wanted a symbolic iconography, something not unlike like an 18^th or 19^th century portraiture of silhouettes.

I knew she should be sad, not unlike the character of Hannah as you meet her initially. I knew he should be proud in a way, looking out into the distance, meeting his fate directly as Ethien perhaps wants to, but may not actually be capable of.

And then more pragmatically I knew I wanted there to be space between the letters as the letters in the title fill the negative space of the slash, the line of light bisecting the main characters. My hope was the symbol, the silhouettes, the very placement of the title and the nature of the font and text would convey the key concepts of the books in an indirect way, and convey some aspect of the characters’ personalities.

Why Spatiality

So what's with the title?

So the most obvious explanation is that some of the books are set in space, although much more so in the later books, particularly books three and four. Book one is almost exclusively terrestrial.

More critically as far as the narrative goes, Spatiality refers to the powers of the Heliod, the main protagonists of the novels. The first Heliod you meet are those who shape space into matter. They form structures, objects from the fabric of space itself. 

Being an architect, the whole genesis of the books was an exploration of the effects of architectonic space on our perceptions, memory and emotions. I think of this effect as “spatial resonance”—the sense of space—the scale, light, materiality is very powerful, and lingers with us far longer than the details of the place itself. I think fondly of a trip to Paris with my wife a few years ago. I distinctly recall the scale and shape of the galleries of the Louvre, the sense of the volume of space, and I am convinced that upon returning, my memory of that space would match up exactly, more so than say the paintings, or the materials of the floor or walls, or location of the galleries.  Same goes for the street we stayed, a narrow street lined with vendors, cafes and stores with a few stories above. I can’t recall exactly the buildings themselves or the hotel where we stayed but I distinctly recall the scale of the buildings, the distance between them, the nature of the light on the structures, the very tangible quality of everything that made up the space of that street.

And while there isn't an overt focus on a type of architecture, there is certainly a medieval bent to the world of the Heliod, and I draw on ancient Roman and Greek, gothic, renaissance, baroque and modern architecture throughout  as well. I attempt to evoke as much sense of place as I could and the impact on those who inhabit or traverse it without getting too bogged down in the detail. 

Living in the Pacific Northwest and having lived and traveled in Italy, Germany, France, Japan and other beautiful lands, I wanted to also explore the space of landscape as well. Even the most magnificent cathedral pales in comparison to the experience of hiking beneath a shimmering canopy of rain-soaked trees in the North Cascades. Also, I find it interesting that many of our fears are spatial in nature: fear of enclosed spaces, fear of heights, fear of open spaces, etc, so examining that, Hannah, one of the main characters is overcome with agoraphobia when she and her companion, Ethien make their way through a vast plain, having lived most of her life aboard starships. I wanted to explore how an absence of structure would affect someone accustomed to always being contained by it.

The last spatial idea that impacts the books is the space of body/psyche as it relates both to architecture and the sense of the self in space. I was somewhat influenced by a colleague from school who based his architectural thesis on his research on schizophrenia. I was intrigued by the idea that someone suffering from schizophrenia can lose the sense of themselves in space—cannot locate themselves in space or perceive themselves separate from it. The main antagonist embodies this idea most fully as when you meet him he has all but lost all sense of who he is and shapes and disturbs space around him as a coping mechanism.

 Lastly the title is also a sort of a riff on specialty. As the novels progress the protagonists learn there are several kinds of Heliod and each has their own special powers related to manipulating space, one can enter the very fabric of space, another can traverse space across great distances, yet another can “destroy” space, tearing open rifts between space.