Two Broken Walls

Jon would be wondering what had become of him, though Maester Aemon would no doubt understand. Before he had lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarly did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page were a hole into another world.

-George R. R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows, pp. 103, paperback ed.

Do you believe in fate, Roger?  Deja vu?  Any of that shit?

I never really gave much thought to it before, but lately it’s almost as though something’s —directing me, almost.  Like, as long as you steer right it’s clear to the horizon, but every time you try to go left there’s a pile of wreckage or an alien stronghold or a sheer cliff blocking you.   Or, say you want to go back and get something you had to leave behind in the lobby because you were carrying too much other shit — but the stairwell just happens to collapse behind you and there’s no other way back.

That’s been happening a lot lately.  Almost as if something was — directing isn’t exactly the word.  Herding, maybe.  As if the fires and collapsing buildings and the very fucking weather are conspiring to move you towards a single endpoint.

You think the Ceph might have that kind of influence?  Think they’re powerful enough to just — nudge the game board this way or that, turn all of fucking Manhattan into a maze for us to run?  Maybe all their stomping around, all that incompetent ham-fisted shooting and smashing — maybe that’s all just a distraction, to keep us from noticing all these subtle machinations masquerading as random entropy.  Maybe they’re ten steps ahead, they’ve got the butterfly by the wings and they’re using it to herd all of us.

What do you think, Roger?  Ever get the feeling we’re not entirely in control?

Ah.

Well, maybe it’s just me then.

An outtake from Peter Watts’ video game tie-in novel Crysis: Legion
[from here.]

Here both authors wink at us and remind us exactly what we’re doing. With Martin, we’re reading a novel that by design sucks us in and allows us to inhabit another world and see it through a dozen sets of eyes. Watts (attempted to) remind us that we’re reading a book of a video game, that we’re reading about a different kind of construct with constraints different from a novel’s.

Sometimes it is good to be winked at in this manner, to snap back for a moment into a wider view where we’re engaged in a one-way communication with the author and perhaps we’re reminded that there are things that need doing in the here and now, that we cannot always escape down a book’s rabbit hole but can and must do other things. I am a junkie: It would be all too easy to keep my nose permanently embedded in a book and allow everything else to be just a gray wander from one brightly colored fiction to the next.