- Published in:
- Pseudopod
- Publication date:
- 4 Dec. 2009
Another story that I wrote at Clarion back in 2006. It was written in the latter half of the workshop, when I began to experiment a little more and move away from my typical science-fiction based work. In this case the piece was an attempt to blend modern relationships, student anxieties, and weird fantasy.
I set the tale in an unamed college of Oxford University for two reasons. Firstly, I knew the setting intimately from my four years at Univ, and would hopefully be able to place some unique details to add colour and authenticity (in my mind’s eye I can still see perfectly my college bar with its “Fish Tales” pinball machine, low arched ceiling, and cramped pool table. On a recent visit back I was appalled to to it fitted out with trendy chairs and a flatscreen TV. The youth of today, I don’t know). Secondly, Oxford’s intense tutorial system, whereby typically two students are cross-examined taught in the decadent surroundings of a tutor’s private office felt a perfect backdrop for the theme of stifled ambition.
I recall clearly having a kind of epiphany at Clarion into the focus of a collection of stories I would write–and still yet might! The anthology would be titled Journeys in Space and Time, and each piece would be connected, in emphemeral or blunt fashion, with critical numbers from the domains of mathematics and physics. For example, zero, Planck’s constant, e, pi, speed of light, infinity etc. I think the seed for that idea came from reading one of Lavie Tidhar’s early pieces, entitled The Gimatria of Pi, which riffed brilliantly on the notion that since a transcendental number like pi could not be condensed algorithmically from its full form–and was therefore truly infinite in nature–in its length it foretold all events. For Napier’s Bones I decided that the number of exponential growth, e, would play a key role, and it was as I was researching this most special of numerals that I came across John Napier and his brilliant insights into exponentials and logarithms. When I discovered that one of the early calculating devices he fashioned were white inscribed sticks named bones, I knew I had all the elements I needed.
