Deploying Apocalyptic Language: Deep Dive

An example for the writers: how I used the metaphors of Society, City, Garden and Sheepfold to craft the argument of Stealing Worlds

There’s a moment near the end of my 2019 novel Stealing Worlds when Marjorie Cadille talks about how Jim Neelin, our jaded heroine’s father, was led astray:

He started out as an idealist, and got tangled up in the politics of it all. When I met him, he'd completely lost his way. He was bound and determined to save the world, but he never went out in it anymore. He had this office in Flint, and he spent all his time on the Internet, campaigning. I knew him for six months before we took a walk in the park! There was a time when he had a personal relationship with the natural world. But he'd forgotten all about it, forgotten that it was what he was fighting for. He wasn't fighting for anything, anymore. He just fought against things.

I wrote this novel for people who have, in one way or another, ended up where Sura and her father are. But here’s the thing: there is no way to argue someone out of world-weary cynicism. If they’re going to “tear down the wall” so eloquently described by Pink Floyd in their art-rock classic, it has to be done via an end-run around Reason. The problem I faced in writing Stealing Worlds was how to show this being done to Sura in a convincing manner. To accomplish that, I turned to symbolism and metaphor and was naturally dragged in exactly the direction I talked about in Apocalypse? Or Just a Catastrophe?—towards apocalyptic imagery. But in this case, that’s a good thing.

Soon after her conversation with Marj, Sura has what I can only describe as a conversion experience. She meets a new kind of entity that has come into the world, a deodand, and it absolutely wipes away her jaded, world-weary pessimism. Afterward, as she’s walking in the woods, she tries to express the experience to herself, and this is where the reader hopefully realizes that this story has been a romance all along:

How to frame this relationship? It's not like the gods woke up and are speaking to humanity at last—tempting as that metaphor is. The AIs are not really humanity's children, either. People will want to treat them like wise parents or ancestors—oracles and spirits. But deodands are as naive as anybody else. They're equals, so, the word for them that keeps coming to mind, is spouse.

Stealing Worlds is about as far from being a romance novel as you can get, but what ensues is, for Sura at least, a lot like falling madly in love. Here I’ll lay out how I deployed apocalyptic language to express that love and to notch up the stakes from a human level, to something approaching the divine.

Warning: spoilers ahead.