Synopsis: Wiles

A philosophical journey, a hodgepodge of high adventure, a panoply of pulp, and helping of history, a mass of mythology, and a mathematical symposium, all in one tale told by an idiot full of fury and hot air, signifying the signified and more and at the same time less. Hold on to your hairpieces, gentlemen and ladies. The 20th century is about to morph into a twisted ball of substance and lack-of-substance beyond all that a reasonable observer might recognize.

The main character in my story is Ivan Wiles, named after the Karamazov brother and the mathematician Andrew Wiles. This story takes place in the same universe as my Liddell stories (two previous NaNo novels and a webcomic), where Liddell University is a prestigious private school just like many in our world, but with more demons and other supernatural eerie things haunting it. Also, the founder is an ambiguously evil demon summoner with ties to a demon hunting clan from Europe.

Ivan has an interest in the occult (which may or may not be his major), and his studies bring him to the realization that there is something to the legends of the Rheingold, a Norse treasure that could bring about the fall of Valhalla. Plenty have searched for it in the past, but it's notoriously difficult to locate. The closest was a group led by a Liddell student fifty years ago. At least, she was involved in the search, and Ivan comes across her journal in the university library. From it, he learns about the Hidden Cities, civilizations in pocket universes founded by ancient world leaders in most of the world's great cities, mostly isolated from each other to the point where their respective civilizations evolved separately. Each city has developed its own character, culture, and customs, and since they are all connected to people with extensive knowledge of the gods (who know how to use a certain ancient technology to manipulate spacetime), it's likely that a few of these places will hold further clues to the Rheingold. The old Liddell party spent a considerably amount of time looking around in New Persepolis, Ur, and New Alexandria. (Also, a city associated with Athens, but I need a better name than New Athens.)

Ivan and his best friend, Felix Roussomoff (yes, named after Andre the Giant), travel with Felix's longtime girlfriend Martina Eilenberg to New Persepolis, where they team up with a band of street urchin orphans who have stolen an airship (I really need a name for the airship), which Ivan manages to rig so they can travel to other Hidden Cities. (Ivan uses his own expertise and the old journal to make travel possible at all.) Places they then visit include an underground hideaway (actually a sewer) inhabited by an old man named Louis Ness, his daughter Lydia, and their dog Ruggles, the city of New Alexandria, where the library was never destroyed and where a massive depository of knowledge is guarded by a cult of zealous librarian fanatics, a vast wilderness area where they are guided by [need a name for a rugged explorer], the upper crust of Persepolitan society, and whatever other adventures I can think up. I'm open to any suggestions, and I could use quite a few more subplots, characters, and settings. I'm tempted to go to a dare thread and lap up everything I can get. Oh, and throughout all of this, the entire world is being hounded by a certain irate Roman deity who is rather ticked at the fact that Pluto is no longer a planet....

My goal throughout is to use characters as blatant symbols for ideas. A major theme I plan to use is ethics, where each of the three main characters represents a different ethical system. Ivan is utilitarian, Felix is Kantian, and Martina prefers the Aristotelian theory of virtues. This gets them into arguments, but ultimately they have to decide if they are really just looking at everything from a different perspective while performing equivalent moral calculations, or they must ask themselves when they can be expected to agree and disagree. I also want to include a critique of Lacanian structuralism (and I have some ideas on how to do that, provided one of the main characters knows some computer science), as well as a few other items, which I'm going to have to put into a list at some point. A question that has interested me lately is the nature of induction, and Hume's criticism of it in particular. I want to cover that at some point, since inductive reasoning is so powerful, yet so many philosophers consider it (needlessly, in my view) controversial.

The underlying physics of the world is interesting enough that I want to find creative ways to incorporate it, as well. The Liddell universe is just one of many created by the Big Bang, where most of the important universes share the same or similar physical constants generated during Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking while each universe was young. Inflation has pushed these universes far enough apart that travel between them is impossible without taking shortcuts. Now, within each universe, something like the Everett many-worlds hypothesis turns out to be true, where each non-deterministic event (e.g. measurement of a superposition or perhaps atomic decay) results in a split of the universe into one path where the event happened and one where it did not. The universe can then be expressed as a curve through a high dimensional space, where the projection of the curve onto a small-dimensional subspace is the curve through time of a given particle or object or whatever. This gives a basic illustration of the universe moving through time, but some of the oldest of the gods have found a way to manipulate the curve as if it were a thread, effectively performing feats of magic. In fact, this is where the gods' magic comes from. Ultimately, this is how the Rheingold works, too, but it's far less limited than anything later gods can do. It could even conceivably be used to kill a god or two, which is an idea Ivan takes very seriously.

In addition to these more usual multiple universe hypotheses, there are rumors in various places that something like the Tegmark Ultimate Ensemble universe might be the actual truth. The TUE where any universe that can be defined by mathematical structures is equally real. This mode of thinking has turned into a cult, with a competing cult arguing for a radical form of modal realism, where all possible worlds are considered real, not just those based on consistent mathematical structures. Obviously, when there are two cults with that much enmity between them, there has to be a cult war. I haven't decided how that will play out yet, but it does provide a nice opportunity for Ivan to become a cult leader, if he is ambitious enough.

Other characters involved in the story: Amphitrite, goddess of the sea; Anubis and other Egyptian gods; a nightclub where the trickster gods hang out, get drunk, and try to out-do each other; a cheerful girl named Chaya Hamilton who hates to talk about herself; Penelope Mandelbrot, a name I came up with recently that has not yet attached itself to a concrete character; Ahab Roussimoff, demon hunter extraordinaire and Felix's grandfather; Crabby Gene, an old sailor who used to be friends with the Roussimoff family until he retired to open a restaurant in Galveston; a cat owned by the current president of Liddell University; a scholar, historian, and sword fighter who befriends Ivan during his journey; a rogue librarian or two; an island where half of the residents cannot lie and the other half cannot tell the truth; yet another cult, this one traditionally apocalyptic (and they call themselves Orthodox Apocalypticians); a team of AI researchers and their robot friends; a bureaucracy in charge of the afterlife (or is it?); posters advertising a lost dog, put up by the Lord of the Underworld; a half-insane reclusive novelist currently writing the serial sci-fi story taking the multiverse by storm in the only popular publication currently circulating in all known universes at once; a vampire who finds out the hard way that he does not sparkle in the sunlight so much as burst into flames and die; and, of course, the mysterious Liddell student who wrote the journal, who could turn out to be the most important character of all.

During all of this, Ivan will laugh, love, learn, and grow fond of his friends and possibly mad with power. You never know with him. Did I mention he's not the heroic sort? He's barely even classified as the sane sort.

I'm currently taking any ideas I can get, as I'd like to have a halfway decent outline by the end of the week, so I can spend next week refining the outline. I need to figure out just how to cover each important theme, and I need a coherent narrative thread and a sequence of episodes for the main plot and maybe a subplot or two in case the main one gets hard to write.

This should be doable, right?