Schedule News and a Coming Feature

What if history is a circle after all — not mythical history, but the actual thing?

“The end is where we start from.”
—T.S. Eliot

---

Two brief notes for subscribers.

A Short Hiatus

First, some scheduling news. I’m on a semi-long vacation, a period of rest, starting last week and extending through the end of the month. Substack writing will resume after Labor Day.

I hope you are similarly resting, taking advantage of a lull in our increasing cultural madness and recharging, as best you can, your own late-summer batteries.

An Added Feature

The second note has to do with a new feature here at God’s Spies.

I’ve been toying with the idea of offering something extra to the paying subscribers. One possibility is to post new fiction — stories, chapters of upcoming novels — that paying members may enjoy and wish to comment on. I completed a book this year, a near-future political thriller set in a climate-stressed America, and it’s making the rounds of agents as we speak. Several short stories, some set in the world of the book, are also ready and will go out to publishers in September. It’s these I’d consider for posting.

But something more immediate has come to mind. I’ve been slowly reading my way through Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, and it has radically changed my view of prehistoric humans — who they were, how they lived, and more importantly, how they thought.

Why does this matter? Because, simply put, we’re going back there. The next anthropological era will be the New Old Stone Age. And for the first time since I started writing about climate, I see this “devolution” not as a loss, but simply as a return to ways of life — yes, ways — our present thinking blocks imagining.

Noble savages of our imagining

I’d like to share these thoughts with paying members — glosses on quotes from the book, notes on major and minor points the authors make, questions that need answering.

None of this will subtract from what free subscribers receive. It’s merely a bonus, should the new series prove worth reading.

Feel free to send me your thoughts via email, as many of you already do, or post them in the comments. I’m interested in your reaction to this material.

To End Where We Began

I have to say, this reimagined prehistoric paradigm has already changed the direction of the novel series. (Sequels are in the works, as well as a prequel, the story of how now became then.) Our inevitable climate endpoint may not be extinction, but instead, if we avoid the dark of expiration, a mere reboot — a less majestical, less fantastic version of the end of Asimov’s story “The Last Question,” when AC says at last, “Let there be light!”

Entropic darkness, of course, will eventually fall, Azimov notwithstanding, but we may thrive till then. The path will be hard, of course, at least at start. But a hard road got us here. People decry the Terror of the French Revolution — the named few suffered cruelly — but few recount or recall the unnamed many, the impoverished, enslaved, abused and casually killed whose centuries of misery led to that revolt.

I’ll end this here. Starting in September look for this feature. To;; then I offer the indigenous greeting “aloha”, which appropriately means “love,” to all of you.