How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Setting I Created

 

When my first child was born, I had already been working on something called Behind Gently Smiling Jaws for a year. The first post I made about it can be found here.

That was more than ten years ago. The idea has never gone away and I have never stopped working on it. It is just that 'working' is being used here in a particular sense: I have not been working on it so much as working it over. It has been like a big lump of dough in my mind that I have been mentally pounding with my fists, or a big lump of chewing gum I have been slowly chewing into flavourlessness, or the hide of a beast I have been turning into leather; I have been worrying at it and squeezing it and tugging it and twisting it and gradually shaping it into something that is comprehensible and usable. 

That process is at an end and I can now earnestly say that I have worked it up something that may eventually be the framework within which a book can be written. As Woody Allen might have said, 'Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.'

The problem that has posed the most difficulty is that the idea is complicated. I have not wanted to sacrifice that complicatedness, as it is important to me: it all makes sense to me. But it has made it a challenge to make it presentable. I now know how to do that. 

The principle is straightforward. An ancient, and immortal, crocodile, born at the dawn of time, created a memory palace within which to store everything it had witnessed in its long existence, and went into dormancy in a lake in what we call Papua New Guinea.

The Naacals, the ancient inhabitants of the continent of Mu, ancestors of the ancient Egyptians, Mayans and Harappans, found the crocodile, and discovered a way to live inside its memory palace. Aware that a cataclysmic event was in the offing (the sinking of Mu and the ruin of their civilisation) a number of them went to live in the memory palace permanently. 

Some Naacals remained on Earth and retreated into hermitude or stasis underground before the cataclysm. Others remained, and after Mu sank (roughly 10,000 BC) became debased, going on to fragment and form what became the Egyptian, Mayan, and Harappan civilisations. 

Meanwhile, those within the crocodile's mind founded a great city, called the Unremembered City, where they all lived among the crocodile's many memories. 

So things would have remained, but over the course of the centuries seven human beings (known ever since as 'the Seven') found their way too to the crocodile's memory palace, and merged with its consciousness, bringing with them their own memories, myths, and ideas. These were:

• Ebu Gogo, a homo floriensis woman from a remote Indonesian island where a remnant population survived until shortly before the time of Christ
• Xu Fu, a Chinese explorer who went in search of Mount Penglai
• Anak Wungsu, a Balinese trader-king
• Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, a neo-Platonic philosopher
• Jorge de Meneses, a Portugese conquistador
• Pape Jan, Ethiopian king who inspired the legend of Prester John
• Sese-Mahuru-Bau, a Papuan hunter who went in search of a lost lover

With Sese-Mahuru-Bau's coming, however, the crocodile's memory palace became too full, and it erupted - everything in it spilled out into the real world, in what we know of as the late 18th century. This brought 'ordinary' human history to an end, and the Crocodilian Era began.

The Crocodilian Era began with the complete shattering and destruction of pre-existing human civilisation. The Crocodile's memories included the dinosaurs, the other beasts of the prehistoric era, a race of aliens who had once lived on Earth, the ancient Atlanteans, and so on, and the Seven brought with them their own myths (Xu Fu brought Chinese dragons and ghosts; Anak Wungsu brought Garuda and the like, Jorge de Meneses brought Goetic demons, and so on and so forth) and the result was chaos. The human population of the Earth collapsed to a few thousand individuals. 

But, fast forward 10,000 years, and things look very different. 

The Naacals who lived in the crocodile's mind, called the Young Naacals, mostly live in the Unremembered City - a flying island-city, like Laputa, which floats about in the sky. The Young Naacals keep themselves to themselves for the most part.

The Naacals who remained hidded on Earth after Mu sank are called the Old Naacals. They live as hermits, scholars, and wanderers - dangerous and mad, for the most part.

The ordinary human population rebounded, over the centuries, and found ways to survive and even flourish amidst the wondrous beasts and strange creatures now populating the planet. 

And the Seven became Gods. Each made a home for him/herself in a certain spot on the globe, and created a realm to rule. These can be seen on the map, above:

1. The Kerguelen islands are ruled by Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, who has turned it into a single, vast university
2. Lake Issyk-Kul is the home of Pape Jan - a fortified inland sea from which he governs a slowly-expanding crusader empire
3. The mouth of the Congo river, where Jorge de Meneses has a pirate city whose ships go in search of plunder across the globe
4. Sardinia, where Anak Wungsu rules over a trading thalassacracy spanning the Mediterranean
5. Benbecula, in the Western Isles, home to Sese-Mahuru-Bau, who has turned all of the surrounding islands into a huge hunting reserve
6. What was once Sao Luis, in Brazil, ruled by Xu Fu - where there is now a sort of equatorial-cum-Chinese Mount Olympus, ruled by him as a sorcerer-king
7. The island of Chiloe, where Ebu Gogo births the bizarre spawn of humans and the amphibious beasts of the Carbinoferous world

In between all this are all manner of different civilisations and wildernesses - the Earth geographically is as it was, but it is an Earth roamed by dinosaurs, aliens, Atlanteans, and the like, mixed in with the human inhabitants and Old Naacals. And of course the agents of the Seven, who are all rivals, are everywhere, working to undermine each other and subvert each other's designs. It's a scene, in other words. And it can all be yours... when the book is written.