My Nowhere

Today, "Perhaps The Stars", the fourth and final installment of the Terra Ignota series of science fiction novels, is released in the United States. I have a lot to say about it, but will save my review for another day. For now, as a form of raising a glass in toast to celebrate the completion of the Terra Ignota series, I'm going to describe a dream I had. What interests me the most is what the scene in this dream implies about the world it would have to exist in.

In the Terra Ignota series, there are characters called the Utopians. The word "Utopia" has come to mean "unrealistically positive future world", but it originally meant "Nowhere". Each of these Utopians have their own Nowhere; an imaginative version of the world that has a special meaning to them personally. They wear display fabric which shows a computer-generated image of that Nowhere. I imagine that if I were a Utopian, I might select this dream to be my Nowhere. 
 

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When I woke up, I immediately wrote down all of this. My final, dim memories from the dream involve answering the phone even though I was not part of the group that built this place. I instinctively knew it was no one's job to answer the phone and help the caller, and so it fell to me, a stranger, and at the same time, no one could be a stranger here.

What interests me most about this scene is what I can deduce from it about the rest of the Nowhere world that it would have to exist in. I probably dreamed about it because it is the type of world I spent my life creating. It reminds me of experiences I've had at local Burning Man events; plywood structures containing an interactive art project, or rope hammocks, or hundreds of handwritten notes of wishes and dreams tucked into the cracks between the planks.

Burning Man and theme park experiences are crafted to gradually separate you from your day-to-day life into a Nowhere world. But this dream presented me with a Nowhere experience merged into mundane life, and the realities of mundane life, such as video games, are embedded in pockets within the Nowhere. It elevates day-to-day life.

 

Consider not only that this is a theme park pavilion with no theme park. Consider also that this is a world in which it is possible to encounter such free-floating experiences free of charge in unexpected places.

 

It would have to be a world in which we all have Basic Income. That would not give us enough money to hire professionals, but we could afford to use the income from our day jobs to build things out of a dream. We'd have to do it ourselves. It would be affordable concrete instead of stone. It would involve jack-of-all-trades autodidact polymaths far more often than it would involve pros who make replica weapons for a living all day every day and nothing else.

 

It would still require a group to pool their labors. The classroom and kitchenette are clues to the social structure that built the physical structure. The Nowhere was not separate from the living of life itself.

 

I don't personally like some of the specifics of the pavilion -- for example, reptiles are very unpleasant for me-- but that's beside the point. It's not a "Utopia" for me personally. Something that merely gives me whatever I want. It's a "Utopia" in the sense of a Nowhere. The dream is a Nowhere of a world of small social structures that create small physical structures.

It has often been said that there was a time when almost all human beings, almost every day, sang and danced and told stories. We mostly did so for free. Mass media showed us the greatest singers and dancers and storytellers in the world, and then we stopped singing and dancing and telling stories every day, and watched the paid experts do so instead. I dreamed of a world of autodidactic polymaths, just barely good enough at a lot of things, creating things that they dreamed about, in the mundane places where they spend their time.

Their everyday is like a pilgrimage day, and their everywhere is their Nowhere.