Notes for a Novel: The Glass Book
© Dana Paxson 2021
Conveying innovative ideas, especially when they seem out of reach, too impractical, or too imaginative to attract practical attention, can best be done in a fictional setting. The invention disclosure for the glass book, a device capable of preserving and presenting content over many thousands of years of time, is a good starting point for a story of a future world discovery and exploration.
A work that follows such a pattern is science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “Rendezvous with Rama”, in which humanity discovers, boards, and explores an alien interstellar vessel that passes through the solar system without coming into solar orbit.
The work being contemplated here has no aliens or interstellar aspects to it, but it is situated during one of the future anticipated periods of reduced solar radiation on earth, perhaps 50,000 to 75,000 years beyond our time, when ice covers the polar ranges and much of the temperate ranges of earth’s surface. It assumes an enduring human civilization, one that has gone through many cycles of renewal and advance, but that has also come into a resilient and modest balance with the planet, in which the total population is a fraction of what it is now, and nature has flourished even in the most-challenging stages of glacial change.
Part of the framework and backdrop of the story is the continuing arc of the great Bahá’í Cycle of 500,000 years, in which the continuing maturation of humanity is enriching and stabilizing our global culture.
The story is set in a small community not too far south of the North American glacial outliers, perhaps in the hills of what is now eastern Tennessee. Over the passage of the time from now to the time of the story, 50,000 years from now, various geological, meteorological, and human forces have altered the now-cold landscape. The community is situated on the south-facing side of a valley slope, warmed by the sun as much as possible.
Communities in the global human civilization of the story’s time are interconnected mainly by radio telecommunications in many ranges of frequency. Communities vary in size from a few members up to several hundred thousand. Nations as we know them now do not exist, but regional centers provide communities with shared resources and understandings. The regional centers are connected with, and part of, the universal community of the planet, all governed through the system now familiar to Bahá’ís everywhere.
The story is of two young people, late teens, who like to explore the rocky hills not far north of the community. Aryanna, a young woman, and Berhane, a young man, are close friends since childhood, and they are in the early stages of courtship.
[Note: the name Aryanna is adapted from the Greek name Ariadne, ‘most holy’, and the name Berhane from an Ethiopian male name meaning ‘light’.]
The summary of the story: Aryanna and Berhane discover a rockfall that has opened a crevice in a steep hillside. They explore the crevice to find a lengthy concrete tunnel sloping down into the hillside. In a partially-collapsed chamber at the tunnel’s end they find artifacts, most of them damaged or broken, but one, hidden under a heap of debris, seems unmarred. They take it out into daylight, and after a little time it lights up.
They have found a glass book, as described in the patent disclosures of the Appendix, and they explore its workings to discover the languages, scenes, events, and texts of our current existence, 48,000 years before their time. The story details their discovery, their efforts to understand it, the reactions of others in their community to its presence and apparent meaning, their travels to learn more of what their newly-discovered artifact has to offer them, their struggles with other communities and groups opposed to unearthing too much from the dark and distant past, their crises of relationship each with the other, and their final great and most-turbulent journey to the world’s governing center to offer the gift of their discovery to the highest human authority in existence.
In the background of this work of future fiction, as of the time of the story there have appeared 45 Manifestations of God since the time that Bahá’u’lláh appeared to establish His half-million-year universal cycle. Humanity has undergone great transformations throughout this vast span of time, having abandoned warfare, and having dispelled racial, cultural, and sectarian hatreds. Differences of awareness, perception, and cognition have proliferated, but those differences serve to enrich and expand human knowledge and community. Cultures and societies are generally highly stable, but faced with challenges of the natural world that today’s humanity would find overwhelming.
The later stages of an ice age limit the habitable climates of earth severely. The seas have receded, much of their volume sucked up into the ice and snow that burden the polar regions. This has opened much land formerly covered by the seas, but the weather has shifted south and the major wind directions have reversed. Dust and snow blow heavily across the once-temperate zone of the story, now nearly frigid over two-thirds of each year. Food sources are much limited in comparison to the great abundance of our times, and the world’s human population size reflects that restriction. At the same time, innovations in energy, farming, and food sources over many millennial cycles have allowed communities to thrive and maintain their size and health even under bitter-cold conditions.
(to be continued)
