The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (D.O.D.O. #1)

by Neal Stephenson

We’ve seen it before in creative arts settings, especially storytelling. If you think about what is going on in a storyteller’s mind when he or she spins a fictional yarn, what they are trying to do is to come up with a story that did not actually happen, but that seems as if it might have happened. In other words, it has to make sense and to be plausible. Typically such a story makes use of real places, historical events, characters, etc. but the events of the story itself seem to take place in an alternate version of reality. The conventionally accepted explanation for this is that storytellers have a power of imagination that makes them good at inventing counterfactual narratives. In the light of everything we’ve learned about Strands at DODO, however, we can now see an alternate explanation, which is that storytellers are doing a kind of low-level magic. Their “superpower” isn’t imagining counterfactuals, but rather seeing across parallel Strands and perceiving things that actually did (or might) happen in alternate versions of reality. I think you can see where this is going, Mel. Even if Tristan smacked the burglar with the oar on only a single Strand, it’s possible that storytellers in other, nearby Strands were able to sense it or perceive it and tell the story in a compelling, convincing way.