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

by Neal Stephenson

“Okay,” I said. Not in the sense of I agree with you but of I am paying attention.

composed of the brightest of menfolk it is, them being intelligencers and counterfeiters, not to mention secretaries, physicians, poets, theologians, apothecaries, and the occasional natural philosopher, and of these last few, doesn’t Sir Francis love to debate with the nature of the universe, in ways that seem like conversations witches might have with each other, if witches were wont to waste their time putting into words things which go without saying. There are no witches in their discourses and indeed no women at all! Like a bunch of turtles trying to discuss flight, they remind me of, and not getting all of it correct, neither.

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.

Ah, the sad wisdom of hindsight.).

The cats have disappeared in the chaos.