Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. …nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men?

Fiction is not only a way of expressing the element of truth in a culture, but is the means of creating it, providing a springboard from which “that which is” can be revealed. Works of fiction are not merely representations of the way things are, but actually produce a community’s shared understanding. Each time a new fiction is added to any culture, the meaning of what it is to exist is inherently changed.