In Which The Blogger Gets Deadly Serious
Hey, you’re back. I didn’t lose you yesterday in trying to discuss the Bright Empires series by Stephen Lawhead for the CSFF Tour. If you missed it, I gave an overview of the first four books. This month we’re featuring The Fatal Tree, the final book in the journey.
Tomorrow I’ll give my review of the book and the series, but I wanted to talk about a couple of the Big Ideas from the series.
The series revolves around the idea of the Omniverse. Similar to the idea of a multiverse, the key hypothesis is that travel between other realities is possible via ley lines, ancient structures made on the Earth when ancients felt the power resident in the lines. The characters in the book can’t travel into future possibilities, but they can enter variations of past events.
This is wondrous, fertile ground for a speculative fiction author or reader. The idea of exploring what happens when different choices are made is very intriguing. One character prevents the Great London Fire of 1666 by simply waking the baker whose oven triggers the catastrophe. But in another version of London in 1666 the baker sleeps, and London burns.
Characters wrestle with this idea along with the idea of God and His role in it. It seems that Creation is more mysterious and mind-boggling that we can conceive, and the idea of the Omniverse and the interconnection through the ley lines is one way that the author contemplates the power of God in the universe/multiverse. The concepts introduced in the Bright Empires series have a lot of potential, and a story is a much more interesting way of wrestling with them than reading a textbook or paper on theoretical astrophysics. In my opinion, at least.
There’s another thread of redemption and trying to correct wrongs done in life. The way these threads are intertwined are very powerful. Can an evil person change? Can we undo damage that we’ve done with our actions in the past? Who wouldn’t like to change a bad choice from our past.
I remember a day when I was five. My dad was mowing lawns on a Sunday afternoon, first for an elderly lady, and then at our house. He came to take a break on the bed we had on our back deck, while I read comic books at the kitchen table.
I went outside and found him breathing funny. I got my mom right away, and before I knew it I was taken to a friend’s house while an ambulance came. I knew it was serious because my friend already had someone over, and he never was allowed to have two friends over, yet I stayed.
My dad died of a heart attack that day.
I wonder at times what would have happened if I had found my dad sooner. Would he have survived? But if he had, I can’t imagine that I would be with my wife or have my kids. Even though I missed having my dad, the chance to change that one event would drastically alter my life.
There’s power in the Bright Empires to do that, and the characters discover the consequence of such choices.
So know that The Fatal Tree and the Bright Empire series as a whole isn’t afraid of Big Ideas. There’s meat in there. Come back tomorrow to find out my final thoughts, and check out the other tours listed on Becky Miller’s blog.