Pope Simon The First (FECoO): Chapter 00 - Introduction to Junis Redux.

My understanding of post-modernism at its most basic is everything is reducible to text. To comprehend anything one must first reduce it to words, to understand context one must textualise (I'm probably making words up here as usual) the content. Reducing it to text makes it more easily able to be manipulated. The experience essentially beyond words is corrupted in the analysis, in the attempt to understand. Schroeder’s cat, the beautiful day, the perfect kiss, become less for the attempt to describe them. The Zen axiom, he who knows does not talk, he who talks does not know. The past is the most recently, most commonly, accepted version of the lie. The past is fiction, the present is fiction, the future is fiction. Much like a political election, given time everyone wins, in their own way, despite who was elected.

History is lies, with each analysis, fact is re-work to fit another point of view. Fiction is lies, just enjoyable lies, with the imposition of the suspension of disbelief.

With a limited (finite) amount of symbols, the alphabet, accepted language (the dictionary defining proper words) mathematically there can only be a limited (calculable) number of permutations. Thus everything has to eventually have been said. The post modernist ideal of text, history, being reducible and manipulatable to any degree. Westside Story is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, reworked, repositioned, to music. Kurosawa's Ran is Hamlet, set in feudal Japan. Even the Matrix is elements of Ghost In The Shell rework with live actors. Roland’s first Harry Potter follows Ursula la Guins Earthsea story too closely for comfort in my opinion.

I don’t claim any of this is original. I am under the impression that some of the ideas are my own, and the structure and re-creation are my own. It's not what you steal it's what you do with it.

With the news that native born English speakers now make up a minority of those who use the language, I would have written all the dialogue in Chinglish (or Singlish, Hindlish/Hinglish) but for the fact that it may alienate all the reader(s) I have (yes I mean singular). Mainly because the thinking amongst those who know is that the English language is moving in this direction. So interstellar society will probably be speaking hybrid breeds of English and (my own preference) Chinese using the native Chinese sentence structures.