Easy
Forgetting is too easy. All the faces
I painted, all the women I loved, have blurred.
Yes, even yours. Do you still have that portrait?
Perhaps I could remember should I see
it hanging on your wall. Or even tucked
into some closet. For a little while
I might remember then. You know I shall
forget again, though, don’t you? Nothing lasts
and soon I find forgetting is too easy.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
this started out as a bit about my aphantasia but grew into something rather different
I have always veered away from the concept of telepathy in both my fantasy and science fiction writing. Why? Because it doesn’t work in the real world so I can find no basis for it to work in a created universe.
Of course, I’ve found ways to get around that. There is ‘assisted telepathy’ in the Jack Mack SF stories (written as Oliver Davis Pike). That is, thoughts can be ‘read’ by a computer via sensors and passed on to another person by reversing the process. This requires being attached to relatively bulky units and is not generally practical. It is, however, the means by which jump pilots communicate with their drive computers when traveling from star to star, so I had to include the ability to use the process for human-to-human communication.
That does open up uses for the technology which I have yet to explore. Maybe someday!
Then there is the ‘talking afar’ that has been part of my Izan fantasies from the start. This is something wizards and gods can do, and is essentially sending a part of ones physical being to another world to speak with someone. To be sure, they also have to have this ability (although one can, if talented and powerful enough, send nebulous dreams to those who lack it).
This meshes with the infinite worlds (or universes) that make up existence. Some humans have the inherited ability to enter those universes — not permanently — and interact there. Gods, for the most part, can travel through them without much restriction, but that’s another subject. Gods can also send part of themselves roundabout through other worlds to peep into mortal minds via a sort of melding. That is, the minds or brains occupy the same space simultaneously. Just surface thoughts, mostly, can be ‘read’ in this manner, but it does give them the ability to pick up any language almost at once.*
That ‘two-minds-in-one-place’ is the closest I come to true telepathy, and it generally requires the cooperation of both individuals, and that both have the ability to enter other worlds. Yes, a truly powerful wizard might be able to force it, and I’ve gone that way a few times. It is to be noted that both will know each other’s mind when it’s all over, so it’s not always an effective way of learning someone’s secrets. It has, perhaps needless to say, definite dangers for both.
For the untrained, or those who do not know they have powers, all this can lead to madness. One ‘hears’ the voices of other worlds, with no knowledge of how to shut them out. The tragic (more or less) King Hara’a of the Malvern Trilogy is one such.
Although I could, in theory, drop telepathy into unrelated stories, I have chosen not to. As I said at the start here, I don’t think it works and I’d rather not make up pseudoscience to explain it. I am not at all big on mental powers of any sort. Telekinesis? Nope, but a wizard might reach through another world to move something. Precognition? Well, I have dropped in prophecies and explained them, again, as wizard powers. If one can send oneself to other worlds, one might — if one had the rare talent for prophecy — also seek worlds through time. Again, this is not a mental power but an actual physical phenomenon, a part of the body traveling ‘elsewhere.’
And not a bit of it has anything to do with brainwaves or electricity or any other of the usual explanations for telepathy.
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*For a long time, I chose not to tell how they knew languages but did finally provide this explanation. There may be just a bit of retcon to it, but it does fit with the other rules I’ve laid out in my world-building.
Fade
Love will fade until you are not sure
you ever loved. Try to believe you did.
It is the lesser of hurts. Believe the moon
remembers. It, too, kissed her once and passed
on into the night. It whispers names
you have forgotten. Names that fade like love.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
This is the route of Wilk on his journey east from Russia to China in 1919 (in the novel titled, appropriately enough, ‘Wilk’). Both the Russian and Chinese names have shifted some from what I used (and varied, for that matter, at the time the story is set) but one should be able to follow this route on a map.
We first see Wilk at a flight school somewhere in central Russia. He heads east by rail, in Spring, to a base and depot fairly near the front, then further east, nearer to Sarapul. He then flies south to Ufa, then further to Orenburg on the Ural River.
He then travels easterly by train toward the Aral Sea with his companions. They have to abandon broken tracks shortly after the Aral, at Kazalinsk, and fly on to Tashkent. They take train north through Aris and Alma Ata, and across the ‘high bridge’ (Ili River?), unloading in the vicinity of Lake Balkash, and joining a caravan east in the truck, through the Dzungarian Gate into China.
From Dzharkent on the Russian side, they cross the border to Wusu, and travel to Tihwa (capital of the province) in China, then to Hami, leaving the caravan there, and continuing south to Ansi, and then a little east to Yumen: “One travels through the Jade Pass and beyond it lies Yanguan Pass and the corridor into China’s heartland”.
Wilk and companions reassemble their airplanes and fly from Yumen to Suchow, then Kanchow and the Great Wall, through the high pass (Wushao) to Liangchow, and on to Lanchow on the Hwang Ho. They fly on South and East to Sian (after faking a course toward Chunking), across the highlands, and south along the Han Kiang, to Yunyang. They move along toward the Tungting Lake area, passing Wuchang and Kanchow, and finally south to Canton by Autumn.
WILK (and, of course, all my books) is available in print or as free ebooks at arachispress.com
Passages
You may wander my rooms,
yet not find the secret
passages. Believe
they are there, Believe
they lie hidden. Tap
paneled walls. Seek
cryptic clues along
dim-lit cobwebbed halls.
Any traps you find
are of your own setting.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
Shape
I really don’t exist,
I’m merely an illusion
I imagined once,
a moment of confusion.
Each forgotten face
is held up for inspection;
every mirror holds
its own fun-house reflection.
I looked into a room
with my name on the door,
but found that it was empty —
who was there before?
Memories of morning
mist obscure tomorrow,
whisper who I’ll be,
illusions I might borrow.
Am I just the shape
I saw once in a cloud?
The wind took but a moment
to wrap me in its shroud.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
In his late-career novel ‘The Gods Themselves,’ Isaac Asimov mentions the ‘ridiculous’ idea of two universes — and two only — existing; that is, if more than one universe exists, then almost certainly infinite universes exist. So any ‘multiverse’ is probably an ‘infiniverse.’
That concept underlies the bulk of my fantasy novels, those that make up the Izan Cycle, but we have no way of knowing — and most likely never will — whether infinity actually exists or is purely a concept and things can be infinite only in potential. Of course, if infinity exists then god (in the broadest sense) would exist, and vice versa. God could be nothing less than infinite and that which is truly infinite must be god. But that’s getting off the subject.
And, again, impossible to prove one way or another (and likely to remain so). Other authors have explored multiverse ideas, some infinite, some not. Pratchett liked to play with the idea of everything existing somewhere. Others, such as Zelazny and Moorcock, set up a tension between two poles (chaos and order, heaven and hell, or whatever you might prefer) and a spread of worlds between them (which would be a constraint of sorts on infinite existence).
In my Izan novels, that tension is between being and non-being, existence and the void. And, of course, non-being doesn’t actually exist. I mean, there’s nothing there, right? But it is still possible to set up a struggle between the two, that which strives to exist and that which wishes to escape it (which is not possible, to be sure). ‘Good’ is that which serves existence — including, but not limited to, life.
Slipping into philosophical stuff there again, aren’t I? I probably wouldn’t write at all if I couldn’t tuck that sort of thing into the stories from time to time, though it is not my main motivation. There are much more mundane, more human, matters one can go on about. The ‘big’ questions may be safely left to lurk in the background. I just give them a nod of acknowledgment now and again.
