The y coordinate in A Canticle for Leibowtiz is the Jewish-Christian understanding of what human beings are and our place in the cosmos. This understanding of the human person cuts across the time line of the x coordinate, thus disrupting the usual approach to dystopian fiction.
What would I say is the y coordinate in my new dystopian short story, “The Bureau of Myths”?
It is that same Jewish-Christian understanding of who we are, represented by the fact that my protagonist, Potomac VII.15, an official in the Regime’s Bureau of Myths, finds a copy of the Acts manuscript in the monastery of St. Dwayne of the Painted Desert. This manuscript, itself incomplete, is the only surviving fragment of Christian scripture and serves as the basis not only of the monastery’s but also of the village’s culture.
But more specifically, the y coordinate is embodied in the kind of community that Potomac VII.15 finds in the Coombe Verde settlement. Coombe Verde is a village like one would find in Jane Austen (Meryton or Highbury), or Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford stories: a small, self-sustaining community ordered to the common good (as opposed to a collective of individual interests) in which an older tradition of the virtues (Aristotelian as enhanced by Augustine and Aquinas) constitutes human flourishing. The inhabitants of Coombe Verde have been inspired to form this kind of community by certain “myths,” not all of which are Christian, which have made such a life attractive.
Coombe Verde is not a perfect community, but what goodness it has achieved cuts across the arid landscape of “The Bureau of Myths” like a summer rainstorm.
“The Bureau of Myths” is available on Amazon for just 99 cents.
The image above is reproduced courtesy of Tomas Castelazo at Wikimedia Commons.
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