Genre fiction is the perfect place to push past the expected and dream up new frontiers for science to aim toward.

The sly beauty of genre fiction is its voluptuous embrace of fringe ideas that rarely occur in normal human discourse other than in the land of impenetrable academic jargon, or tin-foil hats.

Everyday interactions tend to focus on sports, jobs, kids, and other quotidian but essential stuff. And occasionally Miley Cyrus. There’s little room for serious, or even half-serious conversations about quantum teleportation, genetically manipulated super humans, the neurological basis for out-of-body experiences and the like. These topics are outside the expected social bounds, and conversations can only occur in very halting, awkward ways. It’s understandable; common vocabulary about many of these topics is inadequate, still co-evolving incrementally with these ideas themselves.

That’s the beauty of genre fiction. A story set 100 years in the future lets the author go wild with scientific speculation in ways that would get her kicked out of “polite company.” That’s exactly why, in our case, we chose to populate the American west with a new breed of contemporary vampires and insert a theory of human consciousness into the storyline. Now, that’s entertainment. Academic jargon be damned.

The specific gothic twist manifests in the idea of The Meta – an undead extrapolation of the concept of what many thinkers over the last century have termed cosmic, or collective, consciousness.

The idea of The Meta came from my own brush with death, a shared interest in near death experiences and variety of diverse readings – ranging from Richard Bucke to Thomas Nagel.

What is The Meta? It’s an external energy field that contains pre- and post-life consciousness. Given our vampires die, completely, every dawn, it’s an active place, a melting pot of the “stuff” of consciousness that co-mingles and exists in a collective in-between state. In the Cowboy and Vampire books, the Meta is the “place” where the consciousness of dead vampires blends every sunrise and the place from which it returns to become again embodied each dusk. Human consciousness can glimpse this energy field too, but only at death.

What Clark and I describe in The Meta is in essence a hybrid – a non-materialist and non-religious explanation for brain phenomenon, such as near-death experiences and the like, that also expands the contours of the discussion of the nature of human consciousness. None of it is unique although how the threads come together in this particular story line is ours alone. Are the idea defensible scientifically? Maybe, probably not, but thankfully, it doesn’t matter because they’re set in the forgiving context of a genre fiction novel. All it has to be is entertaining.

As Kirkus described it in a review of Blood and Whiskey (Book Two), the Meta “has all sorts of ramifications for human spirituality.” While that’s true, the more interesting part of the Meta, to us, is its ramifications for a theory of mind. Inherent in the Meta is a model of consciousness in which our brains are interpreters, or receivers if you will, of an external collective consciousness. In our current evolutionary state, we only perceive and measure one state of consciousness, its embodied material state. Over time, our brains and senses will evolve to perceive external (cosmic) consciousness as our vampires already do.

Does this mean vampires are an evolutionary step ahead of humans? Yes, it does. And that’s another topic we explore in the book – but that’s a subject for a future post.

Using genre fiction to push the boundaries of science is not new, although it may be new to western gothic fiction. Our goal? Entertain our readers, first and foremost, but maybe also exert a tiny influence on thinking about consciousness. Or at least, start a few happy hour conversations.

More reading:

The birth of consciousness fiction, or con-fi

 продвижение