On a possible alternate name for "The Quantumyth"
Every sufficiently old creative project acquires a small cemetery of names. Some were discarded before they could be written down. I have generally been reluctant to disturb the name The Quantumyth, partly because it has accompanied me for so much of my life and partly because a name can become a kind of address. You say it and find yourself at a familiar door. Yet the longer I spend considering the structure of the hundred tales and the story that surrounds them, the more I notice another possible name taking shape beside it: The Observerse. It is an awkward, attractive little word. I do not know whether I would have chosen it twenty-five years ago. I know why it interests me now.
The Observerse compresses observer and universe into something that can almost be spoken without explanation. Its near relation, Observaverse, is perhaps more immediately legible: the universe of observation, or a universe composed of things that may be observed. The shorter word has a peculiar advantage. It sounds as though a portion of universe has been replaced by the person looking into it, leaving a seam that the tongue must cross. There is also verse in its ending, which suits a collection whose worlds have been written and drawn into communicable forms. These are associations I hear in the word, not an etymology that must be obeyed. A successful name should survive being said casually as well as being examined at length.
Observation was present in The Quantumyth long before I understood that it might be an organising principle. My childhood notebooks were full of figures, environments, weapons, vehicles, animals and places that arrived without the obligations of a finished story. What lay behind that hill? What was this creature doing before the image began? Who had made the object in its hand? A single image became a question about an entire life. I was beginning to make a mythology because I did not want the visible part of a world to be all there was. The urge was not initially theoretical. It was the stubborn pleasure of paying attention and discovering that attention generated further questions.
There is a danger in describing this as observing a universe into existence, because the phrase can suggest that nothing has a life until a human being notices it. The best imagined worlds seem to continue when nobody is reading. The Observer does not confer personhood on Daldas, on the people of Gyonath, or on the innumerable beings who occupy the other tales. The creative question is how an unfamiliar life can become available to another consciousness without losing the sense that it belongs first to itself. To observe, in this usage, is to meet the limits of one's knowledge and begin a relationship with whatever lies beyond them.
In One Special Day, a thirteen-year-old boy at the turn of the millennium notices Eyodi in his bedroom. Eyodi is a Resonant, ordinarily beyond the boy's perceptual reach, and the encounter unsettles them both. I have always liked that reciprocity. The boy sees a figure he ought not to see; the figure is just as startled to be seen. The impossible event therefore begins with two minds confronting one another, neither entirely in possession of the situation. From that mutual perception comes the passage into the Resonant Library of Realities. The threshold opens because there is someone on each side of it.
The Library offers a particularly direct expression of the alternate name. Its Mythsources are living artefacts through which complete experiences may be entered and inhabited. The boy passes into the hundred tales and lives what cannot be adequately described from outside them. An observer of a Mythsource's world has to occupy a position within it, to undergo consequences, to discover how little can be understood through appearance alone. Observation becomes experience, and experience leaves its residue. In the framing story, that residue survives the return to ordinary life as fragments of names, images, feelings and mind-marks, much as a powerful encounter with art can alter a person long after its details have faded.
The individual tales need room to breathe if that arrangement is to mean anything. The Father is not merely an illustration of the Library's metaphysics. It is Daldas's story, rooted in his family and the physical pressures of Gyonath. His decisions matter at the scale of hunger, work, travel, responsibility and affection. A person should be able to encounter that book without being instructed in the machinery of the whole mythology. Each ought to offer its own rhythm and emotional conclusions. The Observerse would have to be plural in more than the numerical sense. Its hundred entries would need a hundred convincing reasons to exist, not a hundred demonstrations of the cleverness of their arrangement.
The word observer can also describe the maker at a desk. Much of my work has involved looking again at something made years earlier and recognising an intention I could not have stated when I first drew it. An old symbol may acquire a story. A design that once existed only because I liked its shape can begin to ask for a society, an ecology and an ordinary day. I must write the conversations, choose the consequences, revise the weak passages and accept that some attractive ideas will not survive contact with a complete story. Observation does not excuse the making. It gives the making a way to proceed without pretending that every discovery was decided in advance.
At the furthest end of the mythology, this personal method takes on a cosmological form. The Vast Harmony and the Evershaping precede the limited categories through which any finite observer might understand them. Olvisutar becomes intelligible through relation, through a distinction made within what could not otherwise be told as one figure, one event or one beginning. The language of quantum mechanics has helped stimulate the imaginative possibilities of The Quantumyth, but its cosmology is fiction, not a scientific conclusion disguised as a fable. The proposition that interests me is philosophical and dramatic: what happens when a boundless condition becomes apprehensible through the finite act of perceiving a difference?
In Tales from the Vast Harmony, the movement from unity into multiplicity has emotional costs, but the prospect of returning everything to an undifferentiated state has costs of its own. A world without any meaningful separation would also have no room for one being to recognise another. If love involves a relation, the other person must remain other. Looking carefully can acknowledge someone else's existence without consuming it, just as telling another person's story requires humility about what can be known. The Observerse, if I used the name, would be a place full of irreducibly different lives. Its unity would come from the possibility of encounter, not from requiring those lives to disclose the same hidden identity.
The boy enters the Library, experiences a succession of lives, returns with an inadequate memory and spends his later years reconstructing what he can. Only after the hundred tales take shape can the surrounding account of their loss and recovery become a story in its own right. The last book then leads towards the child at the first threshold. In the deeper cosmology, the Observer's encounter with the Ulathranon belongs to the conditions by which Olvisutar becomes comprehensible, although the boy experiences that encounter long after the beginnings about which it seems to speak. The pattern closes on itself without the Observer becoming the sole inventor or proprietor of everything within it.
This is perhaps the strongest argument for The Observerse as an alternate title. It names a relationship running through the mythology at several scales: the reader approaching a book, a protagonist facing another life, the boy entering a Mythsource, the adult examining a childhood fragment, and the cosmological moment in which something immeasurable acquires a distinguishable form. It can mean looking, recognising, participating, remembering, making and occasionally refusing to look away. Yet the recurrence need not function like a rule that explains every plot. The joy of an archive is that one can open a volume without first considering the architecture of the building that houses it.
Observerse places the observer at the centre of the reader's first impression, and that may give an inaccurate sense of the stories. It might suggest one protagonist roaming through interchangeable settings, or an entire cosmos whose inhabitants exist only to be witnessed. It also contains a deliberate verbal compression that some people will hear as elegant and others will simply mishear. Observaverse solves part of that problem by stating its components more openly, but it has a more generic ring, as though it could label any collection of parallel worlds connected by a gaze. Neither name communicates, on its own, the material variety of the hundred tales or the mythic tenderness I hope some of them possess.
The fusion of quantum and myth can make an immediate promise of scale and strangeness, while inviting questions about science that the work is not obliged to answer as a physics textbook. It is an unusual word, and unusual words need to earn their familiarity. For me it already has. It holds the formative years, the long succession of sketches and notebooks, and the desire to make a hundred very different stories recognisably part of one undertaking. It is a name I have inhabited while changing the work beneath it. A title can also become the record of a life spent returning to something.
I think of Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere here, chiefly because its name makes room for many distinct books without requiring every title to explain the relationship. His recent illustrated Hoid storybooks are a reminder that the larger universe can give rise to smaller, physically beautiful works that welcome readers by themselves. The Quantumyth's connecting idea is bound to the act of entering and carrying other lives, and to a framing story in which the apparent reader becomes part of the mythology's account of itself. I can learn from the clarity with which another author presents a large body of work while leaving its particular underlying question to be answered on my own terms.
I imagine someone encountering The Father at a Sunday market in 2030, lifting it from a table and turning the pages before knowing any of the terms in this essay. Its pictures must carry a world. Only afterward might the reader notice that it belongs to The Quantumyth, and only after more encounters might the resonances between books begin to gather. The alternate title would make a fine inscription on the inner architecture, perhaps a designation for the accumulated reality of the Library, but I am not persuaded that it should greet that person before Daldas does. The first duty of a book is to permit an encounter, not to present a system diagram.
A game can make observation an action. It can require the player to notice a small detail, infer the existence of a life beyond the visible scene, or accept the consequences of having misunderstood someone. Film can place the viewer beside a character who does not yet possess the language for what is happening. Illustration can suggest an entire unvisited world through the corner of a room. In each medium, attention is shaped differently. The Observerse would therefore name something that can be enacted through storytelling methods, rather than an abstract theory attached afterward.
For now I would place The Observerse among the names worth keeping, perhaps with Observaverse written in the margin beside it. I would not retire The Quantumyth to make room. I began with drawings and the wish that a world might continue beyond the edge of a page. I arrived, over many years, at a Library in which worlds can be entered, lives can be carried, and a boy's unlikely act of perception belongs to the story of beginnings. The observation was never solitary. There was always something there to meet it. Whatever name stands on the covers, I hope the books preserve that relation: a person looks, a world answers, and both are changed by the encounter.