Echoes of the Mystic Chords: The concepts and ideas behind the story
(Note: This and other FAQ-like docs on the Website are written in a “pseudo-interview” format, with an imaginary interviewer asking questions that I’d either heard directly from early audiences or that my creative team and/or yours truly felt would be interesting to readers. This format by its nature lends itself well to an organized, coherent logical flow that’s easier to follow and more fun to read than a random Q&A, so I’ve used it for many of the “backgrounders” on Echoes and how it came about.
Enjoy!)
J. Wes Ulm
Q: Wes, you and your creative team have described Echoes of the Mystic Chords as a “high-concept genre crosser” fusing “a metaphysical thriller with a cosmic dark mystery.” Sounds intense. What are you getting at with that description?
Wes: It’s the soul of Echoes and the trilogy it kicks off – a personal story that’s anchored by an ambitious mythology and fictional arc, centered on the haunting journey of Tim Shoemaker, the main character, and his protégés Rachel Bloom and Zach Choi. The trilogy ultimately ventures into some big questions about life, death and what comes after it, the mind, consciousness, who we really are and where we’re going – but in a radically different way from the literary and philosophical traditions we’re used to. Since the vehicle is fiction, the approach to all this is subtle and a bit indirect, and it follows in the footsteps of Tim himself, who has to tackle these riddles to face down the menace that draws closer with each page.
Q: Your choice of words – “haunting,” “menace,” “cosmic dark mystery” – plus the cover art with all its creepy hints and imagery… it all sounds sort of horror-ish, or maybe scary sci-fi-ish. Is that what Echoes is at heart? A sci-fi horror novel?
Wes: There are elements of both in Echoes, but it’s not really a pure horror or sci-fi novel per se. When I was weaving the narrative, the goal was to create a thought-provoking tale based on the concepts and mysteries that I’d found so cool and compelling in my source material. This inevitably took me in a certain direction to make the story come together, and sci-fi elements as well as a sort of neo-Gothic, mystical horror were natural offshoots of the direction I took.
Q: How so?
Wes: There’s an undercurrent of lurking menace and eeriness that periodically erupts into some chilling scenes in Echoes, but the scariness is simply an organic part of the plot evolution and character development, of where the story needs to go. You’ll definitely glimpse some elements reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King – whom I read a good deal of as a kid. But you’ll also encounter the imaginative and visually rich eeriness that’s so essential to Silent Hill, Gothic novels, some of the darker Japanese anime series, and a kind of nightmarish take on some themes from The Matrix.
Q: The Matrix – yeah, speaking of, what was your source material as far as overall subject matter? Space-based sci-fi draws on astronomy and physics, medical thrillers draw on medicine and human biology. What specific topics did you draw on for the metaphysics and sci-fi elements of Echoes?
Wes: The core source material was a fusion of cognitive science, Leibnizian and Kantian philosophy, metamathematics, and mathematical logic – especially as all these fields united to forge what we today call computer science and “physical information theory.” Echoes itself also draws heavily from motifs related to the psychology of memory, especially from Proust. Yeah, sounds obscure, and outside of some elements in The Matrix and virtual reality-based stories, these notions as a whole haven’t really made a cultural splash, or even much of an appearance in storytelling of any sort. Yet this uniqueness and novelty are also what drove me so much to weave this tale – in part precisely because this rich conceptual landscape hasn’t permeated the realm of fiction. When regarded more holistically, in contexts where they’re not generally reflected upon, the implications of these concepts are mind-blowing, and in a manner that’s truly original and unprecedented.
Q: Why? Does it have to do with the name of the trilogy itself? The Leibniz Demon Trilogy?
Wes: Yes, absolutely. The reference in the trilogy’s title is to the 17th-century mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and polymath Gottfried Leibniz. He’s most commonly known (or lamented) by students today as the originator of the principles and formalism that define calculus, especially as we first encounter it in high school or college math courses. But he was more than that – vastly more than can be given justice in a one-paragraph summary. Binary code, functions and variables in math and research, the basic principles of computer software, the foundations of math and logic, even some key seminal work with computer hardware – all of these things were either pioneered or manifestly advanced by Leibniz over 300 years ago. He was freakishly, almost frighteningly ahead of his time; I always tell people that when they watch those scenes in The Matrix of the scrolling binary code giving rise to the quasi-physical world in which Neo and the other characters do battle, they’re seeing one of Leibniz’s core tenets realized on the silver screen. And that barely scratches the surface of his work and where he was going.
Q: How so? And how did his work lead to your novel?
Wes: There’s so much to Leibniz (and the offshoots and implications of his foundational insights) that I can’t tackle it here without sending this FAQ off-track. So for those of a more sci-fi or philosophical bent, I’ve laid out the essence of the key insights from Leibniz and his successors, and their role in helping me to conceptualize the trilogy, in a separate Web-FAQ. For now, what matters is that Leibniz and his technical and philosophical heirs were working on a grand synthesis to unify wildly different phenomena – from pure math to the physical world, basic biology to human thought and emotion – based on a few elegant, very intriguing core principles. Moreover, the Leibnizian-Kantian corpus even delved into the ancient questions of the connection between the body and the soul, the individual self and the divine, albeit indirectly and in a way that both complements and differs from traditional religious interpretations. This foundation furnished my conceptual starting points for Echoes of the Mystic Chords and the trilogy it kicks off.
Q: How did you adapt this source material to craft your story?
Wes: I like to think I approach my own fiction similar to the way Christopher Nolan devises his films, or as Tolkien and Rowling did for their fictional worlds: merging imaginative, even fantastical speculations with a great deal of rigor and meticulous discipline. I drew on the former to create a world that would tease the reader’s mind and fire the imagination – full of a nearly mystical essence and intrigue. But I also needed the latter to design a believable fictional universe and make the plot and all its overlapping conundrums come together. In fact when it comes to the more sci-fi and metaphysical elements of Echoes, I think there are some parallels with Andy Weir.
Q: Author of The Martian?
Wes: Yes – a masterpiece through-and-through. Andy Weir took the details seriously, to the point of calculating the solar system orbits during the period of his fictional Mars mission, even creating a software algorithm to output accurate data about its many facets. Like him, I also hail from a technical background – in medicine, genetics, and molecular biology in my case – and my aim from the get-go was to merge the best of the “left-brain” discipline from that background with the free-ranging imagination and creativity of exciting speculative fiction. I took more than a year out of writing itself, in effect, to outline the trilogy’s mythology and plot in a way that would ensure that the story could hold up to the most exacting scrutiny. Sort of akin to the way you’d construct a scientific hypothesis in a more technical endeavor.
Q: Why so much effort? It’s fiction after all, you know, creative license.
Wes: True, but I have a driving principle as an author, a promise to my audience in essence. My readers are exploring and discovering the fictional world that I’ve brought into existence, so I owe it to them to make this world self-consistent, logically coherent, and teeming with intrigue. Few things are more disappointing than working one’s way through an exciting story, only to encounter loose ends and a sloppy conclusion because the narrative was never really thought through! Thus I have to ensure that the plot and underlying mythology fit together in a way that’s plausible not only within the story’s internal logic, but also from the standpoint of what we know about these fields in the real world. By anchoring myself in these domains as a professional would, with the intuitive understanding of their nuances and what they entail, I was able to let my imagination roam in a way that was grounded in the actual science on the one hand, yet also intricate, innovative, and thought-provoking on the other. It simply makes for a more exciting story that works on all levels for the reader – riveting and suspenseful, full of mystery and wonder, yet also intellectually challenging in the most genuine sense.
Q: So then you had to research all these fields for Echoes of the Mystic Chords?
Wes: Oh, yes, much more than I ever imagined at the outset. My starting point was actually in specialized subfields of information theory and physics – books and articles by Lee Smolin, Gregory Chaitin, David Layzer, Ernest Sternglass, Seth Lloyd, Eric Chaisson, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Shimon Malin, and later by Martin Davis, whose book on computer science history turned out to be a real gem. As I hinted at before, all of this reading and most of the authors in some way kept leading right back to Leibniz and his ideas. From there I dove into the primary source material – philosophy from Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Sigmund Freud, Herder and Schopenhauer, Vladimir Vernadsky, Marcel Proust, as well as medieval and classical works by Maimonides, Plato, and Aristotle. The Magical Realism of Latin American authors was also great fodder for both the content and style of Echoes, as are psychological explorations in literature (including Faulkner and Hemingway) and Gothic fiction, along with the thought-provoking conundrums of good sci-fi and especially Japanese manga and anime.
Q: How did you distill all this mind-boggling material down into a template for a work of mass-market fiction? In fact, what are the essential ideas that guide the plot for the trilogy?
Wes: I can’t spill too many details on the mythology without lurching into spoiler territory, but I did develop a few ideas from those sources that served as launching pads to kick off the story. Here’s one of the more intriguing. The human brain is by far the most complex structure in the known universe, and its folds and twists embed billions of years of natural history – a history that contains the seeds of what we consider to be our core values and impulses, whether base or noble. Our minds and our sense of ethics are, in large part, the channels of an ancient and very mysterious impulse that has become emergent, coherent, and self-aware in our conscious minds. So what is this impulse? Where does it come from? Leibniz and his successors didn’t get into this question explicitly, but they paved the way for a fascinating exploration of the phenomenon, and it proved to be fertile ground in stitching together many of the threads in the plot for Echoes of the Mystic Chords.
Q: Which brings us back to what you were saying at the outset, regarding the eeriness and menace that pervade the work. All of what you’ve just laid out about the novel and its inspiration – you’ve described it in terms that conjure up intrigue and mystery, without necessarily being scary. Why do Echoes and the trilogy take a turn in such a chilling direction?
Wes: Because the subject matter invariably gets into some unsettling territory about the nature of consciousness and the power of human cognition, and also about the abuse of that power. As I headed down the rabbit hole of ideas from the source material, I realized I was directly engaging many of the basic tropes of what we consider to be horror or scary sci-fi genres. Themes like the unexplored recesses of the mind, the corruption of individuals and institutions, the mysteries of our interactions with and perceptions of an often hostile world, and the subconscious conflicts and cognitive dissonance that often drive people to self-destructive or violent acts. Alongside the more heavily metaphysical and sci-fi motifs I was exploring, these themes took on an aura of profound danger, bewilderment, and fear as Echoes and Books 2 and 3 in the trilogy took shape. That’s the reason for the “cosmic dark mystery” tagline. I didn’t set out in this direction at first, and most of the narrative has more of a feel of eerie mystery and lurking menace than outright horror. In any case, the narrative itself took me in this uncanny and often frightening direction as I fleshed out the story arc.
Q: On that topic, you mentioned Japanese anime and manga as an inspiration, including the influence of Silent Hill. Why is this so important for the story, thematically and stylistically?
Wes: Japanese literature and culture are veritably drenched in imaginative storylines about the conscious and unconscious mind, and how a self-aware sense of being can be forged outside its traditional biological home (the central nervous system of higher animals). Whether intentionally or not, Japanese culture seems to have internalized and mediated upon the philosophical conundrums about cognition that were laid out by Leibniz, Kant, and Proust in the West, and this comes out in Japanese literature, film, and of course in manga and anime. In fact several of the darker, more frightening animes have some of the most innovative takes on this whole family of motifs – Elfenlied, Monster, Deadman Wonderland, as well as the works of Shinji Mikami (The Evil Within and Resident Evil) and especially Keiichiro Toyama (Silent Hill) in several media.
Q: Always thought Silent Hill was pure survival horror.
Wes: Silent Hill’s mythos is a remarkably cerebral sort of horror, in fact much of its mythology and eeriness is anchored in genuine puzzlers from psychology, the cognitive sciences, and even epistemology (what we can know and understand). Toyama was packaging a highly clever and in-depth exploration of human consciousness within a popular PlayStation title that hits you on many levels. That’s because a good deal of its horror and seeming mysticism stem from a basic premise that’s not far from what I detailed above for my own work.
Q: Which is?
Wes: Our subconscious often appears to have a will of its own; what’s the nature of this “will” and why is it so powerful – often to the point of inviting self-destruction (of the conscious will)? This theme can be explored in the contingent sense (how a particular character’s experiences and memories have forged that “sub-will”) or in the more metaphysical and “natural historical” sense I described above (the ancient roots of our cognitive evolution and how they became emergent in our minds). Toyama leans more toward the former in Silent Hill, whereas Echoes and the trilogy approach this theme equally from both angles. In fact, I more-or-less merge the two perspectives in the characters of Tim Shoemaker and his two protégés, who have to wrestle with this conundrum in both the metaphysical and personal spheres.
Q: But still, with regards to the horror aspect itself, Silent Hill is supposedly pure horror – one of the scariest titles out there. Yet you’ve said that for Echoes the horror is more subtle, that it’s not really horror at all as much as a pervasive eeriness and sense of lurking menace. So why the analogy?
Wes: If you look closely, while the Silent Hill world is terrifying and dangerous, it’s not necessarily that violent or grisly, in the sense of slasher-style horror, for most of the installments. I never personally played any of them (my friend’s PlayStation and mad gamer skills were the initial storytelling vehicle here) so I was able to focus in on the narrative and atmospherics, and the sense of dread and mystery are so pervasive that Toyama’s world “registers” as horror to us. (This is notably distinct from the survival horror/sci-fi from Shinji Mikami and Matthew J. Costello in Doom 3 – also narratively complex but much more explicitly violent and grisly.) That’s not far from the feel of Echoes, in the sense of a lurking dread that becomes nightmarish and more explicit at crucial junctures in the plot. The characters throughout Echoes don’t even know who or what the horrific antagonist is, barely an inkling until the closing chapters.
Q: Then how would you say the atmospherics of Echoes differs from that in Toyama’s work?
Wes: The difference with Toyama’s oeuvre is more a matter of degree and plot devices. Silent Hill’s surrounding visuals and “Proustian tokens” often become quite gruesome since they involve ghastly traumas suffered by the characters. These buried traumatic imprints morph into subconscious archetypes (at times mimicking Jungian archetypes outright) that are physically manifested by the powers of the town and several of its inhabitants. Echoes never really gets gruesome like this per se, but its visuals and atmospherics are unsettling and often terrifying nonetheless – “like a twisted nightmare from M.C. Escher or Rene Magritte,” to paraphrase one of the characters (Rachel Bloom) in Echoes. Thus the creepy symbolism of the cover art. Both for Toyama and for me, these frightening elements are natural outgrowths of the story we were assembling. My characters in Echoes are battling multiple demons of sorts, albeit not the “demons” we think of from supernatural or religious lore. They’re struggling to understand the nature of a mysterious entity that seems demonic to them – something ancient and menacing, with a shadowy connection to the very metaphysical foundation of the world they know. But they’re likewise battling their own personal demons, which in turn are linked to their more overtly demonic antagonist. This storyline naturally turns chilling and oftentimes flat-out nightmarish.
Q: Do these various “demons” also have something to do with the trilogy’s overall title?
Wes: Absolutely. I can’t get into what The Leibniz Demon Trilogy means without going full-spoiler here, but the many connotations of the word “demon” itself are indeed a clue. As the characters progress throughout Echoes and through Books 2 and 3, they have to do battle with demons of many different sorts, many of which have a personal connection to them. In fact, as I hinted at early in the interview, this theme of the close interrelation between the individual and the cosmic, the self and the divine, the personal and the metaphysical – it’s a motif that recurs throughout the whole trilogy and especially in Echoes. Pay close attention in the first few chapters and you’ll find an Easter Egg on this very topic – a bit of symbolic foreshadowing I did with some of the key imagery.
Q: We’ll be keeping an eye out for it! A couple more questions to wrap up. First, why did you pursue the trilogy format to begin with, as opposed to a single novel for your story arc?
Wes: The very feature that makes The Leibniz Demon Trilogy so original and unique – the unusual source material and imaginative concepts at the heart of the underlying mythology – also presents a logistical challenge. If you think about it, even stand-alone novels and short stories often take place in the context of a genre or overall story arc with which readers are intimately familiar, so they’re already primed, in a sense, by previous experience. I couldn’t avail of such familiar landmarks for my own tale; not even The Matrix really gets into this territory. So I had to create an infrastructure for the story as well as the overall mythology, and the trilogy format made this possible.
Q: An “infrastructure for the story”?
Wes: It’s the unique fictional world of Echoes and its successor novels – the “future history” of events leading to the novel’s “present” in the year 2025, the characters and settings, and above all the mythos and mystique, including the overall atmospherics and vibe. In addition to its own harrowing tale, it’s the job of Echoes to lay down the foundations for what’s to come, resolving some core riddles while launching even greater ones for Books 2 and 3. Once again manga and anime provided a thematic guidepost here, as did the multi-volume arcs of authors like Tolkien, Rowling, and Martin. The episodic format of manga allows for highly complex and thought-provoking sci-fi plots over the broader story arc, yet are also compelling as individual vignettes. In a similar way, I’ve structured Echoes and the trilogy to complete a thrilling and compelling story with each chapter and section, even as the broader arc is carried out over the three novels.
Q: Last question: What does “Echoes of the Mystic Chords” even mean? Where does the title come from?
Wes: In the Front Matter before the Prologue and Chapter 1, there’s a page with a couple quotes, one of them from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, where he speaks of “the mystic chords of memory” that bound the nation. Lincoln uttered these words with a specific and very immediate goal in mind (averting the oncoming Civil War), but that phrase always stuck with me because of the way it frames memory as something so powerful, a force of nature even – far beyond an individual’s recollections. Proust tackled this question more explicitly later on (and a quote from Proust is also on that page), though for me, Lincoln’s quote concisely captures a lot of what Proust was getting at, too. As it turns out, this motif features prominently in many of the key story arcs for Echoes – at the metaphysical, sci-fi, and personal (for the characters) levels – so the title fit perfectly. As for what it actually means in the story (and what the “echoes” are referring to) – that’s spoiler territory, so I think I’ll leave it at that.
Q: Thanks for giving us a window into Echoes and how your story came about!
Wes: Glad to do so; hope you enjoy it!