Ambrosia: Slightly Tilted
Humanities
Creative Writing Fiction Senior Projects
"Ambrosia" is projected to be a four or five book set, but only the first book will be used in my senior thesis. Book one is called "Slightly Tilted." The universe where the story takes place is a speculative distant future of our own world where nuclear driven steam power is the dominant energy. Technology is stunted however, and transportation and communication are limited to train, radio, and telegraph. Society has evolved progressively, or in the case of some organizations, regressed terribly into xenophobic religious extremists. There is magic, but magic is considered a science and studied in research institutions. The contemporary issue in the science and human interest groups during the narratives is the creation of a living human body from raw materials. Humanity has come a long way, but they are still looking for the soul. The idea driving the story centralizes around the process of writing a story, and there are instances of metafiction. My primary influence for this approach to writing this narrative arises from two places. The first, a desire to write within the fantasy/sci fi genre and make a comment within the text about genre expectations, limitations, and potential. The second, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
The Master and Margarita is a powerful example of metafiction at its best and most subtle. There is a primary narrative constructing a social commentary on Soviet Russia, and a secondary narrative existing as a novel within the novel, written by the protagonist, the Master. As both narratives move closer and closer together, they become entangled and neither can come to a resolution without completing the other. The Master literally gets to meet the protagonist of his own written work. My work is meant to be in conversation with Bulgakov with its similarity in use of metafiction, social commentary, and insertion of the absurd into an otherwise grounded, if fanciful, setting.
My narrative follows several characters, and one, sometimes two, of those characters are actually a self-insertion of the Author. As the external story progresses and grows more and more complex, the author consciously and unconsciously tried to manipulate other characters or plot devices to his/her liking. He/she is acting as a "Mary Sue," of sorts, mettling in things better left alone.The author does not know he/she is actually the author until the ending. He/she exists as an autonomous character until which point he/she tries to assert too much dominion over the plot, at which point he/sh becomes the author in full, capable of breaking, recreating, or otherwise tampering with the fictional universe the story exists in. At the end, he/she realizes that the characters within this universe must be masters of their own destiny and to let the story write itself. The author removes him/her self from the story.
Some themes explored within the work include: sexuality and sexual identity, xenophobia and racism, religious extremism, and feminism.
As my senior project is due in the first week of June, this work is still in progress. I have a professional illustrator doing artwork for it, which is not completed at this time, and the last seventy pages of the novel are not as deeply revised as the first half. This is, unfortunately, a rough work.
