Thoughts on
THE ROOTS OF CHANGE
“Out of twinkling stardust all came, into dark matter all will fall. Death mocks us as we laugh defiance at entropy, yet ignorance birthed mortals sail forth upon time’s cruel sea.”
This was my first completed story. I’m tempted to put “story” in quotes since it’s more of a fictional treatise than an actual story (hey, Ken Liu pulls off this type of story all the time, just see the mind-meltingly remarkable Timekeeper’s Symphony and Bookmaking Habits of Select Species. But then again, he’s Ken Liu).
Indeed, The Roots of Change has faced countless revisions and even more rejections. In spite of that, it will always hold a place in my heart as my favorite “story” I’ve ever written. Not only is it responsible for kicking off any serious interest I had in writing science fiction, but it helped me find peace in a time when I’d been experiencing existential anxiety in lieu of this uncanny mid-stage Anthropocene of ours.
Entropy is natural. Things go to shit. Civilizations fall. Species go extinct. It has happened countless times before and it will happen countless times again. I guess all I needed was an elder figure more in tune with the timescale of our planet to remind me how, from these truths, beauty emerges, and the properties that cause death are what allow us to experience this great universe in the first place. Kindly put, change isn’t all bad.
I am so, so thankful to be here.
“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
I conceived this story playing off the idea of how a truly alien organism might look and function. As I was walking through a mountainous coniferous forest, I realized plants were a great start.
Plants have vastly different cellular structure and body functions. They evolved later than animals. They are intelligent, adaptive, and can communicate with one another, but not in the ways we do. While there is zero evidence that trees possess any sort of sentience or self-awareness, it is entirely possible there are things we do not yet understand about how plants function.
I was surprised when the science in this piece wandered beyond botany and geology, shooting so far out of my expertise into the realm of astrophysics. Though the final third of the story made my brain cells work overtime, I ultimately had fun helping my tree come to its hypothesis for the origin of the universe. It makes sense to me that a tree with an understanding of Earth’s history would believe the universe functions in a similar way to itself: born of a seed, and capable of growing and creating new ones.
Little does our tree know, this is a real theory. “Cosmological Natural Selection,” as proposed by the stunningly brilliant Lee Smolin, suggests our universe may be the product of a black hole from another universe, and is tailored by natural selection to create as many new black hole “baby universes” as possible in which the laws of physics evolve slightly.
I’m far from an astrophysicist, but Dr. Smolin’s theory is currently my favorite explanation for where our universe came from. Naively, I emailed him a file of The Roots of Change to ask if he liked my artistic representation of his theory. Understandably, he never got back to me.