Universal Complexity

I have a great respect for novelists. It is not only the length of the work but also its breadth and complexity that amaze me. We readers see only a tiny fraction of the writer’s world; we see the scenes viewed through a window frame. Beyond that frame’s limited scope the world is far larger. To have more depth than a cardboard cutout, writers create people and places that cast shadows across the rest of the story without coming into our line of sight. Often, the unseen part of the work is as big as or bigger than what we can see.

Fantasy and Science Fiction provide even greater challenges. Not only do the story elements have to be defined but, as the reader has no shared frame of reference, the author must create an entire world. Each detail preconceived by the author is a thread building a firm foundation for the novel. The deeper the world is understood, the more real the story seems.

Miraculously complex and beautiful worlds have been designed by authors such as Raymond E. Fiest, Isaac Asimov, and Anne McCaffrey but the master of the unseen was J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien’s tales are massively deep. Entire species and cultures are detailed. Maps and Music interweave the stories. Tolkien, a linguist, even chose to invent new languages to populate his world. It is hard not to attribute some of the stories power and longevity to its iceberg-like underlying foundation.

There is another author who exceeds Tolkien, the Author of life. I sometimes view God as a writer. It helps explain why he is omniscient. He is viewing history from the perspective of someone who has written and now is editing his great work. If he wants to remind himself what is going to happen on a certain date and time, he simply flips a few billion pages in the right direction. Like many writers, he chose to write himself into the book. In fact, he made himself the hero, riding in on a white horse to save the day in the last scene.

When I was watching Louie Giglio’s “Indescribable” the other day, it occurred to me that God’s back story trumps anything imaginable. The depth of the tale is bottomless. Our story has 9 billion main characters in the current chapter and God has noted each characteristic of each of these characters. He has written down for each and every person their height, their weight, their personality, their skin tone, their inseam length, and the total number of pores on their left pinky toe. The minor characters are equally well detailed including Fifi the French poodle, the large oak in the front yard, and the toilet seat cover in the third stall at the local high school. More amazing still, God has also defined the unseen world, Schoerdinger’s proverbial Cat. We may not know what lies in the box, but God does. God has defined and named the billions of billions of stars in the universe. In each one of these, he has defined the planets, the mountains on those planets, the dirt that makes up those mountains, and the very quarks that make up the atoms that make up that dirt. Nowhere will we turn up a rock or look into the sky and find a blank and ambiguous reality. God’s pen strokes crossed there long ago and it is only up to us to find the meaning behind the lines.