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Notes on Why Stuff Got Written

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Notes on Why Stuff Got Written

Chapter: Ch. 15 — Notes on Why Stuff Got Written Setting: Author’s voice; written from Sofia, Bulgaria. POV: Exurb1a in first person.

Summary

Exurb1a closes the book with a per-story addendum explaining where each story came from. He declares himself “a fairly strong devotee” of Panpsychism and connects the book’s premise explicitly to David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and his own speculation that a wandering spirit could travel forward into the future — which “this book was subsequently born” out of. He closes with a reflection on mayflies, ancestry, and an invitation to the reader to go for a walk.

Per-story notes

  • For Every Dove a Bullet — Origin story of the whole book. Inspired by Panpsychism + David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. Exurb1a notes that matching “what it feels like to be a thing” with our picture of the brain is an unsolved problem; the book only works if Consciousness can be reproduced on non-biological mediums.
  • The Menagerie — An “ethical rant … in the form of a story” about how awful teleporters would be. The hint is that teleporting is essentially cloning people and nothing stops you doing it thousands of times.
  • And the Leaves All Sing of God — Title arrived in the author’s head ten years before the story itself did.
  • 101 Things to Not Visit in the Galaxy Before You Die — Originally conceived with space creatures in quantum superposition who mated with themselves from alternate timelines; sobered up and rewrote it.
  • The Lantern — Partially borrowed from China Miéville’s Embassytown: only certain humans can tolerate hyperspace (the “Immer” in Miéville; unnamed here).
  • The Want Machine — Opens with a Schopenhauer quote. Premise: what if people could choose what to want? A meditation on evolution’s failure to optimize for lasting contentment.
  • Water for Lunch — Written in Melnik, Bulgaria, mid-June 2018. A short story criticising selfie culture.
  • The Girl and the Pit — Written in a single day. Situation-first: “the first archaeologist to dig up an ancient civilisation.”
  • Be Awake, Be Good — Inspired by a podcast about floating aid habitats; relocated to an ocean planet. Exurb1a spent 6 months trying to novelize it and gave up. Notes: “nothing would make me happier than Bulgaria becoming a prominent influence in intergalactic space history.”
  • The Caretaker — Ending inadvertently resembles Black Mirror’s “White Bear” episode; author disclaims intent.
  • Lullaby for the Empire — Closing theme: in crisis, people covet stronger bonds, even during passing friendships. Ties into the book’s long meditation on whether humans can be clever and happy.

Entities introduced

Themes

  • Meta-commentary. This chapter is the author’s “making of” and belongs paired with Introduction as the book’s outer frame.
  • Happiness vs. intelligence. The long closing meditation (“shall we be clever or happy?”) is the book’s final question.
  • Mortality and the mayfly. The closing image — the mayfly’s 24-hour life as a metaphor for humanity on cosmic timescales — reframes the whole book as a call to presence.
  • Primary index for what each of Ch. 03–14 is “really about” at the author’s level. When ingesting any story, start by checking this page for the author’s stated intention, then read the source.

Open questions

  • Exurb1a references “the cosmic universe idea” that Introduction promised a discussion of. Is that discussion somewhere in this chapter in a section I haven’t identified, or in one of the unread stories?

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