Liner Notes for Fairytale Ending

 

Liner Notes for Fairy Tale Ending

The puzzle or riddle goes like this. You are in a room with two exits. One leads to victory, the other to defeat. Also in the room are two guards. One of the guards always tells the truth. The other guard always lies. The two guards are identical, so you cannot tell which is which. You can ask them one question about the doors.

The canonical answer is to ask one guard what the other will say is the correct door to go through; this will always be incorrect as you are either asking the liar what the truth-teller will say or the truth-teller what the liar will say.

So much for logic. What if you don’t know the answer. Or if the situation is more complicated, obscuring the answer. What if there is no correct answer, no door that leads to victory.

In this case how someone responds to the puzzle tells you more about them than about the problem.

Hence the Space Angel’s castle. It puts visitors into situations where they must declare themselves, prove themselves, expose their motivations and desires. Or at least that’s the theory. It’s a little whimsical.

The Deep Patrol is an active, open, overt interventionist starfaring organisation. A para-military force. But what other types of organisation might there be? Hence the Yellow Emperor, taking their name from the legendary Daoist figure. Act without action, do without ado. Wu wei. What if you did the smallest possible action to achieve your goals. What if you simply made space for events to occur that encourage harmony.

What if you helped people, to help themselves, to act in accordance with the precepts you wish to see spread. To operate in plain sight but unseen. Changing charted space into harmonious space.

The choices I made when I started to write the Deep Patrol stories stick with me. The para-military force, the military ranks, an effort to reflect Star Trek. At the start of the series I cut Gunn loose from the patrol to see what he did, knowing inevitably when he stumbled over something big he’d turn back to them. That happened a bit quicker than I thought, I could (should?) have explored more of things outside. Looked into places without an officer class, other ways of doing things.

This then ends Space Angel Pursuit, much as it began. The Space Angel fleeing, chaos in it’s wake. Gunn with an uncertain future. Very few questions answered.

Almost as though it’s been reset for another series.