Deep dive into 'The Pilgrimage'
Looking back at the universe(s) surrounding THE PILGRIMAGE
Before we begin, today’s song is Linea Aspera, Synapse (live)
The Pilgrimage - Deep Dive
For these Deep Dive episodes, I am going to use a question and answer format that hopefully helps you understand the worlds I am building.
The last story excerpt I posted was taken from The Pilgrimage, a chapter in the Lucy Universe of my mega collection Who Built The Humans?
It’s a story about an abandoned afterlife machine who decides to reset the Human species long after we leave her behind on Earth.
Like the other ten stories and novellas inside the WBTH book, it was written specifically for that book. So it doesn’t just exist alone, in the context of the book it is framed by the satire and sci-fi unfolding around it, its chapters split up and interlocking with those of both the early Earthloop universe and the more comedic On-Series (fifteen alliterative slam poems about future apocalypses, with audience participation built in).
So it’s a weird book, and The Pilgrimage is just one of 47 chapters within.
Q: You just said there are 11 stories, not 47
A: That’s right. The 11 stories in WBTH are split into 47 chapters, and each of these interlock. So, if you read story 1, at the end of its first chapter you have the choice to teleport to the next chapter, or continue reading the entire book as a singular thing. The goal being that the book is both a weird novel and a collection, a Novelthology.
Q: How easy is it to navigate?
A: Very. You get told what page to flick through at the end of each chapter if you want to continue exploring that particular universe. This is replaced with a link in the eBook, and there’s also a Cosmic Topology at the end of the whole book which forms a page map of every universe and the respective stories within. All the complexity is under the surface, like a nice car. It’s easy to drive, you don’t need to worry about understanding the engine.
Q: Does it matter which order I read the chapters in?
A: No. Most of these chapters can be read on their own as well, and are in effect short stories themselves. It’s weird. Some people have read the book four times, and found new stuff on each adventure, which was my intention.
Q: How hard is it to market a new form of book?
A: Very. You’d think the re-readability built in would be a selling point but I think it startles people. I’ve been told by writers and readers alike that I’m ahead of some curve, that I’m very clever (and sometimes handsome) but that doesn’t translate to sales.
The Pilgrimage
The Pilgrimage is just one chapter in what was called “Lucy’s Universe” In Who Built The Humans?
It is soon to be reprinted as Beyond Uncertain Stars in 2025, because it is a fan-favourite and it deserves its own space on my growing bookshelf.
The novella has the best opening line of any of my stories, and in seven words sets the tone for the rest of the book.
The first brought their dead in briefcases.
Right away you know this is going to be a weird book, and by placing this universe inside WBTH, right at the front, I was preparing you for the strangeness that comes after. Why are dead humans being brought somewhere in briefcases? Are their remains being kept secret? Where are they being taken?
My goal with WBTH was to build a universe, to have this genuinely three-dimensional thing, a crystal made with words. I wanted it to be more than a novel, more than a short story collection, for it to be a hybrid piece of literature that would draw on my experiences as a science fiction author, comedian, and poet to create something truly weird and interdisciplinary.
Obviously, this was a marketing nightmare. But humans like it.
And, to offset the high-concept strangeness of it all, I also gave it a sense of humour. This sense of humour was not afraid to be dark or dirty, but it always had to have a reason for being there. Tin foil Tim’s mad conspiracies had jokes within jokes within jokes. In the stories about doomed crewmembers on a generational starship, the dark humour existed to keep their morale up, just as it would in reality. In the On-Series, the humour was a response to the topics brought up in the stories before them, a way to reframe these ideas about our origins as a species and see them in a new way.
Building a universe
Beyond Uncertain Stars wasn’t just about Lucy and her desperation to bring humans back, it was also about the various aliens that might find our abandoned planet long after we are gone. The most notable are the Atanattat, who are only side characters in this story, but whose reach transcends that murky barrier between the eleven ‘universes’ of Who Built The Humans?
Atanattat?
The Atanattat are a species of crablike aliens, some of whom have travelled a long way to visit Earth. From the beginning it is implied they are also interdimensional travellers, so it is unknown if they are from this universe or another. They turn up in Beyond Uncertain Stars and other stories, implying a link between them, or at least a way for their ships to dimension hop.
Dear reader, I’m not doing the multiverse in the hollywood sense, by the way. If bad things happen, they happen. There’s no undoing it. If someone dies they stay dead. Even main characters. Dead is dead.
I think popular sci-fi concepts, like multiverses and time travel, have not been explored well enough yet. There is still so much uncharted territory. So I see it as my job to explore them, to do new things with them.
Anyway, the only three Atanattat we meet across my books, Lahkx (later called Lax), Sarbrox, and Scohhrin are only so far from their home because they are out treasure hunting, allegedly.
Each of them shows up (or is mentioned) in a different story universe inside WBTH, providing a narrative backbone that makes this more than a short story collection.
They are also brothers, and their spaceship breaks up at some point before reaching our part of the Milky Way,
Luckily, it’s not a normal ship. But its strangeness brings its own issues.
[ Lego art by Grumblebricks, which is me, by the way ]
So, four timeships equals whatever weird thing the Lax brothers are zooming around in. And this pyramidal starship shows up in a few places across my stories, implying a greater adventure yet to be told.
I should really name the ship.
Strange times.
It’s important to note that a timeship is not always a time machine. They were designed millions of years ago to facilitate time travel, but since then the timelanes have withered and splintered. Timeships themselves cannot traverse time without the timelanes being active and maintained. They are the surfboard to the temporal wave, dude.
Time travel is not possible in most regions of the universe, but it seems to be possible in the year 2016 on Earth, for about five minutes, which is very important to several alien factions who can’t find any other timelanes nearby.
As I was saying, this peculiar ship, which as of yet does not have a name, shows up in a few stories.
The Cosmonaut Who Died Twice, a novella in which the ship is its own character, and the catalyst for the strange second half of the alien contact story. TCWDT is a new novella, and it’s got decent reviews on Goodreads.
The Earthloop Trilogy (some of which is in WBTH), in which it is mentioned by Lax as his method of visiting Earth. There are also several working timeships buried on Earth, which is why Lax is here.
Beyond Uncertain Stars (first printed as Lucy’s Universe) from WBTH, in which this ship is initially batted away from Earth by a miserable Lucy, and then embraced in the distant future by Varda and Orbarop. This universe shows us aliens that live inside the Earth, who we can imagine are asleep during the other timelines.
And another unreleased story, which I don’t want to spoil right now.
The rise and fall of Lax Morales who isn’t a spider and isn’t from Mars.
So, as far as we know, there are three named Atanattat.
In The Pilgrimage, we meet Sarbrox.
In Earthloop, we meet Lahkx.
We haven’t met Scohhrin yet, but he will show up in a prequel novella to the Earthloop trilogy in 2025. It is currently called Tombs of the Tekekk.
There’s a great chapter in Earthloop (coming to the paid tier in 2025) where Lax and his brothers meet up in a dream sequence, in the very same ice cream parlour where Darlene and Lax first met. Darlene was a side character in the Earthloop bits of WBTH, and she becomes a lot more important as time goes on. The quiet town of Swamphenge becomes the main stage for a battle between Lahkx and several competing aliens, all desperate for temporal tech.
Worldbuilding
I want my stories to feel like worlds you are exploring, rather than just experiencing. You’re discovering the secrets of the timeships at the same time my characters are, or maybe even sooner if you pick up on clues.
That’s why Who Built The Humans? is the strange shape that it is, and why it’s got such passionate reviews from the handful of people who have seen my weird adverts and invested in it.
Back to The Pilgrimage
So the technology and world in The Pilgrimage is closely related to other worlds in my main body of work. That story is about simulation theory, rebirth, new universes, and bringing things back from extinction. It is also a story about Time, and how we might defeat its relentless erosion.
Q: If the timeship is in a few stories, do those stories connect?
A: Yes, they do. Some of them share a universe, others (like those in Who Built The Humans?) don’t, but are connected in new ways. Some bounce ideas off each other or have characters dimension-hopping from cosmos to cosmos. There are story links in WBTH that people still haven’t discovered. If you have the collection, read it twice.
Q: When does WHO KILLED THE HUMANS come out?
A: March 5th, 2025
Q: Is Who Killed The Humans? a sequel to Who Built The Humans?
A: No. All the stories in WBTH wrapped up before that book ended, but WKTH does pick up from some of those universes and add new stories and depth. For example, characters like Smarmy McCleverish, who were only in WBTH for a few moments, are main players in WKTH. So whilst there are new universes, I am expanding on some fan favourites too. You don’t need one book to read the other, but it does add more layers to the fun.
Q: Where do babies come from?
A: Baby machine from space
Recap
The Pilgrimage is just one chapter in a novella called Beyond Uncertain Stars, which follows a sentient afterlife machine who tries to bring humans back from extinction with the help of ancient aliens, whilst a different group of aliens circle overhead and debate the nature of reality.
It made one of my earliest readers cry, and she messaged me asking me how I made her care about a robot.
She also made fan art. It was brilliant. If I find it I will add it to this post.
The full novella is currently available in Who Built The Humans? and will be republished in 2025 on its own as well.
The pyramidal starship which docks Varda and Orbarop’s ship in Beyond Uncertain Stars is comprised of four timeships. Timeships show up in several WBTH stories and other books, implying a shared universe.
It’s only getting weirder from here.
Bonus content
The following isn’t relevant to The Pilgrimage, but it does come off on a tangent from this idea of worldbuilding across genres and mediums.
Further worldbuilding
I use Minecraft to tell stories sometimes. Right now my main world is two years old, so it’s filled with past experiments and the ruins of old buildings. I like to use that world to use ideas which don’t fit in my books.
For example I don’t write Fantasy any more (used to as a kid) so any castle-themed idea turns into a Minecraft base. Similarly I don’t write Steampunk, but I do love the aesthetic, so I’ve been making giant gears with the new copper blocks, and finding ways to launch the player character into the air in this industrial era world.
Sometimes I want to write an idea, sometimes I want to build it.
I record videos on the Minecraft world almost weekly, and between this Substack post and my last, one of those videos has gone viral, reaching 1.6 million people.
Lots of those people are asking me about Minecraft tutorials, so my main Youtube channel is quickly becoming my Minecraft channel. I’d like to reach 100 subscribers soon, at the time of writing I am on 94.
The channel also hosts some older standup and podcast videos, if that’s of interest to you. And the recorded Minecraft videos inevitably contain my improv comedy. The video uploading to the channel right now includes me shattering myself against a cave wall and then making a pilgrimage to raid my own corpse.
I want to do this forever.
This was the most fun I’ve had writing a post in a while. I enjoy all the others, but this one is a whole new level of fun. Being multidisciplinary seems to be the key to my happiness.
It has reminded me of being at university, working on poetry and fiction and comedy and scripts and games all day, after which I had a 45 minute break before running that Creative Writing society I set up. That was seven years ago now, and it was brilliant. it was by far the most intellectually stimulating time in my life, and I need something like that again.
You may see my old video games return… after WKTH launches.
Going out and meeting readers at conventions, or meeting comedy people at radio recordings, or reading comments here, is what keeps me going.
And, now I am back to the day job after a four-week absence, I am realising with renewed clarity what was obvious when I first started putting my stories out into the world, rather than just hoarding them on usb sticks.
I want entertaining to become my full-time thing.
I don’t even mind if it pays less than whatever it is I do now.
I want to tell stories.
So if you’re interested in reading the universe that embraces The Pilgrimage, protecting it from the cold winds of spacetime, and are interested in keeping this Substack thing going, I have to reluctantly ask you to consider buying my debut book.
Because people say it’s better than tolerable.
Also, if you order it soon, it should turn up before Christmas.
Thanks again for being here,
-Phillip
