Imagine a scene from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, individuals walking among a forest, reciting their chosen book, word for word. This a small, inconsequential response to a culture lost.
Imagine an ocean of whales, each projecting into a common aural space, a nuanced, harmonious version of a collective inheritance, honed to reflect each whale's mental experience and perspective, a process covering 25 million years. Imagine a collapse of this shared inheritance, their population decimated by a rapidly multiplying species capable of destroying culture and environment. Would the whales attempt to recover their culture, their story? Do they now?
Imagine Mindkind within such a collapse. An organism with a large prefrontal cortex and an opposable thumb, manipulating the environment, adding massive external memory, exploiting massive energy sources, motivated by individual self-preservation, experiencing a collapse triggered by the power of literacy among a chosen few. First emerging nine thousand years ago, this ability to abstract and the consequent power of symbolic thought, enabled massive population growth until their culture shattered. Would they feel isolated, exposed, abandoned by some higher power? Would they be but shards of a shattered god, deaf to a once shared verbal culture? Could each shard bond with another, slowly rebuilding cultural worlds? Would we be surrounded by hope or guile, violence or resignation, gluttony or contrition?
Such is the imagination fueling Mindkind. The novel builds from everyday conversations on a city bus, with subordinate stories within a culture's story, bringing new insights into the human condition today. Relying on published anthropologic studies, the work does not claim to be a better characterization of our world than scientific and cultural works, but instead uses plausibility as a frame for positive alternative futures.
