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The 3rd Order 3/3/2005 9:58:56 AM
Classic science fiction prided itself as being the most seditious of literary genres, proposing that what is, is not what will be--or perhaps even should be. There is a new body of work that promises to bring that tradition out of abeyance.
While The Fan-Shaped Destiny continues to circulate through the multiverse and Reckoning is being shopped around NYC, the first and second volumes of a new series are nearing completion.
Provisionally titled The 3rd Order, they extend the FSD saga across continents--from past centuries into the nearer present of our dangerous new age.
This blog will trace the series' development from the early volumes through publication and, from time to time, candidly comment on the books' all-too-real historical underpinnings.
3rd Order does not seek safety in pseudonym and euphemism. For neither historical figures nor religious and political fetishes do these volumes shy from naming the sacred cows. The 3rd Order, the Fan-Shaped Destiny is made flesh.
The broken world of 2025 fitfully awakens from the Machiavellian dream of nation states. Former great powers stand nervously aside as new mutations of empire stir in the wings.
Strangely, the nearer East experiences relative peace. Extra-territorial Jewish and Palestinian states maintain an equivocal coexistence, while religious orders, once again become great as princes, vie for power:
The Ecclesiastical Order: From the Third Temple of Jerusalem, restoration of an ambitious Levitical priesthood has precipitated a crisis in:
The Apostolic Order: Throughout Christendom, in Rome, Alexandria, Istanbul and Moscow alike, a conjectured rite of Malkiz’edek threatens the Pentecostal successions of bishops.
Like thieves in the night, the military orders of both steal upon the town of Safed, below the Golan Heights. It is rumored that, to the mystical city of the old Qabbalists, a prophet has come out of Africa.
Jerusalem believes this mysterious figure’s ritual “healing of the dead” may consummate the Qabbalistic promise of yihudim, even herald the Messiah ben David.
But the prophet’s sights are set a million miles beyond the Jordan. In the Byzantine recesses of a restored Khalifate may lie concealed the key to the religio-political schemes of:
The Third Order: a lineage with recall of lives before Rome, Jerusalem or antediluvian Salem itself, back to prehuman and even angelic antecedents.
More invested than Jerusalem in this prophet--insulated by cultic enthusiasm and veiled by a shadowy bodyguard from the Druze diaspora--are the threatened Christian bishoprics.
Imagine her as the first of the apostles, imagine her as the qadesha of elder gods--from Sinkiang to Côte d’Ivoire and across the Atlantic, her maxim is found scrawled on walls in ancient Coptic, al-nyoc anect:
