Victor Grippi – The Atomic Writer

Hello Readers,

Just a reminder that The Ninth Cube is being paired with Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time on Amazon during the month of November. You can buy both books at a discount.

Check it out!

Have you ever read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?

Here is my version of the story:

Suppose a group of people are chained to a large rock inside a deep cave. The rock faces the end of the cave, and the people chained to this rock can only see the back wall of the cave. They have been chained there since childhood. Given these circumstances, reality for these people are the shadows and sounds they experience that are reflected off the cave wall.

Suppose one day a member of the chained group is set free and allowed to walk behind the large rock. Once on the other side this person realizes that the shadows come from a large fire burning in a fire pit, and from people that walk between the fire and the rock. The sounds are from these free people that walk in and out of the cave. Wouldn’t this person be unable to describe or identify the fire and the other people? To him, reality is the shadows and sounds from the cave wall. These new entities would seem alien, mystical, magical, or even demonic in origin.

Further suppose that this freed person is then taken outside the cave where he experiences the shining sun and trees and everything that exists outside the cave. Would he not be able to accept these things? Could he categorize and rationalize these new objects after spending his life tied to a rock inside the cave?

Now suppose this person is brought back to the cave and the rock where his friends have been tied to all their lives. Once there he tries to explain the origin of the shadows and the sounds and tries to convince them that the cave wall is not real but in fact an illusion. How do you think the other people will respond. Wouldn’t they think he was crazy, delusional, possessed; that his eyes have somehow been corrupted? Remember, all their lives the only reality they have known existed in the images and sounds reflected off the back of the cave. They would think he has been taken somewhere unknown and corrupted.

When he attempts to free another bound person, wouldn’t they try to kill him?

The moral of this story is that we are only able to comprehend and categorize that which falls within the boundaries of our limited viewpoint on the world. What we believe is real is limited by the degree to which we can perceive it.

The only way to expand our perception of reality is by experiencing new things, by reading stories of new possible realities that exist right on the other side of the rock of our lives. An entire universe of people, places, and things may exist right in front of our noses but we remain unable to perceive it because we refuse to accept the possibility that it exists at all.

Reading is one of the best ways to expand your mind and experience the countless possibilities in our world. To be more specific, books classified as speculative fiction take reality as we know it today, and expand upon it. This genre takes technology and makes one more step into the unknown. These books ask the big what if questions: what if we create an artificial black hole, what if it is actually a wormhole, what if we can time travel through it, what if it leads to another dimension.

Books like Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time, and Victor Grippi’s The Ninth Cube ask these questions and more. Hawking’s book is non-fiction and presents the current state of technology and physics theory, while The Ninth Cube takes these as premise and speculates on what the future may be when these theories become reality.

Fiction writers are like puppet masters who create shadows on the wall. All too often these do become reality.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking, what if…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer