My Second Great Dream

As I’ve written elsewhere, my life has been inspired and guided by a vivid and detailed dream I had at age 14, over half a century ago. While many people have such dreams, this was the only one in my experience that was confirmed by empirical evidence. Five years after my dream, I discovered another person’s dream that was identical to my own in every detail, excepting one.

When I wrote A Celebration Society, my wife and I had two objectives. First, we wanted to attract a cadre of world-class experts who would lend their competencies and enthusiasm to this project. Second, we wanted a mass movement.

I have been gratified by the number of such experts who have stepped forward, either privately (such as the Chair of a renowned university economics department) or publicly, as evidenced by the endorsements we’ve been blessed to receive. More keep coming.

However, I was dismayed by our complete failure to materialize a movement. I had started with high hopes: after all, decades after its introduction, Star Trek has tens of millions of fans and devotees; quite a few of whom sincerely wish to live in a world of sustainable technological abundance and human decency.

Several years ago, in a moment of extreme frustration, I closed my eyes and basically said to Divinity: “The dream you gave me as a child, supported by many subsequent events, led us to this place. I believe you want a Celebration Society to manifest. However, I can’t see a way for it to do so without a mass movement, and I clearly lack the skills to launch one. Either show me a way forward, or bring me a person with those skills.” Then I surrendered the whole thing. I felt a sense of peace; I had done what I could. I forgot about the prayer.

Several months later, I found myself on the production set of a television series. It had incredible characters and some applications of technology which were entirely new to me. (Because I spend so much time following technology trends, that’s quite rare.)

I was completely enthralled. I couldn’t wait to see the first finished episode, and I was convinced that this series could change the world.

Then I woke up. The disappointment was profound. My thoughts were, “That should exist.” “Someone should do that”… and then: maybe WE should do that.

This last caused trepidation because, while I am something of an idea factory, my wife’s formidable combination of pragmatism, logic, and storytelling skills means that she unerringly homes in on the structural flaw in most of my ideas. I REALLY didn’t want this one added to that ash heap.

To my delight, she agreed that we should write it, together. This takes me to an interesting synchronicity. While I had of course known that my wife is a national reader’s choice award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, writing for television (or movies) is a whole different skill set. Few people have both.

I learned that day that many of her friends and colleagues who are well-known SF authors have been telling her for years that she should write for television or movies!

What followed were many hundreds of hours of us writing what’s called the “series bible” (essentially, all of the Do’s and Don’ts; rules and character descriptions, that will allow other writers to collaborate with us in developing this world of storytelling with integrity.)

I also had to learn how to write a screenplay. It’s a far different thing than writing books or articles. I wasn’t very good at it. Fortunately (again!), all of my weaknesses were complemented by my wife’s strengths.

After dozens of rewrites, and critiques by credentialed scientists and engineers to assure that the show is plausible in all respects (this is “hard” science fiction, like The Martian), we submitted it to contests to get further feedback and see where it might go.

It was a national finalist in a contest last year. This year, we’ve been preoccupied with some health-related matters. However, one of my startup seed investments is going public next year, and being hailed as “The Apple Computer of quantum computing”. With some of the money from that and a few close allies, we should be able to produce the series.

Also, I was later given a second dream about it. This dream included specific guidance on the business of production, even showing me details of who our agent will be, the studio head, and the contract we should expect to sign.

It is called Shadowking. To this day, I have no idea why that was the name given, but my wife and I have figured out a reasonable explanation for it and for the other important names given, our theory being that we should hew as closely as possible to the first dream, in order to support the integrity of the vision.

Of course, we won’t know whether Shadowking will lead to a mass movement until it is well into production, which we estimate to be circa 2025. What we do know is that a marketing guru and ally, who pulls no punches and critically reviewed the pilot script, told us that this has has enthralling characters and an incredibly rich world, with the potential to be a Star Trek or Star Wars for this generation.

Today, there are an estimated 10 million Trekkies and Trekkers. It’s further estimated that half of them really want to live in that kind of world. (The fact that Star Trek includes elements that physics today considers impossible doesn’t stop them.)

Shadowking is set in the early 23rd century. It’s focused on three rotating, nuclear-powered starship-worlds, traveling from our Sol system to the distant, mysterious, planet known as Haven. Shadowking is the Celebrationist world. Accompanying it are Queen of the Skies, a Democratic world, and Uprising Humanity, a Tianshang (“soft Orwellian”) world. Each is perhaps the last of its kind, following a system-wide cataclysm. The logline for the series is, “Traveling to the stars, this remnant of shattered humanity will face inhuman threats and all-too-human crises. Hard SF.”

By being scrupulous with the science and technology, we will assure that–however fantastical and wondrous it may be–Shadowking will remain plausible. We’ve started assembling an expert advisory panel, including Caltech and Stanford PhD’s and an actual rocket scientist. Further, we’ll have just a few absolutely inviolate contractual points: it will never be permitted to stray from plausibility, and we will own a section of the website called, The Road to Shadowking, which will be all about forging that mass movement.

We’ll see…it should be exciting!

Let us know if you have any expertise or connections that may help.