A Drama of Ideas Unfolding in Two Exotic Worlds.

The Flown Bird Society is a cultural critique and intellectual crucible wrapped in an adventure story.  It weaves a tapestry of cloud forest and alien realities, science and spirit, animism and materialism. The protagonists frame their remarkable experiences with Aletheian conversations about philosophy, the real, and our kinship with the animate Earth. The tale is enriched by many images of magical, otherworldly landscapes.

The Story. Visionary benefactor Sridar assembles the team of scientists Beth and Micheal, safari guide/artist Big O, and brilliant telepathic twins D’Ahmet and Tahel. They are joined by the mysterious and possibly nonhuman adventuress Miriam.

While living in the Costa Rican cloud forest, touched by its myriad forms of life, they encounter an indigenous shaman and have bizarre apparitions and spiritual visions. They learn a metaphysical secret and struggle with malefactors who are out to steal it. All this is in the pursuit of a vital, foundational cultural transformation.

The Concept. The Flown Bird Society is a science-meets-religion allegory. Strangers explore a secret world from their jungle hideaway. Their dialectic discussion is mirrored by their real-life adventures in two different realities. It is resolved by embracing animism’s view that the world is a tapestry of living, co-creating personhood.

This comes with captivating images of a world that might be: a world akin to Earth that is also a metaphor for the vastly aware, mutually enmeshed potential of our own ecosphere.

Thematic Traditions. Some say we are entering a new age of Romanticism, like the nineteenth-century one of Beethoven, Blake, the Brontës, and Wordsworth. The Flown Bird Society – fore-fronting Nature and wildness in setting, concept, plot, and image – could be a signpost for that change. The book also borrows from the literary tradition of Magical Realism, with subtle nods to myth and the supernatural, along with some Science Fiction world-building.

Notes on methods. This book is a multi-level experiment in story-making and cultural conversation. It’s also in large part a book of ideas. Too often, nonfiction books are essays bloated into saleable objects. One remedy is to write stories where characters have thoughtful dialogues in a setting that can enrich the theme being explored.

This technique is so shocking and hard to sell because it only started recently, with Plato in the fourth century BCE. Many writers have said we remember characters, not the story. So why not give characters more depth by letting them speak their minds? Here, then, are the methods that make TFBS unique.

    • Turning an artist’s abstract images into scenes from an alternate reality.

    • Inventing a metaphysics for that reality.

    • Juxtaposing the alternate metaphysics to contrast with real animistic concepts.

    • Enacting a deep debate over the need to return to an animistic vision of our living world.

    • Throwing together characters from around the world and beyond.

    • Relying mostly on dialogue to convey the dialectic, plot, and characterization.

    • Presenting dialogue in the format of a playscript.

    • Keeping the reader grounded by placing brief standfirsts before each section.

    • At the end, proposing both scientific and contemplative ways for cultural transformation.