It’s always risky dipping your toes into the waters of macro-culture and the zeitgeist, but let’s go swimming anyway.
I’m sketching out the outline of a book series called The Synth Wizards, which is currently the working title for something I hope will turn into pentalogy you will one day read. It’s fueled by my love of Synthwave, sorcery in Fantasy fiction, and stays in the same world as my Urban Fantasy, The Blessed & Possessed.
But while TB&P was a series about faith, found and rediscovered family, and forgoing power for something more, The Synth Wizards is an attempt to examination three things plaguing our world today:
The downfall of capitalism, the failure of modern masculinity, and more importantly, why we’re all so damned determine to mine Nostalgia in the midst of an intentional decay we can stop. It’s going to be a story not about the hard decisions we make on the quest, but the hard decisions we make about ourselves along the course of life (which is, like, the biggest quest of all.) The way we choose to look at ourselves mirrors how we are taught to look at our culture, our world, and what is going on around us in real time, which is another difficult concept in 2025 when we have real lives and digital ones as well, both with stringent requirements imposed upon us to determine who we were, who we are, and the scariest question, who will we be after it is also said and done.
But I keep getting caught up in the problem of the Nostalgia, especially here in America. I do not kid myself: there’s always been a want in all cultures and individual circumstance to return to yesterday or yesteryear, especially in the realm of experience and aesthetic. It’s seeking safety.
I suffer it too. There are summers I wish I could live in forever at my Aunt Francis’ house. Certain people would still be alive, and whole, and there. In some crucial ways, Nostalgia is a modern opiate we use to dim the pain of those bygone days and places, and the feelings we had in them. Tolkien felt the same way about his Sarehole Mill, which later inspired pieces of the Shire and Middle-earth.
Yet at some point the quest to regain nostalgia like trying to resurrect the dead—sure, it sound like it will turn out well, but when has it? When has clinging to the past to the point of wanting to re-manifest it again ever turned out well? And I would miss out on Margo, my muse, and the wonderful adventure in love and kindness we’re having with my son.
(And I might still have that house, if God wills me with great luck, endurance, and a chance. It is important to save our Sareholes.)
Since 2008 one might argue that American culture, and therefore global culture, has moved from its “golden age” of creativity and innovation to a constant cycle of recycling the boom periods, which usually follows the demographics of the populace. It used to be from 1950 to 1978 that this particular time in culture was revered, but with the Boomers dying off things invariably shift. The rest of my life is going to be surrounded by people with wants for the 80s, 90s, and early Aughts up to, let’s say, the end of the second Obama term. And I fear how hard people will cling to their notion of a past reality versus the real challenges we face in the current one.
I always say this about the 1990s: yeah, a lot of it was cool, but Kurt Cobain shot himself for a reason.
I can say as a Millennial about to hit forty years of age that the timeline of my generation is not a great one either. I could go on and on to why, but the effect, I think, is far more different than what has happened to previous generations because of the prevalence of mobile devices, social media, and a sclerotic economy that seemingly refuses to budge in helping itself out. Capitalism has not been the friend to Millennials and Gen Z like it was for Boomers and a certain percentage of Gen X, but in our vanity we don’t really stop to even think about the impacts of the other choices.
Changing the world doesn’t happen overnight or easily.
Worse, it doesn’t change at all if people are too worn out to care.
I write Fantasy because I love it as much and more than anything else (other than my wife, kid, and cat), but also because it allows an expression of the soul many of us seek to find in our words, crafts, duties, what-have-you. Of course the other genres do this in other ways, but Fantasy in itself is unique because it can verbalize in the internal world in ways the others often refuse, but also include those other things.
I need to find the words to tackle the spell of doom we have placed upon ourselves, wrapped in the illusion of a time we’re never getting back.
At the same time, the past matters, can enrich us, and I believe sensible nostalgia could lead to reflection instead of regurgitation of the old to the sake of staving off the new, or the scary, or the challenging. I also need to find the words to speak to men because I am fearful for what the world is going to look like for my little boy, and it is already worse than anything my peers of any gender expression had to deal with in our youth.
Part of the danger of Nostalgia is that it tricks us with safety.
For me, that is what I remember of the Late-1980s and the 1990s and my Aunt Francis’s backyard—I was safe, but it kinda felt like so was everyone else (even though we know that not to be the case.) I think everyone in search of Nostalgia is in search of safety, but there are forces who want to use that safety to lure the naïve, unexpecting, and most often the unaware into predatory situations and a sedated position to be abused. We see this in music, business, sports, finance, film and television, Big Tech, the arts, the sciences, and yes, especially in publishing. Andrew Tate is out there selling young men pyrite from a time that never existed save in bad martial arts films, but you can’t sit here and tell me that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have a better plan for those boys and young men either when they are trying to hearken to a 90s bipartisanship that died with Florida and the Supreme Court throwing the election to Bush. One reason we want to relive those “halcyon” days always breaks down to a feeling of security, which I think several Saudi Arabian terrorists demolished for every American on September 11th, 2001.
There’s something going wrong here. The technology placed in our hands is being used to silo us not only into digital walled gardens we only inhabit like zoo animals, but silo ourselves away from each other and the actual experience of living this life in the real. The Matrix-allusion aside, men are being spun into realities where they are meaner, violent, and disregard goodness for a self-defined sense of the word that is permissive of abuse and exploitation.
And then they’re being told that’s okay. “It’s the world that’s doing this to you, so you must do it back to the world.”
What a crock of shit.
But to prove that the stew in the cauldron these wizards and witches of the elite are brewing is, indeed, a crock of shit I need to find the words to describe for you the awful taste, and that there are things out there that not only taste better than a crock of a shit, but are better for you, your soul, and those around you where it counts: in the mind, body, and the spirit, by ourselves and as part of each other.
I keep you apace of the journey. Until then!