This is a purely fictional story, taking inspiration from Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and a whole lot of other things! It is a tale in the form of a poem, and I hope to continue it with many more parts to come…
The People of Gol’em
In the time before time lived a being
Nothing but existing; suspended in the void
Not seeing, not feeling, it wasn’t created
Nor shall it be destroyed
In it’s timeless state it stirred, it’s mind unfurled
Behold, Order and Chaos spilled forth!
Floating in the aether; no shape or form
Until they clashed, and a half of the void was torn apart
In its place a million, million stars
Celestial bodies, twisting and burning with flame
Bound on the battlefield of this mortal plain
The war between Order and Chaos raged
And from this eternal struggle, the Earth was made
Blood spilled from their strife
And mixed creating life
On the surface of this trivial grain
Beasts burst from the Earth as trees
The rains gave birth to the creatures of the seas
The winds that drifted by awakened the creatures of the sky
Order gave life, Chaos gave death
And they intertwined to create a cycle
As rhythmic as your breath
From within the dust formed hundreds of lifeless husks
Fashioned by mysterious hands
They were struck with the breath of life
Behold, the creation of woman and man!
This humanity rose, and a Voice said unto them
“From this day forth, you shall be known as the people of Gol’em
Order has birthed you, Chaos shall take you
And from your seeds shall rise the nations of men
You shall wander the Earth evermore
And you shall have the power to love, and to wage war
You shall be of different shapes and colours
And that is a blessing, for like the fruits of the trees
You shall invoke a vibrant word
But mark my words
Even with this wisdom and warning
You will sacrifice your health and chase all the wealth
Alas, it is of no use where I await you in the void”
Scatter they did, and their numbers did grow
Generations would come and go
Until the blood started to flow as they split into their tribes and clans
They were no longer the people of Gol’em
Behold this rabble of woman and man!
Time passed in a torrent as mighty nations were forged
Yet for Order, Chaos and their eternal fight
They dwindled out of sight
As sparks among the clashing of swords
The being of the void watched his children, and his children’s children
In the ocean of time, it glimpsed humanity’s end
As well as it’s beginning…
Whitechapel Gods is best described to me as a dark blend of fantasy and science fiction set in Victorian London.
In an area of London known as Whitechapel, two mechanical Gods arise; Grand Father Clock of cold logic and Mama Engine of creativity and emotion. Whitechapel becomes a walled off place that is not loyal to the Queen or London. Lifeless killer robots called boiler men who are almost unbeatable patrol these walls and the streets, carrying out the will of Grand Father Clock while the black cloaks serve Mama Engine.
Cover of Whitechapel Gods
On top of all of that a mysterious disease goes through Whitechapel, slowly ripping apart the flesh of the victims and slowly turning them into lifeless mechanical beings. As Grand Father Clock aims to complete full order and Mama Engine does her Great Work, people are sent to the Chimney where they are tortured but kept alive by machines and not allowed to die.
Meanwhile, in the literal and metaphorical underground world, the Queen’s agents are aiming to topple these Gods, and they face many challenges and losses ahead. On top of that there are other Gods waiting to arise…
Review
On a personal level, the book starts off in a mass of confusion for me and I found it hard throughout to fully imagine what the author was trying to convey. Nevertheless, he was very successful in creating a sense of darkness and despair in Whitechapel, completely transforming it from the Whitechapel that I have seen.
The characters are truly loveable and believable. Oliver, a former rebel who is troubled by his past and his failures which resulted in the death of many innocents. Missy who was a former prostitute drugged into submission by her madame, Gisella, whose voice still haunts her. Bailey is a British patriot and leader of the current resistance. Bergen Keuper, a mysterious German explorer who appears to be cold, fearless and calculating. John Scared, an old but cunning man with his own little game, notorious for forcing children and urchins to watch his brutal torture methods. These are just some of the characters that I can list of the top of my head and they all interrelate realistically and very nicely.
However, like I said, it was confusing, and so one has to be patient until the pieces start falling into place. What kept me reading was the genre and the concept of Mechanical Gods that could possibly fall, but I imagine that those who aren’t initially interested might not get very far. The reason that the Gods fascinated me was because it provoked thought of how one can really define a God, and their apparent mortality lies close to Nordic and Greek mythology, which is far different from the world religions of today.
Despite all of this, it was a truly inspiring book even if it was fictional. It is a story of incredible resilience against almost impossible odds, and packed with action. It is not childish as people will swear and curse and that helps with the real gritty feeling of the story. But my favourite parts are when the author describes each of the Mechanical Gods, their inner workings, their minds and how they affect and break human beings. It is a tough job to do this convincingly, but the author does it well and makes it look easy.
Do you want a physical, spiritual adventure set in a dark London with an exquisite blend of science fiction and fantasy? Then please read this book!
I made a thread on a social networking site (Reddit) about the importance of writing out time lines for story planning. A contributor recommended a piece of software called yEd for making quick diagrams and graphs (it is free!).
Now concerning my own work in progress, called the Circular Polis, I had already written a timeline on paper, and I generally find it better to write things on paper. However, there were other things to plan, and I decided to use this software to plan it. The precise aspect was the structure of my fictional army that belonged to the Polis, a modern dystopia state loosely based on Plato’s republic but with a dark twist.
Anyway here is the end result of my planning:
As you can see, the units themselves (beneath the squads, cavalries and bombardiers) are very Greek influence for obvious reasons.
Now on to the software itself. The basics of it is that I only had to spend at most a full comfortable hour before I mastered it, so there is no steep learning curve. It is quite intuitive to use and you can construct all sorts of programmes. As you can see on the link above, if you are still sceptical about using it then you can run it straight from the website by downloading a simple file (remember to have the latest version of Java installed).
But on a personal note, I quite enjoy writing things on paper instead of always using software. But it does have an advantage in that you can save the plans, save them as .jpeg images, and upload them on internet cloud systems such as dropBox or google docs.
Download it, try it out a little and do what is most comfortable in the end. Happy planning!
I have been working on The Circular Polis for quite a bit now, I guess it is one form of escapism for me.
Perhaps I should explain what this thing exactly is. It is a story. Is it a novella? A novel? Or even a short story? I don’t exactly know, all I know is that I am on the fourth chapter so far.
The Circular Polis is the tale of two members of the Secret Police in a modern dystopian city known as The Republic of the Polis and how they are caught in the middle of a conspiracy that leads to war. What they find out is starkly different to what they think they know.
The society of the Circular Polis is quite loosely based on Plato’s perfect city state with a militaristic twist to it. There are three main classes of citizens in the state. The workers, the guardians and the philosophers. Each class has its internal rankings. The workers can be simple manual workers, craftsmen or managers of entire factories. The guardians can range from police men, to soldiers in the army and members of the R.S.A. (Republic’s Secret Auxiliary) or secret police. The Philosophers are mainly politicians who are entrusted to run the Polis with a fair but heavy hand. Guardians are selected according to ability to train and become philosophers, while workers stay as workers all their lives meaning that there is little social mobility for them.
There is no concept of a nuclear family in the state. People of the same class are selected to breed with each other. The newborn is swiftly taken to the academic sector where they are looked after, reared and then trained depending on who their parents are. The child is at first told the “noble lie”, that is that the Earth has given birth to him and the state as well and that all are family. Only when they mature are they told the truth. The biological parents are to carry on their lives as normal. In the modern era, test tube fertilization which is more remote for the participants is being used more and more often.
The difficulty of imagining a place where there is no such thing as parenthood is way more difficult then cooking up a random creature in one’s mind, and I guess that is part of the challenge. It just sounds so strange and alien, so unlike any other society that I personally heard of before that it may just be impossible to conceptualize consistently, but I guess that is part of the fun of writing a book like this.
We drove uphill on a dirt track in a friends car. We were visiting his new home in Jenin, north of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which will be finished soon. I was glad to get out of the car as every single one in this place is like an oven when put under the summer sun. It was also a breath of fresh air to see independent homes instead of tower blocks that ate away at the hills of Palestine.
Our friend had left a small patch of dirt in which to grow some plants. A green plant was already growing there, it was a leafy one that we call “farfahina” which I had tasted in salad a few times. He cut a batch off and handed it to me and I ate from it. It has this distinct tangy taste of warmth, and to eat it fresh from the soil, was, to me, an honour.
The most significant part of this short trip, however, was to see the balcony of the house. Almost every home had one for those hot summer days and nights to hang out in. This particular balcony faced north into Israel proper and I stood there just staring at the land that was starting to flatten from the hills of the West Bank. I was undisturbed as the balcony was shielded from the hot sun. It was when I was looking that our friend stands besides me and says
‘Do you see that hill over there?’
Indeed, there standing alone like a giant pimple, was a large hill dotted with trees, it must have been over two miles away.
‘Yeah, I see it’ I reply
‘Just over that hill lies Tiberius’
Tiberius, where my family was from. It was then that the air became still and fresh as I was taken back in time, back over sixty long years. My grandfather had just built a house in Tiberius itself that overlooked the beautiful sea of Galilee. It was not actually a sea but a large blue lake. How scared must he and his family have been to flee all the way to Syria and Lebanon in the wake of the 1948 Arab Israeli war? They turned their backs on this place never to see it again, with no clue as to what lies for them in the future. And our village, al-Shajara? It has become nothing but a ghost town that is now in ruins, almost indistinguishable from its natural surroundings. Now it lives only in our memories for those brief periods of time that we do talk about it.
And yet, here I am. The third generation of the catastrophe that befell us. I am only a few miles away from a place that holds our tragic tale. I gazed at the foot of that hill and sure enough there was a fence that represented the Green Line, the border between Israel and Palestine. Will it turn into the ugly grey concrete wall that I glimpsed in Bethlehem and near Jerusalem? Maybe. I knew that if I was to go near there the best thing that would happen would be that I get a warning, the worst thing would be that I get shot dead. Here I am, the third generation, and we still have not seen Tiberius again.
Asides from hip-hop, I like writing short stories and my thoughts down in general. But one day I decided that, since some hip-hop pieces do tell stories in themselves, why not try to see how they can be told in the form of prose? So I chose a track to base a story on, and that track is Broken Window by Rhyme Asylum in their album Solitary Confinement, (I wrote an article about this piece before) and here is their track:
What is great about doing something like this (and which I will do more of in the future) is that because of the nature of hip-hop, there is not a lot of detail compared to that of prose and so you are left to your own imagination as you add detail. It is as if the track has provided the story and a basic skeleton, and I was left to add the flesh of it all. For example, there was no detail regarding how Dr Dean Emmett in the track was arrested, so this is what I did “Three loud knocks penetrated the silence of Dr Emmet’s one bedroom apartment. He jumped from his bed and glanced at the time; 4 in the morning, who could it be?”
Once could actually add their own spin to the whole thing. I made this piece sound like a classical Halloween scary story just by adding a little ending: “It was said that on the night of the Doctor’s death violent noises were heard in the air ducts and the institution’s alarm was set off for no explainable reason.”
The character or characters within the track were not given much of a back story, and it is really fun when you are given a character and you come up with how they ended up in a certain situation (it is harder than it sounds!). “Having gained a degree of Psychology from the University of Durham and working for a counselling agency in London, one could tell that he was well off. Still ambitious at the age of forty three; he would have had a bright future ahead of him.”
Funnily enough, the reason I chose the University of Durham was actually because one of my Chemistry/Physics teachers at school (who was very intelligent and cool) actually went there. Anyway, without further ado, here is the story itself: http://hayatli7.deviantart.com/#/d3fi3wi
I look forward to writing more things like this, actually I am working on one now inspired by Immortal Technique’s Dance with the Devil. I hope that it will come out nicely.
In my first post ever (second paragraph) I mentioned briefly the role of the beat with every track, and that is being used as a guide for the rhythmic flow of the artist. But that is not all. The beat, being a musical piece, can be used to set the mood and to add to the emotional impact of a set of lyrics. One of the best examples I can think of when it comes to mood is Rhyme Asylum‘s Broken Window from their album Solitary Confinement. When I first heard it I was engrossed in what was said and very powerful imagery formed in my mind. Here is the video, followed by the lyrics:
[Verse 1: Psiklone]
My name is Dean Emit, victim of a serious mistake Diagnosed as clinically insane Sectioned, imprisoned and detained The last thing I remember I was being physically restrained First sensed something was amiss Noticing the other inmates had cuts across their wrists My trust in the nurses hesitated Instantly ceased taking medication [Waiting] They segregated selective mental patients I once caught a glimpse of the room where they’d take them Reasons why remain undisclosed A hundred volts straight to the victim’s frontal lobes Disguised as medical tests Vulnerable people were being sentenced to death [This is beyond madness] I had to escape Spent night and day racking my brain Insomniac, but I had no solid plan One day in group therapy, eventually lost my rag [Is this some kind of sick joke?] Next thing I knew, a doctor pushed me straight through a window Awoke later in my bed, as my mind cleared A pain in my side sparking the idea Tied up without side effects Shook loose the undetected shard of glass from behind my vest Heart pounding inside my chest Managed to slice my restraints, fell down beside my bed Stood up, pulled off the ceiling’s iron mesh Climbed the winding vent entangled in spider webs Exited down a flight of steps Ditched my hospital gown so the dogs won’t find the scent Felt the cold wind on my face Blinded by the moonlight, my mental prison escape
[Verse 2: Possessed]
His name was Doctor Emit institutionalised For committing the most unusual crimes Torturing patients numerous times ‘Till one escaped, brought the truth to the light Losing his mind but kept it top secret Unnecessary methods of shock treatment No waiting list kept going till the power died Or the patient did, which ever came first He was a slave to his hunger within Tied them up sewed razors under their skin Eyes void of emotion When asked why he did it, he just said the voices had spoken Insane, locked in a cell Dementia in control of all knowledge of self Day to day he’d yell about the crimes Like he didn’t do them and they’re still taking place Swimming in the depths of depression Volatile, living on the edge of aggression Never did get a confession (Flipped out) during a routine group therapy session When asked “are you scared of the past?” He jumped up by the window put his chair through the glass Demented look in his face Guards took him away put him to bed fully restrained Didn’t bother drugging him up The next morning they walked in and saw him covered in blood Should’ve known from behaviour patterns That this was a suicide waiting to happen Life he came to hate with a passion Shard to the wrist, fatal attraction Examining the evil deed There it was on the floor the jagged killer that didn’t flee the scene Broken Window
[4 x Outro] Window to the soul, broken Now his ghost is out in the open
The first thing I noticed when I clicked play for the first time ever, was the beat and that is because it is the first thing that plays (duh!). The melancholy mood it sets really reflects the subject of the track and works with it very well. The slow piano rhythm accommodates the slower more dramatic flow of the artists in this, which is very good for suspense.
“A hundred volts straight to the victim’s frontal lobes” When the artist says this particular line, a very special feature of story telling is revealed. When you are recounting your own experiences or that of someone else, you do not say it in a monotone voice, but in an emotional tone that reflects the mood of the experience itself. This becomes very very clear with this line when he uses one of fear and sheer surprise.
“Vulnerable people were being sentenced to death [This is beyond madness] I had to escape Spent night and day racking my brain Insomniac, but I had no solid plan One day in group therapy, eventually lost my rag” Events unfold in rapid succession which in this case gives the effect of something building up into a climax.
“A pain in my side sparking the idea” He says this line with genuine surprise and epiphany, you can almost see a light bulb shining above his head there, which is great. He is experiencing this, he isn’t retelling the experiences of someone else.
“Shook loose the undetected shard of glass from behind my vest Heart pounding inside my chest Managed to slice my restraints, fell down beside my bed Stood up, pulled off the ceiling’s iron mesh Climbed the winding vent entangled in spider webs” From the first line in this section the beat, and the artists voice, really pick up. He uses a lot of active verbs to make it an active section, so all of this combined makes for a very suspenseful piece.
“Blinded by the moonlight, my mental prison escape” The way he finishes of the verse by saying this line is immense! Psiklone literally kills this verse; amazing work.
Now we start with Possessed, who plays a different character
“His name was Doctor Emit institutionalised For committing the most unusual crimes” Having a name is very important, as it gives a point of reference. And if you pay attention you will realize that this is a major twist in the form of a radically different perspective on things.
“No waiting list kept going till the power died Or the patient did, which ever came first” The way this was executed was good because it is something you just expect to hear in a horror/scary story. I could imagine someone sitting by a fire and saying this line.
“Tied them up sewed razors under their skin Eyes void of emotion When asked why he did it, he just said the voices had spoken Insane, locked in a cell Dementia in control of all knowledge of self Day to day he’d yell about the crimes Like he didn’t do them and they’re still taking place” Here he is making connections with what the first character was saying but from a different perspective (see lines 6 – 14). The second and third lines in this section are creepy as hell!
“He jumped up by the window put his chair through the glass” This is what really happened when Psiklone’s character said a doctor pushed him through a window. Crazy eh?
“Didn’t bother drugging him up” The beat once again picks up from this point to create an increase in suspense up to the climax:
“Should’ve known from behaviour patterns That this was a suicide waiting to happen” So Psiklone’s character commits suicide, so what was going on from his perspective when he was running through the field with the moonlight on his face? We get the answer at the very end:
“Examining the evil deed There it was on the floor the jagged killer that didn’t flee the scene Broken Window”
[4 x Outro] Window to the soul, broken Now his ghost is out in the open“
This piece is interesting because it brings two parallel perspectives side by side, yet it doesn’t say for definite which one is right and the other is wrong. Rhyme Asylum seem to have a recurring theme of madness/insanity in their tracks and the theme here was put to good use when they put perspectives under question. But as well as that, I think this made an awesome horror story!
RT @hazemhayatli: #edl hitting the streets of london causing fear. Not all Muslims are terrorists and not all English people are #EDL http:… - posted 3 days ago
