The Pneumanaut

‘Reconaissance ship against the sun’. The Complete Book of Space Travel, by Albro Tilton Gaul. Illustrations by Virgil W. Finlay. 1955.

*Oh wait, I suppose I did!

'Pneumanauts' Cover Reveal & Preorders!

C. J. W. Armstrong — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:47:21 GMT

Anchorfall in T-Minus 13 days…

We are only two weeks out from launch, people! If you’ve been following my journey to publication at all, you’ll know that pretty soon my debut sci-fi novel Pneumanauts will be released into the big bad world to fend for itself. I’d love for you to be among the earliest to grab a copy for yourself and journey with Kirk, Roland, Louis and Marlene across the Saskatchewanian prairie in search of…extraterrestrial life? Existential purpose? God? Or is there any meaningful difference between them?

Below is the link to the publisher’s website if you’d like to preorder. At present, the only option is to order directly from the lovely people at Eclogue Press themselves (which is actually the best financial option for them and for me, but not necessarily for you) which will be printed and shipped by their supplier. My understanding is that the novel will go up on Amazon before August 30th, the official launch. As Eclogue is based in the US, readers from other countries will likely have to pay shipping and import fees. If that’s a barrier for yourself, I totally understand—maybe wait until the Amazon option goes up and evaluate your options. The Ebook version (also to be released at a later date) is also a possibility as well, and crosses borders frictionlessly!

Anyway, if you’re really committed and keen to see what I’ve been cooking up, don’t be a stranger and preorder here!

But that’s not all! I’ve also been working with a dear friend on developing a professional website. Still a work in progress, but it’s actually already launched—go on and take a gander!

I’d also recommend subscribing to this newsletter, if you haven’t already, as there will be more news and promotion coming soon! Maybe even a giveaway or two…

But really, what you’ve been waiting for is the juicy preview, right? I know I’ve been fairly coy thus far regarding just what this story is all about. It’s sci-fi—you know that much—but maybe not the kind you might be used to. It’s set in 1976, for one, instead of some distant future. It’s set on the Canadian prairie, which is not a place people usually think science fiction-y stuff happens. If that’s already piquing your interest, I’ll also remind you that I’ve written several pieces offering peeks at what’s really going on under the hood. You can check out the novel’s origin story, the accompanying semi-official soundtrack, and the intertextual library I’ve been curating.

Okay, okay! I’ll quit stalling. Allow me to share with you the blurb from the back cover to give you a sense of what you’re in for:

We never made it to the Moon.
In 1969, when alien objects anchored themselves in Earth’s orbit, humanity braced for the end—an end that hasn’t yet come. After a period of hysteria, the world slowly returned to its status quo. These Big Dumb Objects, however, still loom overhead, waiting to unleash their wrath upon the Earth.
Seven years after the objects’ arrival, teenagers Kirk, Roland, and Louis set off in a stolen van to hunt for answers to half-formed questions about their purpose, place, and existence in a universe much stranger than previously thought. All the while, an intangible clock ticks down. Rumors abound of an attempted first contact, and only God knows what will happen if the BDOs finally open up.
As the “spirit sailors” drive West across the Canadian prairie, confrontations with the past expose old wounds. Coming of age in an age of stagnation isn’t easy—and it isn’t any easier when the people you’re counting on are exactly the ones standing in your way.

We’ve also already got a bit of feedback from ARC readers. Here’s what hasd to say:

Pneumanauts is an ambitious exploration of heavenly signs and existential doom, while remaining a grounded story of a wild 1970s road trip. This is a novel which avoids easy answers and forces readers to confront the lies we tell to others and to ourselves.

…And here’s that amazing cover I’ve been titillating you with!

Cover art by .

So, consider yourself duly informed! The debut novel from myself, C.J.W. Armstrong, and Eclogue Press is launching August 30th. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss out—there’s more to come!

The Stone Age Man

C. J. W. Armstrong — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:42:41 GMT

I must confess that, for most of my life, I’ve not felt much enthusiasm for the genre of poetry. When it comes to creatively exploring my innermost thoughts or feelings, I’ve never felt drawn to this particular method of expression. However, I’ll credit moving to Ireland—a country with a rich literary history and poetic tradition—as sparking a newfound interest in it. Reading some of the greatest poets in the English language and studying their craft has helped me to gain an appreciation for the art form, and with it, a keen desire to experiment.

This time around I’ve gone for a more narrative-led approach, rather than heavily focus on structure or language. The power of this poem—so far as there is any—lies in the internal experience of the character, I feel. What’s beautiful about poetry is its ability to convey and grant access to an ‘inner world’, or an ultimate truth. Our Stone Age Man does not have the same sophisticated words or conceptualiztions to express his thoughts as we do, yet his mind is aflame with all the same yearnings and fears and hopes as ours. A poem, then, might be the best tool we have to help us to bridge the ten-thousand year gap between our own consciousnesses and that of our ancestor.

I hope you’ll enjoy this poem. If you do, please take a moment to let me know, either by liking or commenting. Your encouragement and feedback will certainly go a long way to helping this fledgling wordsmith develop his confidence—and skill!

Émile-Antoine Bayard, illustration for Louis Figuier's L'Homme primitif, engraved by Charles Laplante, 1870.

The Stone Age Man

by C. J. W. Armstrong

The Stone Age Man

Seated by an ebbing fire ‘neath the starry canopy

Lay his head down next to his mate and slumbering kin

And dreamed a dream so vivid and bright and fantastic—

More wondrous than he had words to express—

That he could not tell of it to anyone thereafter.

He saw himself as something radiant:

Nobly-born

An Enlightened Age Man

Adept in understanding, aflame with ambition

Climbing toward heaven, the stars his handholds and footholds

Supporting his ascent as he scaled the Moon and surmounted the Sun.

He saw others like him; they talked together

Debated and contended in arcane tongues

Sharpening words and wits against one another’s, like weapons

Weapons they wielded cunningly, keenly, cutting their kindred down

At times in the name of strange ideas, strange gods, strange obsessions

At times in the name of nothing more than blood, soil, or gold

At times for love, at the cost of all else.

The marvelous works they had raised up, they tore down again

Their burnished blades now abraded to blunt instruments

Their towers were burning and their stars blotted by smoke

And he saw himself differently, then:

A Dark Age Man

Woeful and weeping

And he heard himself say:

‘If only we had not risen so high,

We might not have fallen so far.’

The Stone Age Man started, woke

Blinked his bewildered eyes in the embers’ terminal glow

So wondrous, so terrible was this dream

So impossible to express

That he could not tell of it to anyone thereafter.

And so he lay his head down again next to his mate and his kin

Brushed the hand of his child—still breathing, slow and gentle—

And went back to sleep.

The 'Pneumanauts' Intertextual Library

C. J. W. Armstrong — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:08:46 GMT

Anchorfall in T-Minus 30 days

No work of fiction exists in a vacuum. I’ve been reading books, watching movies and listening to music for nearly my entire life, and it’s undeniable that they have informed my view of the world. I mean, ideas have to come from somewhere, even if we’re not sure exactly where or why. Regarding my novel, I can’t claim that everything sprang onto the page from out of nowhere; no, I’d already been marinating in an ideational soup for several decades by the time I sat down to write what would become Pneumanauts. Sure, I had certain touchstone texts I was specifically mindful of as I conceptualized and formulated the novel, but these were merely the ones that bubbled up to the surface of my consciousness. Just think about how many ideas, opinions, values, thoughts and beliefs were simmering away down in the depths, shaping me in ways I could neither describe nor comprehend…

Wait, what’s this about soup? Forget the metaphor—my point is that everything is connected in ways subtler and more profound than we can readily appreciate. As such, this list is less about the works which directly inspired Pneumanauts and more about works that are—to use the haughty parlance of an English literature major—‘in dialogue’ with the novel. There are some stories here that I love; others I have mixed feelings about. All made me think. They share some of their conceptual/thematic/structural DNA, though they may be quite distinct from one another. They may even be oppositional or contradictory, but that can be a good thing. Often it’s when we probe the tension between differing perspectives that a better, more holistic understanding arises, I think. Reading this novel is just the beginning of a much longer journey you could take—one you’ve already undertaken, in fact.

It’s my intention to continue adding to this library as time goes on. I want to catalogue the stories I stumble across which have something to say in response to my novel, and vice versa. The human endeavour to understand ourselves and our place in the universe (chiefly expressed through our compulsion to create and consume art, I believe) is a webwork of perspectives, experiences, values and beliefs; there’s something to glean from each and every one of them. I certainly don’t have the full picture, and neither does anybody else. It’s only by sitting down at the proverbial campfire under the stars and regaling each other with our stories, listening to one another, critiquing one another, that we can begin to see the bigger picture. We can catch a glimpse of ourselves situated in the tapestry of human history, our lives weaving together a (sometimes incoherent) grander narrative.

So, if you’re planning on reading, currently reading, or have read Pneumanauts, and you’re wondering ‘What else is out there?’, I’d say this list is a good place to start. Let my work be a jumping-off point to begin exploring the works of other wonderful minds. It behoves the curious and introspective to read, watch and listen widely. Consider what this novel is trying to say, and weigh it up against other voices. Above all, keep wondering and wandering, as we pneumanauts do. Don’t worry too much about the destination—odds are, you’ll never feel as if you’ve ‘arrived’, achieved all that you want to achieve, made it all make sense. But neither is it true that you can’t progress. We can always go farther, delve deeper, aim closer to the mark. Each connection we make is a new pathway to tread, a new channel for thought. Potential for change, in essence. And if we’re not changing, then we’re not moving, and if we’re not moving, then we’re dead.

You’re not dead yet, are you? Good. So keep going. Check something new out from the library. It’ll be worth it.

Artwork by David A. Hardy.

Fiction Section

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
This one goes without saying. I mentioned in a previous post how this novel helped me to see science fiction in a whole new light and gave me the courage to progress with writing Pneumanauts. I won’t repeat all of that here; I’ll just touch on some of the overlaps between the stories that might get the ‘dialogue’ going.
Parable focuses deeply on religious themes, but frames them in a way I found utterly engrossing. It asks questions like: what might a religion of the future be like? One that seeks to correct the imbalances and injustices of the religions of the past by embracing change, instead of struggling against it? Who could lead such a religion? Who would follow? Could these devoted few actually succeed in reshaping a world broken by hatred, war, mistrust and deceit?
Parable suggests that such a thing could be possible. It’s set against the backdrop of an America descending into chaos, turning into a dystopian nightmare—a nation falling apart at the seams. This devolution is in part fuelled by a dangerous new drug craze (something that my own novel inverts). The violence and desperation on display are harrowing, but the main character presses forward, nurturing her small but growing movement. There’s a distinct sense of hope—peace, even—that she possesses, despite the adversity she faces along her journey (again, contrasting the sense of impending doom felt by the characters in Pneumanauts).
Honestly, if you’re looking for a place to continue exploring the themes present in my work, this is it. Highly recommended!
A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews
It’s been a long time since I read this novel, but it’s stuck with me all these years. Set in a Mennonite town in Manitoba (one of the prairie provinces of Canada, next door to Saskatchewan, where the protagonists of Pneumanauts hail from) it tells the story of a teenage girl who’s been ostensibly abandoned by her mother and sister and struggles to feel as if she belongs in the community. Mennonites, in case you aren’t familiar, are a certain Christian group who practice varying degrees of ‘simple living’—not unlike the Amish, though the latter are more restrictive, on balance. Our poor protagonist feels quite stifled living in her lonely Mennonite town; she rails against the dogmatic preacher, the strict codes of behaviour, the social norms. She’s been raised as part of this distinct and, from her point of view, repressive ‘world’ where everyone follows a certain pattern, professes certain beliefs. She feels she’s been indoctrinated, basically, and she finds ways to fight back.
That rebellious spirit she shares with the main protagonists of Pneumanauts, to some degree. The desire to escape the claustrophobic confines of a smothering hometown—to say nothing of said town’s smothering religiosity—can be overpowering for a young person. These two things I know to be true: teenage angst is a very real force, and coming of age is never an easy or straightforward process.
The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg
I swear to you, I read Book of Skulls long after I’d finished writing Pneumanauts. I’d already signed the publishing deal before I even knew this book existed! Thank goodness somebody alerted me to it, though, because it’s astounding how much narrative DNA this story shares with my own novel.
Here are the basics: four young men drive across America to visit the site where an ancient cult is supposed to have hidden themselves away, all in pursuit of obtaining the secret to eternal life. The cult promises to grant immortality to whomever survives the ritual—a ritual which requires the blood sacrifice of any two of their members. But is any of this real? Is there really a cult living out there in the Arizonan desert? Do they really have the power to help new initiates cheat death—and is such a thing even desirable? Each fellow has his own view on the matter, and their personal beliefs—as well as reasons for going along on this road trip—differ greatly.
Normally, I’d be worried about how much overlap there is between this story and my own. Does this mean I’m unoriginal? Hackneyed? Derivative? Not so, I think, because the devil’s in the differences. For starters: there’s a streak of cruelty running through this novel, as well as heavy 70s-era sexualization and misogyny. It gets dark in ways I wasn’t quite ready for, and it delves deep into the ugliest parts of the male psyche. An R-Rated story to contrast with my own PG-13. But at the end of the day, it’s a story about faith as much as it’s about anything else. What does it mean to really believe—to have a faith so strong, you’ll throw anything and everything else away before you abandon it?
Also, it’s certainly true that nothing new is under the sun. Unlike Newton and Leibniz, who feuded over who deserved credit for discovering calculus, which both men had notated separately with no knowledge of the other’s work, I’d be proud to be seen as having put together the same ideas as Robert Silverberg all on my own. He’s one of sci-fi’s most prolific writers, and has a brilliant imagination. I find it something of a marvel that this novel exists at all, and was written in 1972, no less! I’m just glad I knew nothing about it before I started writing…
Recommended, but only if you’ve got a strong stomach and a willingness to look for the humanity in otherwise repellent people.
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
Foolishly, I once thought that religion and science fiction had nothing to do with one another. I should have read Canticle years ago, because it shows just how integral religious experience can be to people’s lives, even after something as calamitous as nuclear fallout.
The basic premise of the novel is that, in the distant future, humanity ekes out a meagre existence in the aftermath of total civilizational collapse. It is the Catholic Church—which, as an institution, survived nuclear war and everything that came with it—which now acts to safeguard human knowledge, and therefore holds the key for humanity’s restoration. It’s an idea based on historical truth, in fact; during the Dark Ages, it was Christian monks who preserved the legacy and wisdom of Greek and Roman thinkers by copying out their texts for centuries. Later, these foundational ideas would be rediscovered by a new and literate generation during the Renaissance.
Ignorance was always our truest enemy, argue both the monks of yesteryear and the novel. It’s an idea that I find intriguing: faith in a higher power is not ignorance at all, but necessary—especially in times of strife. Since at least one of the characters in my novel holds on to their faith, at least in some sense, it feels as though Canticle offers an affirming view of why it’s worth it to do so, even when the world’s gone to ruin and it doesn’t make much sense to believe in anything at all.
Five Little Indians, by Michelle Good
My novel, by its very nature, can only speak from a particular perspective. Though the main characters view themselves and their experiences as representative of ‘what it’s like’ to grow up in rural Saskatchewan during the 1970s, the truth is, their stories are hardly representative of all possible stories. One of the key ideas in Pneumanauts is that it may be impossible for any of us to truly understand or appreciate how another person sees the world. So, what are we to do about that?
Michelle Good’s novel represents a side of Canadian history and identity that’s likely unfamiliar to many people. She writes about the experiences of several First Nations (the term Canadians tend to call Indigenous people, as opposed to ‘Indians’) teenagers who are released from the residential school where they’ve been living for some time. If you don’t know anything about the history of the residential schools, well, I’d recommend you read the novel as a place to start learning. It’s something like the national shame of Canada—a government facilitated effort to eradicate First Nations people and culture.
I was quite sensitive to the fact that by including a First Nations character to round out the three main protagonists, all of whom are part of the ‘settled’ population, I was in effect putting words in the mouth of a person whom I couldn’t easily claim to understand. I read Good’s book, among other things, as a way of trying to see things a bit differently. I don’t even know if it’s possible to succeed in such an endeavour—that’s the tension that exists in my own novel—but it does seem worthwhile at least to try. Hopefully others will see this as a valid attempt at bridging gaps and encouraging reconciliation, however minimal.

Film Section

Dazed and Confused, directed by Richard Linklater
The quintessential coming-of-age film for life in the 1970s, as far as I can tell. Not so much a single, cohesive story as it is a meandering exposition of the lives of various teenagers, all navigating the highs and lows of idle adolescence on a hot Texan night. Required viewing for anybody looking to capture the zeitgeist of the era, I would argue. (Also features Matthew McConaughey’s film debut in a small but iconic role.)
Dark Star, directed by John Carpenter
Stoners on a neverending space trip—that pretty much sums up this movie. It’s a sci-fi B (or C?) movie about some astronauts carrying out tedious waste management tasks on a rusty old ship drifting through space. There are sentient bombs on board that must be placated to keep from detonating prematurely. Philosophical interlocution seems to help with this. There’s a beach ball alien bouncing around on board (yes, you read that right). At the end of the movie somebody surfs straight into the sun. Think low-budget, rough-edged, burnt-out Space Odyssey, and you’ve got the gist.
It’s absolutely the kind of thing that some knuckleheaded 20-something college dudes would dream up after getting blazed, and indeed, it’s exactly that—it started its life as a student film at the University of Southern California. But that doesn’t make it any less human, or interesting, in my view. But what can I say? Had I been born just a few decades earlier, I might easily have been one of those film student knuckleheads dreaming up a movie like this!
2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick
The real McCoy of transcendental, mind-expanding cinema. My all time favourite movie, with no sense of irony. We can debate if the final 20-minute psychedelic trip is visionary or excessively indulgent (it’s the former), whether the intro is tediously overlong or the daring work of an auteur (it’s the latter), or any number of things about the movie—I’m here for it. I think there’s a reason why this continues to be held up as Kubrick’s masterwork, and a seminal piece of sci-fi storytelling all these years later. This is a story that’s about the grandest themes imaginable—who we are as human beings, how we came to be here, and just what our place in the cosmos is. It’s Homer’s Odyssey retold for the Space Age; it’s the ultimate hero’s journey. It’s humanity’s journey, from birth to death and beyond.
Could not be more highly recommended.
Thelma and Louise, directed by Ridley Scott
A road trip journey told from a distinctly feminine perspective. The sisterly bond between the two protagonists is front and center to the story—one worldwise, the other innocent and naive. Their journey is one of glorious emancipation from the patriarchal structures (and individuals) that seek to keep them docile, submissive, dependent. It’s these two women against the world; they support one another through thick and thin, even when that support costs them everything.
It’s a brilliant movie from start to finish, with an especially brilliant and devastatingly poetic ending. Highly recommended.
First Reformed, directed by Paul Schrader
A struggling priest contends with the depravity of humanity and the apocalyptic destruction of the natural world. He does his best to maintain his fealty to his faith, to be a compassionate and effective leader to his congregation, but how much pressure can a holy man take when he truly grapples with the sheer insidiousness of the world we live in? Raw, powerful, and hauntingly bleak.

Non-Fiction (?) Section

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Not exactly straightforward to argue that Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical road trip story counts as ‘non-fiction’, but here it is anyway. This is the seminal work in the tradition of the Beat poet—the original post-WW2 rebel, the jazz cat, the outsider on a mission to find the Meaning of It All. They traipse about America with reckless abandon, burning to the ground all the structures and obligations that keep so-called ‘society’ running.
Reading it now in 2026, the actions of the two protagonists undoubtedly strike us differently than how they did the original audience. We might imagine these men quite different to how they imagined themselves; it’s not always easy to see them as free-spirited outcasts stickin’ it to the man, but rather as arrogant egotists lacking both self-awareness and awareness of just what real suffering looks like. It’s up to you to judge, of course. But the high-minded ideals they claim to serve—art, freedom, beauty, clarity of thought and spirit—these remain powerful motivators to us still, all these decades later.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Thompson imagined his own roman à clef as a direct response to Kerouac’s earlier work. This time, however, there’s none of that starry-eyed idealism on display. Thompson’s writing his own American road trip stories in the 70s, a time of despondency, cynicism, and nihilism. The dream of a better world—a freer, more equitable world—that the Beat poets sowed and the hippies of the 60s tried to nourish was well and truly dead by the time the 70s rolled around. Thompson drives his Great Red Shark (the car they’re travelling in) right over the carcass of their dreams like roadkill. Fuelled up on as many hard drugs as the human body can handle, he and his companion skitter about the blasted Mojave desert on insane errands and misadventures, their sanity fraying and splintering. There’s no meaning to be found here—it’s the funeral of Meaning. It’s the requiem of the American Dream.
The Dalí Renaissance: New Perspectives on His Life and Art after 1940, edited by Michael R. Taylor
The painting you see pictured on the cover of this book is Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), my favorite painting in the whole world. Dalí painted it at a point in his career where he was transitioning away from the surrealism he has become known for (perhaps you’re familiar with works of his like the melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory) and exploring more overtly religious themes. Dalí had become fascinated by advancements in physics, of all things, and began to formulate his own ideas about how the sciences might inform and even fulfill our deepest spiritual intuitions. He wrote treatises laying out his theories, bringing them together over the years to create ‘nuclear mysticism’, a kind of conceptual fusion between Catholicism, classicism, science and art.
For readers with no sort of academic background in these fields, it may be strange to think about Dalí’s ideas here as having any real weight or meaning that we might easily glean. But I’d remind those readers that all of us have a worldview—we’re all operating under certain assumptions about what the world is, how it works, and who we are as people within it. Dalí was an artist, so he was someone who tended to think about those worldviews a bit more deeply and expressively. ‘Nuclear mysticism’, as a worldview, is one I find incredibly attractive, though I won’t get into all my reasons why here. I’ll just say this: Crucifixion is my favorite painting not only because it’s harrowing and beautiful, but because the cross you see Jesus nailed to is actually a 4-dimensional cube. It reminds us that there are other levels to our physical reality that we cannot perceive or experience, yet are absolutely real. The world is a stranger, more wonderful place than we readily admit. The painting is a powerful reminder of that fact, and a call to explore these divine mysteries—with scientific and intellectual rigor.
Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
An important work by a 19th-century Danish philosopher might seem an odd inclusion, but Kierkegaard knows a thing or two about what it means to have faith. He examines closely the powerful and terrifying nature of the Abraham and Isaac story—the ancient Biblical narrative of a father commanded by God to offer his own son as a sacrifice. Kierkegaard’s key insight is this: an act of faith, of true faith, looks utterly incomprehensible to everyone else. The man who truly believes does not follow the rules or patterns of us ordinary, logic-bound, empirical people; he lives his life according to principles that the rest of us never dare to. He is terrifying, but he is also magnificent. He shows us what it really means to fear God, and what comes from a life lived in such ‘fear’.
- Into the Unknown: The Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Cosmos by Kelsey Johnson
  An astrophysicist explores the limits of human knowledge and understanding, especially when it comes to cosmology. She lays out what we know about the biggest questions in the universe—what is time, how did the universe begin, if there are extraterrestrials—and also makes clear what we don’t yet understand about the world we live in. And that’s something to be excited about! The author approaches these topics with clear-eyed realism about the limitations of our scientific prowess, as well as its incredible achievements, imparting a sense of wonder and excitement all throughout. After all, we humans are an inquisitive species. Our curiosity is what motivated us to stare into the fire and harness its power, to embark across vast and uncharted wilds and oceans, to look up at the stars and wonder ‘why’? There’s so much out there to discover, and if we’re to have any real chance of doing so, we need to be honest about what we know—and what we don’t know.

Pneumanauts: The (Semi) Official Soundtrack

C. J. W. Armstrong — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:43:47 GMT

This is a post I’ve been looking forward to sharing for a while now: the semi-official soundtrack to my debut novel, Pneumanauts, due to be released this August (‘semi’ because, who knows, maybe they’ll make an actual movie with its own soundtrack someday!) I’ve made no secret that music served as a significant source of inspiration for this work. If you want to know more about how the novel came to be and what influenced it, you can read my previous post here.

But for today, I’d like to set aside my authorial proclivities and instead be your drive-time DJ. Listening to these 25 tracks should give you a pretty strong sense of the spirit that animates this story. Each one acts as a sort of conceptual anchor for a certain idea, character, or critical story moment, all while paying homage to the stoner doom underground music scene, which this novel is, in part, a tribute to. I wanted to showcase a wide variety of styles and artists within the genre seeing as it exerted such a profound influence over the novel’s thematic development. To that end, I endeavored to bring together a veritable medley of tracks that run the gamut of the stoner/doom/sludge/desert-swamp-space-garage rock/heavy blues/heavy psych family. Classic hits are juxtaposed with ultra-deep cuts; titans of yesteryear are set alongside ambitious up-and-comers; raucous fist-thumpers give way to contemplative downtempo ballads; oldies are covered, reinterpreted and made new again. Taken all together, this collection acts as a celebration not just of the novel, but of the stoner doom movement as a whole—honoring its roots, its identity, and its development through the decades.

If you just want to listen to the music without any potential story spoilers, the full list is here in proper order. (You’ll need a Spotify account to listen to them in full, bar one track which isn’t available in the Spotify library—I’ve a different link below for that). I say ‘proper order’ because the tracks have been arranged to follow the narrative thrust of the story. Think of it like a concept album: this playlist is designed to carry you along a journey in much the same way as the characters in the novel are. I’d recommend listening to them in sequence to get the bona fide experience. If you’re out on a long drive, winding along dusty roads and dead stretches of open highway, so much the better! As I’ve said before, Pneumanauts is a road trip story—and what’s a good road trip without some killer tunes to blast on the speakers?

Anyway, here are the links to each song:

You might like to listen to this playlist before reading the novel to get a foretaste of what’s about to unfold. Or, maybe you’ll come back after having read the story to see for yourself how these tracks connect. Maybe you’re just on the hunt for a few good music recommendations. That’s more than fine!

However, if you’d like to go deeper, below you’ll find a breakdown of each song and what its special significance to the novel is. I hope you find some tracks you truly enjoy, even if the musical styles represented here aren’t quite your cup of tea. Fair warning, though: there are some spoilers below, as quite a few of these songs directly link with important plot moments in the narrative. I’ll try to be cryptic in the telling so as to not give too much away.

Happy reading/listening!

Supernaut. Artwork by Jonathan Grimm Art.

1. Vidage

by 1000mods

From the 2011 album Supervan Vacation

Are you lost when you’ve found your way?

This track sets the mould for all the others—perfectly emblematic of what the stoner doom scene’s (and the novel’s) aesthetic is all about. Picture a beat-up old boogie van rollin’ down the street in the steaming heat of summer, glazed-eye teens slumped against the sweat-stained seats. You’ve got the vibe, right? Now buckle up, we’re going for a ride…

2. Vision Quest

by Professor Electric

From the 2022 album Delusions of Grandeur

The priest, the witch doctor
Swept up into an altered state
I can’t feel my feet
But I’m running through forgotten tomorrows

This swampy, off-kilter, groovy-yet-mired-knee-deep-in-thick-sludgy-distortion tracks captures the early confrontation between the three protagonists—Kirk, Roland and Louis—and their would-be roadside rescuer. Roland’s high and not thinking straight. He tries to be a badass, but makes a fool of himself. Choking back the witch doctor’s rancid brew might unlock the secrets of the universe, but that doesn’t mean it looks dignified.

3. Jesus Is Just Alright

by The Doobie Brothers

From the 1972 album Toulouse Street

Jesus, he’s my friend
He took me by the hand
And led me forth from this land

Just a trio of Jesus lovin’ doobie brothers, that’s what we have here. Our three heroes, now having been narratively introduced, abscond in their stolen vehicle across the plains of Saskatchewan in holy pilgrimage to visit the site of an alien visitation. It’s the summer of 1976; the heat is deadly, the boys are wild and free, and God is on the radio. Or is He up there, hanging out with extraterrestrials aboard their UFO?

4. Faith Is for Suckers

by Valley of the Sun

From the 2019 album Old Gods

And I want to, I need to believe
‘Cause this darkness is all that I can see

This song acts as a kind of theme for Roland, one of the three boys. Roland fashions himself something of a nihilist, though that’s not a word he’s ever heard of. He’s been burned one too many times and has come to resent the religious upbringing he shares with his fellow riders. Yet at his core, there is still a yearning for something—anything—to make it all make sense, even if he doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

5. Space Truckin’

by Deep Purple

From the 1972 album Machine Head

The fireball that we rode was moving
But now we’ve got a new machine
Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah, the freaks said
“Man this cat can really swing”

Night falls and the boys find themselves partying in an abandoned gravel pit, reconnecting with an old ‘friend’ of Roland’s. The van’s fixed up and ready to go space truckin’ once more. (Retro vans, cars and dragsters traversing not only dusty highways, but space and time itself, is perhaps one of the most enduring motifs in the stoner doom world.) Alcohol flows, laughter echoes, fires burn—as do the rolled joints. But the tension is mounting, and Kirk’s not the only one uncomfortable with where all this is headed…

6. Charles William

by All Them Witches

From the 2013 album Lightning at the Door

I’m gonna lift my head
God willing
I’m gonna raise the dead
For you

Kirk finds himself taken with one of the girls Dean has brought to the party. She’s way out of his league, but that doesn’t mean he can just stop feeling what he feels. The reserved yet resolute passion evinced by the singer in ‘Charles William’ is similar to the desire that Kirk battles inside of himself, I feel. He’s a boy who longs to be a man. Like in so many things, he’s trapped on the cusp—which is to say, he has a sense of where he wants to go, but has no idea how to get there, or what it even should look like when he’s arrived.

7. You Can’t Quit Me Baby

by Queens of the Stone Age

From the 1998 album Queens of the Stone Age

Slashed and I cut, and I do it for you
I want you to notice when I’m not around
Wherever you are

Kirk indulges further in his flight of fancy with Heather. It’s not healthy. There’s a fair amount of Christian guilt mixed in, too. He’s not a virgin; he’d insisted so earlier, when Dean was holding court. But the sexual confusion he feels—conflicting stories he’s telling himself about purity, about lust, about love—threaten to overwhelm him. The tempo increase and cacophonic ending to this song mirror perfectly the fiery confrontation between Heather and Dean, Kirk’s crush crashing and burning, and the disorienting revelation of Roland’s agreement to distribute contraband on behalf of Dean.

I’m happy to include QOTSA on this list for two reasons: first, I credit them with awakening my love for music, being the first band I ever heard on the radio and actually liked, motivating me to go onto Limewire (this was the early 2000s) and download an mp3 file of ‘Sick Sick Sick’ from their Era Vulgaris album.

The second is that their frontman, Josh Homme, was once a member of an incredibly significant stoner doom band called Kyuss. After their breakup, he went on to to form QOTSA. In their earliest years, Homme kept with the template that Kyuss had created—grungy, hazy, high-energy desert rock, which this song is a perfect example of—before adapting their sound more and more according to Homme’s unique vision. To call their modern iteration ‘stoner doom’ now seems a bit of a miscategorization, but you never forget your roots, so they still belong on the family tree. They are undoubtedly the most famous and recognizable band within the genre in this day and age—the closest thing to a ‘mainstream’ stoner doom band. That being said, they are starting to show their age themselves… One day they’ll be as classic rock as Sabbath is today, I’d wager!

8. Then Came the Last Days of May

by Blue Öyster Cult

From the 1972 album Blue Öyster Cult

I’m leaving soon, the others are already there
You wouldn’t be interested in coming along, instead of staying here?
It’s said the West is nice this time of year, that’s what they say

The stage is now set: the boys set off for British Columbia, the site of the Wedge landing, newly equipped with Dean’s stash of illegal tranqs. ‘Then Came the Last Days of May’ essentially tells the story of a doomed friendship—three buddies looking to make a quick buck, exercising poor judgement, failing to anticipate betrayal. Portentous, to say the least.

9. Keep On Rollin’

by Stonefield

From the 2013 album Stonefield

I’m just a child with good intentions
Been acting years beyond
And why am I wasting my tears
I’ve just gotta keep rollin’ on

(This is the track that doesn’t appear to be on Spotify—here’s an alternative link to listen to it.)

Our final major character now appears in dramatic fashion. The boys know nothing of her background or her trauma, which this song speaks to in subtle yet powerful terms. Marlene, as the others will soon learn, is a girl treading her own path in life. This song acts as her theme. In many ways, she is defined by her determination to keep ahead of all that’s behind her, and not look back. She just keeps on rollin’—as if she has any other choice.

10. Riders on the Storm

by The Doors

From the 1971 album L.A. Woman

There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play

What do we make of this life, this ‘storm’ into which we’re thrown? We have no choice in the matter—nobody ever asks us what we think about existence, if it’s worth all the hassle. We just find ourselves being born into the world, and before long we’re left to fend for ourselves, make sense of it ourselves. It’s a harsh induction, to be sure. For some, it can be too much.

Some of us search for answers. Some of us don’t. But, at the end of the day, we’re all riders. We do our best to stay in control, not be dragged away or under. Kirk, Louis, Roland and Marlene are just the same. That’s what it is to be human.

Does that mean that God, then, is the one who caused the storm?

11. I’m the Storm

by Mr. Bison

From the 2020 album Seaward

Let the wind intone the call
To disclose the truth inside my soul

Kirk achieves a moment of clarity after his initial encounter with Marlene. Here, it seems, is a definitive sign from above. He’s been searching for truth, for meaning, for purpose. Marlene—though he doesn’t understand her—seems the key to possessing all these things. The storm inside himself may yet be harnessed. Overcome. Personified.

This song, in my view, fits as Kirk’s theme. It’s about his internal turmoil. It’s also about his breakthrough moment—the cloudburst, when he begins to believe he might have found a path forward. A way to settle things, once and for all; a clear and specific articulation of what’s been eating away at him, and how he can bring himself to move on from all this religious, pastor’s-son baggage he’s carrying.

12. Desperation

by Place of Skulls

From the 2010 album As a Dog Returns

Take my hand if you don’t know where you’re goin’
I’ll understand, I’ve lost the way myself

Kirk invites Marlene to join their merry band. Though the lyrics of this song appear positive and uplifting, encouraging the listener to take heart and face the brokenness of the world in an open-hearted manner, I think the title ‘Desperation’ gives us a clue as to how the singer is truly feeling. They seem to be putting on a brave face, as it were, hoping against hope to find a way forward.

A side note about the artist: this is the first in a series of stoner doom covers of classic 70s rock songs—Steppenwolf, in this case. I should also mention that Place of Skulls is a kind of stoner doom supergroup. At various points in their career, their lineup has consisted of members from hugely significant stoner doom progenitors through the 80s; namely, Saint Vitus and Pentagram, who helped carry the Sabbathian torch during an era when heavy music was abandoning their style and getting faster, angrier and more complex—think Metallica, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest. The overtly Christian themes of their music is also quite unusual, and certainly noteworthy. They were a natural inclusion in this playlist, as you might expect!

13. Sweet Leaf

by Weedpecker

From the 2015 tribute album Sweet Leaf - A Stoner Rock Salute to Black Sabbath

Straight people don’t know what you’re about
They put you down and shut you out
You gave to me a new belief
And soon the world will love you, sweet leaf

Louis’s theme comes later than the others, but it’s no less important. Louis seizes on his own perceived chance to achieve his destiny by attempting to commune with the alien invaders. He’s convinced himself that the only way to enlightenment is to abandon all caution, all human reason. He must surrender in order to transcend.

Naturally, Black Sabbath must be featured in any playlist of iconic stoner doom artists. ‘Sweet Leaf’ is nothing less than an anthem—a manifesto, even, as far as stoners are concerned. We could say that Louis is laying down his own manifesto at this point in the story. I selected this cover version rather than the original because I think it introduces some sinister undertones to a song that’s otherwise rather exurberant and celebratory. We must note that Louis’s actions will have dire consequences later.

14. Bridge of Sighs

by Little Albert

From the 2020 album Swamp King

Why so unforgiving?
Oh, why so cold?
Been a long time crossing bridge of sighs

…And Louis is first to suffer these consequences. He crosses a bridge too far and is ejected from the group. Whatever bond the three boys shared is irrevocably broken at this point.

This track reminds us how all rock music is rooted in the blues. Here Little Albert’s cover of Robin Trower’s 1974 song takes the original’s mournful elegance and layers on a thick miasma of haze, grime and burnt ash. This is blues rock, but blues rock with an atmosphere of malaise and dread—of being stuck in the swamp, covered in mud (perhaps analogous to being stained by sin?) Certainly, doom is encroaching upon us now…

15. Breathe (In the Air)

by Doom Side of the Moon

From the 2017 cover album Doom Side of the Moon

Long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
Balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave

There is a quiet and contemplative moment as our three protagonists come to understand the depth of the breach between them. Marlene, outside their circle, looks on—or perhaps, looks past them, basking in the sunlight and the breeze.

It’s hard to imagine a 70s-era psychedelic rock outfit more famed than Pink Floyd. Here, members of stoner rock group The Sword—whom we’ll learn more about later—have formed a cover band and recorded their own rendition of Dark Side of the Moon in full, infused with stoner doom elements. ‘Breathe’ struck me as the best inclusion for this list because of how it captures both a sense of tranquility and of ephemerality; the lyrics speak to the beauty of life, but warn of the heartache that is to come for all of us who walk the Earth. Also, the cacophonic crescendo at the end of this version lends itself to the shattering of trust between Louis and the others, which preempts the fateful decision that he makes…

16. Supernaut

by Black Sabbath

From the 1972 album Vol. 4

Got no religion, don’t need no friends
Got all I want, and I don’t need to pretend
Don’t try to reach me, ‘cause I’ll tear up your mind
I’ve seen the future and I’ve left it behind

Here we have the track which I credit with having introduced the -naut into the stoner doom lexicon, spawning multiple iterations: songs and bands with names like ‘psychonaut’, ‘erronaut’, ‘monsternaut’, ‘hashtronaut’ (that’s a good one), just to name a few. The guitarwork on display here floored me when I first heard it, just as I imagine it would have floored two sheltered teens living in the backwoods of Saskatchewan in the 1970s. This song exemplifies the frenetic, ebullient, pummeling energy that heavy music can muster in people—particularly those who perceive themselves as outsiders, rebels, the downtrodden, the left-behinds with an axe to grind. Kirk and Roland each fit this bill in their own various ways. Jamming out to Geezer’s sublime riffage and Bill Ward’s drumming allows them to forget their frustration at the world and each other, if only for a little while.

17. Doom

by Meniscus

From the 2016 album Refractions

[Instrumental]

This atmospheric piece perfectly captures the sense of awe and trepidation the characters feel as they look upon the alien Wedge for the first time. There are no words to describe such an experience. The thing they look upon is grand, impressive, magnificent, humbling, intimidating, sublime, disturbing, terrifying, and wholly unknowable, all at once.

The fact that this track is entitled ‘Doom’ is no accident, either. We don’t like to spend much time reflecting on our temporal existence, our mortality; the power of Doom reminds us how small we are, and how immense the forces that govern our lives from birth to death.

18. River

by Swan Valley Heights

From the 2016 album Swan Valley Heights

Don’t you know that I have looked down into your dirty soul?

In the shadow of the Wedge, on the shore of a gleaming, placid lake, Kirk recounts the story that serves as his primary motivation for leaving home and chasing after his elusive God. It’s a quiet, poignant moment, and painful. There’s a lot of inner strife and existential guilt that comes up to the surface. Kirk wonders why, looking upon the object of his fixation, he feels no satisfaction, no sense of fulfillment. He hopes that Marlene has the answer; he’s not happy with the one he gets. This song, if not in its lyrics, then its overall mood and atmosphere, captures the full scope of emotion in this pivotal scene.

19. Locked and Loaded

by Brant Bjork

From the 2008 album Punk Rock Guilt

Vietnam rock on the radio
And we’re locked and loaded, and it’s time to go
Night riders on the way to hell

The Wedge remains silent. Kirk is arrested by soldiers patrolling the perimeter of the fortifications set up to keep the masses who have gathered to this place—people not unlike Kirk—corralled. The situation is all under control, but there’s a palpable tension in the air; these are armed men, guarding against a perceived threat they do not fully understand. All hell’s bound to break loose sooner or later.

Also, Brant Bjork is another one of those stoner doom icons, being an original member of Kyuss and bandmate of Josh Homme’s. He’s had a prolific and successful solo career since then.

20. Spacegrass

by Clutch

From the 1995 album Clutch

Dodge Swinger 1973, top down, chassis low
Panel dim, light drive, Jesus on the dashboard
T-minus whenever it feels right, Galaxy 500
Planets align, a king is born

The motif of the stoned operator cruising through the vast reaches of space and time recurs in this iconic track. Clutch can perhaps be credited with cementing this as part of the stoner doom inconography. This time, however, there’s a distinct sense of disorientation—reality lines blurred, hallucinations made real. The engine revs, the planets come into alignment, the king is ready to be born. Kirk is distinctly Driving Under the Influence at this point. But the influence of what, or whom?

21. The Sound Inside

by Rainbows Are Free

From the 2019 album Head Pains

I can hear inside your mind
This is how it sounds inside
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Kirk’s really losing it. His head’s a mess, he can’t see straight, let alone think straight. His senses are overloaded; he’s at his wit’s end. He can no longer keep contained everything that he’s been bottling up. The ‘sound’ inside his own mind is deafening, overwhelming. He’s about to become the Doom’s latest victim. His final run-in with Roland makes sure of that.

22. No Quarter

by Led Zeppelin

From the 1973 album Houses of the Holy

Walking side-by-side with death
The devil mocks their every step
The snow drives back the foot that’s slow
The dogs of doom are howling more

Zeppelin’s influence on the development of hard rock cannot be understated. I don’t think I need to expound on this point; it should be obvious that they one one of, if not the seminal act of the Golden Age of rock n’ roll music. They’ve also got a certain psychedelic weirdness to them—a spiritual awareness, even—which I think many in the stoner doom scene have endeavored to preserve. I’ve selected from their catalogue a moody and melancholic piece that accentuates the fallout from Kirk and Roland’s dramatic confrontation. It’s a violent one, and it doesn’t leave much room for hope. The nefarious forces of Doom seem to have won the day.

23. Black Spring Rising

by Kadavar, featuring Ilgen-Nur

From the 2020 album The Isolation Tapes

Will I have this chance to find something
Something new inside of me?

Resurrection.

That’s about all I can say without completely giving the story’s ending away. And this ending, let me tell you—it’s damn well near perfect, if you ask me. Read the novel and come back to me with your own perspective!

24. Answers In Your Soul

by Church of the Cosmic Skull

From the 2016 album Is Satan Real?

Why do you never answer when I call you every day?
All I ever wanted was to know your secret name

If this novel were to have credits rolling in much the way that movies do (thanks to my wife, my children, my mother, my father, my sister, my editors, my early readers, and on and on…) I’d want this song to play while it’s happening. It’s a lovely mournful, yet hopeful note to end on, and it asks the same big questions that the novel is asking. Best of all, it allows us to arrive at our own conclusions. All it does is assure us that ‘the answer is out there somewhere’.

Also, fun fact about the band: Church of the Cosmic Skull have a corpus of weird lore to them, and they’ve made up this mock-religion/cult which the band members all purport to be members of. They worship, well, a giant skull (all part of the performance, I’m pretty sure) and act as vessels or conduits for something called the Cosmic Word. They’ve got a fleshed out set of precepts which form their belief system and everything. Very much on-theme for this particular work of fiction.

25. Farstar

by The Sword

From the 15th Anniversary Edition of the 2010 album Warp Riders

Farstar, across the reach of space-time
We dream of fire and star shine

As we close the final chapter and return to our own reality, it’s my hope that a feeling of bittersweet pathos will settle over us. We’ve just been on a long, intimate journey, and now it’s over. We must turn our attention to the next one, far in the distance, and prepare ourselves whatever we may find.

This track is a bonus inclusion at the end of Warp Riders, a favorite record of mine which is indirectly referenced throughout the novel itself. It’s a concept album whose story serves as the baseline for what Louis reads in his comic books. It didn’t feel right not to include something directly from Riders, and ‘Farstar’ provides an excellent thematic and conceptual bridge between the story and our own world.

And there you have it: the complete Pneumanauts semi-official soundtrack! If there are any songs or artists that you liked in particular, do let me know. Also, if you’re already a fan of the stoner doom underground scene—a fellow worshipper at the altar of fuzz, a sludge-reveller, a wretched doom-monger, a spaced-out psychonaut traversing the bounds of time and space—introduce yourself and let’s talk spliffs n’ riffs. I’m always looking for a good new band recommendation. It’s a deep, deep well we draw from, and I’ve the sense that I’m nowhere near the bottom.

All the best, and stay heavy!

The Origins of 'Pneumanauts'

C. J. W. Armstrong — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:59:11 GMT

Anchorfall in T-Minus 73 days

As we approach the launch of my debut novel, I’d like to share a bit about how we got here in the first place. The road to publication has been long and winding, perhaps more so than many future readers might expect. There were a lot of hurdles to clear along the way—draft edits, full rewrites, agent querying, contest submissions—so when I look back over the journey in its entirety, I can see that the distance travelled is something of a story in itself.

I was going through some of my old notes from the earliest phases of the novel’s conceptualization just the other day, which gave me the idea to write about this. All writers have their own unique creative processes; some plot methodically, spending countless hours crafting chapter summaries, character profiles, and establishing lore before ever sitting down to write their first draft. Others do something akin to ‘vibe-coding’ and just let the ideas flow, from mind to page, more or less without interruption. Then they go back over their work, again and again, honing the raw material until the final, polished story emerges.

In my case, I keep a sort of digital journal in my phone to jot down ideas as they come to me (once upon a time, it was a real physical journal). You never know when inspiration will strike! Gradually, as the notes accumulate, a concept for a full story begins to solidify. At some indeterminate point—I’m not exactly one of the super-methodical creative types—I judge that enough’s enough and it’s time just to write the darn thing. I don’t usually have a full story plotted out, or even ideas of what the different chapters will contain. In my experience, you don’t necessarily need that level of meticulous planning beforehand to bring a novel into existence. What you do need is an intriguing premise, a driving question to animate the story (What would happen if…?), maybe a couple of ‘thematic resonances’ ie. ideas which, though as-yet unshaped, point the story in a certain direction by imagining some of the hows and whys and emotional beats that are meant to be hit, and a handful of interesting characters to play off of one another. These ingredients probably work better for creating science fiction stories than they do other genres—you probably do need to do a lot more research if you’re going to create, say, a historical fiction novel—but as sci-fi/fantasy is my wheelhouse, I can attest that this system (insofar as I can call it a ‘system’) works fairly well. I’ve written 3.5 novels* to date, and while the earliest ones are certainly not of the same level of quality as Pneumanauts, they’ve all more or less come to fruition through this process. Conceptualization, iteration and reiteration—persistence, in a word. That’s the name of the game, so far as I’m concerned.

It took a lot of persistence to get Pneumanauts to where it is today. Without further ado, let’s dive in!

Artwork by Ed Valigursky for the 1972 edition of The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein.

The foundation

The general context for my creative process having been established, I can tell you that the earliest ideas for the project which would eventually become Pneumanauts came to me sometime in 2018. I can’t say precisely when or why—I generally have a poor memory, perhaps on account of my ADHD—but I do recall that this story emerged from my desire to create something very different than what I’d made before. All of the previous novels I’d written at this point in my life were varying shades of sci-fi/fantasy, as this has always been my preferred genre to both read and write. My tastes hadn’t changed, but I had. 2018 was around the time that I was beginning the serious work of transitioning into that longest of personal eras, that of the full-fledged adult; the version of oneself who’s now seen and done enough in life to have a definitive sense of ‘who one is’, and also, I suppose, ‘who one is not’. It’s at this stage that some major decisions must be made. Possibilities must be collapsed into actualities. The myriad of options open to youth must be narrowed, and pathways chosen. In my case, I’d recently become engaged and was looking at the prospect of my life becoming narrower, in a sense—not a bad thing at all, I should make clear. I mean to say, the future—the narrative trajectory of my life—was beginning to look a very specific way. It was going to involve the person I was marrying, and not as some incidental side character. Having a family of our own was on the horizon, as was where we would settle, what our careers would be, who would be part of our lives for the long term—friends, parents, colleagues, and indeed, children. We were both twenty-somethings working abroad, hitherto experiencing life on our own terms, learning and growing as individuals, beholden to none but ourselves. And that was great! Those are important developmental stages for anybody to go through, made all the more challenging (and rewarding) by doing it in a foreign country and culture.

I suppose that, as I looked to the future and saw the rest of my life taking shape, it prompted me to also look back on where I’d been, and where I’d come from. My past life in Canada was already receded into the rear-view mirror, having left home to work overseas a year earlier, but it was becoming clearer than ever that I would never be returning. Not like, never never—I mean, never to live my life as it had once been. Canada was my home—it was where I’d grown up, the place that has formed and nurtured me—but it would not be my home again. It was very much a place in my past. My spouse was not Canadian, and it was looking like if we were to settle down together anywhere other than where we currently were living and working, it would likely be her own home country. That was an adventure worth embarking on, for sure, but it did instil in me a certain nostalgia for the world I was leaving, and indeed had already left well behind.

So I started getting ideas about a new story I might tell—a story about where I’d come from. A story that might help me to make sense of myself, of how I’d become the person I was. The sunset of my youth was upon me, I recognized. Not to sound too fatalistic, because we are, of course, always changing and growing and adapting to our life circumstances, no matter how old we are, but I do feel that I was nevertheless crossing a threshold. Once on the other side, my life would become about a lot more than just me, in the way that an adult who’s made compromises, closed doors and shouldered burdens must contend with daily.

I imagine that sounds like I was doing a lot of navel-gazing at the time. Indeed, the creative work which served as an initial spark for Pneumanauts could easily be described as such. I’d decided that I’d eschew my usual propensity for the fantastical and wondrous and try to tell a more ‘grounded’ story. Something akin to a memoir, even, funny as it is to think of a twenty-something, barely a quarter of the way through their lifespan, writing a memoir. I’d been reading another memoir—Martin Luther King Jr.’s, if I’m not misremembering—and had also begun consuming a lot more nonfiction than I had in the past. News and political analysis, for the main part, and not necessarily for the better. I don’t mean this to say that I was overly self-serious and believing that I had some grand, important lessons to impart to the world. No, I was quite aware that my experiences in life thus far were fairly ordinary, none too dramatic, and not exactly the riveting sort of stuff that might make books fly off shelves. What I wanted was to write for myself, first and foremost (I think that’s generally decent advice for writers, though it must be counterbalanced by the awareness that such an approach will only take one so far) and do some purposeful introspection. I knew I was a skilled writer, with a genuine grasp of craft and appreciation of quality—should it not be possible to turn my tools upon my own story, rather like a painter creating a self-portrait?

I suppose, also, that I was experimenting in writing something that might be considered ‘literary’. Science fiction and fantasy are not generally regarded by the wider populace as genres of literary value—a fact which I have my opinions about, but I won’t get into here. I set to work, and cranked out the first few chapters of a project which was focussed squarely on those formative experiences which I felt had shaped me. My university years, I thought, seemed the best place to begin kicking over the rocks of my selfhood and examine the wriggly things hiding in the crevices. I’d write about the tension I’d felt being a Christian person, thoroughly churched, with a pastor for a father—and a rather unique background as being, at least for a period of my childhood, part of a religious sect oftentimes classed as a cult—and being set loose in the wild, wild world of secular, liberal tertiary education. This was, after all, an incredibly important and transformative period of my life. I believe I underwent something of a course correction during those years, in fact; I might easily have turned away from the opportunities—opportunities which compelled me to change, embrace, explore—and stuck with what I knew, what I was comfortable with, if I hadn’t met certain people and made certain choices while away at school.

So far, so good. But then I got several thousand words into the first draft and realized I wasn’t having any fun. It’s not that what I’d written was poor, but it was certainly dry (my most common complaint when reading so-called ‘literary’ works) and ultimately uninspired. The fact that it was semi-autobiographical, funnily enough, wasn’t holding my interest. I’m an interesting person, sure, but I’m not more interesting than, say, space pirates or ancient alien civilizations or techno-wizards fighting transdimensional demons on dragonback or whatnot. I was a sci-fi/fantasy writer at heart! Where was the high strangeness, the sheer wonder that I so loved? Why would I write about boring old life on Earth when I could be writing about fanciful, exciting, awe-striking life on other planets, other worlds?

Suffice it to say, the project wasn’t working, but the core idea had potential. A story about a kid going to university and having his (relatively immature) faith challenged—there was something there. Maybe not the setting itself, but the idea of dealing with the inner tension of believing something, or wanting to believe something, and struggling to hold to it. That was a story I’d been living my whole life. That’s where the idea for the working title had come from: ‘Trench Foot’, as in, the festering rot that sets in when one is trapped in the trenches between two opposing sides, battle-lines drawn and intractable, unable to progress or retreat. The common framing of the religious vs. secular worlds as fundamentally at war with one another is one that I have issues with, but having grown up thoroughly immersed in one of these worlds, and also acutely aware of how different the other was—and struggling to navigate the gap between them—it seemed to appropriately dramatize the conflict I was looking to explore.

At no stage was I thinking that I’d be writing Christian fiction or specifically for religious audiences. Rather, I felt that the experience of having faith and working out what that means in the world—a world which can often feel indifferent or even hostile to such beliefs—while not universal, followed the same foundational arc that all good stories do: a person facing obstacles both external and internal, moving forward to achieve self-actualization. Handled deftly, such a story could be made intelligible to those who’d never experienced it. I thought I might be able to represent this sort of story as part of the human mosaic—not a sermon, not a testimony, but a spiritual journey.

The influences

So, the core idea has taken root, but I needed to rethink what overall shape the story would take. Looking back, I can identify three distinct external influences that were all working away in the background of my mind, subtly influencing me and, eventually, coalescing into the breakthrough that I needed.

The first was a conversation that I’d had with my father years prior, also from the time that I was a university student. We were travelling back from school for Christmas break and had stopped along the highway at a roadside Tim Horton’s (a prominent Canadian coffee and donut chain) for a quick bite. I’ve written about what happened that day on this publication previously, so I won’t repeat too much here; I’ll simply state that we talked about what a Christian person’s proper response to the discovery of aliens ought to be. That might seem an odd discussion to have with one’s pastor-father, but I’m quite lucky to be part of a family that, while maintaining certain religious convictions, remains open-minded and theologically curious. My dad took my question seriously and we talked about what happens when a believer is confronted with something straight out of science fiction—something which, our best scientific understanding of the universe would tell us, is more than an abstract absurdity, but a likely-as-not eventuality.

That conversation planted a seed which would germinate many years later, not only in the formation of Pneumanauts, but in this entire publication! The permission—the encouragement, even—I received as a young person to critically examine the ideas I’d been taught all my life has set me on an explorative journey which has been incredibly rewarding and meaningful. Without it, it’s easy to imagine I might have fallen into a stunted sort of pseudo-faith, spiritually hindered and hemmed in on all sides by dogma and fundamentalist ideology. If you read the novel, or indeed, any of the posts on this little site, I think you’ll find that my writing reflects the conviction that we shouldn’t be afraid of asking difficult questions about what we believe and why. Both Pneumanauts and The Pneumanaut are committed to doing just that, as well as recognizing that there may not be any answers—at least, not on this side of the Great Beyond. The key is in the searching, and in the meantime, learning to be comfortable with ambiguity (and the disagreement of others).

The second direct influence that helped transform what started out a personal memoir into an offbeat science fiction novel is Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. This book, more than any other, helped inspire me to see the concept of Pneumanauts as viable. I read Parable through sometime in 2019 after receiving a copy as a gift from a friend—a fellow sci-fi enthusiast, who particularly enjoyed highlighting the works of lesser-known authors, oftentimes from marginalized communities. I’d actually encountered this novel earlier in life—in university, again, as part of a science fiction literature course I was taking—but had failed to read it through or fully engage with it. It had seemed just a bit too mundane, at the time. ‘Mundane’ was even the name that the professor had given to the sub-genre it belonged to, as, though it does employ some science fiction elements—it takes place in a dystopian future, there is a strange novum (new thing) which has transformed the way society functions—these elements are relegated to the background of the story, appearing only intermittently or vaguely alluded to. The story eschews the usual preoccupation with dense world-building or common science-fictional narrative tropes, like space exploration or combating alien intelligences, to focus on characters and their personal dramas, which are largely of the ordinary kind. Family issues, financial troubles, relationship difficulties. Racism, also, in this case. The world that Butler constructs is readily recognizable, setting it apart from what we usually think of when we consider what makes science fiction, science fiction.

I bounced off of Parable the first time perhaps because I hadn’t read widely enough to properly situate it in its literary context. But, as I reread it, I found myself engrossed. The religious symbolism, first and foremost, captured my interest. I hadn’t realized that it was possible to employ such overtly Christian themes and topics in science fiction.** Indeed, the main character’s journey is specifically one of spiritual discovery. What was a story about a pilgrimage doing in the science fiction category? And why were the science fiction elements—the invented, speculative novum which distinguished this constructed world from our own—pushed so far into the background, so much so that the characters hardly encounter any of them? I saw that Butler had charted a course I might like to follow: she’d placed human characters, their personal and relational issues at the front and center, and simply let them interact. The science fiction world they inhabited was just ‘the world’; they needn’t be overly preoccupied with it any more than we are with ours. Don’t most of us simply get on with life, our daily routines, our intimate relationships, rather than getting caught up in political conspiracies or rescue missions or assassination plots or journeys to strange and isolated places? Those things might happen, but they tend to happen out there, in the background of our own humble little lives.

Pneumanauts, then, could focus on its characters. The science fiction elements—because at this point, I knew I wanted something to differentiate the world I was creating from our own—could be framed as almost incidental to the story enfolding in the lives of these human beings I’d imagined. I’d started out wanting to write something more grounded, more psychological, and reading Butler’s work was like receiving permission to do so. Religion, as well—the exploration and critique of it—was fair game. The pieces were starting to come together: a story about young people struggling with their religious beliefs, set against a backdrop of a world like our own, but distinct in some critical way. Maybe aliens could be the differentiating factor—the novum? What would these young people do if they found that aliens were real, just as I’d asked my dad that one day at Tim Horton’s?

The final source of my inspiration was perhaps the most unusual. I love to read, but I also love video games, I love art, and I love music. I’ve found all of these things to be rich seams of creative inspiration throughout my life. In this instance, circa 2018-19 I’d become nigh obsessed with a particular sub-genre of heavy rock, variably referred to as ‘stoner’, ‘doom’, or ‘heavy psych’. I’ll use the term stoner-doom from here on out, though the dualistic name belies a veritable bevy of micro-genres and styles all captured under a wide umbrella.

Stoner-doom can be understood as Black Sabbath worship, in the most basic terms. Black Sabbath, widely and appropriately credited for being the progenitors of heavy metal, are one of the most consequential bands ever, I’d argue. Most people recognize their cultural contribution in pioneering brutal guitar riffs, driving drumbeats and occultic imagery which, when bound together, more or less make up the fundamental character of what heavy music is recognized as worldwide. What is less often immediately associated with Sabbath, though no less integral to their identity, is their fondness for getting high. Stoner-doom takes up a special fascination with drug culture and revels in the spacey, tripped-out weirdness that ensues when one gives themself over to the influence of marijuana, shrooms, and the like. The slow-moving, sludgy aspects of Sabbath’s sound (featured especially on their debut record) are indicagtive of this. If you’re familiar with the band’s catalogue at all, think of the three songs ‘Sweet Leaf’, the self-titled ‘Black Sabbath’ and ‘Planet Caravan’ as evincing the spiritual essence of the genre.

Disclaimer time: I should probably pause to mention that I am a straight-edge kind of guy (cue the reader’s skeptical eye-rolling) and have never done any kind of drug in my life. That’s partially because of my sheltered upbringing, but also because of my own choices and convictions. So, when I say that I’ve an ‘obsession’ with the stoner-doom indie music scene, it’s not because I myself am some kind of enthusiast for psychedelics themselves.

I can’t quite put my finger on why this particular musical style scratches just the right itch for me. Earlier in my life, I had quite eclectic tastes, but ever since diving headfirst into the heavy stoner-doom underground, I’ve hardly ever come up for air. It’s like there are these submerged caverns of sonic sublimity, and no matter how far I probe, there’s always more to discover. I can’t cast my net wider because there’s always further to go deeper, if you catch my drift. It’s partially to do with the deliciousness of a slick, grimy riff and the guttural bellowing vocals; it’s partially to do with the plodding, mammoth-stomp rhythms and the sheer weightiness of the overall sonic experience. But it’s also got a lot to do with the unique iconography employed by this particular scene. Stoner-doom has a very specific visual style that complements the aural. Bands will often feature artwork on their album covers and merchandise that is heavily inspired by the 1960s and 70s eras, when rock was king and dope-smoking was ubiquitous. There’s also inspiration drawn from classic science fiction and weird fiction, as you can see in the particular artwork I chose to use for this post (the dead astronaut is something of a recurring motif across the genre). There’s occultic stuff, as is often the case with heavy music, but it’s rendered in a curious way—sometimes blended with outright Christian symbolism, sometimes with feverish, dreamlike psychedelica. And other times it’s just kind of stupid, nerdy, testosterone-fuelled guy stuff: muscle cars with oversized engines, boogie vans flying through space, fantasy heroines wielding battle-axes, monsters ripped from the pages of comic books and pulp magazines. Put together, it becomes a very strange brew indeed, setting it apart as its own special branch of the rock n’ roll family tree.***

I’ve been listening to stoner-doom for years now, and it’s a genre of music I find creatively stimulating in all sorts of ways. I suppose it’s to do with the fact that I suffer from a very peculiar sort of anemoia—a sense of nostalgia for an era I’ve never myself experienced. That era is the heady days of the late 60s and 70s, when all the things that make stoner-doom what it is—vans, booze, drugs, sci-fi, monsters and magic—were at the forefront of the cultural milieu. I’m not advocating that we go back to those times, but I feel there’s just something cool about them. Maybe that’s down to my dad’s influence acting on me again, since he grew up during that period and lived many of those now-archetypal experiences firsthand. He’d lived in Saskatchewan—part of the Canadian prairies, often regarded as a bleak a place as any for a young person to grow up—and had been driving around in vans and listening to Sabbath and their ilk when they were contemporary. I’d never been out West (apart from one trip to Alberta and BC to see the Rockies, which did also feature in my conceptualization of the novel), but I got a flavor of what life was like from an image he kept in his office of a farm building and a silo set against a multi-toned sunset, surrounded by flat fields. It was an altogether stark and harsh beauty, to my mind.

Turning this over in my head one day, I realized that I had an ideal setting for my story. I’d briefly considered setting the novel in the States—because that’s where anybody looking to gain an audience tends to set their stories—but there was something about the prairies which I felt drawn to. I was embarking on this creative journey to better understand myself and where I’d come from, after all. That meant understanding my parents, and where they’d come from; their experience, in particular their experience in the church we’d been part of when I was younger, had shaped so much of our lives. What I began to see was that to tell my stories, I’d have to tell theirs as well. The same went for my grandparents. The notion of looking backward in time, rather than forward, took root.

1976 ended up being the year I finally settled on; a year when the likes of Sabbath, Floyd, Zeppelin and Deep Purple could be heard on the radio or playing loudly from car stereos as they rumbled down the highway. It was also, of course, a time marked by its prevalent drug culture, but not the idealistic free-lovin’ sort of the 60s. By the late 70s, the hippie dream for a better world had faded and given rise to a more cynical age, characterised by a jaded nihilism and general malaise. That kind of era, it seemed to me, was what the stoner-doom scene was trying to spiritually channel and evoke in its listeners, ever since its inception in the late 90s with acts like Kyuss, Clutch, Fu Manchu, Sleep and Electric Wizard. An era marked by a pervading sense of doom, even if no one could quite put their finger on how or when it would all fall apart. It seemed also that we were living through a similar era currently.

Now I had all the ingredients I needed: a mundane sci-fi story exploring religious themes, focusing on relational struggles of teenagers living in the desolate landscape of the Canadian prairie in the 1970s, employing the iconography of the stoner-doom genre for thematic resonance. It would be a story oddly displaced in time and theme—both serious and scornful of the sacred, wonder-struck and world-weary, regressive and progressive (and hopefully not transgressive), sitting uneasily in the spaces between all of them. This, I thought, was a story only I could tell. A story made authentic by my unique vantage point and life experience. It would be weird, but weird could be good—or, at the very least, not boring. A story that might have a shot at going the full way and being published someday, somehow, someway.

The campaign

Spoiler alert: it did! But it was not exactly a straightforward path to finally getting there. The novel went through several phases of pitching, where I took different tacks to try and get it off my my hard drive and out there into the wider world, in some capacity. I’ve taken to calling this section of the post a ‘campaign’ because it required sustained, intentional effort to get this novel over the line, and there was never any guarantee that it would make it. I’m eminently grateful to the people at Eclogue Press for seeing the potential in the story and pouring their time and resources behind it to help it succeed.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves—how did this story go from a concept, to a finished manuscript, to the stage we’re at today, counting down to launch? Well, there was the drafting and editing to get through, first. Pneumanauts went through three drafts before I felt it ready to take on the world. The name, also, was something that needed to be decided on. A good novel needs something snappy, something distinct yet memorable. The working title throughout its early life was ‘Motorprophets’. I never particularly loved the name, but it captured what I was aiming for: religious connotation juxtaposed with something harsh, guttural, a touch irreverent. It sounded like it could be a band name, which I liked, and also acted as a descriptor of the novel’s main characters: a group of misfit, disillusioned teenagers on the hunt for meaning and purpose in a world that didn’t make sense, a world which seemed ambivalent to their very existence.

The idea for the name ‘Pneumanauts’ was essentially an improved version of Motorprophets. I noticed that many of the stoner-doom bands I liked had various tracks with the suffix -naut included, usually a word of their own invention. ‘Supernaut’ by Black Sabbath here is perhaps the best example, and indeed, I found a way to feature the song in the novel itself as a special homage. The idea of the -naut was yet another totem existing within the collective consciousness of the scene’s members. What it signified could vary from the profound to the ridiculous. In my case, my eureka moment was when I combined -naut with the Greek word ‘pneuma’. I knew straightaway that this was the perfect title to capture the spirit of the book.

Once again, I’ve written about the meaning of the word pneumanaut on this publication before (which make sense, as I named the publication itself The Pneumanaut!) so I won’t repeat too much here.**** ‘Pneuma’ can be taken to mean the spirit or soul, and a -naut is a sailor, or one who explores. Spirit-explorers seemed to be the perfect way to express what the characters of my novel were all about. They were each of them pneumanauts, which isn’t to say that they were in any way similar in their beliefs or convictions; rather, what they shared was a profound yearning for more—to know more, to understand more, to get closer to the answer to life’s big questions. They were each spiritual seekers, and they were all on journeys taking them to very different places. It was an exercise in branding, in part, but it was also much more. I’m proud to be a pneumanaut myself, and to belong to a family of fellow pneumanauts!

With the title locked down and the manuscript reviewed and polished, the next big leap was to take it to market. This was a hurdle I’d tried to clear in the past with previous novels I’d written, yet never succeeded. I’d taken courses on approaching agents, attended writers conferences, read lots of material giving advice on how to write query letters. I’d kept a list of publishing contests available to amateur authors for many years, and had even entered a few of them. I got to work on the query letter, researched some agents whom I felt might be interested in representing me, and sent them off.

I heard nothing back. I don’t think I’ve ever received any sort of reply from any literary agent at any stage, ever. Now, I’m not going to use this as an opportunity to bash the traditional publishing industry—Lord knows, my interests are as niche as they come, and I can hardly attest to the mass market appeal of my work. Still, it seemed the place to start looking. I didn’t take it too hard when those query letters went unanswered, as I believe I’d calibrated my expectations just right. The trad-pub world simply was/is not looking for the sorts of stories I’m looking to tell, or it seems, from someone like me to tell them—though there were glimmers that maybe, just maybe, there might be some passing interest if the story in question was off-the-wall enough to ruffle a few religiously-conservative feathers. The novel Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar hit shelves during this period, and I took it as a sign of encouragement. Though I didn’t particularly enjoy the novel, it did show that stories which dealt with religious themes in a serious, if unconventional manner, could get some traction. I filed Martyr! away as a viable comp title and continued my campaign.

I don’t know how many attempts I made to reach out to publishers, all told. It was several years of abject failure on that front. What kept me going was a sense that, even if I couldn’t get the story published, I was very satisfied in my own right with what I’d created. It truly was unique—a story that could only exist because I had envisioned it. And there were also some small boosts of encouragement that came from a handful of contests and small publishing houses. I actually mailed off a physical copy of the manuscript to a press in Saskatchewan, writing a specific pitch for them. They declined, citing the fact that they just really didn’t think their audience would be into this sort of thing, but they did indicate to me that they felt the story had merit.

That actually happened several times while I was pursuing publication. Numerous times I sent the manuscript off only to have it be rejected, but with a bit of feedback saying that whoever had evaluated it saw potential in it. I submitted it to a British contest—one where I had to pay to gain entry, and pay further for professional feedback. The pros scored the story 4.5 out of 5 stars across 5 metrics (characterization, plot development, etc.) Not too shabby! It gave a me a clear sense that I was onto something and motivated me to keep at it.

Perhaps my closest brush with victory was when I sent it to a publishing contest hosted by an indie press based out of British Columbia—the grand prize being, as you can imagine, publication by said press. This was a Canadian publisher specializing in speculative fiction, and they were looking to promote stories that were set in Canada, written by Canadians, with a speculative element. Right up my alley, I thought. Pneumanauts made it all the way to the final round of selection, beating out 95% of the competition. I know that because they contacted me to let me know that my manuscript was sitting in front of the judges, awaiting their final decision! In the end, however, it was not chosen. I’d come so close, yet was so far. That episode marked the end of a long and intense effort to get the novel published. I made fewer attempts after that, having had my hopes dashed and lost steam, and by the end of 2022, I wasn’t really trying at all. Pneumanauts was thus relegated to the dark corners of my hard drive to collect digital dust.

And so it might have stayed indefinitely, if not for a few small developments in my thinking. The first was a gradual dawning realization which helped to reframe my entire sense of what publication meant: I was a stoner-doom fan, listening to stoner-doom music, part of a stoner-doom enthusiast community, which basically the entire mainstream culture was ignorant of. Many of the bands that I loved released records—excellent records!—without ever being signed by a label. They recorded in their basements, using their own equipment. They organized tours and did promotion by themselves. This is the reality of working in an indie scene, and the indie scene is a self-made world! Why shouldn’t it be like that for writers and novelists? The bands I listened to weren’t waiting for gatekeepers to approve of them before getting their creative labor out there into the world—they were just doing it, and depending on the support of a dedicated and committed underground to keep them afloat.

The second development was my burgeoning interest in theater and playwriting. In the country where I now live, there’s huge support for community-based theater. It’s quite amazing to see—people who live in the same town just getting together and putting on plays for their fellows in the local area, not for profit, but for the love of it. There are competitions and prizes and everything. In becoming attached to a couple of these groups, I was inspired to write new material for them. My first thought, wouldn’t you know it, was to adapt Pneumanauts for the stage. It was an excellent creative exercise and highly rewarding—I’d recommend you try it sometime, if you’re a fellow writer and you’re looking to breathe new life into a story you’ve got languishing somewhere! The result was a fully producible rendition of the novel, which, who knows, maybe I’ll get to put on someday. My theater group held an open play reading for the text and I got a lot of positive feedback. Hearing the characters I’d created be voiced aloud rekindled my interest in the seeing Pneumanauts become more than just a manuscript, but a story for people to read and engage with on their own terms.

It all culminated in the summer of 2024 when I bit the bullet and started a Substack. I’d had an idea of writing publicly ever since sharing Pneumanauts with the members of that theater group. At the time, my goal wasn’t to try and get it published; this publication, in its earliest conceptualization, could be viewed as a kind of spiritual successor to the novel. I simply felt encouraged enough to start putting myself out there in the world and simply see what would happen. Exploring the intersections between science fiction and theology seemed to be what I could uniquely offer. Self-publishing the novel itself—once something I would never have considered, so enamoured with the idea of traditional publication as I once was—was an option on the table, and I was open to doing it once I had a better sense of where the Substack would lead.

I honestly didn’t expect it would lead me here, to writing about this whole journey and relating it to you, my (hopefully) future reader. It was this platform that brought me into contact with the likeminded people at Eclogue Press. I saw what they were looking for and brushed off the old manuscript, made a few quality of life improvements—including carving out two whole chapters which, I now saw, seemed to slow the pace of the beginning section too much—and sent it off, not suspecting at all that it would lead to publication, after all these years.

And then request for the full manuscript came. I’d never made it that far before. I gave the remaining chapters a polish, sent them on, and waited to hear back. The rest, I gather, you can piece together yourself.

What a journey it’s been. Pneumanauts, as you can imagine, is very dear to my heart. I’ve poured countless hours of my life into making it the best, most evocative, most truthful story it can be. I think it’s a story worth sharing—I’ve thought so since it first percolated in my mind, back in 2018. And it’ll be shared with you on August 30th, 2026.

I hope you’ll enjoy it.

*None besides Pneumanauts being published, I should perhaps add. The 0.5 here refers to one novel which I stopped writing after putting over 350,000 words into it. Word of advice: if your debut novel is 350,000 words long and still unfinished, you need to stop writing, start paring back and work on your editing skills! Still, writing that 0.5 novel (itself longer than all the other completed novels I’ve written, combined) and all the others each proved valuable learning experiences, in their own ways. I can see clearly how my craft has developed through the creation of each one.

**I hadn’t read books like Walter M. Niller Jr.’s Canticle for Leibowitz, Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light or Neil Stephenson’s Anathem at the time. I know better now—science fiction and religion, despite the tension between them, have often throve together!

***An excellent example of this is The Sword’s rollicking sci-fi concept album Warp Riders, whose story and artwork served as direct inspiration for Pneumanauts. I even smuggled it in to the novel itself, as one of the characters reads an in-story comic book that riffs on the themes and ideas in the actual album. Give it a listen—it’s one of my favorites of all time!

****Head to my introductory post Welcome to the Pneumanaut! for a more thorough discussion on the matter!

Heads Up, Fellow Pneumanauts!

C. J. W. Armstrong — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:11:48 GMT

Anchorfall in T-Minus 93 days

I’ve been cagey, I’ve been coy. I’ve been sitting on big news for nearly a year now, and I’ve not yet come right out with it and told you. If you read my end-of-2025 post way back when, you might have caught glimmers, titillating glimpses of what lay in store. For reasons that are mysterious even to myself, I’ve not yet mustered the courage to announce in plain, unequivocal terms just what the heck I’m doing here on Substack, what it’s all been building towards. I’ve merely alluded, insinuated, intimated that things—very special things—were in the works.

Things like getting a novel published.

I guess I’ve had a hard time believing it myself. I’ve been holding out, waiting for things to fall through, waiting for the dream bubble to pop and for me to wake up in a cold sweat, wondering what year it is, who’s the President of the United States, what exactly is ‘Substack’—is it like Twitter?—and what on Earth 6-7 is supposed to mean.

But it hasn’t happened. The dream’s still real, or at the very least, it seems doggedly determined to keep up the illusion. And every day we’re getting closer to the fateful moment where we go LIVE, and there’s no longer any shadow of a doubt. I mean, I named my entire publication after this thing—does it really make sense to act like it doesn’t exist, like I haven’t been working up to this moment my entire life?

So, I might as well tell you now, since I’ll have to tell you sooner or later: my full-length novel, Pneumanauts, is being published by this summer.

They are a new indie publisher dedicated to bringing high-quality science fiction stories to underserved audiences—stories that explore the unknown, that interrogate the ‘known’, that search and yearn for the light always. Stories that are a bit different a bit weird, a bit hard to classify, quantify, yet retain some bespoke, irresistable quality that sets them apart from the mainstream. High-quality stories unabashed in their ambition of achieving literary excellence (I won’t say I’ve succeeded in this regard, as you can be the judge), that plumb the depths of the human experience, shying away from nothing; stories that strive to capture what is true, insofar as any none of us can grasp real Truth with a capital ‘T’. And stories that go out there and kick some ass, if we’re being honest with ourselves.

I do believe that I’ve crafted a story like this. The fellows at Eclogue must agree, because they agreed to publish my work and bring it into the world. They’re doing work that I believe in, and they believe in me, so the love’s all mutual—which is a great feeling, let me tell you!

I’m not going to take up too much of your time now, precious as it is. But I will ask that if you’re interested in following me on this journey to publication, I’d be simply over the Moon. I intend to give regular updates and reveal more about the book in due course. I’ll write about what inspired it, what I learned in my efforts to attract agents and win literary competitions, how I curated a killer playlist to get the vibe of the novel just right, how I honed my skills as an editor and taught myself to kill my own darlings, how I learned to not give up and second-guess myself into oblivion, and much, much more. It’s going to be quite the summer, and I can’t wait to get started.

And speaking of journeys…

Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that Pneumanauts is, at its core, a road trip story. It seems to me that road trips stories are very appropriate stories to tell when you want to ponder life, what it all means, what it’s all for. Road trip stories are fundamentally stories about the transformative power of journeying, and we’re all of us on a journey—and I’m not just talking about spiritual ones. We are quite literally situated on a spherical spacecraft sailing through the cosmos at 67,000 mph, never again to revisit the exact point in spacetime that we once occupied. The orbit of the Earth around the Sun, and rotation of the galactic arm, the galaxy itself spinning endlessly through a sea of void; when you think about it, we are all of us sojourners in a deep, profound sense. Who knows where we’re going, or where we’ll end up? Who knows who we’ll become along the way?

A good road trip story offers potential answers. And Pneumanauts is, if nothing else, a good road trip story. But it’s also much more—a story about friendship, brotherhood, heartache, teenage angst, teenage lust, existential crises, drug dealing, racial tension, theology, religiosity, criminality, masculinity, Saskatchewan, Canada at large, desperation, nihilism, violence, love, forgiveness, revelation, resurrection, the End Times and the coming of the New Age. And aliens. It’s a story about aliens, too.

And it all started with a question I asked my Dad in a roadside Tim Horton’s somewhere between Kingston, Ontario and Toronto: If aliens are real, and I’m a Christian—am I supposed to go out there and convert them?

So, if you’d like to sojourn with me for a little while, why not click the Subscribe button below? I can’t wait to share this story with you, dear reader…

Not the actual cover artwork - official cover to be revealed at a later date!

A Pneumanautic Exploration of 'Chants of Sennaar'

C. J. W. Armstrong — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:00:29 GMT

Today’s post is something a bit different. I’d like to share about a piece of media that made an impact on me, and examine in detail what this impact was. The piece in question this time around is Chants of Sennaar—a humble little video game developed by Rundisc and published by Focus Entertainment. It can be completed in about ten hours. The impression it leaves upon the heart, mind and soul, however, may well last much, much longer…

Now, this isn’t a game review or a player’s guide. This is a pneumanautic exploration—an earnest hunt for hidden truths and deeper meanings in the unlikeliest of places. The territory we map is mythological, but we know that myths—whether they appear in books, movies, music, video games or what have you—have incredible power to awaken us, to alert us to the hidden parts of ourselves that yearn for…what, exactly? Truth? Love? Beauty? Why is it that words on a page or pixels on a screen, when stitched together in just the right pattern, evoke such awe-inspiring responses within us?

A pneumanaut does not know. But a pneumanaut trusts that there is merit in the seeking. Most of all, a pneumanaut hopes that the seeker, by some higher will or power, will be rewarded in the endeavour. And so they seek, hurtling headlong into the depths of eternity…

Human creativity and jet-powered tractors

I’ve been led to believe that there are no more great works of art. The time of the Renaissance men painting masterpieces and sculpting marvels is long gone. Perhaps some decades ago, great stories and plays might have been penned—Hemingway, Miller, Faulkner. They would have sparked a ‘national conversation’, would have been admitted to the cultural canon, would have been studied by the young and contemplated by the old. But if you look around today, at the desolate landscape that is the post-millennial Internet age, you’ll be left wanting. Lately, it seems best to imagine the Internet as a post-nuclear wasteland, irradiated and scoured from the fallout of brain-rot memes, pornography, political disinformation, scientific disinformation, ragebait, clickbait, callous grifting, and AI-generated slop. You need a hazmat suit just to wade into the comments section. You can’t scroll for ten minutes without seeing something hateful, hurtful, or downright evil. How could any healthy, vivacious culture develop in an environment as hostile as this?

Now, if you’re willing to brave the adverse conditions, you might be able to rummage through the detritus and find some rare and true gems—perhaps an undiscovered musician posting genre-breaking material on YouTube, or an avant-garde painter uploading mesmerizing works to Instagram, or an incredibly talented writer posting on Substack to an audience of fewer than a hundred. But what then? Your spirit may have been lifted, your understanding of the human experience elevated by this wonder of an artist whom you’ve stumbled upon, but this counts for very little, algorithmically speaking. The feed scrolls on—or perhaps better said, the feed feeds on—consuming anything and everything offered at its altar. Every click, every comment, every moment spent lingering over a video is processed and subsumed into the byzantine enumeration of a blind and insatiable input/output machine that feels nothing, understands nothing. It gorges and spews data—nothing more.

If we’re feeling particularly dour, we can think of that input-output machine as the fuel-guzzling engine accelerating the dilapidation of our culture. It’s like a jet engine set in the chassis of a rusty old tractor, propulsing it forth with such violent speed that it sabotages the integrity of the overall structure. Move too fast, and pretty soon things begin to break loose and fall off. Yet this machine, for all its tremendous influence in our world today, cannot do what we humans have always done on our own. Wherever two or more of us gather, there we establish a culture. No artifice is necessary for this to happen. We figure out, organically, how we ought to behave, what we ought to value, what we ought to believe about ourselves and the world. And then, we express those same beliefs outwardly. We share them with one another. We paint, we compose, we craft, we write, we sing, we dance, we fashion, we create. Creative expression springs from somewhere within us, somewhere uniquely human—somewhere inspired or derived from the divine, we might even say. Maybe there’s something profoundly embodied about this whole culture thing that our ancestors unwittingly understood but, in our age of fibre-optic cables and wireless communications, we’ve lost touch with.

Perhaps where we’ve gone wrong as a culture is in mistaking the breadth of connection for the depth of connection. The Internet has made it possible to establish links with an unprecedented volume of people, places, things, and ideas. Our smartphones act as portals to the wider world, granting us access to virtually any person or place that we can imagine. But if we pause a moment and consider just how meaningful these connections are—how much they truly reflect an honest-to-goodness bond of understanding, solidarity, receptivity—I think we’ll find that the vast majority of them are incredibly shallow. On social media, for instance, one can encounter and engage with veritable thousands of users in a single doom-scrolling session, but how many meaningful relationships can be created and sustained this way? One can comment on a post and think of themselves as having ‘connected’ with some person on the other side of the world, but how much worth, how much depth, does that connection truly exemplify? Has there been any real, honest, identifiably real interaction, marked by mutual understanding and common experience? I’m not saying that powerful relationships can’t or don’t form online—the story of the fellow who found friendship and belonging within a World of Warcraft server proves they can—but I am pointing out that of all the ‘connections’ that are formed in the strange land of cyberspace, vanishingly few reflect the kind of authentic human connection that we would recognize as ‘real’ in the outside world.

That matters because great art can’t be borne from a fractured, emaciated, ersatz cultural landscape. Not easily, anyway, because greatness itself denotes a certain kind of ultimacy—it has to go beyond barriers, beyond group identities, beyond anyone and anything, to reach up toward the highest realms of our shared ideals. Great art is not the same thing as good art, remember. Great art must, by definition, be grand in scope, ambition and profundity; it must appeal to that deepest part of all living, breathing, red-blooded human beings who find themselves bound up together in that roiling, seething, endlessly evolving system of ideas, values, beliefs and behaviours that we might call a ‘culture’. It must speak to the soul, it must speak to the moment, it must speak to the past and the future, all at once. It must say something true—not just for you and me, but all of us sharing this space, this country, this nation, this continent. It must be greater than any one of us, standing side-by-side on this hallowed ground.

It doesn’t seem like the Internet, as a place for the exchange of ideas and the expression of values and beliefs, is very good at facilitating the sort of universality needed to birth these sorts of artistic works. We may appear as if we’re more interconnected than ever, yet we’ve never been further apart. We’re driven ever-deeper into our algorithmic silos, feeding and being fed a diet of machine-curated media in a closed loop. Our capacity to really engage with each other, with big ideas and big themes, deteriorates as the distance between our digital islands expands. It seems hopeless. Movies, books, television, drama, sculpture, fine art: none of these disciplines has yielded that truly magnificent work which shall define our age, to which all of us, no matter who we are, may point and say, ‘In this, we find the truth about ourselves.’

And yet, there is another artistic medium which has thus far escaped our scrutiny. We’ve ignored that newest, youngest art form, still struggling to establish itself and earn its rightful place in our culture as a domain where true art can be made, expressed, and explored. That domain is video games. And that great work, yet to be discovered by the masses, but primed and ready to take its proper position as a Great Work of the 21st century (if only people would come off their high horses and recognize video games as the artistic medium of the future, and indeed, the modern era), I would contend, is Chants of Sennaar.

Let me tell you about it.

Devotee fanart poster created by Reddit user Nano91.

Lost in translation

One great American novelist of yesteryear, Herman Melville, said that ‘to produce a mighty book, one must choose a mighty theme’. Chants of Sennaar has a mighty theme indeed: the restoration of human civilization to its former glory. I’m not sure if the game’s creators intended it to be an allegory for our current age, but when the final credits rolled, and I found myself basking in the beauty of the finale, I was struck by how this story perfectly articulated the moment we’re living through. I mean, it was uncanny—the game captured the essence of what we feel is happening in the world today, on the grandest scale. There are endless discussions going on—both online and off—about the downfall of Western civilization, the hollowing out of civil society, the vapidity and vacuity of our culture in the era of Tik-Tok trends and viral marketing campaigns. Experts are diagnosing the social and political ruptures in the global order almost as fast as podcasters can crank out hot takes on the same issues. Things are spinning out of control, and everybody has this pervading sense of doom and disillusionment; we thought the world was one way, but it isn’t, and now we’re all sliding into the abyss together, powerless to stop our own ruination.

Chants of Sennaar knows this, and it knows where we’re heading. It shows us a world that has truly come apart at the seams—not in some violent, apocalyptic sense, but a world founded on higher ideals that has already gone through a long, slow, and inexorable decline. But what’s even more impressive is that it offers us a vision for the future. As we journey through this colourful, fallen world, we begin to see how it might be repaired. We learn how the degradation can be reversed. The game invites us, the player, to be the instrument of change. And by the time I’d finished my playthrough, my goodness, I was convinced: this is the way forward. It’s a lesson that’s simple, elegant, ageless. It’s one we’ve forgotten—that we’re in the process of forgetting. Maybe, if more people play this game, we can abate the worst of what’s to come.

For me to reveal this lesson to you, however, I will need to spoil many of the details in the game. For non-gamers, I’m sure this isn’t much of an issue—you’re eager just for me to get to the heart of what makes this little video game a ‘great work’, as I’ve been saying. For those readers of mine who are gamers, I’d recommend that you experience the game for yourself, then come back to this piece and read on. I’d be depriving you of a truly enjoyable experience of discovery and wonder. But the meaning of this game—the moral revelation it imparts unto the player who overcomes its challenges—is truly something amazing. I feel compelled to write about it; I must relate what it tells us about ourselves, about our society, about how we might combat that degradation we seem to feel gathering pace, day in and day out.

Chants of Sennaar is fundamentally based on the story of the Tower of Babel, inverting it in a clever way. ‘Sennaar’ is actually the name of the location where the Bible tells us people gathered from all corners of the earth to construct the Tower. This alone affords it significant credibility as a contender for ‘great work’ status, as great art often dialogues with the ageless, totemic mythologies that have shaped our collective psyche for millennia, parsing them for new audiences as well as mining them for completely new depths of meaning. The Tower of Babel, for anyone unfamiliar, is a Biblical narrative which tells the story of the earliest efforts of humanity to form a cohesive civilization. The long and short of it is that mankind, in his hubris, endeavours to erect a grandiose monument to his own achievements, by his own merits. There’s a lot of theological stuff to unpack here, but we’ll set most of it aside for now and focus on the basic outcome: God sees that human beings are about to do a terrible, terrible thing, and takes it upon Himself to stop the Tower from being constructed.* The Bible tells us that God ‘confuses the language’ of the people constructing the tower, causing them to be unable to communicate. Their capacity to coordinate and cooperate is summarily undermined, and the progress of the audacious project is thwarted. Soon, the various people who once gathered together at Babel scatter across the world, never again to challenge the authority of heaven.

Chants of Sennaar, while not necessarily set in our world, shows us an altogether familiar one where the Tower has long since fallen into disarray on account of the various inhabitants’ inability to communicate with one another. As we, the player, are introduced to this world—our avatar, referred to as ‘The Traveler’ finds it/him/herself awaken in the depths of the Tower’s lowest levels—we soon realize that navigating the labyrinthine structure will be very difficult. Neither we nor our Traveler understands the languages of the Tower’s denizens that we encounter, and therein lies the challenge: we must use whatever clues we might stumble across to try and decode these foreign tongues, so that we might progress toward our goal. And what other goal could there be than to reach the Tower’s top, where a shining beacon of heavenly light glistens eternally? Or at least, that’s what the wall murals created by the Tower’s bottom-tier inhabitants, the Devotees, seem to think is waiting for them once they ascend.

As we mingle among the Devotees, paying close attention to their behaviours and the artworks adorning the public squares, marketplaces, and holy sanctuaries that make up their domain, transcribing every new word we learn in the Traveler’s little pocketbook, we begin to learn something of their deepest-held beliefs. They are a fanatical bunch, hence their name, and they seem intent upon making pilgrimage to the top of the Tower. What grieves them is that another of the Tower’s civilizations, the Warriors, has shut them out from the upper levels. Iron gates guarded by stern-looking Warrior-men prevent the Devotees from ever leaving their quarters. They beg and plead with the Warriors, explaining that God—yes, one of the first words we learn in the Devotee language is God, whom, based on their murals, it is clear they believe to dwell at the Tower’s pinnacle—is calling to them, and their greatest desire in all the world is to come and worship in his presence.

But their cries fall on deaf ears, or rather uncomprehending ears, for the Warriors understand nothing of the Devotee language. The Warriors have their own language, and indeed an entirely unique culture to that of their neighbours. As the Traveler makes their way into this new domain, utilizing their ever-expanding vocabulary to bribe, cajole and ingratiate themselves to whosoever might be able to assist them on their journey, it becomes clear that the Warriors and the Devotees are two entirely separate cultures who for generations have lived in mutual suspicion and misunderstanding of one another. The Warriors, we learn (also by paying close attention to their own murals) arrived at the Tower long ago, attracted by the beautiful music they heard emanating from its upper levels. As they established a home for themselves in the Tower’s many chambers, they encountered seemingly angelic beings, the source of this music, and were entranced. They call these people the ‘Chosen’ on account of their illustrious, seemingly divine nature. They thought these Chosen so magnificent that they sought to guard them jealously from those strangers who arrived at the Tower some time later, the Impures—‘Impure’ being the term for ‘Devotee’ in the Warrior tongue. As the Traveler learns more of the Warrior language, it is made clear that the Warriors think very poorly of the Devotees, and deem them unworthy of ever holding audience with the angels. This is the reason for the locked gates at the threshold between the Devotees’ realm and the Warriors’.

You might be starting to notice the pattern here. On the Traveler goes, and soon they find a means of passage into the domain beyond that of the Warriors, where these ‘Chosen’ reside. We soon find that these creatures are not angelic or ethereal at all, but another culture altogether: the Bards. The Bards know full well that the Warriors view them as superior creatures, and laugh at them from behind their gilded walls. In the Bards’ realm, they live in splendor and decadence, whiling away their hours eating, drinking, and making merry. They care nothing for the plebian rabble of their Tower’s lower levels; they believe them to be backward, ignorant, vulgar. They care nothing for the misery of the poor ‘Idiots’, the underclass of their society who live and work as slaves. The Traveler learns the Bards’ language as well, and in doing so, comes closer to understanding just what has gone wrong in this culture—how they misunderstand their neighbours, and themselves, failing to properly integrate into the greater superstructure of the Tower.

The Traveler’s ascent continues through yet more strange domains, though I will spare you the details so that you may experience some of the game’s story for yourself, should you wish to play it. What I will relate is what is perhaps the game’s greatest secret: what awaits you at the top of the tower. The final, secret civilization that the Traveler must commune with is that of the Anchorites, the Tower’s creators and original inhabitants. The Anchorites are a highly evolved society with wondrous technology, yet have sequestered themselves away at the Tower’s highest echelon behind impenetrable barriers. So complete is their seclusion that none of the Tower’s denizens even know that they exist. As the Traveler finally discovers a means of reaching them, we are disturbed to find that the Anchorites’ culture has degenerated in their many, many years of self-isolation. The entirety of their tribe has retreated from the world so thoroughly as to escape into a virtual reality called ‘Exile’. There they live a protracted half-life, perpetually connected to machines that sustain their mass hallucination—all save one member, whom you stumble upon as you explore their abandoned streets. This lone survivor reveals that they are the reason we awakened down in the depths of the Tower: they hacked the system, escaped Exile, and awakened the Traveler, revealing us to be a kind of failsafe program for countering existential threats to the Tower itself. The survivor pleads with the Traveler to break Exile’s hold over their people before it is too late. We come to understand that the Anchorites need to re-engage with the outside world, the world they created: the Tower has been deteriorating as its masters have neglected it, and its total collapse is imminent.

The true nature of the Tower becomes clear to us: this place, built by the Anchorites, attracted various tribes from across the world to gather together in a spirit of unity and harmony. Yet the Anchorites came to fear and misunderstand these newcomers and decided to shut themselves away. They created Exile as a sort of artificial intelligence to facilitate their seclusion, hence its name; Exile, in turn, went about sowing division and discord among the various tribes, undermining their ability to cooperate and thereby potentially breach the Anchorites’ defences. All in all, it has been a disaster for everyone. Mistrust and misinformation abound, and none of the tribes—which each have certain characteristics or skills which might have benefitted the others—have any meaningful connection to one another. It is up to the Traveler to return to each of the different tribes, and using the knowledge we’ve gained over the course of our journey, deactivate the hidden server centers in each of their domains where Exile has been secretly monitoring and reinforcing their segregation. Only then might the tribes be able to reconnect and work together to solve the problems facing them.

We know what we need to do. But what actually happens when we do it? And what does it all mean?

God = Duty = Beauty = Transformation = Exile

If you pay close attention while progressing through the game, you notice that each of the Tower’s distinct tribes exhibits some sort of distinctive flaw. The hints are subtle, going deeper than the simple fact that the tribes look down on one another and fail to properly communicate. They have all regressed in one way or another, just as the Anchorites regressed as they withdrew into Exile en masse. An attentive player will note that this regression is rooted in each of these cultures having lost something they once possessed. The Devotees, to begin with, have lost their agency, becoming so focused on their religious rites and practices that they have ceased to make any progress at reaching their goal of ascending the Tower. They beg and plead at the Warrior’s gates ineffectively, while their elites—the priests who occupy the monastery at the heart of their domain—mill about uselessly, praying their prayers but not actually doing anything to help their people. A beggar languishes outside the monastery, unaided. Within its walls, Devotees gather to hear the words of blessing of their leader, the High Priest, but he has mysteriously vanished. No one actually sends anybody to go looking for him (that’s what the Traveler ends up doing)—they just linger about the place, hoping that he will appear, though he never does. Outside in the beautiful gardens, the trees and plants wither and die because no one is tending to them. The Devotee’s entire culture is frozen in a kind of collective paralysis, unable to take any meaningful action that might improve their lives.

The Warriors are regressing as well. Not only are they haughty and brash, they are ignorant. There is evidence in their murals—relegated now to a hidden chamber where it appears they no longer venture—that they were once proud seafarers, skilled at astral navigation. It was this skill which enabled them to find their way to the Tower. They valued it enough to constructed a large observatory at the edge of their domain some time after thier arrival. But by the time the Traveler visits them, however, the observatory is long abandoned. Its lenses are missing and the annals cataloguing the stars are scattered haphazardly around the room. Outside the observatory, the Warriors waste their energy on pointless and repetitive tasks, carrying out the orders of superiors that neither they nor the superiors appear to understand. In lonely places, Warriors can be found shirking their duties by getting drunk and engaging in coarse behaviour. The signs are again clear: this once powerful and resourceful people has lost touch with their own character. Their worship of the ‘Chosen’ seems all the more foolish when the objects of their adulation sneer at them from afar.

We could keep going. The Bards live in opulence and callously mock the Idiots who serve them. They dwell in their palaces, visit the theater and attend lavish garden parties, while the Idiots dwell in the sewers below, wretched and resentful. There is a distinct sense that they perceive themselves as superior, yet are blind to the dependencies they have on those they deem ‘lesser’. Higher up, the Alchemists—oh wait, I said I would save some surprises for you! Suffice it to say, they have their own issues which they seem incapable of addressing (a certain paranoia, in their case, which prevents them from courageously pursuing the knowledge they so desperately seek).

Once the Traveler has reached the Anchorites and learned the truth of the Tower, however, it becomes clear that each of these tribes holds the key to arresting one another’s regression. The Traveler descends the Tower again and revisits each location, in search of the purple gates where Exile’s servers lie hidden. Along the way, if the player is careful, we also may stumble across strange, advanced communication portals—think of it like an ancient Sumerian video call service—where different members of each tribe are trying to send messages to each other, to no avail. If the Traveler takes the time to translate these messages, helping the various tribes to communicate, we will find that little by little, the Tower begins to change. A group of runaway Idiots from the Bards’ realm find sanctuary in the Devotees’ monastery. The Warriors send a battalion to aid the Alchemists in chasing off the fearsome creature which lurks in the caves near their realm, enabling them to pursue their scientific research in peace and security. The Alchemists send a representative to visit the Devotees to help restore their gardens to verdancy. The Bards overcome their disdain for the Warriors and send a performance troupe to entertain them with song. And all of them, we soon find, assist the Anchorites in reacclimatizing to life outside of Exile, conversing with the Tower’s creators and finding ways to collaborate on restoring the structure—their shared home—to its former grandeur.

This is how the Traveler’s mission is fulfilled. Once each of the servers is shut down, and Exile itself deactivated (a task which does not prove straightforward, as the rogue AI makes every attempt to hinder the Traveler, even going so far as to forcibly connect us to one of the same immersion devices that kept the Anchorites trapped for countless years), and once all of the Tower’s tribes have been reunified—all by the power of translation, as written in the Traveler’s humble pocketbook—the game reaches its finale. The Traveler, accompanied by members of each of the tribes, ascends to the very top of the Tower. What they behold there affirms the great theme that has been building over the course of the entire journey: the power of language to bring people together in unity of purpose and spirit.

You see, we do find God at the top of the Tower. After we reactivate the Tower’s ancient systems and begin the process of its restoration, we see a great holographic glyph—the Devotee’s word for God—appear in the air above the Traveler’s head. But then the glyph changes. We realize that the glyph we’ve seen so often inscribed in two dimensions is now rendered in three. As this three-dimensional hologram rotates, it becomes clear that, when viewed from a certain angle, the symbol is also the Warrior’s word/glyph for Duty—Duty being the driving philosophy that animates the Warrior culture, and acts as their highest ideal. The hologram shifts again, transforming into the glyph for Beauty, the Bard’s greatest ideal. Then again for the Alchemists—Transformation, or Knowledge—and again for the Anchorites—Exile, or Transcendence.** At each of these transformations, each of the different tribesmen gathered at the Tower’s pinnacle gasp in wonder and delight as they witness their respective ideals come together as one. All along, they believed they were serving different gods, different ideals; now they realize that there is but one, and each of them has only been seeing one side of His face. It’s only when they all come together and recognize that they each possess a piece of the puzzle, and not the whole, that they can begin to pursue the real truth.

Hello? Is anyone out there?

When I watched that final scene play out, I was genuinely moved. I hadn’t seen it coming: the reveal that each of the tribe’s ideals—words which I had learned and used many times over the course of my journey, as I’d gotten to know these different people groups and come to understand their cultures—was as surprising as it was powerful. It wasn’t a simple ‘blind men touching an elephant’ situation; I had witnessed in vivid detail how their civilizations had achieved so much, and had fallen so far. There was true pain that had been felt by these people—harm done to themselves and to each other—in their narrow-minded pursuit of their individual priorities. Yet, now we could all see that it was for nothing; what they had always needed was to dialogue with one another, share their perspectives openly and honestly, trusting in each other and seeking to coexist harmoniously. They each had their own value system that was perspectival in nature, rather than relativistic. The truth—the real truth—could only emerge when they combined these perspectives, sharpened them against each other. This process was entirely necessary for meaning-making, not superfluous. They needed each other to progress.

It struck me that this was a lesson for our time, for our culture. Each of us has a unique perspective on life that is true and valid, but neither is it the whole. We must seek to understand one another’s viewpoints if we are to better understand ourselves. We need each other in a very real sense! Connection, real connection, is vital. It sustains us, keeps us healthy, corrects our imbalances. Authentic connection with one another reminds us of who we are, our strengths and weaknesses, and how we need support. Authentic connection reinforces our distinct value and draws out that special talent, skill or mindset that we bring to the table, which we can use for the benefit of all. God did not create us to be islands unto ourselves, to serve our own disparate ideals—He created us to be his children. and that means that all of us, while being different from one another, are still family.

It’s a lesson that we seem to have forgotten as a culture, these days. We seem to have traded authentic human connection for a facsimile—for an array of facsimiles. Synthetic bonds fostered by circuits and wires instead of flesh, blood, and spirit. Followers over real friends. Online discourse over purposeful community engagement. Influencers over parents, grandparents, neighbours, teachers, coaches. I’m not saying that these things are inherently wrong, but they are out of balance in our culture, just as the various civilizations of Sennaar were out of balance.

Like the people of Sennaar, I think we need to learn to reconnect. I think we need to stop fearing one another—resenting the different tribes we see from a distance, different than our own, believing different things, pursuing different ideals. I think we need to be brave and go out there and meet them where they’re at. I think we need to throw open the gates, not shut ourselves away, or immerse ourselves in systems that filter out everything which we may regard as strange or ‘other’ for our continued comfort. I think we need to be better at admitting that we don’t have all the answers, and we need help. I think we need to be quick to reach out a hand, both for our sake, and for others’.

I think we need to start speaking each other’s language. Because language is the expression of thought, and the expression of thought is the expression of the self—and if you can’t know who I am, if you can’t see me for who I am, how can I feel safe enough to trust you? We’ll never find a way to overcome the challenges that face us, collectively, unless we can start trusting one another again. And Lord knows we’ve got some pretty major hills that we need to climb.

If the Internet is the new Babel, then maybe we do need to tear it down—destroy what we’ve built before it destroys us. But I’m using the Internet right now to reach you, dear reader. I’m trusting that you’ll read these words and find some truth in them. I’m offering you an authentic connection: this is me, expressing my thoughts, my ideas, as honestly as I can, expecting nothing in return, but hoping that something will resonate with you. It’s as much as any one of us can do. It might not be enough to stop what’s coming. It might not be enough to stop our descent into tribalism. But after playing Chants of Sennaar, I can at least take solace in the fact that the solution exists. We know what it is.

Let’s reconnect, before it’s too late.

*It might seem strange to the modern reader that God takes exception to humans building a tower that may ascend to heaven, as if heaven were a place that could be physically reached by human effort, but it’s the deeper meaning here which needs to be extracted. The key is to view the Tower of Babel as a symbol of humanity’s insistence that we are gods in our own right; we know what’s best for us, we can achieve whatever we desire, and so we have no need for God Himself. In Christian theology, that is not a good idea for human beings to get into their heads, and it warrants swift and decisive dislodgment. You might view the Tower as a stand-in for any of the egregious human-designed efforts to ‘make the world a better place’, according to our own warped senses of what the world ought to be: the Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Terror in Revolutionary France, and on and on it goes. We humans lack the understanding to make perfect moral judgements on our own; as created beings, we are dependent on a higher being, a Heavenly Father, who is ultimately in control of all. We disrupt the metaphysical order of the universe when we forget our place, which nothing good can come from—as Babel’s fall, and all these other disasters I’ve mentioned, duly show.

**Here is a link to a visualization I found online if you’d like to get a better sense of what I’m talking about, though the best way to exoperience the sublime beauty of this moment is just to play the game for yourself all the way through!

Sleep or Swim - Pt. 2

C. J. W. Armstrong — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:04:38 GMT

The following is a continuation of short story I wrote in 2021 (and tidied up with a few minor edits), originally published as part of an anthology. Read the beginning of the story here!

Sleep or Swim - Pt. 1

C. J. W. Armstrong — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:07:18 GMT

The following is a short story I wrote in 2021 (and tidied up with a few minor edits), originally published as part of an anthology. I was participating in a writer’s collective at the time, and every so often the group would band together and create new work, centered around a partoicular theme. This time around the challenge was to write a ‘hopepunk’ story—a story which maintains an upbeat, unwavering orientation toward the light, no matter how impenetrable the darkness gets. Radical optimism in the face of overwhleming odds; love and kindness fluorishing in the harshest, grimmest conditions. In hopepunk, ‘The fight is worth it’, as the tagline on the publication says.

I do think that we need more stories in this vein, not so that we can pretend that the world’s a better place than it really is, but because we need to remind ourselves that the human spirit in an indomitable thing. We are capable of greatness—great compassion, great innovation, great courage. We need some of that inspiration if we are to take on the challenges of the day and overcome them. The better world only begins when we come together and build it ourselves, brick by brick.

I hope you this pulpy little sci-fi romp. The second and final part will be published in due course. If you’d like to purchase the entire anthology, it can be found here.

The alarms went off just as the druidess was preparing to dive into the lake. Red lights flashed in the sky and sirens belted out a shrill warning from somewhere beyond the clouds. The druidess grimaced, contemplating whether to ignore it—at least long enough to jump in and feel the icy bite against her skin—but retreated from the precipice. Roberta would not be pleased if she was late to take up her post. The druidess cast a forlorn glance around the rocks, the forest, the crystalline water, then reached a hand up to her eyes and pried away an invisible blindfold.

The bare metallic walls of the ship’s interior flashed into view. Kelly had to blink a few times to adjust to the glare of the fluorescent lights. Her ears thrummed with the guttural vibrations of the engine, buried somewhere below her feet under layers of plasteel armastructure and hyperfiber cables. She peeled the visigoggles from her face and straightened her back. Shame none of that in-world exercise transferred over to her real joints and muscles. Her limbs had gone stiff after sitting inert for so long, so she took a moment to shake herself loose. Then she set the visigoggles on the mantle beside the hoverchair, triggering the immersion chamber’s sliding door.

Kelly tugged impatiently at her hair as she tied it back into a slipshod ponytail. This time, she’d come closer to bona fide swimming than ever before. It thrilled her as much as terrified her. She’d given up trying to wade in from the shore because it was too unnerving her to see the water level slowly increase, swallowing her ankles, then her knees, then her waist. Throwing herself in was her new strategy, one she was almost sure was going to work. It wasn’t like she would drown if it went badly—the simulation would shut down before any mortal harm befell her. Of course, just when she’d worked up the nerve to jump, Roberta had to interrupt her. She would have to conquer her fear all over again when her next break came.

Kelly ducked her head as she made her way down the catwalk toward the mess hall, dodging steam expulsions and shorting electric circuits. There were burn marks all along the corridor from the fire they’d had a month ago. They’d nearly lost the whole C-Deck that day. What would that have left them with? The maintenance wing and the freezer. She clucked her tongue as she hefted herself up the narrow ladder and up to the main deck. Would’ve hardly been worth salvaging if that’s all that was left.

Roberta was waiting by the monitoring station they’d rigged up across from the food processor. They hadn’t had much choice about where to set up their base of operations—the galley was the largest area that hadn’t been contaminated besides the maintenance wing, but it was far more comfortable. Couches and a few tables lined one side of the room, the other the cooking area. Not that either of them had used the stove or anything else besides the processor. Danny had been the chef, and his brains were splattered across the observation deck window. She sighed as she sat down in one of the swivel chairs across from Roberta. Danny had been cute. Maybe there could have been something there. Maybe he would have made her that spicy jambalaya he was perfecting, if she’s asked. He was always going on about the virtues of fresh ingredients over synthetic. Would soil-grown chili peppers still have the same kick? She’d never find out—the hydroponics lab had been the first to be overrun.

“What’s the latest? Any movement?” she asked the back of Roberta’s head.

“Nothing to worry about. Did you have a nice swim?”

“Didn’t get a chance, actually.”

“Hm. Waste of time anyway.”

“Is it? Excuse me for trying to learn something new. I’m challenging myself, Roberta. Trying to keep my mind occupied. So what if I can’t use it outside the simulation?”

“I mean that—simulations, that’s the waste of time. You want to learn to swim, you need lessons. Practical ones.”

“Yeah, well, are you gonna teach me?”

“I’m a little busy keeping this wreck afloat, as it happens.”

Kelly gave a stiff nod. “Right. So, if there’s nothing to worry about, why’d you flip the emergency switch instead of just knocking on the door?”

“You know what time it is, don’t you?”

“Uh—” She felt an icy stab of guilt as she glimpsed Walton’s novelty cat-clock hanging above the water recycler. “Oh, damn. Sorry. Guess I was really in the zone.”

Kelly chewed aimlessly on the end of her ponytail until Roberta turned herself around from the monitors. The woman’s face was creased in a deep-set frown, as always. Her head appeared freshly shaved. Her arm muscles rippled as she leaned forward, folding her hands together and resting her elbows on her knees.

“Kelly,” she said. “We need to talk.”

“You sure now’s a good time?” Kelly motioned to the grainy image on the rightmost screen. “That Sludge pile looks like it’s on the move.”

Roberta didn’t flinch. “It’s not a problem. You being late is.”

Kelly nodded, but the shifting image on the display distracted her. The Sludge pile—a particularly large one—was oozing along the transport bay ceiling, pushing wiry tendrils ahead of itself as it probed its way around loose tubing and pipework. Kelly could trace its path easily enough. It was encroaching on a ventilation duct. The fan blades were still spinning, but the Sludge wouldn’t mind having a few of its tendrils sliced off; it would gum up the machinery and then slide through the gaps like gelatin pressing itself through a meat grinder. The same thing had happened all over the ship.

“Do you have an explanation?” Roberta said.

“Uh, yeah. Sure. That simulation Jefferson programmed—you know, ‘Ancient Island’ or whatever he called it. It’s amazing. Like he made it from memory, or something. There’s this lake—the water’s so clear, it reflects the sky like a mirror. It feels like you’re swimming in the sky. And—it’s the weirdest thing—it’s so quiet there. It’s only ever you. Alone. Total isolation. It sounds awful, I know, but when you’re there, walking in the woods, climbing the rocks, it’s so peaceful. Makes you lose track of time. Makes you feel like time doesn’t exist, even.”

Through all of this, Roberta kept staring at her, stonelike, while the Sludge inched closer to the duct. Kelly had been tracking it as she talked, waiting for Roberta to do something, and now she pointed a finger at the screen.

“Roberta, seriously, it’s almost at the vent.”

“I said it’s not a problem.”

Before Kelly could respond, the Sludge pile reached the duct. It stretched out several probing fronds toward the fan blades. Kelly was about to give a cry of alarm when a fiery blast consumed the screen, then disappeared a second later. She caught a glimpse of the Sludge in the corner of the screen, creeping its way back across the pipes as fast as its mess of appendages would allow.

“The hell was that?” Kelly said, leaning across the table. The incinerated Sludge lost its grip, dropped from the ceiling and banged off the hull of one of the abandoned all-terrain vehicles left in the bay.

“A booby-trap I rigged up.”

“Oh. Is that what you were doing on your shift?”

“Didn’t take that long. Only needed to open up some gas valves, build a little device capable of producing a spark. I placed them around some of the critical junctions.” She pointed behind her own head, where a boxy device was affixed over the kitchen doorway. Kelly could see a few others on the monitors screens—the engineering level, the hydraulics system chamber, the maintenance deck. “Once the Sludge trips the sensor, boom.”

“Knock knock, who’s there. Fireball,” Kelly said. “Nice. Where’d the explosives come from?”

“No explosives. Just rerouted a couple of the fuel channels.”

“Wait, fuel channels? You’re siphong fuel for this?”

Roberta shrugged. “So what? We’re not using the superdrive for much else.”

“What about if we need to set a new course?”

“This is dead space. New course to where? Deader space?”

“We don’t know what’s out there, that’s the point. Rogue planets. Flyby comets. Search parties!”

“How about another asteroid carrying a hostile alien lifeform?”

Kelly ignored her cynicism. “If the scanners pick up an outpost or a hospitable world within jump distance, it’s not like we can just drift there. Might be lightyears away. Don’t you think we’re better off conserving fuel for when we need it?” She gestured to the screen. “I mean, booby-traps are cool and all, but we’ve been getting by just fine with zapping the Sludge when it gets too close.”

Instead of answering, Roberta bowed her head and rubbed her eye sockets with her thumbs.

“See, Kelly, this is why we need to talk,” she said without looking up. “There isn’t going to be any hospitable planet. No friendly little outpost to take us in.”

“You can’t know that for sure. We’ve been broadcasting our distress beacon for months now. You know how far radio waves travel in that amount of time?” Roberta lifted a weary eye. “Okay, I don’t either, but it’s pretty damn far. Wayne told me that much.”

“Wayne’s dead, Kelly.”

“I mean, he could just be in some kind of coma—”

“He’s shambling around the engineering level with Sludge coming out his eyes. He’s dead, alright? For all intents and purposes. And we’re gonna be next. That is, unless we…”

Abruptly, Roberta stood and paced across the galley. Kelly tracked her movement, a tiny tremor of dread shooting down her spine.

“Unless we what?”

Roberta turned to face her. Her expression seemed carved from granite.

“Freeze ourselves.”

Last Instructions of a Pneumanaut

C. J. W. Armstrong — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:31:18 GMT

NOTE: I’d recommend reading on a large screen, if you’d like to experience the work as originally intended. Phones seem to cause some of the spacing to be disrupted.