All you that faine philosophers would be,
And night and day in Geber’s kitchen broyle,
Wasting the chipps of ancient Hermes' Tree,
Weening to turn them to a precious oyle,
The more you worke the more you loose and spoile;
To you, I say, how learned soever you be,
Go burne your Bookes and come and learne of me.— Edward Kelley
I.
This is a work of fiction.
You may have already realized this. The fact that the "world map" is missing a few continents may have tipped you off. You may also have noticed the absurd over-confidence in descriptions of things that happened fifty thousand, eighty thousand, or a hundred thousand years ago. If you are particularly detail-oriented and academic-minded, you may even have noticed that many of the "references" that appear in the text are fake.
The purpose of this world-building project is to create a fictional alternate history that is deep enough and vast enough that it can serve as inspiration for multiple writing projects. The "knowledge" presented here is rich tapestry of half-cocked theories about the prehistory of humanity that is
close enough to what is scientifically known to be true that it is plausible. There are a lot of unknowns and gray areas in scientific knowledge of the distant past, so for the most part the world presented here strives to fall in the zone of: "Well, we don't know that to be the case... but it doesn't actually conflict with the things we do know." That's the sweet spot.
The result is a world that has
just enough detail to allow you to browse at your leisure and find stories to tell. Why were the Bondi neanders so much more aggressive than their peers? What did the Apo Duat humans do to drive away the Bougain denisova in Sunda, making them literally flee to an entirely different island? Why did the Zarzians suddenly flee their homeland around 8,000 BP, leading to the Zarzian diaspora and causing their language to have strange and subtle influences on languages from Cycladia to Indus to Birit Narim? These are just a few of the many writing prompts available in this world for anyone who feels inspired.
II.
In order to create a convincing pseudoscientific history of the world, we also had to create a convincing story around
how we know what we know. You will discover an entire storyline surrounding the "research on the turnings" in the appendixes and footnotes in this project. This meta-story is rich and detailed, but as with the main narrative it is also incomplete. Did Edward Kelley's typology of turnings really come from Edward Kelley? Or did Kelley steal work from John Dee? Was it related to the mysterious meeting that John Dee had with Francis Bacon and Thomas Phelippes the same year that Kelley met Dee? What documents and artifacts might Éliphas Lévi have passed on to Kenneth Mackenzie, causing him to found Societas Rosicruciana with Samuel Mathers only a few years later? What events forced this area of intellectual inquiry "underground" and kept it segregated from mainstream science and academia even to this day? Those of you with an interest in stories centered on conspiracy theories, secret societies, and science-vs-pseudoscience, may find prompts in this meta-storyline as well.
III.
It is important to be socially responsible when working with alternative histories. For example, many indigenous cultures today preserve and are direct descendents of cultures that existed ten, twenty, or even forty thousand years ago. Because of the timeframe we are working with in the Book of Turnings, we had to decide between two approaches for addressing indigenous cultures: we could simply exclude them entirely from our fictional world, or we could acknowledge them and provide basic tie-ins to the larger story we are creating while at the same time reminding people that it is inappropriate to create fictional stories around indigenous cultures unless you have an authentic connection to that culture. Our complete omission of North and South America is an example of the first approach. The culture pages we have for the Koori, Noongar, and Martidja Banyjima people are examples of the second approach.
Despite our best efforts, we may have misstepped! If you come across any element in this world that is offensive or inflammatory, that uses a name or term that is offensive in any cultural context, or that reinforces negative stereotypes or otherwise misrepresents a marginalized group, please contact us through our profile and we will work with you to get it changed. Any such incidents are unintentional, but we know it is not enough to simply say "it was unintentional" and move on: we are committed to working with people to improve this world and make it something that everyone can enjoy.
