User:Jeremygbyrne/Alchemy Cycle

Symbol used to represent the Alchemy Cycle

This article is intentionally encyclopaedic in style. See also this plain-language introduction.

The Alchemy Cycle is a wikific and associated texts set in a para-historical imaginary world where the artificial religion Xianity plays a major role in the early history of the 21st Century.

That all but one of its major commercial works — including the novels Augury, Alchemy and Astrology and the film Alchemy (as well as certain peripheral works) — are credited to fictional characters featured in the works themselves (cf. Red Book of Westmarch) is a central conceit of the Cycle, which is designed to reward hermeneutical analysis.

Setting

The Cycle is set primarily between late 2008 and 2012, but certain of its stories take place in the future, and further in the past.

The northern winter solstice on 21 December 2012 marks the end of one long cycle of the Mayan calendar (see also [1]), and the Cycle ties this date into the Apocalypse mythology of the Abrahamic religions in a zeitgeistian self-fulfilment echoing Terence McKenna.

Characters

{{spoiler}} The Cycle centres on an expatriate Australian woman named Sarah Bennett who uses a memetic engineering methodology called Eumetics to design a highly successful syncretic religion, with the intention of bringing about World Peace. In the fictional reality of the Cycle, Bennett's three-book Alchemy Cycle is published between 2018 and 2022 with the intention of reinvigorating Xianism, which had lost much of its early impetus by the mid-twenteens, and thus it invites a reading as polemic.

Bennett's fictional near future involves a 9/11-like recapitulation of the Gunpowder Plot launching the European "political stardom" of young King William V, and he features prominently in several works of the Cycle alongside his "child bride" Queen Frances and close confidant, the radical reformer Pope Nicholas VI.

Other characters include the anonymous director/filmmaker of the 90-minute machinimated feature film Alchemy (who may or may not be the person on whom the major AI character Seven is based, and whose reinterpretation of much of Bennett's original dogma to develop several new themes of her own reflects the significant changes within Xianity following the death of its founder) and various members of an African American family named Monroe, who apparently represent Bennett's ideal of humanity. (Bennett's orientalism may or may not owe something to her relationship with a man named Morgan Said in the mid to late noughties.)

Minor characters

Product

The novels of The Alchemy Cycle Augury, Alchemy and Astrology (short descriptions) — not a trilogy, but an eschatological conspiracy thriller dyad set in 2008 and 2012 and an action-adventure prequel set in 1930s Central America — should find a mainstream publisher, hopefully before the secret history market suffocates on Da Vinci Clones.

The atmospheric, impressionistic computer-generated Alchemy (website; first-draft opening scene script) may never be made — principally because of the time constraints inherent in its very-near-future setting — but the light-hearted "Indiana Jones and the Colour Out of Space" sensibility of the genre-stretching Astrology (website) is certainly aimed at commercial production.

The stageplay "Alchemy", set in Perth, Western Australia in late 2012 and played out in two 40-minute acts is designed to be suitable for amateur production (particularly with the participation of the real people who feature in it).

Minor Works

Red Planet, a short novel about the Chinese colonisation of Mars
"Conditional Pass", a novella about "the end of the Third World War", purporting to be a History honours presentation about the motivation of New Zealand terrorist Daniel Lee
The King With Ten Friends, a factional graphic novel telling the story of William Windsor's "Peacemaker" period
Alchemical, a collection of short fiction related to the Cycle
"The Quicksilver Screens", "The Fisherman of the Abyss" and "The Jaguar, the Serpent and the Sea", Call of Cthulhu adventures set in the world of the Cycle

Trivia

LJ Post announcing start of publication, discussing inspiration
Details of the novels in the Cycle
Speculation about Future popes
About the Alchemy Cycle symbol
Discussion of Jose-Maria Menchu (and some more)
Pre-announcing the launch of the Cycle
Commentary on Mercury in the Cycle
The Datapool and pods are important technologies in the Cycle
Note about The 2012 Games and the Cycle
References to the origin of the so-called Russian Messiah
Notes about the development of the Cycle
Note about recent discoveries in the evolution of the Human brain and the Cycle