The story behind Cantos of Arcadia, a thematic sequel to That Hideous Strength

It promised salvation. It delivered only doom.

Our mission at Wood Between Worlds Press is to find, cultivate, and publish the best new writers of adult and young adult speculative fiction who are consciously working within the tradition of the Inklings. 

We already have a roster of really exciting authors we’re signing for future contracts, and we’re in conversation with several other writers who are unknown gems you’ll definitely want to read.

The Cantos of Arcadia Kickstarter is our way to jumpstart this Inklings revival.

This book – the epic tale of one man’s quest to save humanity from an AI/alien hybrid – is very near and dear to my heart. I like to think of it as a sequel to That Hideous Strength, and today I’d like to share the backstory with you.

The Story of the Akathist of Thanksgiving

About five years ago, my friend Benedict Sheehan approached me to write a libretto for a dream project that he had been commissioned to write. It was a classical music oratorio based on the text of a wonderful prayer called "The Akathist of Thanksgiving". 

This akathist was found in the hands of a priest in Russia, named Gregory Petrov, who had been killed in a concentration camp. The remarkable thing about this work is that it is very much associated with persecutions against the Church, especially the torture and killing of clergymen. 

Yet this prayer is filled with a joyful contemplation of the creative world and with ebullient natural imagery quite unusual for Orthodox hymnography. It’s fascinating in that there’s a three act structure to the prayer itself: it starts with a call to adventure, goes into the underworld to encounter the dead faces of loved ones, and comes up through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross into a resurrection marked by a renewed appreciation for creation and life itself. 

This akathist was written by Metropolitan Tryphon (Turkestanov), who was the go-to spiritual father of those clergymen who were persecuted the most during the time of the Stalinist purges. 

Storytelling Set to Music

Back when I lived in California, I and several singer/poet/storyteller friends used to gather in the beautiful golden hills and write for hours. One particular thing we loved to do was to set stories to music and offer these multi-media stories as concerts. I’ve actually given these concerts all over the world, and they’ve always been very well received.

A Mythic Retelling of America’s Past

So Benedict, who wanted to do more than just set the text of the prayer of this akathist to music, approached me to work with him on this project. He wanted a narrative superstructure that would intertwine with the prayer to create a unique listening and storytelling experience. 

Initially, we came up with a crazy ambitious story that was set in a near-future, post-apocalyptic setting (light on the sci-fi), where those in America who survived an extinction-level event tried to make sense both of their past and their future by telling mythic stories of America's past. 

The Three American Fairy Tales

Eventually, the superstructure of the post-apocalyptic setting became too much to handle for a classical music libretto, so we decided that we would only include three stories of America's past, told in fairy-tale style, and intertwined with the prayers of the akathist. 

These were to be honest but ultimately hopeful retellings, in mythic mode, of some of the most difficult moments in American history, including colonization and slavery. We were quite conscious that this concept was incendiary and potentially dangerous, but the idea was to retell the past in a way that suggests a hopeful view of the future. It was to be myth, as well as history. 

• The first was an idyllic fairy tale retelling of the colonization of America by the English as seen through the eyes of two characters reminiscent of Pocahontas and John Smith. 

• The second story touched on the issue slavery, which we tackled in a way that I thought was very nuanced.

• The last was an almost Matrix-like vision of how the future became as dark as it is. This last tale was based, in part, on a myth I wrote with a fellow storyteller from England about thirteen years ago. 

Benedict’s Project

The collaboration was a lot of fun, but at the end of the day, it was still just too long, and time constraints forced us to ultimately abandon the libretto idea entirely. 

Benedict did create this monumental work, but it was only based on the text of the prayer, not my stories. It's a huge, ambitious work, and you can listen to it here.

What Became of My Stories?

I had put a lot of time and energy into this project and had to set my stories aside for a time. But something interesting happened a few months after this…

I ended up rereading my original telling of the post-apocalyptic sub-narrative and the fairy tales interspersed together with the words of the prayer. And I realized I had a complete, novella-length work that actually could be published. All it was missing was an ending. Benedict and I had never come up with this together. 

So I decided, why not try to finish it? This was hard. It required going back into the disappointment of the project we had envisioned and completing the story independently. But it worked. 

It was about 20K words and very mythic in nature. I made it a gift to my Patreon subscribers, who were very positive about it, and I thought that was the end of it. 

But the story just wouldn’t leave me alone. 

The idea kept niggling at me. There was a story here that wanted to be told in a more expansive fashion. 

Future Archeology

So I worked backwards. I asked myself, if there were to be an epic mythic retelling of America’s story after a cataclysmic event that almost annihilated humanity, what would that cataclysmic event be, and what would the myth be? 

(In her fascinating work Always Coming Home Ursula LeGuin calls this “future archeology.”) 

During this time, I started to write short sci-fi stories and submit them to various competitions judged by some of today’s top writers, such as Tim Powers and Dean Wesley Smith. Some of my stories got to the semi-finals, reaching top forty out of hundreds of thousands of submissions.

Joining the AI Conversation

Also around this time, there was a bizarre explosion of large-language model AIs being developed at hyper-speed. Some of the conversations surrounding these developments were hysterical, and some were blindly optimistic.

John Vervaeke gave a video essay on the threshold points of how humanity will react to the coming AI revolution, particularly AGI, and his response really intrigued me–the way he was talking reminded me of some of the best sci-fi I’ve ever read: 

When he talks about things like “Silicon Sages,” my mind goes to Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun, with its weird manifestations of technological religion (e.g. faithful and believing robot nuns). I am fascinated by these kinds of crossovers between science and mysticism in fictional settings, even if most of these stories tend to dismiss the mystical. Hearing Vervaeke talk about this did not make me think it will happen in real life, but I do think it’s a great “what if” starter for a story. 

By the way, in the midst of all this,

Paul Kingsnorth

was also writing his series on the Machine, and Joanthan Pageau was discussing how he sees this AI technology as a potential emergence of an independent will that is malevolent, the technology being a body inhabited by a darker power.

AI in the Akathist Story

Suddenly I realized there was a way of telling the akathist story I had written through the lens of this AI emergence. When I sat down to try this, the story just popped into my head, and out came chapter 1, a complete short story we’re offering for free through Kickstarter. 

After that, it was just a matter of putting the pieces together, and that's where the story got really interesting. 

I started to push the story, and it started to resist, saying, “You’re not ready to do this. You need to be in the right frame of mind. Go fill your creative well first.”

So for a while, I stopped writing entirely. I didn’t write a single word for about two years!

A Weird Email

And then one day, I got a weird email. I can’t say much about it, because it’s proprietary info and I signed an NDA. Suffice it to say, someone asked me to write a video game script set in the far future, distanced both in time and in space from the home and humanity. That’s a common enough trope in space opera and sci-fi (Christopher Ruocchio does it to great effect).

What does this have to do with Cantos of Arcadia? 

Approaching Sci-Fi Like Fantasy

When I started writing this script, a weird thing happened: I realized that all the short stories I had been writing, and the new akathist story, were all in the same story universe!

When I recognize patterns like this, I get so excited.

I realized that building the Cantos universe was similar to building a fantasy world. You see, I’m not just interested in scientific concepts; I’m interested in how a story can grow and become its own world based on the events expanding out from an epicenter, which in this case is the inciting incident of the akathist story. 

Cantos of Arcadia is the nexus of so many stories I am so excited to tell, some of which I’ve already told in short story form in my Patreon community. 

What’s in a Name?

I realized I needed a strong title to represent this new world. There’s so much symbolism in the title Cantos of Arcadia, but here’s the brief version:

Arcadia is utopia. In a lot of poetry and popular art, it’s associated with the utopian dream of the founders of America. It’s also a kind of pastoral paradise. There’s a series of paintings called “Et in Arcadia Ego,” meaning “even in paradise, I (death) am there.” There’s always a skull in these paintings, and it’s a very jarring and effective contrast that I absolutely love.

I’m trying to echo this in the title. 

The word cantos, of course, is also a deliberate nod to the fact that this story began as music, as well as to the idea of culture being preserved by a kind of religious order. Beyond all this, it’s a nod to A Canticle for Leibowitz, a series of three novellas that influenced the form of my story. 

A Sequel to That Hideous Strength

What really got me excited is that this story idea follows in the footsteps of my childhood love for a certain kind of sci-fi that was not particularly materialist or transhuman, but rather contains a vision of humanity that pushes at the edges of what’s possible in a light-filled, joyful way. 

This was especially evident to me when I read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, which shows that both Narnia and the space trilogy are tied thematically by a medieval cosmology that harkens back to the Greek myths. 

Cantos of Arcadia is my entry into the genre that C.S. Lewis created with That Hideous Strength. It’s a type of thematic sequel. In particular, I want to continue to explore Lewis’ idea of destroying the multiplicity of humanity for the sake of a single, sterilized superhuman–the devil’s ultimate attempt to subvert the Incarnation.

I also love how Lewis interwove Arthurian myth into a science-forward world. 

A New Generation of Inklings

As I mentioned at the outset of this post, Cantos of Arcadia is an important stepping stone in a much larger vision – the vision of a press that publishes this generation’s Inklings. 

I can’t wait to share with you some of the remarkable stories I’m reading and hope you will help spread the word about Wood Between Worlds Press and my Cantos of Arcadia Kickstarter to everyone interested in seeing an Inklings revival for our times.

~ Deacon Nicholas Kotar