Last week, I finished writing a solid draft of what I would consider to be a cosmic mystery novel. Which is all I really want to say about it at this point, only that it’s one of a few shifts in the last month. Summer in Phoenix ended in a torrent, the busy season at my day job’s over, and, of course, I moved this newsletter from Substack to behiiv.
Periods of transition are good moments for reflection. So, a year and a season into this newsletter, I think it’s time to revisit the questions I initially came up with to guide my search for cosmic mysteries. Questions like:
Do the characters encounter elements that call into question their assumed parameters of their world? What are these elements?
What is the source and/or explanation for these elements? Does knowing the source/explanation erase the sense of cosmic dissonance in the characters? (Or in you?)
Which scene(s) best expressed the cosmic mystery at the heart of the story?
Even at the time, I knew I was making a set of tools for myself without quite knowing what work I’d end up wanting to be doing. These questions served me well in the first few months, but I did stop referencing them at some point. Some months I found these questions led me down repetitive paths, in other months I found myself wandering into the gaps the questions didn’t account for. Questions of what, which, do/does ended up steering me into compiling an internal spreadsheet of cosmic mystery tropes. Good for knowing which works are resonating with each other, but the newsletter’s focus on a single title each month isn’t ideal for engaging with that cross-media conversation.
(I also did think I’d manage to articulate whatever I meant by ‘cosmic dissonance’ by now. Zachary Gillan’s essay ‘Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism’ gets to the heart of it, and even touches on mysteries and why it’s essential to leave certain questions unanswered.)
The question I thought I had all figured out—so confident I didn’t even put it in the list—was this: What makes a cosmic mystery in speculative fiction?
At the time, this was my answer: “…the key to finding a satisfying cosmic mystery is to meet the characters in the world they believe they’re in.”
Which didn’t really get me as far as I thought it would.
Almost every work of speculative fiction is a mystery, at least to the reader. A lot of it has to do with contemporary exposition norms. How does this world actually work? is the question that represents the appeal of a great deal of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, especially set in imagined societies and worlds. In such stories, it’s a common approach for the author to conduct lore triage: so as to not overwhelm an imagined target reader, the author will prioritize the need-to-know info and scatter the rest pretty much exactly like clues for the reader to stumble upon as they progress through the narrative.
In media particularly concerned with the mechanism of progression, like video games, a potential mystery’s clues get wired up right alongside the worldbuilding. Since I started this newsletter, I’ve played a handful of games in which progression is tied to mastering the game’s sleuthing mechanics: Return of the Obra Dinn has a journal and a time-traveling stopwatch to put you at the scene of the crime, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes has a ‘photographic memory’ menu and plays like an escape room.
In spring, after I played Persona 3 Reload, I wanted to ‘do a fun one’ and talk about a few installments of the Persona series as well as an indie game following in Persona’s footsteps called Cassette Beasts. Persona 3 and all its remakes focus on a Japanese high school student investigating Tartarus, a tower that the school transforms into during a twenty-fifth hour in the day, during which Jungian shadow entities spill into the mundane world. Sort of a psychic-Superfund site howdunit. In Cassette Beasts, the player untangles various forces at play on an interdimensional nexus island threatened by cryptid monsters, cults, and cosmic horror manifestations of English cultural exports such as Arthurian legends and Alice in Wonderland.
The mystery is the world and the world is the mystery, but the ‘clues’ to the mysteries are locked behind winning boss battles against eldritch monsters. The investigations succeeded on the merits of understanding demon fusion and monster type affinities—not sleuthing. I scribbled down some notes about violence and ‘cosmic noir’, the concept of ‘fair play’ mysteries (mysteries that the reader should be able to solve alongside the sleuth so long as they’re paying attention), and mystery games that are mechanics-forward versus narrative-forward. ‘Monsters + Methods’ is set aside for now, but it helped me think about cosmic mysteries set in worlds unlike ours:
Is the story’s setting unfamiliar to you? Is it unfamiliar to the perspective character?
What is unknown to you? What is unknown to the perspective character?
Is there a point in the story in which you share the same questions as the perspective character? Is this the driving mystery?
So far these questions have helped me navigate mysteries with outsider or naïve sleuths, mysteries set in alternate histories, and mysterious settings presented through incurious protagonists. May these questions continue to be helpful, or at least be unhelpful in thought-provoking ways.
Many of you found your way here via Andrew Dana Hudson’s newsletter solarshades.club. For those who didn’t, ‘cosmic mystery’ is a term that emerged from years of dialogue about strange mysteries that spoke to us. His forthcoming book, Absence: A Novel, is a cosmic mystery now available for pre-order wherever books are sold. I highly recommend it.
What’s next
Thank you for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, please let them know to check out the Cosmic Mystery Club.
As long as the newsletter’s been running, I’ve mostly stuck to close-read analysis of individual titles that I’ve announced a month ahead of time. I really enjoy taking stories apart and putting them back together again to see how they work, but I’ve also accumulated a backlog of larger subjects I want to tackle. The legacy of mystery box shows, William Gibson’s uncanny modernity, the publishing industry’s influence on genre boundaries and marketing trends in ‘genre-defying’ speculative fiction. I also want a way to share my enthusiasm for the cosmic mysteries I’ve encountered each month. I’ll be experimenting with the format in the coming months to figure out how to fit all these pieces together.