I used to teach, I trained in linguistics and archaeology, and I have a web page at if you didn’t happen to arrive here by that route. I live in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, and I share a house with Jane Fancher, another writer, and two cats, who have about 100,000 miles of travel on them. I’ve been most of the way around the world-the only exception being the stretch fromPerth, Australia, to Ephesus, in Turkey: haven’t ever been in that sector of the globe. I travel, I figure skate, I take photos, I sometimes do art. When offworlders come, they disrupt society and individual lives in so many ways, and the world will never be the same.I’m C.J. With them comes a grey economy, as goods disappear from the visible, 'real' community to circulate among the invisibles, in effect, creating a closed system, even though all of its loops are not acknowledged. And so a whole invisible underclass, including the unacknowledged nonhuman Others populates the city.

To acknowledge the existence of something that isn't considered 'real' is to be declared insane, and therefore invisible. The culture of Freedom is structured by people's definitions of reality rather than anything so crass as objective reality. The story follows Herrin from his small-town upbringing to his arrival at the central university and meeting Waden and Keye to creating the first piece of public art once Waden assumes power to subsequent events once various conflicts emerge. Later in the book, the dialectic prologues converge with the story. At first these little stand-along snippets of dialogue reflect Herrin's character through his past or future, but generally unrelated to the events in the chapter. The first opens with a quote by Pythagoras: Man is the measure of all things. Can you see where this might be going? The three main human characters are Herrin Law the artist, Waden Jenks the politico and soon-to-be First Citizen (read: dictator), and Keye Lynn the creative ethicist, the three most brilliant students at University.Įxcept for the first, each chapter opens with a little dialectic interchange between Herrin and someone else. The planet is called Freedom, the main continent, Sartre, and the capitol, Kierkegaard. On a small, remote planet, a human colony was established. And a story about the dialectic run amok. Or maybe not, it's been a few years, and I just packed up all my notes from grad school.Īnyway, Wave Without a Shore is a sort of first not-quite-contact novel. He was always going on about defining reality with sketches of clouds (that would be the intangible concepts, or immaterial reality) and brick walls (that would be the operationalized definition for the purpose of collecting data to try to measure reality).

I used to own it as a discrete novel, but I gave it away to a professor whose research methods seminar reminded me of the story.

Wave Without a Shore by C.J. Cherryh