Aylett - Heart of the original: originality, creativity, individuality

Dear Reader,

The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound.

Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). Were just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, youll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

If youre not yet a subscriber, we hope that youll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a 5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type HOTO in the promo code box when you check out.

Thank you for your support,

Dan, Justin and John

Founders, Unbound

For Lindsey

Originality irritates so obscurely you may

have to evolve to scratch it.

Jeff Lint

The truly new invents new guts for itself.

Its an old idea that if we got enough people spinning in their graves we could use it as a power source, a graveyard forming a turbine array. But since the spin-action depends on a preoccupation with other peoples business and opinions, have you wondered how much energy you would produce?

Those who match nothing but themselves rarely notice the hairpin turns of external decree. They think in the rich syntax that results from living life in the wrong order. Fashion is a set of times petty ordinances, local laws we submit to through inherited consent. In this environment truth is as loud as a photograph of a violin and originality both feared and slandered as legend. Nothing much interesting happens amid a conformity so innate it cannot clearly perceive or discuss itself.

Before the satirist Bierce threw his phone into the furnace he talked about our resolutely stalled evolution. A great one for affable scorn, he was admired to within an inch of his life. Like Twain, he had noticed that giving the same argument while wearing different trousers gives the illusion of varied insight. Those who claim that there are no more first times refuse to state when the last-ever first time occurred. When did it all end? Others hold up old ideas in new clobber and claim originality. Anything to avoid creating the real thing. Combined with the historic policy of ignoring the first instance of any particular idea until it has spread enough to be restated generally, these approaches minimise the uncomfortable notion that an idea can originate from an individual. Its less disturbing to have a spider climb into your mouth than to have one climb out.

True creativity, the making of a thing which has not been in the world previously, is originality by definition. It increases the options, not merely the products. But while many claim to crave originality, they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it. They have no receptor point to plug it into. Attempts to force it result in the sort of fire that burned Teslas wonder-lab to the ground. Repetition of familiar forms is preferred. The hailing of old notions as original lowers the standard for invention and robs most creative people of the drive to do anything interesting, let alone seek out the universe of originality which is waiting, drumming its fingers and wondering why nobody calls.

Raw thought is more available to those not stuck to the temporal floor. Thousands of what if the Nazis won the Second World War stories are hailed as innovative despite the first appearing in 1937. In the mid-thirties Katharine Burdekin knew the allies would win the upcoming war but wrote a thought experiment about the alternative, Swastika Night, published the year Ayn Rand was busy plagiarizing Zamyatins We. Randolph Bourne was one of the few journalists to suggest the First World War might not be such a bright idea and annoyed everyone by calling it the First World War. It was supposed to be called the Great War or the War to End All Wars. Bourne was ignored because his opinion disturbed the narrative and because he was disabled. Another such figure was Simone Weil, the sort of goofy genius whod fire all minds at a posh dinner and end up tucking the tablecloth into her pants and dragging everything to the floor.

But even those bold enough to accept the obvious have a preternaturally tenacious resolve not to venture beyond it. The absence of meaningful novelty doesnt help the boring catastrophe of modern times, congested with old deception. Lets blow our noses. Life is a moment to respond before we are repaid into the unknown. Find the strongest gravity, fold the worlds edges into it and flip it inside-out like a dogs strange ear. Energy is merely the intermediary of oblivions smithereens. Write every story as if it was your last, whether suicide note or proof of life.

How many times does a man have to shave before his chin gets the message?

Certain ceremonial masks of sub-Saharan Africa portray expressions of astonishment and provide relief from having to repeatedly fake surprise at the same things an energy-saving bliss reserved for the tribal shaman. Cultures which ban such masks through a prohibition against graven images are predictably scandalised at everything, including their own legs. The wearily exasperated looks on the faces of lions in the earliest cave paintings attest to Paleolithic people being constantly caught unawares by the cats ferocious attitude. Woolly mammoths are also depicted as having been appalled to a standstill, rarely running or having a nice time. When shamans began portraying monster-jawed zigzag devils, antlered insect men and flying sharks to broaden everyones horizon and ensure they wouldnt be dumbfounded by every development, the clans hunters were still startled by the slightest sound. Fossil evidence suggests that early hominids had reinforced cheekbones to withstand being frequently punched in the face, and no wonder.

To the short of memory everything is unprecedented, and the rest are pressured to pretend. For the media to thrive, the uneventful must daily go with a bang using the Wolf-Rayet principle of massive gas and ferment gradually losing mass to the surrounding reality. Belong to the always-sudden world if you wish for shallow stress and lack of progress.

Roger Penroses 2010 book Cycles of Time claimed that the closed-universe Big Bang/Big Crunch/Big Bang/Big Crunch repetition view was a new one, though it had been current for decades. We can use the same model to watch cycles of ideas, in which the same ones are claimed repeatedly as new. In the one-after-another closed universe model, no information is transmitted from one universe to the next. In the Cyclic Idea model of false credit, people present information and others later repeat it while claiming originality after which someone else does the same, and so on. An equivalent to the crunch node allowing the fraud is perhaps short attention span/memory, plus the desire to pretend to be absorbing new information without the small discomfort of actually doing so. It also drastically slows down the rate at which we can move on to the actually new. The relatively inexpensive necklace worn by Kali, Goddess of Destruction and Rebirth, consists of human skulls representing the alphabet used to create the universe. That these heads are empty at the node between one universe and the next lends support to the theory.