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Metafiction
I greatly enjoyed The Road to the Dark Tower - it certainly expanded my appreciation of the series.
In the chapter "Art and the Act of Creation", Bev refers to "metafiction", that fiction which is self-referential, and in which the fictional characters are aware of their fictional condition. Toward the end of his career, beginning with The Number of the Beast, Robert A. Heinlein introduced this concept to his own work as a means of tying together his oeuvre. He introduced an idea he called "Eschatological Pantheistic Multiple-Ego Solipsism" - anything imagined by a fabulist exists somewhere in the Multiverse. Of course, the name itself is nearly meaningless (eschatology is the branch of theology dealing with the end of the world; pantheism is the principle that any and all forms of worship are directed to the same universal entity under different names; solipsism is the philosophy that the only reality is the one directly experienced and anything outside the self is illusory), but the concept remains.
In the chapter "Art and the Act of Creation", Bev refers to "metafiction", that fiction which is self-referential, and in which the fictional characters are aware of their fictional condition. Toward the end of his career, beginning with The Number of the Beast, Robert A. Heinlein introduced this concept to his own work as a means of tying together his oeuvre. He introduced an idea he called "Eschatological Pantheistic Multiple-Ego Solipsism" - anything imagined by a fabulist exists somewhere in the Multiverse. Of course, the name itself is nearly meaningless (eschatology is the branch of theology dealing with the end of the world; pantheism is the principle that any and all forms of worship are directed to the same universal entity under different names; solipsism is the philosophy that the only reality is the one directly experienced and anything outside the self is illusory), but the concept remains.
Comments
Eschatological Pantheistic Multiple-Ego Solipsism. Boy, that's a mouthful, without even the benefit of having a nice, pronounceable acronym!
No cool acronym either...