“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

With Homer’s Odyssey making its billion dollar return to pop culture and Marvel’s X-Men relaunch just around the corner, suddenly the cyclops is right back in the middle of America’s cultural zeitgeist.

It takes me back to my Ancient Civilizations class at Cal Poly Humboldt. I can still remember my shock at learning that the plural term for cyclops was cyclopes (rhymes with BEES).

In many ways we aren’t that different from the ancient Greeks—staring at the walls of Mycenae and Tiryns and deciding that they must have been crafted by a race of giants.

My Personal Connection

My father worked for the California State Division of Highways. He was the last man to cross the Klamath bridge before the bridge was swept away in the 1964 tsunami. He was running behind the truck that held the rest of the highway crew. If Dad had been just a little bit slower, I wouldn’t be here today. The ruins of that bridge have always been sacred to me.

Visiting Iceland this summer, Caitlin and I toured the Eldheimar Museum in the Westman Islands. Inside, there are the excavated remains of a full home that was buried beneath the Eldfell volcanic eruption in 1973. From outside the building, visitors get limited control of a camera, letting you peek around the remains of items left in the house when the family fled in the middle of the night.

Also sacred.

Ruins are at the heart of my fiction. In No Grave for Ghosts, Mount Draynor serves as a warning from an ancient time—a piece of technology that a modern society has claimed but doesn’t fully understand. In my broader Doorwaker universe, religions, civilizations and species try to create meaning from the scraps left behind by an advanced society. On one level, it sound silly. On another level, it’s been around forever. Like Pharaoh Thutmose IV in Egypt’s New Kingdom, encountering the head of a great sphinx in the desert and building a prophetic dream around it.

Humans create meaning.

To me, that’s why ruins and storytelling will always be connected. Ruins ask a question. Stories are some of society’s most primal attempts to answer it.