Spoilers!!!

You have been warned. 

This page will go into some light detail on different aspects of the story because I have to imagine there were some parts that made you wonder...right?

After this sentence, all content assumes you've read the book.

When I started Drop I had a bunch of different small goals. Among the first was I wanted to end an entire novel on the word “dude.” Just because. So that was the very first piece that was written.

I also set out to try and portray the feelings associated both with a high, and with a trip. The high being a lesser experience that is still grounded in reality, just a warm and fuzzy version, hoping to connect with those who know the experience, and supplement the idea for those who don’t.

As far as a trip, that tends to be a much more significant experience, thus the labeling “trip” because you are going somewhere else for a little while. Even if you aren’t hallucinating, things shift and the world is not quite what it normally is. Trips are governed by the mental state of the tripper, being generally good and fun, educational and informative when in a good and confident headspace. However I have observed that when not in a good headspace, concerns, anxieties and fears can be amplified and the trip becomes almost torturous. When tripping, we are often presented with facsimiles of our world, or our internal environment. 

If you watch closely you will hopefully notice all the connections between Phil’s reality prior to Dropping, and the world he enters after. He is confronted with concerns, emotions, paranoias, fears, stunning visuals, euphoric experiences, and many little pieces of the world become factors in his trip. For example, Chip and Henry, extensions of Phil’s internal sensitive self, are named after a character and part of his early moon base experience. Jeff, with his moon glowing eyes and highly expressive ability, is representative of Phil’s shameless inner emotions, the part of self that responds with unhiding honesty in self and feelings, but can also act as a wise guide. We also see his desire for connection with Adrienne finally acknowledged, and the planet he visits named with the same letters as her last name while he makes steps towards realizing what he's had inside.

The Soicharb, simply Brachiosaur backwards, minus a few letters, is dog-like and has healing abilities. Clearly expressive of a past attachment to an animal that brought Phil peace when he needed it. There are many other minute connections, such as the presence of his music, the use of nanobots in ways he has only dreamt of, the ship they return in looking like his remote, even as simply as the old “am I high? Nahhh. Wait…yeah?..no.” and on and on. For the record, if you have to ask, you’re definitely feeling it.

Though the focus is mainly on Phil, in this story, he and Darek share the trip and many experiences, but their inner environment results in Darek having more relaxed, exploratory and enjoyable experience. Even toward the end when he is captured, he only lives through his fear of isolation when Phil is bombarded with intensely negative experiences.

We see a distinct contrast between Valderia, a utopian type society based off of Phil’s knowledge and experience building for a healthy and forwardly sustainable future, and Netmada, a more dystopian feeling mess reminiscent of Earths broken past. Ancara comes in to play as a more basic society centered on more holistic and less technological approaches rooted in Phil’s desire for a healthy, natural world, and childhood experiences with his father teaching him survival skills.

In trips we are confronted with realities of self and afterwards, if we consciously focus on them and realize they are rooted in truths of self, we can pick apart problems and address them in new ways. In other cases, there is no thought required, there comes a moment where a thought or conflict suddenly click’s into place and the tension surrounding it resolves.

 

Looking at more connections, the species themselves stem from astrobiological inferencing wherein we explore how a planets history influences the species that occupy it. I like to look at this as genetic erosion. Think about natural processes here on Earth. The moving crust creates areas that are higher than others, lower, older, and newer. Mountains are formed, and then weathered and eroded over time. Look at the difference between the Sierra-Nevada mountain chain of the western US, and the Appalachian mountains of the east. The Sierra Nevada’s appear much larger and have more jagged features. They are younger, and have had less time to be eroded. The Appalachians are smaller, tend to be smoother, and even host a different feeling soil – they are much older and have been worn for longer. Look at how rivers carve through rock, how islands move, and coasts shift.

On Earth, we are of mammalian descent but only as a result of very many highly specific instances throughout Earths history. Had there been no asteroid impact in the gulf, or had it been 10 minutes early or 10 minutes late (hardly even fractions of time in the scale of the billions of years of universal existence) we would not be here – at least, not as we are. Imagine in that case, no asteroid could mean that reptilian lifeforms continued to develop and eventually evolved toward sentience/intelligence, and development of society. Who knows? We begin with DNA, our genetic molecule and then apply environmental stressors. Over many millions of years, those stressors cause some genetic features to be removed, lost, and changed – weathering and erosion. At points, we even see the formation of new features as a result. I haven’t decided if I believe all life will be DNA based, or if it is a molecule unique to Earth, but either way, the species we see today are solely the result of the wear of time and environmental factors on DNA in the form of organisms – meaning, if things happened differently, I believe we would have an entirely different set of organisms. Extending this idea, that means the life we see on other planets (I have no doubt it is there) will look different, and does not necessarily have to be humanoid or of mammalian type descent, thus the insect-like Ancarans.

Other connections: