The Physics of Compassion

When you write a novel, you feel the words dragging you away from the world you initially designed and into a wholly different, bleeding truth. While writing The Root Order: Rust and Turquoise, I was pulled into precisely that vortex. In my mind I was building the rusted, corrosion-reeking, sulphur-cloud-blanketed dystopia of centuries hence — yet the more I let my characters speak, the more I realised with horror that the place I was describing was not centuries away at all, but right here, right now.

For years we were taught a lie: that morality, virtue, and conscience develop in parallel with civilisation, wealth, and prosperity. Yet when we look at the history of humankind and at today's world, we see the exact opposite. The richer, the more powerful, the more comfortable we become, the further we drift from our innate nature; we slowly suffocate our capacity for empathy in the cold cellars of our arrogance and selfishness.

The hunger, the destitution, the never-ending wars, and the exploitation that plague the world today are not rooted in technological deficiency or scarcity of resources. All of this devastation has a single cause: humankind's deification of its own ego — that insatiable “Always for me, only for me” mentality. The faithlessness and egoism that cannot feel the pain of the person standing opposite, that believes it deserves to warm itself in someone else's hell for the sake of its own comfort — this is the bloodiest idol of the modern age.

The “Arz-ı Harabe” — the Rusted Earth — I depicted in the novel is not some submerged, fantastical future; it is the present condition of our hearts. The tyrant İlteriş and the Martian Commander Barlas are not merely science-fiction characters clad in heavy carbon armour. They are the very modern tyrants who wear neckties, who hide behind the façade of modern democracies and exploit the masses through algorithms, promissory notes, and manufactured crises, stripping humanity of its will. Today, just as in the novel, humankind willingly prostrates before the machines, systems, and digital illusions it has built with its own hands.

Yet the universe is not arbitrary chaos; the Creator has inscribed an inviolable order of physics and mathematics into every particle of the cosmos. Centuries ago, Ibn Rushd proclaimed that religion and philosophy would never conflict — that they are two faces of the same truth — and in doing so he pointed directly at this order. Plato, in his Allegory of the Cave, described people clinging to the shadows on the wall as the sole reality — pointing at the same rusted ignorance embodied by the “Machine Faith” in the novel; they accepted the illusion because they could not conceive that another truth might exist. Ibn Khaldun, when he spoke of the collapse of civilisations, referred to the loss of Asabiyyah — that bond of solidarity and empathy; any civilisation that loses the consciousness of “we” is doomed to collapse upon itself. All of them were pointing at the same ancient truth: every mind that severs itself from the cosmic order collapses along with everything it has built.

At the heart of the Root Order philosophy, the Kök-Lisan, and the Vahdet network lies precisely this encounter between ancient wisdom and Hard Sci-Fi. And the roots of this encounter germinate in the depths of a millennia-old Turkic culture. There is a primordial heritage stretching from Ergenekon to the Kut belief, from the Orkhon Inscriptions to the Book of Dede Korkut — the memory of a nation that shaped civilisations, founded states, and rose from nomadic tents to world-spanning orders. The Creator Himself declares that He created humankind in different tongues, different colours, and different cultures. Therefore every nation's own culture, its own ancient wisdom, the spirit carried by its own language, is a unique reflection of universal truth — and deserves to be kept alive, not to wither in the shadow of others. The Root Order universe is precisely that courage: carrying this ancient Turkic spirit into the hard science-fiction universe of the future — neither by denying it nor by surrendering it to others' cultural moulds, but by distilling it from our own essence and creating it anew.

Seen through this spirit, if everything in the cosmos is a work of the Creator, then none of us is separate from the other. In quantum physics, the fact that particles respond identically at the same instant regardless of distance — quantum entanglement — is, in essence, the laboratory proof of the Vahdet faith.

That is why I built the novel's heaviest thesis on a single sentence: “Compassion is not a moral luxury or a choice; it is an existential imperative.” When you point a gun barrel at another person, the agony of the flesh that bullet tears apart strikes your own soul through invisible threads. To harm another is, within the Creator's order, to open fire on your own heart. People can crush one another so easily because they have forgotten this. In the novel, when humanity's ancestors forcibly connected their minds to the system and burned to ash within seconds from “Sensory Overload”, it was not a science-fiction fantasy; it is the thermodynamic metaphor of arrogance being annihilated in the face of an ocean of empathy.

And I must confess that what gnawed at me most, what stole my sleep while writing this novel, was that great laziness that has persisted for millennia: waiting for a hand to descend from the heavens and save us.

Writing this, I saw myself in that crowd too. When we hit hard times, when the world grows uglier, when tyrants grow stronger, didn't we always wish for someone to come and pull us out of this mire? We surrendered our will to others. We sought refuge in the hypnotic glow of television screens, social media, and political promises. Yet the Creator has entrusted us with a tremendous gift: consciousness and free will. The Root Order utterly rejects passive spectatorship in the perpetual motion of the cosmos. The order does not answer a person who is incapable of cleaning the rust on their own street yet expects healing from the sky. In the Creator's order, merit is earned through will and action. Unless we push the limits of our own nature, unless we confront our own darkness, no merciful hand will reach down to us from the vault of heaven.

As Aral cried out: "To await a saviour is the most wretched idleness of mind and conscience!"

No magical hand descending from the sky, no superheroes, will fix this world. The world will be healed by people who hear the voice of their innate nature, who set aside pragmatism and selfishness and dare to clean the rust on their own street. Everyone must rise to their feet with whatever strength they possess, speak out against injustice, and add a single grain of beauty to this decaying world. Unless we set in motion that divine dynamism within ourselves, no external force can save us from where we stand.

The Root Order: Rust and Turquoise is not merely a science-fiction novel you will read and set aside; it is a light held up from the mirror of the future to the arrogance, the exploitation, and the consciencelessness of today. And this light does not fade with this first book — The Root Order: Rust and Turquoise is merely the opening act of humanity's reckoning with its own nature.

I hope that when we meet within these lines, you too will flip the switch of that silent awakening inside you. For in this ancient order of the Creator, there is no room for passive waiting — only for honourable, mindful, and compassionate action.