Arbiter - Principia Dua

When a band makes a bundle for their upcoming album you typically find a shirt, or a sweater combo. Hell I thought Becoming The Archetype was getting creative when they offered a custom pocket protector, or August Burns Red for making rather humorous baseball cards of themselves. But in steps Arbiter to take things to a more dedicated level, their vocalist Connor has written a 50 page book, entitled Principia Dua to accompany the story of their upcoming dual album Ironclad/Machinations, a venture of which is really creative in its own right.

Principia Dua is an eight chapter work written in the language of the Dua, which is a race from the story behind Ironclad/Machinations, who are going to be aiding the losing army in ‘the great divide’ which is the war between the Extropians (humans that underwent cybernetic alterations to make themselves better than human) who are exiled in the 2040’s (they represent the Machinations portion) and the unaltered humans who forced them into exile (who represent the Ironclad side of things.) The Principia Dua is intended to teach the losing side morals and values, and guide them on how to live out the rest of their lives in a noble manner.

Here's a brief look at the writing style.

The book is written very poetically and is a relatively brief but interesting read. As I mentioned before it’s written in the language of the Dua, which when you look at it at a glance looks like a bunch of gibberish, but once you realize what’s going on with the wording it’s fairly easy to translate. There are no plurals in the language of the Dua, but it’s still fairly easy to understand. For instance one of the Chapters is ‘Humanah][hanamuH’ Which means ‘humanity’ and another is ‘Judgemah][hamegduJ’ which means ‘judgement’ and so on…  it’s like a pretty heavily altered form of English that makes English look foreign almost which is pretty cool, but it’s similar enough still to be understood without much guidance.

Principia Dua might not interest those who are into the band solely for the music, but to someone like me it shows that the band is really into their work and putting for the effort to write this grand story and create an accompanying book to further push the universe they’ve created is really awesome. If you can snag a copy of Principia Dua do so both to have an interesting read, and to help support a great band.