Fred Brooks is well known for his book, The Mythical Man-Month, and for his No Silver Bullet article. That material was required reading in one of my software engineering classes. I made a brief note about man-months in my previous post, and while I was looking through the Internet, I found an interesting article by Brooks. Actually, it was an acceptance lecture for an ACM award. I found a passage on subcreation interesting. Contrast this view of subcreation with the view presented in the TCS article in the previous post. Here's a small excerpt:

Making things has its glories and joys, and they are different from those of the mathematician and of the scientist. Let us reflect together on these in a fundamental way.

The creation account in Genesis 1-2 is marvelously rich and subtle, and it can be read on many levels. I am not myself a seven-day creationist, but I take the account very seriously. It reports that our maker gave humanity seven incredibly splendid "birth-day" gifts. Pondering the list, we see the satisfactions of our deepest longings and the provision of our greatest joys (see Figure 1). Here, I want to focus on the last, the gift of work, of the capability and the call to make things.

J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, spent his life building a rich fantasy world with its own laws, species, languages, and geography. He calls this creativity the gift of subcreation, and he illuminates it in a poem peculiarly relevant to the graphicists' craft [5]:

Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed,
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed;
we make still by the law in which we’re made.

Tolkien applies this idea especially to the creation of fantasy, and fantasy worlds; I follow the English writer Dorothy Sayers in applying it to all human making [4].

A little reflection shows us that the power to make things, in imitation of our Maker, is a gift for our sake, not his. As he scornfully reminded the people of Israel, he doesn’t need our creative powers:

“The cattle on a thousand hills are mine; if I were hungry, would I ask you?” [Psalms 50:12].

So we must conclude that the ability and the call to create are given to us to enrich our lives and to enable us to enrich each other.