Prentice Dolphin Draft
An Epic Mission of Soliloquy
2020, words 17,583, pages 78, not factoring this appendix
The orphanage for unread novels has 15 occupants at this time, 9 of the forlorn souls already up for adoption. Rather than rattling the bars of some ether jail cell for release they pine silently in their creators crowded mind.
Science-Fiction readers today rarely pick up on subtle subtext. If you are one who does so and enjoys the prospect of figuring things out in such a subtle way, then some of what I write below will be spoiler material.
I was inspired to write Prentice Dolphin by two hosts and readers.
The Brickmouse took exception to the setting of Reverent Chandler and Malediction Song, “pushing back” against the concept on the assertion that Islamic masculine culture gets as poisoned as Christian by Modernity and that future religious wars are so unlikely to be tenable fiction themes. Now, this is common from science fiction readers, like him, that only the most likely future might be tolerated enough for the suspension of disbelief necessary for the reader to enjoy the story.
I, however, come from an odd speculative school. I have experimented with numerous future ice ages in science fiction: the Sunset Saga, Timejacker, Uprising, Who Writes the Songs of Night [the Reverent Chandler trilogy], SPQR and Elder Earth. Prentice Dolphin is another guess at what a cooling earth might look like after the collapse of Modernity.
I fielded a complaint by the editor that Negroes could not maintain medieval iron age technology. A close look in the text will reveal that the catholic people of African descent who people the South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama of a heavily glaciated “Post Titan” America in Prentice Dolphin, rely on their technology and education upon a distant folk across the ocean who were God’s original chosen servants.
The idea for the term Titan applied to an extinct or nearly extinct Аrуаn population is based on the title of a book on past European achievement published by Counter Currents in about 2016.
The science fiction premise behind the extinction of people of European descent in North America was suggested by Yeti Waters as a biotech possibility. I reuse this concept in Timejacker. When I told him I was going to write it as a novel he became upset and was afraid that I would give the idea to the evil Creep State Plutarchs who rule and hate us. I informed him, “Look, if you can imagine it, and I can develop the idea realistically, don’t you think the smartest crackers in the world have already done so?”
He was pissed and worried. I assured him that almost nobody will read any of my fiction and that, in any case, the best science-fiction writers of the past 40 years do not write commercial novels or short stories, they work for the Pentagon and other far-minded outfits. If Phillip K. Dick were alive today he would be used as an experiment and/or consultant by intelligence agencies and or pharmaceutical concerns to deepen and expand current mind control efforts.
The theme of racial cleansing technology suggested by Yeti Waters was central to Greg Bear’s novel Quantico, which was ham-fisted in execution. Elevation of this theme to one of alchemical magic over evil, was suggested in my mind by the excellent short novel by Jack Vance, The Miracle Workers.
Prentice Dolphin was a chance for me to write heroic fiction from a cloistered and sedentary perspective, from the view point of a writer in a post literate world, basically taking a Phillip K. Dick protagonist and putting him in a Robert E. Howard story.
I have made a weird name for myself among writers for having delved deeply into combat arts, to the point of having more stick fights and machete duels than any human known to us. This is only because we live in a post masculine world where physical prowess is only to divert the masses as their avatars battle for points on a score board or score card. Particularly, as I sit crippled for my 10th wretched week, merely from the strain of traveling with a 40 pound backpack, I understand, that in the ages of iron and heroes I often write of, when all men either slaved or soldiered, I would have been relegated by my slight stature and poor athletic ability to toil as the Ditcher above Soliloquy, or at best achieve a bottom literary tier as a curator to the works of more learned men.
The loud winds and icy conditions were inspired by wintering between Selek and Ravensdale, Washington, at the foot of a mountain down which the wind often howled through the stanchions that marched from some distant dam in the Cascades down to the coast. That year we were iced in by a terrible storm and relied on a wood stove to boil creek water. This is the same place where I wrote, in winter, the novels Uprising, Nightsong of the Nords and Sorcerer!. It is also the specific setting for American Dog.
In all of these novels one may find the audio influence of the writer living and hiking under those terrible power lines. Having lived and worked there on that homestead for four winters, I have chosen it for the setting for the novel Slave, as I can write from that view point while anywhere, it now etched into my withering bones. Also, the novel Timejacker was literally born in a day of hard rain-sodden logging work and a doubt-filled nightmare at dawn in that very place.
As a pedestrian and weird musing loner, I have, in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and in rural Washington, found much solitude and solace walking beneath power lines leading from dams to coastal power stations. Such cuts often offer a shortcut for the walker, going right over mountains that roads circle. Also, in urban settings they offer densely treed margins and refuge from Bantu huntsmen. There is something about a pale prey animal walking off up a power line cut that strikes his African huntsmen with doubts that they might be being lured into some hillbilly ambush. That instinct has preserved my life in the past, and I used it in this novel as an echo of the awe that so many of my black coworkers have held for rural spaces. Hence, in Prentice Dolphin, I place the homeland of the feared Rendel, Heathenry, over the mountains breached by these titanic stanchions.
Prentice Dolphin, the character, is based on a boyhood friend named Mike.
The sergeant of pikemen is based on my friend and fellow fighter Erique Watson.
The Ditcher is based on Barry, a black fellow I worked with in 1983, who went to heavy metal concerts and would sing Judas Priest’s song “Victim of Changes” as we worked on the night crew stocking shelves.
The dogs were inspired by the great hounds I have walked in the foothills of the Cascades above the Cedar River these past four winters. Their matron is based on the cake decorator from the store that Kevin [my assistant manager] and I managed who was eves dropping on us while we discussed the disasters that would attend us if we permitted our most heroically slutty cashier, who had attempted to seduce us both, to have her way. The cake decorator, a giantess, who became a chef, assured us that our shared weakness for buxom redheads was safe with her. Thus Sally the Shepherdess is a composite of these two women in one person.
The chief of the Barbaries was based on a Northeast Baltimore shoplifter who Kevin and I failed to tackle.
Bigun One is based on Daryl, a community college offensive lineman who stocked frozen food at the store Kevin helped me manage, who might have easily restrained that shoplifter.
Justice Claret is a composite of Oliver, who is a black man who loves medieval myth, and Kevin R., once my assistant manager at that same store, as we battled the barbarian crackheads and thieves that besieged our small retail outpost.
The Rendel antagonist is based on MMA fighter Sean Glass.
The last redoubt of cracker Heathenry in the Afro-Catholic Ice Age of Prentice Dolphin would be Northwest North Carolina and East Tennessee, where Sean and Survival novelist, Andrew Edwards have relocated in this, the age of their ethnic dispossession.
