In Part 2 the discussion concerns the fiction projects currently complete, in progress or outlined that are based factually and thematically on primary sources from Ancient and American history, with those sources discussed in brief.
In 2011 I was researching the novel Seven Moons Deep, which I would not complete until 2020. This is the final volume in the incomplete Sunset Saga. As a time travel yarn I wished to present the first and only accurate depiction of life in Early English America. So, in researching the likely plight of the serving staff, sailors and soldiers at the disposal of the fictional protagonist Lord Pendelton Shaw, in his search for the Seven Cities of the Moon [Cherokee Towns supposed to hold looted Spanish gold] I began investigating the hidden history of what I had been taught was Colonial America, a place that few British subjects outside of the highest elites ever called “The Colonies.”
This investigation has reaffirmed what a high school urban history teacher once told me, that “Our only history is the history of the upper class view,” that since for 99% of civilized record keeping only the economic and intellectual elite possessed the medium of letters we rarely receive the words or thoughts of a working man or a slave. Even though some of these were slaves, Epictetus and probably the author of Gilgamesh, the view they crafted was predominantly of and exclusively for the top 1% of society. Thus our history is of and for the top 1% for all but the final 5% [1] of our shared existence.
I have noted, that even among working class Americans, there is an obsession with tracing our family line back to royalty, always top 1%. My family is no different. Upon realizing that the heroic epics of our deep past essentially ended at the end of the Middle Ages and was not taken up seriously again, outside of pulp fiction intended for working class readers, I intended to tell historical stories from the view of the working class—my own class. Virtually all American novelists and most writers of speculative fiction are products of Higher Education.
Having spent 30 years learning how to write in a tolerable style, in 2010 I set my hand to time travel fiction as a means to do this. That was a poorly focused choice which I have abandoned. What follows are the fiction projects that I am now pursuing parallel to my historical investigation of Arуan Antiquity and Plantation America.
Plantation American Historical Fiction
-1. Sold, 2016, 165 pages
-2. Cox & Swain, 2022, 217 pages
-3. Bound, sequel to Sold
-4. Freed, a short fiction anthology with characters drawn from runaway want ads in gazettes, in which they were depicted, often in unflattering wise, by their masters in, So His Master May Have Him Again and So Her Master May Have Her Again.
Ancient Mythic Fiction
-1. Ire and Ice, 2016, 223 pages, Horror, Roman Legionnaires hunt a Celtic witch
-2. The Jericho Bone, 2016, 457 pages, Horror, the Egyptian famine of 1201
-3. Yusef of the Dusk, 2019, 119 pages, Swords and Sorcery set in 1201
-4. Under and Iron Crown, 2019, 86 pages, Fantasy, A Biography of a Mythic King
-5. Holiday Blue, 2022, 143 pages, Science Fiction, A Novel of Titanic Ennui and Rebirth, unpublished [This was an attempt to envision the Homeric pantheon of pagan antiquity as actual extraterrestrial visitors, through a more realistic lens than the rose colored glasses worn by “Ancient Astronaut Theorists.”]
-6. Timejacker, 2023, 204 pages, Science Fiction, A Forever War Novel, unpublished [Many of the Timejacking characters for this were taken directly from Plantation America research. The novel is pure, outrageous race war fun, though it does traffic in accurate historic events.]
-7. Of Ichor and War, 2023 or 24, Fantasy, begun but stalled due to the intimidating scope. This novel is based directly on Homer’s Iliad and posits mortal revolt against the gods and a war on heaven lead by Diomedes [who wounded Aphrodite and mortally wounded Ares, according to Homer], pressed by Hector and Achilles and masterminded by Odysseus.
-8. SPQR, 10,000 words in progress, 2023, Science Fiction, This full length novel posits an alternate history in which King Arthur lead a successful defense of Britain against the Angles, Jutes and Saxons and Charles Martel was slain at Tours, confining Christian Rome to the British Isles. The setting is 2031, with technology roughly equal to 1820 but having been stagnate for 200 years, remaining at sail and steam power as Rome retains an economic and cultural bias in favor of mass slavery.
…
Elder Earth
This alternate history science fiction is set in an America in 2031, that is still “New England” under a Britannic King, in a world where Henry the Eighth had sons, there was never a British Bitch Queen, and there was no Reformation. The tech level is 1648, or roughly stagnant at the date that there was no Peace of Westphalia, complete with crusading orders of knights battling heathen tribes, monstrous creatures out of tribal myth and voodoo sorcerers in Arkansas.
Below, each novel is listed with the medieval legend that inspires it.
-1. Sorcerer!, 2022, 162 pages, Beowulf & The Odyssey
-2. Ranger?, 2022, 260 pages, The Song of Roland by Teraldus the Norman
-3. Wife—, 2022, 139 pages, Inferno by Dante
-4. Slave, 2023, in progress, The Song of Roland
-5. Knight., 2024, outlined, Purgatory and Paradise by Dante
The following are merely imagined titles, covering various stations of life in a late medieval world where devils, demons, angels and miracles coexist, in other words, as much of humanity imagined their world through most of our past.
-6. Booger
Set in Awes South and Voodoory
-7. Vagger
Set in Easter New England and New Ireland
-8. Scout
Set in Wester New Ireland
-9. Paladin
Set in Awes North and West
-10. Alienist
Set in New Spain and Voodoory
-11. Factor
Conclusion set in Awes South, Voodoory, New Ireland and Saint Mary’s Town on The Bay of the Mother of God in Easter New England
Notes
-1. Assuming 6,000 years of Grain Based Civilization and the last 300 years a period of relatively general literacy.
