Confronting Doom

I just finished Chapter 32, “Confronting Doom,” and this chapter really represents a transition for me as a writer. For a while, I was feeling guilty because “Stefan’s Owl from Oblivion” is getting so long. I was reluctant to say more because I still was feeling the page limit shackles of traditional publishing… the guilt trip they apply to all writers. But after a year of work, so far, on this revision pass of the book, I realized that already the book is eight to ten times longer than a publisher would like. They have to think of the cost since they are trying to sell to the lowest common denominator of readership. Frankly, those readers will never read this book, even if I gave it to them for free. Let me just say up front, this book can be difficult to read. Because it is Literary Fiction, the characterization, the details about the characters are an extremely in depth look at them, so much so that you will feel that you personally know them. This is one of the things that distinguishes Literary Fiction from Genre Fiction. Genre Fiction needs only enough details about the character so that you understand the plot. Its goal is to get somewhere. For Literary Fiction, you are taking a ride, for a period of time, on the lives of the characters. The goal is to feel what they feel and to fully understand their nature.
 
Despite this book being an eclectic combination of science fiction, fantasy, Norse mythology, Mayan mythology, and fairies as  beings that exist in reality, the writing is designed to make you believe that this is happening, today, right now… that it totally is reality. In a former book I wrote, one reader was annoyed at me because it was so real to them that they were looking everyday in the news for signs that the characters really existed, that alien-human children had entered human society in some unknown way. I couldn’t tell them that they had just given me about the highest praise my kind of writer could receive.
 
So getting back to this chapter, I used an added style I had developed in the first of the book where I added several background chapters: a more gritty Earth culture theme, really, as I figured finally  in this chapter, a geopolitical spy thriller theme, because who else would be the first to get involved with alien-human immigrants but the intelligence agencies: wanting to befriend any extraterrestrial life long before everyone else found out. The goal would be to control the narrative, to be a friend, to not repeat the mistakes of people colonized in the past… namely not to be conquered such as the natives Columbus encountered, but to try to be viewed as a partner commanding at least some respect. One of the things I explored in earlier chapters is what would it mean, what would it require to gain the respect of a superior extraterrestrial being and what might their motivations be in coming to this planet.
 
The following excerpt is the last two pages of the chapter. In this chapter, Tova is the fifteen-year-old, human looking, Sun God, the reincarnation of the original Sun God, Lifegiver, who originally created the Sun-God-human hybrid life-form. Carol, is the twenty-four year old friend of Tova and is a CIA agent. The CIA is secretly working with her and some other alien-human children because they want gain advantage for the US and have the US appear as a friend to the extraterrestrials. Tova has already been murdered by the Russians but then brought back to life by an alien culture seventy-three light years away known as Sophista. Carol, who was a human looking fairy life-form, adopted as a child by parents working for the agency, was also murdered by the Russians when they murdered Tova’s father. She was also brought back by the Sophistans and though she doesn’t fully realize it yet, was recreated as a Sun-God-human hybrid. Professor Kettil is the youngest professor to ever achieve tenure at Cambridge and is one of the first naturally occurring human telepaths. He is a professor of evolutionary neuro psychology and serves as a sort of therapist, helping these alien-human hybrid children adapt to Earth and its hostile culture. As part of this, he is studying the children to determine how these children’s brains have advanced in this new form and what that will mean for humanity.
 
The current conversation is taking place in Tova’s spaceship, called a Sun Needle, which by design looks like an extremely advanced, Earth business jet. The idea is that only some humans will know that it really is a spaceship. The spaceship is currently located one-hundred miles above Cambridge and has such an enormous amount of power that it can hold itself in that position without orbiting. I hope you enjoy this speculative look at humanity’s future and will stick around as the book is created.