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Noriama

About

Hard-Sci-Fi has always interested me as a genre. It’s that same strange mix of education and indulgence that was sprinkled through 80s-90s public television; an adult version of Bill Nye or Sesame Street. It’s also a clever assertion that both fantasy and active-imagination are not necessarily required to create engaging stories. It is, in a sort of way, historical revisionism of the future.

You can err on the side of education, such as with A City on Mars, or with entertainment, such as Project Hail Mary, but the goal of Hard Science Fiction is to not only be narratively “true,” but factually as well. The work is better the more real it is.

After exploring the Atomic Rockets website, I found myself wondering, “What would the first colony in space actually look like?”

There were problems, not the least of which are explored on Atomic Rockets, but I found myself wondering what reason there was to emmigrate from Earth. The Solar Punk and Ecological movements of recent years have (mostly rightly, I think) protested space colonization as a distraction created by people who think fleeing the planet preferable to cutting back on consumption.

After deciding the only reason was survival of species, it made sense that the only colony worth building would be in another solar system. The more I explored the math and the problems involved in such a project, I realized that by colonizing another system, we are in fact creating our own aliens.

From there, the theme of “distances between us” was unavoidable.

As with most of my stories, the idea that struck me first was a retelling, in this case a futuristic look at the vanishing Roanoke colony. What if the first human colony in space suddenly vanished? What if we travel outside our solar system before we have access to AI (in the immortal-human-brain sense, not the quite-fast-spreadsheet-reading kind). What is common ancestry when compared to the vast reaches of space? What happens when you find youself confronted with a puzzle that has no answer? What does being “human” mean?

I won’t say my oeuvre doesn’t have some common threads. I’ve had to work some things out, and writing is how my odd brain does it.

Suffice it to say, This story has gone through multiple revisions, both in style and content. The only thing that hasn’t changed much at all is Victoria’s arc.

Chapters

The Poems of Madam Albithurst

About

Ozzie Fitch was a bit of an experiment with language, to see if I could tell a story about a person using not-quite-MLA-standard-language. It was interesting, to say the least, but from there I moved on to my next experiment: telling a story with not-quite-standard-structure.

The Poems of Madam Albithurst is not a story. Does it have beginning, middle, and end? Of a sort, but in my exploration of the written word, I have come to appreciate that the distinction between prose and poetry is a bit more of a spectrum than a binary — as most everything is. I tried to use Madam Albithurst as a means of seeing how far my complex relationship with language could be pushed. Rather than editing and avoiding complex digressions and descriptions, I indulged in them.

Don’t read this like a story. It may be hard at points, uncomfortable even, but this isn’t a story. It’s a poem. A long one, to be sure, but if you engage with it on this level, and you may find it easier to understand.

The poem takes place in the Myriad Worlds setting; Inspired in part by the absurd worldbuilding of Troika! and the surreal beauty of Evan Dahm, The Myraid Worlds is a setting of complex and conveluded realities hanging in the deep purple Velvet. I hope you enjoy the tour.

Chapters

The Raiselig Dossier

About

Hilda is a great TV Show/Graphic novel by Luke Pearson. In it, the titular main character is accompanied by Alphur the elf. As an elf, Alphur is a red-tape enthusiast, devoted to ensuring protocols are followed, contracts are adhered to, and every T and I are crossed and dotted. Hilda can’t even see the elves until she has signed all the paperwork allowing her to do so.

From this, a simple idea: Magic is in words. The first magic word was Abracadabra, assumed to mean “I create as I speak,” or rather, as I will, so it is. As time goes on, stories of wizards involve more magic words, more complex arcane gestures, charts, telescopes, potions, etc. They were scholars and scientists, their magic arising from complex and intricate procedures, rather than mere fiat.

As the process continues, eventually, would not all magic become contracts and established precidents?

There was humor in this idea, and sadness. I invisioned a world where snapping your fingers to light your fireplace required contractual negotiations, and even existing as a goblin required a Notary Public. I saw old folk monsters becoming the newer re-envisioned versions of themselves, because the files needed updating. I saw people who thought they were one thing forced into becoming something they weren’t.

Enter Raiselig, a corruption of the Afrikaans translation of “Mystery Light” or “Traveling Light,” a being who was once a Will-o’-the-wisp, or a vampire, or an amalgamation of thousands of different myths from across the globe. Ultimately, they are a being who knew once who they were, and now survives their abusive redefinition by learning and enforcing the rules of behavior that tormented them, perpetuating the abuse on others.

The Dossier will likely never be more than a series of short stories. While I have other ideas for Raiselig, none of them are really capable of sustaining a full book.

Chapters

Ozzie Fitch

About

Ozzie Fitch is a tale of hope, of struggle, of friendship through the trials of life, but mostly about pain. The pain we carry, the pain we share, and the pain that could cripple us if we are not careful.

Some hide their pain, turn from it in an attempt to maintain their veneer of adulthood. Some succumb to it, turning bitter and cynical as they see any joy or passion for life as a morbid lie. Some turn their pain into power. Some call it magic. And some feel their pain is the only thing that makes them worthwhile.

Ozzie Fitch, gutter-wizard and proud iconoclast, believes something far more dangerous: he believes that other people’s pain is the only thing that makes them special.

This story is my take on Catcher in the Rye. No, not really; more it’s my take on The Magicians, a brilliant book in two very specific ways, and horrible in every other. (them’s my opinions)

After noting what I saw as failures of the book, I decided I would focus on one specific idea: Magicians are children. They can’t mature, because part of maturity is recognizing that you can’t get everything you want, and magic is all about getting everything you want.

Inspired too by the FATE SRD and it’s handling of street magic, Ozzie Fitch became a character who embodied every foul aspect of grievance politics. While Ozzie’s anger at the system is valid and significant, he wrongly believes that it is the suffering that is valuable and gives people power. He thinks he is challenging “the system,” while instead is actually recreating the self-same abuses that the system perpetuates. He doesn’t actually have a problem with the system, it’s that he doesn’t have power in it. He is a gatekeeper more focused on his own pains than on collaboration and mutual aid. While he truly wants a Utopian world for all, he believes cynicism and nihilism is a viable method of resistance.

He is wrong.

My greatest fear with this work is the “evil-is-cool” effect, which results in people thinking Joker, Natural Born Killers, and Taxi Driver are stories about heroes, rather than cautionary tales for people to learn from.

My solution? Tap into Brechtian theory and force people to translate Ozzie’s mindset through a made up street-speak, a slang created by the magicians of the city. I am still uncertain if it works, but it certainly was interesting to experiment with.

Chapters

The Chains of Gods

John Gardner’s Grendel is a remarkable book. Adapted into the beautifully appalling children’s cartoon (yes, that’s real), Grendel is at once a retelling of the epic poem of Beowulf and an exploration of multiple philosophical concepts, including Existentialism, Nihilism, and Absurdism.

After reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, I found myself enamored with several philosophical questions, not the least of which was why did this purportedly heroic figure of Gilgamesh start life as a tyrant? I had long since felt skeptical of the concepts of “heroism” in both the moral and narrative senses, so I decided to ape John Gardner and re-tell the Epic of Gilgamesh from Enkidu’s perspective, while exploring the philosophy of morality.

What does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be good? Is Kant’s “will to goodness” any different than Nietzsche’s “will to power?” Can morality even exist between people under a power imbalance? If so, what would that look like?

Alongside these questions, I found myself experimenting with form and function. My experimenting made this work nearly impossible to translate into HTML, so I have instead uploaded the book as a file you can download. I hope this isn’t too much of a problem.

This is perhaps my most literary work to date, and while I daresay there is maybe more of me in Edmund Moulde, this work contains perhaps a less masked version of myself. I openly sobbed while writing multiple chapters, especially the final one.

Speaking of: it is important to note that the epilogue and final chapter have swapped places over six times in my revising. I think you should read both, but in whichever order you’d like.

Download here: The Chains of Gods

Edmund Moulde

The Macabre Tale of Edmund Moulde

About

Edmund Moulde was born from a flash game. At least, that’s the first spark I remember. It was a silly little thing, where you played a young Addams-family-like scientist creating Frankenstein monsters to fight other scientists, and I only played it for a bit before shrugging and moving on with my browsing.

The idea of a Gothic child, who — Dr. Jekyll like — set about doing science in an old castle clicked in my brain. Unbidden, the idea of a horred old widow who adopted a child for the sole purpose of cheating her hated relatives out of their inheritance came soon after. Countless bits of inspiration followed, and before long I had collected enough to write a trilogy before I had even finished the first draft of book one.

It took years of editing for me to be happy with the first book. I learned this about myself: I am a polisher. I cannot let go of something unless it’s perfect, and nothing is ever perfect. I need to think, consider, maximize, and after more than 10 years, I finally consider the first book “done.”

I make no such admission about the second, third, or fourth.

Edmund and I are very much alike in many ways. I daresay Edmund is as much a fantastical autobiographical character as a work of fiction. I think the biggest difference between the two of us is the worlds in which we live, to say nothing of the quality of our support networks.

Chapters

Edmund never thought he would be adopted.

Prospective parents were always looking for children with fuller cheeks, ruddier skin, or maybe blinked a bit more often.

It wasn’t that he minded much — he wouldn’t know what to do with a family — It was just that he had never been beyond the gates of Mrs. Mapleberry’s Home for Wayward Lads and Ladies, and he was curious about the soot-choked city of Brackenburg that lay just half an hour away by coach.

It wasn’t until Matron Mander Moulde arrived at the orphanage one day and adopted Edmund to spite her blood-relatives out of their inheritance, that Edmund learned there was much more beyond that wooden fence then he could have ever imagined in his worst nightmares…

Grimm’s School for the Erratically Gifted

About

In many ways, this book was supposed to be the first book in Edmund’s story. I had imagined a very Rowlingesque (sans bigotry) opening of the odd little Moulde boy being tested after he used the chemicals from his sister’s makeup kit to revivify his dead pet rat. Then, off the odd little Moulde boy would go to learn about the mad sciences of penny-pulps and wrought-iron steampunk.

That changed pretty quickly as I developed the world around Edmund. Soon he was an orphan adopted by a spiteful dowager, and heir to one of the Nine Founding Families of the great industrial city of Brackenburg.

But Edmund was always going to go to school, and he was always going to learn something important about higher education — namely, its social function as distinct from its practical use.

Am I happy with the result? It’s a mixed bag. This is one of my under-drafted works, and is often the case, I feel like I tried to do too much. More than any other book, this one has changed both in form, skeleton, substance, and focus multiple times during its drafting. It is, all in all, I feel a somewhat inelegant result.

Nevertheless, there’s still quite a lot I enjoy, including Edmund’s poisoning, Professor Whiskfield’s opinions on Mad Science, and the Teapot Coterie’s ball. Perhaps I will come back someday to really polish the book into something I’m proud of. For the moment, I will swallow my pride and fear.

Chapters

“Nos Demonstrum Illis Omnes”

Carved into the gates that lead to the hollowed campus of Grimm’s School for the Intermittently Gifted, it is a motto as well as a promise; a promise that Edmund means to fulfill. After being accepted into the greatest school for academia in the world, he has the opportunity to learn all there is to know about exotic sciences and arcane literature. Then, he’ll show them all!

But first, he will have to deal with mad professors, selfish students, a shadowy raven stalking the graveyard, and a nobility too busy enjoying themselves to help. And when the actions of a mysterious murderer threaten the existence of Grimm’s, it will take all of Edmund’s guile and wits to save both the school, his family, his future, and his own neck.

The Battle of Harmingsdown

About

The third book of the Edmund Moulde quadrilogy was fun to write. I enjoyed coming up with all the little world-creative details, creating a world that was as much about fun little things as it was about people. All in all, while I can’t seem to ever allow myself a sense of satisfaction with my work, I can at least nowadays see some virtue in it.

I created the Wickes almost by accident, but once I had, they were always going to be one of Edmund’s greatest foes. Not because they were smarter — they were not — but because he was afraid of them.

I’m not sure why, but when I decided Edmund was going off to war, I knew from the start that he was responsible for the Christmastime truce. The story grew from there. While I sprinkled actual historical dates throughout the series, I had a lot of fun mucking about with world-war technologies and their inventions.

The Black Cat Confederacy used to be a full on team of malcontents, including the stockmaster, an explosives expert, and “the twins.” I removed them to simplify things, since their presence was more important for content outside the main story, but I like to think they’re still exist, making a mess of things in the military as a less idealistic version of Die Schwartze Hunden.

Of the many revisions I have made in this story, Schtillhart has always been trans, and yet I still remain uncertain of Edmund’s own sexuality. He is certainly some kind of Ace, though to what degree I have not bothered to explore. After all, it’s not really my business, is it?

Chapters

The World was at War. This was not Edmund’s fault.

It was, however, his responsibility; because when War comes to Brackenburg, it is the duty of all Nine Founding Families to do their part for the war effort. But the Moulde Family had no regiments to mobilize, no money to provide, not even a third-born son eager to prove themselves on the field of battle for glory and perhaps a medal. All the Moulde Family had was Edmund; and after a grueling five years at Grimm’s, he knew that becoming a General, leading a regiment, and above all Being Noticed was not the wisest course of action.

Far wiser would be purchasing a Lieutenant’s commission and joining the Army Bureaucratic Corps, so Edmund could spend all his time safe in Filing Room B beneath the Brackenburg City Hall, and make sure he was the first person to see any reports or pieces of information that could one day help a young and enterprising Moulde rebuild his ailing family.

But War is far more complicated than Edmund originally thought. And when a childhood nightmare returns to haunt him, he realizes there is something far worse going on in the world than politics; something that will draw him deeper into a world of spying, subterfuge, betrayal, and trenches. Something he can’t fix until he travels to the front lines at Harmingsdown, and sees the whites of his real enemy’s eyes…

The Last Days of Yesteryear

Matron Moulde is dead. Long live Patron Moulde.

There is so much to take care of; the letters, the arrangements, the finances, the solicitors, the estate, the wedding, the well-wishers, the harm-bringers, the Church, the Police…

“Who is this Orphan Prince?” whisper the landed-gentry. “Above all else, who is he?”

For years, Edmund had known the answer quite clearly; but now with Matron dead, he must come to terms with the fact that he might not know himself very well at all. Is he really a Moulde? He could fight a war to save a school, save a country over an early dinner, but in the wake of Matron’s passing, can he finally prove both to the world and himself that he truly is worthy of the title Patron? Of the family name?

Can he finally do what Matron adopted him to do and save the Moulde Family from poverty, disrespect, and destitution once and for all?

Or are these the last days of yesteryear?

Chapters