Jan 19, 2019

Negative

Araminta Station in the
Ekcolir Reality. Original cover
art by Johannes Bruck
Back in 2015 I offered some speculation about how brain regions such as the amygdala and the caudate can shape human responses to the events that take place inside fictional stories. In 2017, Winfried Menninghaus et al published an article called "Negative emotions in art reception: Refining theoretical assumptions and adding variables to the Distancing-Embracing model". They suggested that their Distancing-Embracing model can help account for people's enjoyment of negative emotions. In my case, I find it difficult to distance myself from the horrific events that some authors include in their science fiction stories.

cover art by Boris Vallejo
I've been searching through the infites that were given to me by Yōd and Nora and have found a few of their memories of some stories that now exist only in the library of the Writers Block. In the Ekcolir Reality, the analogue of Jack Vance was born as twins. There was some synergy and competition between the two Vances and sometimes they wrote variants of each others stories. Apparently there was a version of Araminta Station in which Glawen had to live through both the murder of Sessily Veder at the hands of Kirdy Wook and the death of Wayness Tamm on the shore of Lake Dimple.

source
In my own fiction, I find it very difficult to allow any of my characters to reach a tragic end. Most recently, Georgy White died in a flood, but a copy of Georgy was made and sent to Observer Base. I'm not really comfortable with the idea of Glawen loosing the love of his life twice within a few years time. Apparently in that version of the story, Glawen, Eustace Chilke and Flitz traveled together in a Fortunatus spaceyacht to Earth in search of the Cadwal Charter.

Amanda
Glawen meets Eustace's niece, Amanda, who works as a communications technician at the airport in Division City and dreams of saving enough money to travel to far worlds. Amanda is able to telephone the Shoup Import and Export facility in the nearby suburb of Boulton, gain the trust of an employee named Tanya Mirmar and obtain the address of Melvish Keebles, on the planet Nion, 4th planet of the Pharisse star system, far away in the direction of the constellation Argo Navis. Amanda insists on joining the mission to Nion.

on Nion in the Ekcolir Reality
Arriving in Tanjaree, they find that Keebles has been murdered. Amanda is able to hack into Keebles' phone and find that just before being killed, Keebles had apparently been in contact with Adrian Moncurio in Moonway. Quickly taking the Fortunatus to the far side of Nion, they find Moncurio, but he refuses to provide any information and heads off among the Standing Stones, soon to meet his demise at the hands of Benjamie.

Earth
Amanda is finally able to hack into the files stored on Keebles' phone and finds an an address on Earth under the name Moncurio.

Arriving in Pombareales, Glawen and Amanda hatch a scheme to breech the defenses of Casa Lucasta and obtain information from the stubborn Irena Portils. Using forged documents, Glawen and Amanda pretend to be Mr. and Mrs. Moncurio and they file paperwork for adoption of Myron and Lydia. Dr. Olivano is happy to make use of Glawen and Amanda. Irena attempts to burn down Casa Lucasta, but Myron is able to telepathically contact Amanda. The children are rescued, but a search of the partially destroyed Casa Lucasta finds no documents of relevance to Cadwal.

Amanda and her daughter
Myron sees the solution to the mystery in the thoughts of Eustace Chilke, and finally the Cadwal Charter is found where it had been hidden inside the Atlas of Far Worlds at the Chilke farm near Idola. Glawen and Amanda are comfortable together and they decide to spend the rest of their lives together. Is Glawen's loss of Sessily and Wayness made up for by his relationship with Amanda? In the Ekcolir Reality, there was a novel called Return to Araminta that described the daughter of Glawen and Amanda as having unusual physical and telepathic abilities due to the special nanites that she carried in her body.

1916
Wayness and her daughter (source)
For several years I have had fun imagining that after the Asimov Reality had been successfully used to tap into Phari expertise in the design of femtobot endosymbionts, Isaac Asimov was allowed to create the Writers Block. The Writers Block was a refuge where a collection of replicoids could turn the science fiction literary genre into a mechanism for warning people of the 20th century about impending events of the near future, particularly those events that would have dramatic impact on the development of new technologies and how technology would impact Earth's ecosystem.

source
Sadly, that effort backfired and resulted in an intensification of the global warming problem in the Ekcolir Reality. "Riding on the coat-tails" of the Writers Block project, Jack Vance was allowed to write science fiction stories that reflected events in the far future of the Asimov Reality while Isaac Asimov was able to create fictional accounts of the far future of the Foundation Reality.

in the Ekcolir Reality
In the Buld Reality, the function of the Writers Block was redirected towards the goals of the Trysta-Grean Pact. The fiction of Vance and Asimov was allowed to function as a way of providing the Editor information about Deep Time. In the case of Jack Vance, the replicoid of Vance was allowed to experiment with how to use the Bimanoid Interface to influence the behavior of an Earthling even before Vance was born. The Vance replicoid practiced how to use the Bimanoid Interface by connecting to the mind of an Earthling named Joan Griffith Chaney.

Under the influence of the Vance replicoid, Chaney began writing stories about her visions of the past and the future. Joan Chaney had been engineered to be able to use the Bimanoid Interface by her parents. Joan's father, William Chaney, was a tryp'At and her mother was an Interventionist agent named Svahr, using the name an identity of an Earth woman known as Flora Wellman. Svahr took over the body of Flora Wellman when she moved from Ohio to California at the end of the Civil War.

sedron bombs
In the Asimov Reality, sedron bombs had been used to destroy every site on Earth where nuclear weapons had been stored. A high-energy form of radiation from those explosions caused all nearby people to develop a form of radiation poisoning that was known as the Scarlet Death. Before the sedron bombs were detonated, all of the nuclear weapons were teleported away, so there was very little nuclear fallout.

in the Ekcolir Reality
In the Ekcolir Reality, Joan Chaney published a short story called "The Scarlet Bomb" in 1897. She later expanded that tale into a novel, published in 1913. The plot of the story concerned a devastating nuclear war of the future (the war started in the year 2013) that used dirty plutonium bombs (in the Ekcolir Reality, plutonium had just been discovered in 1895). In the story, time travelers from the future returned to 1890 and tried to prevent the discovery of plutonium.

Radhas
In 1903, Joan Chaney published a short story called "Archeology of the Archean". That was a time travel story about a woman named Rachel Nyrtia who traveled into the far past of Earth and lived among a group of ancient alien visitors to Earth known as the pek. The pek were investigating a series of hidden bases on Earth, Mars and Venus that had been built by the Phari.

source
"Archeology of the Archean" was written back when time travel was still possible. Here in the Final Reality, Nora has long been an Interventionist agent and her memories extend back into the time travel era. She seems to have long anticipated that it would be Georgy White who would discover hierions on Earth. Back before time travel became impossible, Nora had apparently viewed the future of the Final Reality and saw that Georgy would wind up contributing her own stories to the library of the Writers Block.

future science
Based on hints in the infites that I received from Nora, I now suspect that Rylla's mother may have been Radhas, who was herself a carrier of Asterothrope genes. If so, it will be interesting to see how good a telepath Rylla can become with some training and practice.

source
There is also the lingering question of the fate of Radhas. Is she still on Earth? Nora's memories of Radhas seemed tinged with a hint if tragedy, as if some evil befell her. Will poor Radhas become a source of negative emotions in the Exode Saga?

Next: science fiction after 60
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