Wiki Fiction Blog, Year 1

Asimov and comrades.

This blog post is a look back at the first year of this blog. There were 84 blog posts and about 44,000 words. That means there was a new post about every 4-5 days and about 520 words per post. There were an average of 7 posts each month and the most active month was February with 13 posts.

During this past year I have become very involved with writing The Start of Eternity, a fan fiction sequel to Isaac Asimov's time travel novel. In honor of all the attention I've paid to Asimov's science fiction in this blog I selected an image that includes Asimov to grace this blog post. That image was created for a blog post called Asimov the Collectivist.

If I have to select one blog post from the past year as my favorite, it would be Time Loop. While developing the plot of The Start of Eternity, I came to realize that it would be fun to write Asimov himself into the story. During the past year I have benefited from writing about my fiction, both here and in my on-wiki blog.

Year 2. I don't enjoy writing fiction if I feel like I have a deadline or a due date. However, it might be possible for me to complete The Start of Eternity before the end of 2010. I hope that during the next year there might be at least one person who sees this blog and decides to participate in some collaborative fiction writing. Although The Start of Eternity has grown to 130,000 words, new collaborating authors are welcome, either for that project or another collaboration.

Denisova hominin

interbreeding populations of humans (source)

Sometimes it can be a struggle to make science fiction more interesting than science fact. In The Start of Eternity, a fan fiction sequel to Isaac Asimov's time travel novel, I imagined that 20,000 years ago there were four distinct subtypes of humans on Earth. Further, I Imagined that when the Neanderthals became extinct, the last ones alive on Earth lived in central Asia (see map).

mitochondrial DNA

Today I heard about the discovery of Denisova hominin, what might have been an actual fourth human subtype that shared Earth with Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis and modern humans. So far, all that is known about this subtype of human comes from study of a finger bone. The bone yielded mitchondrial DNA which suggests "Denisova hominin" branched off from the Neanderthal/modern human lineage about a million years ago.

Asimov's Struggle With Aliens

In The Start of Eternity, there are characters such as Overseer Doltun who could possibly be descended from "Denisova hominin". Before the discovery of "Denisova hominin" I was imagining that the Overseers were possibly Homo ergaster or a similar ancient human variant.
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Update: the blog post, above, was written in March 2010.

Ancient Denisovan-related mitochondrial DNA from Spain (2013) 

Related reading:
Evolutionary History and Adaptation from High-Coverage Whole-Genome Sequences of Diverse African Hunter-Gatherers

2018 - Half neanderthal & half denisovan
In 2013 I began to re-work The Start of Eternity so as to make it the first book in the Exode Trilogy: The Foundations of Eternity, Trysta and Ekcolir, Exode.

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