During the first three months of this year much of the backstory of
Exode has come together. As can be seen in the "word cloud" to the right, people and places in
Exode have taken over this blog.
Cast and Locations
I'm currently in the middle of writing Chapter Three of
Exode which describes the years during which
Parthney lives at
Lendhalen, a secret base for the training of
Interventionist agents. Lendhalen is hidden away in the
Koly star system, in the Galactic Core.
Gwyned is the only other
false Buld at Lendhalen while Parthney is in residence. There are a few members of the
Buld Clan who live at Lendhalen such as
Leymaygn. All Buld are human, but only the "false" Buld are genetically identical to the humans who live on Earth. Most Buld, including Leymaygn, are hermaphrodites, a human variant that was engineered by the alien
Huaoshy to be the crew on board spaceships that travel between settled worlds of the Galactic Core.
While traveling from his home planet,
Hemmal, to Lendhalen, Parthney met his first
Pla. The Pla are a subgroup of the Buld Clan. The Pla don't have the usual swarm of
pek nanites in their bodies, but they have different nanites that were provided by the
Fru'wu.
Nanites are one of the technological
gizmos that play important roles in
Exode.
There are two Pla who run Lendhalen,
Pla'mak and Pla'kao. They believe that all residents at Lendhalen have no nanites in their bodies. A powerful magnetic field is used to inactivate pek nanites, allowing the residents of Lendhalen to remove pek nanites from their bodies. The Pla need their Fru'wu nanites, so Pla'mak and Pla'kao never enter in Lendhalen and they communicate electronically from outside with residents like Leymaygn.
The most numerous residents of Lendhalen are robots. Unbeknownst to Pla'mak and Pla'kao, these robots contain a third kind of nanite; nanites that originated in the far future of Earth. Those nanites were brought back in time by
Trysta Iwedon, who is Gwyned's mother. Although not mentioned in
Exode, Trysta is better known to science fiction fans as Noÿs, the famous time traveler from Asimov's novel
The End of Eternity.
Robin is the major robotic character in Chapter Three.
Robin, Gwyned and Leymaygn play important roles in preparing Parthney for his future life on Earth. Pla'mak and Pla'kao mostly operate in the background along with another Buld,
Vozgrow.
Other important groups of humanoids in
Exode are the
Prelands and the
Nereids. The Prelands live on worlds like Hemmal. They were crafted by the Huaoshy to be successors to humans on Earth. Just as we humans replaced earlier humanoids such as
Australopithecus, the Huaoshy planned to replace we Earthlings with Prelands. The Nereids are an alien hunanoid species that originated on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy. They play
an important role in
Exode because they don't like the Huaoshy plan to replace humans with hermaphroditic Prelands.
Although Gwyned and Parthney don't realize it, genetically they share Noÿs as their mother. Parthney's paternal complement of chromosomes came from
Ekcolir. Gwyned's paternal complement of chromosomes came from
Deomede. Ekcolir and Deomede were both born on Hemmal, trained at Lendhalen and sent to Earth as Interventionist agents. However, they are two different people, analogs from two different
Realities. Ekcolir lived in the
Noÿs Reality where he and Noÿs had a son, Thomas. In the
Buld Reality, Deomede and Noÿs have a daughter, Gwyned.
Ekolir had a
major role in causing the Buld Reality to come into existence. Gwyned carries an important message from Noÿs to Parthney. Parthney is puzzled by the antagonism that develops between himself and Gwyned: he never guesses that that Gwyned is his half sister.
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| Quarter One, 2013 |
Noÿs visits the
Klyz teleportation hub as passes the nanites that she has carried from the far future into a robot of Fru'wu design. Those nanites carry a huge amount of information, including the genetic pattern of Thomas. Eventually, the genetic pattern of Thomas is passed on to the pek. The "Noÿs nanites" eventually are present within Robin when Parthney and Robin are together at Lendhalen.
It is the pek who
create Parthney using the genetic pattern of Thomas. Eventually, Parthney is working on Earth as an Interventionist agent when he is captured by
Overseers. After being taken to the
Observer Base on the Moon, Parthney in "infected" by the nanites that have long resided in Thomas. This allows Parthney to escape from Observer Base and return to Klyz. Thomas "takes the place" of Parthney and the Overseers never notice the switch since Parthney is a clone of Thomas.
Along with Hemmal, two other planets in the Koly star system have some residents.
Oib is similar to Mars and is actively being terraformed by the Buld.
Clu'ten'iun is the actual location of Lendhalen, but Parthney is tricked into thinking that Lendhalen is located on Oib.
Vance
As described above,
Asimov provided the means (Noÿs) to give we Earthlings an advantage over the
god-like Huaoshy. Only slowly did I come to realize that the main character of
Exode (Parthney) is genetically the son of Noÿs. Similarly,
Vance has influenced
Exode.
During the past year
I've looked to Vance's fiction for inspiration in how to deal with another of the fundamental foundational issues of
Exode. Along with Parthney, the second character that I wrote into
Exode last summer was
Hana. Hana is an Earthling, but Parthney teleports her off of Earth. Hana and Parthney's son, Boswei, meet, fall in love and have a son:
Izhiun. Izhiun eventually goes to Earth and discovers that Hana was mistaken; her husband is not dead. Rather, he is alive and well on Earth and becomes the conduit by which we Earthlings can learn the hidden story of our origins as a species: that Humanity has been crafted by the Huaoshy.
I initially felt guilty about trying to introduce the murder of Hana's husband into
Exode. Now I've gone a step further and now must
point to Vance as my inspiration for writing myself into
Exode. In a strange twist of fate, I was selected to be the one to put Parthney's story on the internet; I became
Hana's husband!
Quarter One of 2013
Sorting out the backstory of
Exode took me about 40,000 words spread over 26 blog posts from January through March. In my
first blog post of 2013 I sketched out some details of the planet Oib, the world that I originally imagined as the place where Parthney would be trained for his mission to Earth. However, locating Lendhalen on Oib would have been too simple!
The Huaoshy make use of many tricks to control the rate of growth of populations within
Genesaunt Civilization. In the case of the Buld, it is easy for the pek to switch the reproductive mode between two options: 1) the Buld can give birth to immature embryos that are then further gestated by the pek, and 2) the Buld can "reproduce" in a way that causes the new embryo to replace its parent. Rather than leave the parent's body, the embryo can aggressively replace the cells of the parent's body. The Buld on Hemmal refer to this as "going through the
change".
At the start of 2013 I transitioned from writing
Chapter Two of
Exode to Chapter Three.
Prison of Space described the Pla and the importance of "partial change", the means by which the Pla can sustain their independence from the pek. In
Under Oib, I continued to develop my thinking about Oib. At that point I still imagined that Lendhalen would be located under the surface of Oib.
In
When is Exode?, I finally decided exactly when the events of
Exode take place. That allowed me start placing key elements of Fru'wu and Nereid interactions with Humanity into the timeline of Exode, including the
trip of Parthney to the Andromeda galaxy.
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| Belinda, Gwyned and Parthney |
As part of constructing the unusual culture that exists at Lendhalen, I decided that there should be
robot residents at the Interventionist training base. I had already decided that Gwyned and Parthney would not develop a sexual relationship, so I started imagining how Parthney might exercise his young male libido with a robotic playmate.
At the end of 2012 I crafted a
front cover for
Exode based on events in
Chapter One. Three weeks into 2013 I went ahead and made a
back cover using images from
Chapter Two. While thinking about how to cram several years of Parthney's life into Chapter Three, I wrote
Time Warp. In that blog post I had some fun picturing Parthney as a James Bond-like character, but I was still thinking about Oib as the location of Lendhalen.
I next sketched out some of the backstory for
Pla'mak and Pla'kao, the two co-directors of Lendhalen. That blog post also included my initial ideas about how Parthney would reach
Observer Base on the Moon after being captured by an
Overseer using the cover identity "Belinda Tement".
In my next blog post I described the
Klyz Teleportation Hub. Given the importance of the Fru'wu Interventionists, I realized that I needed to include another Interventionist base in
Exode. I also decided to write
Jane Grey into the history of Lendhalen as a way of knitting Buld history together with Earth history.
At the end of January
I finally realized that it made more sense to simply
pretend that Lendhalen is "under Oib" while locating it on another planet. It is possible for Parthney to travel from Oib to Cla'ten'iun and not notice the shift of 100,000,000 million miles because of the availability of
teleportation technology.
In February I
finally realized that I could make
Exode a sequel to
The Start of Eternity. When I had begun writing
Exode my thinking was that I would never write another novel that involved time travel. As it turns out, the time travel is all completed before the events of
Exode, but time travel does play an important part in the backstory of
Exode. Initially I was imagining Thomas as the son of Noÿs and
Andrew, but I later developed roles for Ekcolir and Deomede as the fathers of Thomas and Gwyned.
In the middle of February I started seriously taking on
the task of weaving Noÿs into the story of
Exode. Initially I had imagined Noÿs as a convenient way to provide advanced technologies to human Interventionists, but then I kept finding amusing ways to link Noÿs to the other
Exode characters. Going into the end of February I was
still struggling with how to ensure that Parthney would find his way from Lendhalen to Earth. I had to confront the fact that Gwyned wants to return to Earth. I imagined that the Observers would
easily notice her if she tried to sneak back to Earth. I realized that
Robin could play a decisive role in first making Parthney comfortable at Lendhalen then ultimately convincing him to abandon Lendhalen and move on to Earth.
Near the beginning of March I
started exploring how the Interventionists would be forced to change their ways after 20,000 years. Pla'kao is the main "
counter-revolutionary" who sees the need to alter the efforts of Interventionists from 1) pushing for technological change on Earth to 2) making sure that the Earthlings do not unleash a technological catastrophe.
Pla'mak and Gwyned keep pushing the Buld revolution onward, imagining that any problems confronted by we Earthlings will have a technological solution.
In the middle of March I started to
sort out details of how to convert the Noÿs Reality into the Buld Reality. I realized that Noÿs needed to travel back in time once more, but
it was not immediately clear what she would have to accomplish in our past. By
March 22 I had come to recognize the basic topological structure of the Buld Reality: that there are three possible future outcomes for we Earthlings. I needed to find the way for Noÿs to make possible a "happy ending" for we Earthlings, otherwise our fate would be a quiet replacement of our primitive species by the more advanced Prelands. I was also deep into imagining how Asimov himself could be written into
Exode.
In my last two blog posts of March I decided on the
extent to which the Nereids would control the end game of
Exode and I was finally far enough along in my thinking that I could put down in print a
coherent timeline for
Exode. Whew!
Related Reading:
Guide to Exode development during 2012
Topic Guide for Exode
