The Gohrlay Circle

In the Foundation Reality: Moon Ride

"People believe whatever they want to believe." -Howard Treesong

I've been struggling to wrap my head around the idea that science fiction as a literary genre was created in an attempt to end the Time Travel War. According to Gohrlay, since the pace of technological advance was slightly accelerated in the Ekcolir Reality, the first experiments aimed at using science fiction writers to reveal the secret history of Earth began in the 1920s of that Reality.

Deep Time
As I've mentioned previously, there were some interesting differences between the Ekcolir Reality and the world as we know it. One of the distinctive features of fiction in the Ekcolir Reality is that by 1900 there were more female authors than males and the protagonists of stories were as likely to be women as men (example).

In the Ekcolir Reality: The Gohrlay Circle

Given her fundamentally important role in starting Humanity down the path towards liberation, Gohrlay herself became an early test case for how to use science fiction as a platform for telling the secret history of Earth. According to Gohrlay, John Williamson was the first person to tell the story of how Gohrlay's brain was scanned and used as a template for the positronic brain. In the Ekcolir Reality, Williamson wrote several linked stories about Gohrlay, including one called "The Gohrlay Circle".

"The Gohrlay Circle" provided an account of how Gohrlay returned to Earth in the 20th century to play a role in the end game of the long struggle to liberate Humanity from the pek. Of course, most readers interpreted such stories as fiction, never suspecting that Gohrlay was a real woman, a Neanderthal from Deep Time.

In the Ekcolir Reality: Gohrlay's Brain

It was through the publication of stories like "The Gohrlay Circle" that the secret history of Earth was first told to humans and so Williamson's science fiction provided a major breakthrough in human-alien relations, a sort of proof of concept for the strategy that was ultimately used to end the Time War. I still find it hard to believe that the goal of telling the previously untold story of alien visitors to Earth was the motivation behind the creation of the literary genre of science fiction in the Ekcolir Reality.

"The Gohrlay Circle" was the last of a series of seven popular stories by Williamson that featured Gohrlay as the main character.

The first story in that series told how the structure of Gohrlay's brain was scanned to obtain the pattern for a positronic brain. In the Buld Reality, that story was not told until the 21st century, which is a good measure of how far delayed we are in this Reality in discovering the truth about human origins.

In the Buld Reality: The Cosmic Express

According to Gohrlay, in the Ekcolir Reality an electron microscope was first built at the end of the 19th century, almost 40 years before the first electron microscope was constructed in the Buld Reality. In the Ekcolir Reality, scanning microscopy (both with electrons and with visible light) was in use by the time when writers like Williamson created the science fiction genre during the 1920s.

To appreciate how dramatic the changes were in the Ekcolir Reality we need to look even further back into Deep Time to the Foundation Reality.

In the Ekcolir Reality
Original art by Leo Morey

In the Foundation Reality, there was a brief flowering of "gizmo fiction" (the term "science fiction" never caught on) and Williamson wrote stories such as "Moon Ride". In "Moon Ride", a pair of newlyweds fly off to the Moon aboard a spacecraft and spend an unhappy weekend at an underground lunar city.

In the Buld Reality, Jack Williamson wrote "The Cosmic Express". In "The Cosmic Express", the plot is very similar to that in "Moon Ride", but rather than use a space ship, the newlyweds are teleported off to their dream destination (in this case, Venus).

Teleportation

Original artwork by Margaret Brundage
and Leslie Edwards (Ekcolir Reality)

In the Ekcolir Reality, Williamson wrote "The Klyz Telleportation Terminal", an account of how teleportation was used by the Fru'wu to move Interventionist agents to and from Earth.

The Ekcolir Reality might have been the peak of the Time Travel War. In "Rule of the Pek", Williamson wrote about time travel by Luri's replicoid.

Sadly, Gohrlay does not like to talk about herself. I'm trying to get her to provide more authoritative versions of Foundations of Eternity and Exode. However, Gohrlay claims that she is too intimately involved with the secret history of Earth and would be unable to write objective accounts of her role in Earth's history.

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