I recently
made plans to begin a project aimed at developing my ability to write short and effective "teasers" for long works of fiction. Of course, as for any good New Year's resolution, I've found ways to avoid starting this new project. Rather than go short, instead I've been putting together a 30,000 word-long pair of introductory chapters for
The League of Yrinna.
Teasing
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| Star Trek: Trullion |
It was almost six years ago that I had a blog post called
Teaser Tuesday (#1). Maybe some day there will be a #2, but I'm not making any promises along those lines. Occasionally I do quote from my favorite stories, usually from a novel that was written by
Jack Vance (
see below).
I'm currently in the mood for a different kind of teasing, more in the spirit of short teaser videos for films. When
I gave Gohrlay an assignment to create a short "abstract" for part of her life's story, she came back at me with, "If it is so easy, then
you write a teaser for
The League of Yrinna."
Of course, I immediately began searching for reasons to
not take up that challenge. Since I'm 'only' two chapters into the novel, that means I'm still not certain exactly how to describe my fan fiction sequel to Jack Vance's novel,
Trullion. AND, you know I'm desperate to avoid writing a "teaser" for
The League of Yrinna when I'm coming up with delay tactics like pleading, "But I still need to edit the end of
Chapter 2."
Marune
In order to write
The League of Yrinna, I have been looking back at details in Vance's Alastor Cluster novels. It is dangerous to look too closely at anything in the
science fiction genre.
Example: book covers. I recently
took time to complain about the book cover blurbs on my copy of Vance's novel,
Ecce and Old Earth.
The back cover blurb on my copy of
Marune is amusing:
"...
the Connatic ruled the sprawling Alastor Cluster. . . and kept track of the doings of each of his trillion or more subjects."
This is an intriguing idea, but it is not the story that Vance told. However, in
The League of Yrinna, I imagine that the Connatic has been equipped with a
Phari endosymbiont. What if that gave him the power to access every person's
replicoid within the
Hierion Domain?
I originally imagined replicoids as being the invention of
R. Gohrlay. She needed them in order to take advantage of the
Momentum of Time and cause the same people to appear in each
Reality of Earth.
Might the Phari have created replicoids for some other purpose? I imagine that the goal of the
pek is to help creatures like we humans transcend our hadronic existence and merge with the
Huaoshy in the
Sedronic Domain. I imagine that the Phari have less advanced technology than the pek, but it is not clear exactly what their abilities include. Maybe the goal of the Phari is to convert biological life forms into artificial life forms that reside in the Hierion Domain.
Part 3
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| hussade masks |
Moving towards Part 3 of
The League of Yrinna, I want to have the Connatic resign his office and participate in the Clarke/Vance/Asimov effort to make contact with the Phari.
The game of hussade is going to play an important part during the time when Glinnes and Duissane are on Yrinna. I imagine that the Phari are responsible for the popularity of hussade in Alastor Cluster. Here is what the back cover blurb says on my copy of
Trullion:
"
The Trill were a lackadaisical, easy-living race - except for the planetwide game of hassade when a ferocious instinct for gambling drove them to risk all -"
 |
| Jantiff |
Yes, the publisher even misspelled "hussade" as "hassade" on the cover. However, I like the idea that humans in Alastor Cluster have a kind of instinctive obsession with the game. This idea will be taken to the extreme on Yrinda where the outcome of hussade games is used as a kind of lottery for human breeding experiments.
Glinnes and
Duissane will become caught up in the efforts of the Phari to produce a new type of human that is fully compatible with Phari endosymbionts.
Wyst
I wonder if the person who wrote the back cover blurb on my copy of
Wyst even read the story. It includes this statement about Alastor Cluster's people: "...
whose sole protector of law was the mysterious person known as the Connatic." That rather awkward phrasing makes me think of
Asimov's
laws of robotics.
What if the Phari are some kind of automated system that is continually scanning the galaxy for new space-faring species and absorbing them into an advanced civilization that exists inside the Hierion Domain? The artificial life forms within the Hierion Domain might have long ago lost interest in the
hadronic domain.
I'm imagining that the Phari follow a set of rules or Laws. While following the dictates of those Laws, they have designed the
Idite clan as a way to produce a series of Connatics who can help keep pushing the human population of the Cluster towards the ultimate Phari goal of putting an end to humanity as a biological phenomenon and shifting our species towards a new existence as artificial life forms.
Next: caught up in the Phari web
The back cover blurb on my copy of Marune is amusing:
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