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Review: The Dark Earth, by Gordon Doherty

Review: The Dark Earth, by Gordon Doherty

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The Dark Earth (Book Six of Empires of Bronze) by Gordon Doherty

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

The Dark Earth is the sixth and final volume of Empires of Bronze, Gordon Doherty’s historical fiction series set in the ancient Hittite Empire. In the last volume (The Shadow of Troy) Mr. Doherty gave us his version of the Trojan War. This tale goes one better (or one worse): it’s set amid the Bronze Age Collapse itself.

The Dark Earth breaks with earlier books in the series, most obviously in that the central character is no longer King Hattu, but his son and heir, King Tudha of the Hittites. Climate change, civil war, and foreign invasion have whittled the once-mighty Hittite Empire down to a pale shadow of its former self. When Tudha rose to the throne, it was foretold that he would revive the kingdom’s fortunes. Unfortunately, darker prophecies dating back to his father’s youth are also in play. Tudha has very little left with which to face the challenges of his time: murder, betrayal, and a massive invasion of the so-called “Sea Peoples.”

If you know the history of this period, the end of the story will be a foregone conclusion: Tudha’s struggle will be in vain, and the Hittite Empire will fall at last. The Dark Earth works best as a story about fighting against impossible odds, and yet refusing to give up hope for the future.

Mr. Doherty continues to work well with the historical sources. This story uses a number of odd details from the final years of the Hittite kingdom – most notably, the one time that we hear of the inland-centered empire having a navy and campaigning at sea. Some elements of the story did strike me as being a little implausible, most notably the sheer size of the Sea People armies. I suspect Mr. Doherty is engaging in some exaggeration there, in order to tell a rousing blood-and-guts adventure story of almost mythical proportions.

The story has a genuinely surprising conclusion, one which escapes from the strict historical narrative to give the reader a sense of hope at the end of the journey.

Mechanically, the novel works reasonably well, although the formula of the earlier books begins to feel a little worn here. Unfortunately, Mr. Doherty got a bit careless with copy-editing in this final volume of the series. Flaws in the prose style weren’t quite enough to pull me out of the story, but after the good editorial work of the last few volumes they were a little disappointing. Workmanlike, but not remarkably so.

Readers should be aware, as always, that the story is set in a brutal and violent time. Descriptions of human cruelty and violence are common and very explicit.

I enjoyed The Dark Earth, and although there don’t appear to be any more stories planned for this series, I’m certainly likely to go looking for more of Mr. Doherty’s work. Recommended as a dark, but in the end hopeful, recounting of one of history’s worst disasters.

Status Report (24 July 2022)

Status Report (24 July 2022)

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The month of July is moving along more or less as I expected at the beginning. I’m making slow, incremental progress on both the first complete draft of Architect of Worlds, and on a first working draft of the novel Twice-Crowned. It’s actually been a productive month – I’ve managed to carry out at least a little forward motion almost every day.

By the nature of both projects, though, I have not really gotten to a point where there’s a big chunk of new material for me to release to my patrons and readers. Next month, more likely, but July is looking like a month without any big milestones.

This is to inform everyone, then, that there will be no charged release for my patrons in the month of July. I’m going to concentrate on putting the first coat of polish on Architect of Worlds and getting within striking distance of finishing Act I of Twice-Crowned. I should also have the month’s book review ready within the next week or so. Then we’ll see how the month of August shapes up.

The Rings of Power: A Small Side Bet

The Rings of Power: A Small Side Bet

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I’ve been watching the roll-out of the upcoming series The Rings of Power with a great deal of interest. I’m generally skeptical about film adaptations of beloved literary properties – I often enjoy them, but I also often wish the developers would pay closer attention to the source material. In this case, it’s clear that Amazon is preparing to exercise a lot of freedom within the lore of Tolkien’s world.

On the other hand, as a writer myself, I’m always interested to see how cross-platform adaptation is done; especially how it can be done to work well as a cinematic presentation without doing too much violence to the source material. Whether Amazon is going to be able to manage the trick remains to be seen, but for now I want to jot down a few notes as to how I might have gone about it. Consider this a “side bet” of sorts – over the next few years, I’ll be patting myself on the back (or cursing under my breath) as I see how well or how poorly I’ve managed to anticipate how the story unfolds.

Tolkien geekery follows! If you’re not closely familiar with the source material, especially the appendices to The Lord of the Rings and the second half of The Silmarillion, feel free to skip the rest of this one.

What’s clear is that we’re going to see the story of the Second Age of Middle-Earth. This is the era after the defeat of Morgoth in the First Age; it’s the time during which Sauron – the great behind-the-scenes villain of The Lord of the Rings – first works his evil will on a massive scale in the world.

What’s also clear is that Amazon’s writers are compressing the timeline of the Second Age to a considerable degree. The major conflicts of the Second Age in Tolkien’s source material take place over several thousand years. It appears that many, if not all, of the same plot beats will be taking place in the Amazon series within a single human lifetime. Human characters such as Tar-Miriel, Elendil, and Isildur are going to be appearing in the series from the very beginning, whereas in the source material they don’t appear until the very end of the Second Age.

We know that the series is planned to have exactly five seasons. As it happens, I think the epic story of the Second Age breaks down neatly into five plot beats – so this is how I think they’re going to lay it out.

  • Season 1 (The Long Peace) – everything up to about 1500 SA in the source material. Middle-earth is at peace, so we’re going to get plenty of character and setting development. We’ll also see plenty of foreshadowing that the kingdoms aren’t as stable as they look, and some kind of dark power is on the rise behind the scenes. Look for a character who appears to be an Elf and goes around tempting people to reach for their secret ambitions, probably going by the name of “Annatar.”
  • Season 2 (The Rings of Power) – roughly 1500-1690 SA in the source material. Celebrimbor rebels against Gil-Galad, sets up his own kingdom in Eregion, welcomes Annatar, and creates the Rings of Power. Close to the end of the season we see Annatar revealed as Sauron, who creates the One Ring in Mordor. Celebrimbor and his allies reject Sauron and take off their rings, knowing that Sauron will respond with violence.
  • Season 3 (The War against Sauron) – roughly 1690-1701 SA in the source material, but also conflated with events of the late 3200s SA. Sauron attacks the Free Peoples and nearly destroys Middle-earth. Eregion is laid waste, the Dwarves are put under siege, and Elrond goes off to build Rivendell for the first time. Sauron seems to be on the point of victory when Númenor comes to the rescue, defeating Sauron’s armies and capturing Sauron himself. Sauron is taken to Númenor as a hostage in the final episode of the season.
  • Season 4 (The Downfall of Númenor) – roughly the late 3200s and early 3300s SA in the source material. Númenor, already suffering from social unrest and dissension, is corrupted under the influence of Sauron. If Pharazôn hasn’t already seized power before, he does it now and soon becomes Sauron’s puppet. He leads the Númenoreans against the Valar, triggering the Downfall. The sinking of Númenor takes place in the next-to-last episode of the season and is both cinematically gorgeous and horrible to watch. In the last episode we see Elendil and his sons leading a few survivors into exile in Middle-earth.
  • Season 5 (The Last Alliance) – the later 3300s SA in the source material. The survivors of the last two seasons try to pick up the pieces in Middle-earth, but they soon realize that Sauron is back and preparing to march once more. They form a Last Alliance and fight a final war against Sauron. We’ll get to see the siege of the Dark Tower, and the last battle on the slopes of Mount Doom where Isildur captures the One Ring. The last episode will probably show us Isildur’s fate and the disappearance of the Ring, setting up the story of the Third Age.

I’ve probably missed a bunch of details. We’ve seen at least one Balrog in the trailers – are they going to be pushing the fall of Moria all the way back into the Second Age? There appear to be proto-Hobbits wandering around, and I have no idea how those are going to fit in. We’ll just have to see.

Still, I’m betting I’ve got the broad outlines down. I think there’s the possibility that the show will be able to give us all the great dramatic beats of the Second Age, even if they compress the timeline immensely for the benefit of a TV audience. It makes sense – difficult to build dramatic tension or handle the logistics of film production if you try to stick to a timeline of thousands of years, and you therefore have to keep replacing most of your cast. We’ll see if they manage to pull it off!

Status Report (17 July 2022)

Status Report (17 July 2022)

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Aside from working on Architect of Worlds as time permits, I’ve also been working on a first draft of the novel Twice-Crowned. That’s making enough good forward progress that I’m increasingly comfortable calling it my primary literary project at the moment. If you check out the sidebar on this site, you’ll notice that I’ve updated my “In Progress” widget to indicate where I am on word count for that. I’ll keep that up to date as I work, so you can get a sense for how well that project is going over the next few months.

Status Report (10 July 2022)

Status Report (10 July 2022)

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Just a quick note today. If you follow my Facebook feed, you’ll know this has been a rough week – I haven’t gotten much creative work done since before the holiday. Only this weekend have I managed to get moving again, mostly working on the first few chapters of Twice-Crowned.

I did take a few hours today to paste together the first integrated draft of Architect of Worlds. It’s all in one big document now, for the first time since I started work on the project back in 2016. In Microsoft Word, it comes to about 175 pages and a little under 74000 words.

There’s still a ton of editorial work that needs to be done before I can share the complete draft with anyone (see my planning message for July for a summary). I doubt that’s going to happen this month. Still, this is a big milestone.

Planning for July 2022

Planning for July 2022

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June went fairly well, it seems. I was able to get a new section of Architect of Worlds written and pushed out to my patrons, I also shared a timeline for my Danassos setting as a free release, and I got another book review written.

The usual list of projects is getting a big overhaul this month. The thing is, that section of Architect that I wrote last month is the last section that wasn’t complete in draft. I’m now in a position to meld all of the pieces of Architect together into a combined draft for the complete book. The result won’t be finished by a long shot, of course. I have a lot of work to do before I can start thinking about layout and getting ready for final publication:

  • Build the first complete draft for the book out of the separate parts that exist now.
  • Polish up the world-design sequence.
  • Polish up the “working with real-world astronomical data” section.
  • Complete a few minor sections, especially in the “special cases” chapter.
  • Add “modeling notes” sections, with references to scientific papers and textbooks, to any portion of the design chapters that doesn’t have them yet.
  • Clean up the extended examples.
  • Clean up the math throughout the book (rationalize variable names, be consistent about how computations are described, and so on).
  • Develop images (diagrams, flowcharts, public-domain astrophotography, alien-worlds images) to fill out the content.

I suspect this is going to take at least a couple of months, and it’s going to be one of those cases where the draft looks terrible for a while before I get it under control. I don’t think this is going to generate any releases for my patrons until I’ve waded through most of the above steps. I’m therefore announcing now that there will almost certainly be no new Architect of Worlds releases to my patrons for at least the month of July, possibly the month of August as well.

Once I get close to having a really clean and complete draft for the entire book, ready to start on layout, I may share that with my patrons as a final charged release before publication. There will almost certainly be enough new material to justify that. We’ll see how things go. I’ve still got my fingers crossed that I might be able to release the first edition of Architect of Worlds by the end of this calendar year!

Meanwhile, regarding my literary projects, I’m switching over to the Danassos project as my top priority for the time being. I’m going to start working, as time permits, on a draft of the novel Twice-Crowned. If I can put down, say, at least 25 kilowords of polished narrative at the beginning of the novel, I may share that with my patrons as a charged release.

My intention is to divide my time between Architect and Twice-Crowned more or less evenly this month, and we’ll see what results I get. Watch this space for updates, as always.

Here’s the planning list, with two items in the “top priority” category:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Work on preparing a complete draft of the book for eventual layout and publication.
    • Danassos: Begin work on a new draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
  • Second Priority:
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
    • Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
    • Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story, set during her first year at the Interstellar Service academy.
  • Back Burner:
    • Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
    • Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
    • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
    • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
    • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).

Aside from these items, I suspect I may end up doing a little cartography, certainly for Danassos, possibly for Human Destiny as well. I may have a couple of free sketch maps to share with readers and patrons this month.

Review: The Lazarus Taxa, by Lindsey Kinsella

Review: The Lazarus Taxa, by Lindsey Kinsella

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The Lazarus Taxa by Lindsey Kinsella

Overall Rating: *** (3 stars)

The Lazarus Taxa is a readable and entertaining, but rather predictable, story of time travel and dinosaurs.

Sidney “Sid” Starley is a daredevil, constantly in search of experiences that no one else has ever had, the riskier and more dangerous the better. When we first meet him, he is climbing a Himalayan peak that no human has ever conquered before – partly because the local government has forbidden mountaineers from making the attempt.

After his expedition fails, Sid is bailed out of prison and recruited by the British billionaire Richard Mansa for a new venture. Mansa’s firm has developed the world’s first working time machine. He now plans to prove the new technology with an expedition back to the late Cretaceous era, the time of the dinosaurs.

Sid jumps at the opportunity, and soon finds himself with three teammates in central North America, sixty-eight million years into the past. After six months on station, the time machine will have recharged sufficiently to bring them home to the present. The plan is for them to survey the countryside, examining the flora and fauna, gathering photos and scientific data. They are well-armed, they have plenty of supplies, and their transit vehicle is something of a fortress. They have every confidence that they will be able to survive their sojourn in the Cretaceous. At least at first.

Unfortunately, it soon becomes obvious that Mansa has misled Sid and his colleagues in several respects. They find evidence that their expedition was not the first to venture into the distant past . . . and there may be other humans already there, with an agenda of their own. It soon becomes a race to see if they can solve a few mysteries and still survive the experience.

As far as basic mechanics are concerned, The Lazarus Taxa is at least workmanlike. The copy-editing was a little rough in spots. Characters and plot are unfortunately rather flat and predictable – the story reads like a treatment for a film script, with all the anticipated beats and plot twists. I saw the solution to the mystery well in advance, with the remaining suspense coming almost entirely from wondering which of the characters was going to reach the denouement.

It’s clear that Mr. Kinsella is well-versed in paleontology, and it’s in the passages where he describes a long-ago and alien Earth that the book relaxes enough to shine. He makes a move which I found rather odd at first: every few chapters he breaks up the dramatic action with a short essay in authorial voice, giving the reader some paleontological detail. The technique grew on me after a few iterations. Many inexperienced genre novelists make the mistake of larding their narrative with exposition-dumping and telling-not-showing passages, pulling the reader out of the story every time they succumb to the temptation to show off all their research. By loading most of that into these well-marked interstitial chapters, Mr. Kinsella avoids crippling his dramatic narrative with it. The result reads a little like a “docu-drama,” and it works well once the reader is used to it.

Readers should be aware that the story ends up rather violent and gory in places. It’s a story about dinosaurs meeting humans – of course there will be some scary beats in the plot!

I found The Lazarus Taxa readable and entertaining. Recommended if you’re interested in stories about dinosaurs, or time travel into Earth’s distant past, with a dash of corporate intrigue.

Short Story Now Available: “Encounter in the Dawn”

Short Story Now Available: “Encounter in the Dawn”

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I’ve posted a new short story, “Encounter in the Dawn,” to the Free Articles and Fiction section of this blog.

“Encounter in the Dawn” is an excerpt from a piece of fan-fiction I wrote back in the 2012-2014 timeframe. It’s completely separate from the fan-fiction’s source material, however, and works as an original stand-alone vignette. Consider it an experiment in writing well-researched historical fiction, without any speculative elements at all.

Reviving Danassos

Reviving Danassos

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I’ve been blocked on my major literary project in the fantasy genre for over a year now. I did manage to write one piece of short fiction in the Krava’s Legend series, but the second novel hasn’t budged in a long time. Not sure what’s up with that – I have some notion of where the story needs to go – but I’m just not feeling the story the way I did with The Curse of Steel.

Meanwhile, a few days ago I went back and re-read what I had written of my novel Twice-Crowned, which I last worked on in about 2019. It’s about 22,000 words so far, and I find it’s actually pretty good for a rough draft.

Twice-Crowned is a bit of alternate-historical fantasy. It’s set in a world that looks a lot like Classical Greece, but with a few supernatural elements folded in, and a big point-of-divergence that is bending the course of history away from what we’re familiar with.

The notion is that there was a survival of the civilization we call “Minoan,” which got away from the sack of Crete by proto-Greeks and set up an enclave in the west. Where our history put the city-state of Syracuse, this alternate timeline has a city called Danassos. It’s a lot like other Hellenic poleis, with the very prominent exception that women are full citizens, holding property and exercising their own political rights and privileges. In one sense it’s a world-building exercise – how can I come up with a culture that’s plausibly Classical Greek and yet has the very non-Hellenic feature of (relative) gender equality? What consequences would that be likely to have as the history of the period unfolds?

I’ve been moved to spend a few days working on back story and research, with the result that I’ve got a fairly substantial timeline document and the start of some notes on how this imaginary society works. I think by this evening I’m going to package some of that up as a free release for my patrons, just to drum up a little interest in the project. Once that’s done, I need to get back to work on Architect of Worlds over the rest of June.

In the long run, I think Twice-Crowned may become my main literary project for the next few months, taking the place of The Sunlit Lands. Maybe if I can get that novel finished, I can come back to Krava’s Legend with fresh eyes.

Planning for June 2022

Planning for June 2022

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Well, May didn’t go quite as planned. I originally planned to write the last open section of Architect of Worlds, but early in the month my muse decided to go and live on Mars instead. I ended up writing about 10000 words describing Mars in the Human Destiny setting, and giving myself a ton of new ideas for the universe and for fiction set therein. So my big project for May turned out to be a new partial interim draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate instead.

Okay, Mars is (more or less) out of my system now, so it’s back to Architect of Worlds for the month of June. Here’s the formal planning list for this month:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Write a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings. Also carry out further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section. These two tasks are expected to give rise to a charged release, assuming they amount to at least 10,000 words of new material.
  • Second Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section. May lead to a free v0.2 update, or may simply be integrated into v1.0 of the complete book.
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
    • Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
    • Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story.
    • Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
  • Back Burner:
    • Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
    • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
    • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
    • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).

About the only change from the initial plan for last month is that I’m bumping a new Aminata Ndoye story up in priority a little. My main focus is going to be on Architect this month, but I may spend some time working on a story about Aminata’s first year at the Interstellar Service academy in France. Basically an immediate sequel to “Pilgrimage.”

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to tinker in my extensive spare time with QGIS and the NASA topographical data for Mars. I may work on one or two maps of 23rd century Mars for the Atlas, and if that works out it may yield a couple of free rewards for my patrons. We’ll see how the month goes.