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AEON'S EDGE:
The Flight of The Zoroaster
This journal may contain adult concepts.
Created on 2008-06-15 17:53:45 (#15872328), last updated 2009-05-25
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Basic Info| Name: | L. A.Williamson |
|---|---|
| Location: | United Kingdom |
BioHerein contained is the work in progress of a novel, named Aeon's Edge: The Flight of The Zoroaster.
A hard SF Space Opera Noir, set in the far flung future of an alternate-history. The story of an ancient and galaxy-spanning human civilisation's first contact with something approaching the alien, and one crew's flight against the odds.
Excerpt-1 [taken from Prologue: Tempus Fugit. Tempus Invictus.]
The beginning of a story is always its most important part, for in its words are set the pattern of all that follows. So it is written.
They came to life long, long after we had died.
Crawling their way out of the slime just as we had done, and as many others doubtless would have, had they not been denied the chance.
Spreding far and wide, they diverged. Encircling their little globe, seperating, becoming different from one another.
It would be a long time before they remembered their shared origins, and when it came it would be a memory only reborn through pain, fear, loss, and perhaps hope.
In time they built up great cities around themselves, to preserve what they were, and keep the night at bay. Yet even as they worked to keep the unknown outside, the wisest among them sought out and contemplated that very thing, cause of fear, cause of wonder, the unknown. As men of science studied the material and its workings, mystics studied the subtle planes, and learned to use their properties.
Great kings rose to keep their people safe, and marched out from behind their walls into the wilderness, and the wilderness shrank back before them.
Much to my sadness these Great Kings, nigh on gods to those around them, soon learned the art of great warfare, and peace never shall come again, without a price.
As their unrelenting progress quickened, Kingdoms became Empires, and those studious men of both kinds soon began to see their world, the universe, as it truly was, terrible, and wonderfull in its complexity.
As they thought, wandered, marched, sailed, talked and traded, their nations grew so vast that in places they squoze against each other, jostling for position, some dying so that others might live.
At length, a man came forth from the great land of Rome, and despite being driven by the same evils that drove them all and once drove us, he had a dream, and both the power and luck to fulfill it. Much did he hope but little did he know, that his legacy may well last forever.
At his instagation the strangest and most inevitable of things sprang up around their so called middle-sea, a system of co-operation, an alliance, between, and to the mutual benefit of, himself and those rulers that bordered his own Empire. Though it served its purpose during his lifetime and beyond his untimely death, enabling civilasation to triumph over the barbarism that surrounded it on all sides, it would never have lasted, in fact one might have said, it never had a chance. It was a tool to those that used it, nothing more.
Then the universe intervined, and changed everything.
They called it the Hammer of The Gods, and so it truly was, hurtling in from the deepest recesses of space and pounding into their small world as a streak of fire that darkened the sky and shook the earth.
Among the wailing and moaning, harvests failed, cities revolted, thrones trembled and men cowered beneath the anger of the heavens and near permanent night, crying out that the end was near. As the world threatend to plunge back down again into unknowing oblivion, that tool, became a necesity.
Excerpt-2 [taken from Chapter One: The Drought of Reason]
He had lost his arm in the tumultuous events surrounding his disgrace, and the subsequent loss of his position. Erra-Sin had once been a prefect to the Ensi, or king, of Ur. Responsible for monitoring the affairs of Zall-ag su, second largest city on his home world. But his family ,who obtained him the position, had refused to pay for an organic replacement. So that he might never forget the shame his fall had brought down upon them.
He had, however, commissioned some modifications that made it worth his while.
It was after that he had signed up for the position of first officer, on the freelance explorer ship Zoroaster.
To save himself from bankruptcy, and to escape from it all.
That was two years ago now, to the very day in fact, though few aboard the ship knew of Erra's colourful, and chequered past.
They were now three months out of the ports of Second Ctesiphon. Three months since they had left the Terran Dominion and known space far behind them.
Contracted by the Persian government to chart some of the unvisited systems of the Outer Rim. The very edge of the galaxy.
In the distance stretched the civilised worlds of humanity, the Via Lactea's only sentient children. A band of space three thousand light years wide, reaching from the Core of the galaxy to near its very ends, almost forty five thousand light years long.
Millennia ago at the dawn of the Renaissance, the newly convened Grand Senate, wrapped in all it's hubris, had decreed that Terran race would go forth and colonise their galaxy from the Core to the Rim.
In time, this had of course led to the Dominion's length hugely outstripping it's width. In order that the ancient decree might someday be fulfilled.
Back then a new wave of explorer ships had started to leave the old worlds almost immediately, arrogantly racing toward unknown stars in the names of their peoples and personal glory. And though the pace of their departures had slowed considerably over the centuries, it had never stopped. And thus the crew of the Zoroaster followed in ancient footsteps indeed. Or perhaps yet older, going back to the first brave explorers that had set sail for the horizon on the clear oceans of sacred Terra. Wide eyed in wonderment, and uncounted years ago.
Erra turned to leave the observation dome, it was time he took over from the captain on the bridge.
The heavy bulkhead door slid open with a hiss revealing the dimly lit hexagonal corridor that led down into the bowels of the Zoroaster.
As he walked, footfalls resounding, he passed Heliose, their astrometry and navigation officer. She looked down her aquiline nose and smiled gently at him as she passed, the folds of her white dress fluttering out behind her as she walked. To Erra Heliose was possessed of an icy beauty, a quality that he found at once attractive and repellent.
A hard SF Space Opera Noir, set in the far flung future of an alternate-history. The story of an ancient and galaxy-spanning human civilisation's first contact with something approaching the alien, and one crew's flight against the odds.
Excerpt-1 [taken from Prologue: Tempus Fugit. Tempus Invictus.]
The beginning of a story is always its most important part, for in its words are set the pattern of all that follows. So it is written.
They came to life long, long after we had died.
Crawling their way out of the slime just as we had done, and as many others doubtless would have, had they not been denied the chance.
Spreding far and wide, they diverged. Encircling their little globe, seperating, becoming different from one another.
It would be a long time before they remembered their shared origins, and when it came it would be a memory only reborn through pain, fear, loss, and perhaps hope.
In time they built up great cities around themselves, to preserve what they were, and keep the night at bay. Yet even as they worked to keep the unknown outside, the wisest among them sought out and contemplated that very thing, cause of fear, cause of wonder, the unknown. As men of science studied the material and its workings, mystics studied the subtle planes, and learned to use their properties.
Great kings rose to keep their people safe, and marched out from behind their walls into the wilderness, and the wilderness shrank back before them.
Much to my sadness these Great Kings, nigh on gods to those around them, soon learned the art of great warfare, and peace never shall come again, without a price.
As their unrelenting progress quickened, Kingdoms became Empires, and those studious men of both kinds soon began to see their world, the universe, as it truly was, terrible, and wonderfull in its complexity.
As they thought, wandered, marched, sailed, talked and traded, their nations grew so vast that in places they squoze against each other, jostling for position, some dying so that others might live.
At length, a man came forth from the great land of Rome, and despite being driven by the same evils that drove them all and once drove us, he had a dream, and both the power and luck to fulfill it. Much did he hope but little did he know, that his legacy may well last forever.
At his instagation the strangest and most inevitable of things sprang up around their so called middle-sea, a system of co-operation, an alliance, between, and to the mutual benefit of, himself and those rulers that bordered his own Empire. Though it served its purpose during his lifetime and beyond his untimely death, enabling civilasation to triumph over the barbarism that surrounded it on all sides, it would never have lasted, in fact one might have said, it never had a chance. It was a tool to those that used it, nothing more.
Then the universe intervined, and changed everything.
They called it the Hammer of The Gods, and so it truly was, hurtling in from the deepest recesses of space and pounding into their small world as a streak of fire that darkened the sky and shook the earth.
Among the wailing and moaning, harvests failed, cities revolted, thrones trembled and men cowered beneath the anger of the heavens and near permanent night, crying out that the end was near. As the world threatend to plunge back down again into unknowing oblivion, that tool, became a necesity.
Excerpt-2 [taken from Chapter One: The Drought of Reason]
He had lost his arm in the tumultuous events surrounding his disgrace, and the subsequent loss of his position. Erra-Sin had once been a prefect to the Ensi, or king, of Ur. Responsible for monitoring the affairs of Zall-ag su, second largest city on his home world. But his family ,who obtained him the position, had refused to pay for an organic replacement. So that he might never forget the shame his fall had brought down upon them.
He had, however, commissioned some modifications that made it worth his while.
It was after that he had signed up for the position of first officer, on the freelance explorer ship Zoroaster.
To save himself from bankruptcy, and to escape from it all.
That was two years ago now, to the very day in fact, though few aboard the ship knew of Erra's colourful, and chequered past.
They were now three months out of the ports of Second Ctesiphon. Three months since they had left the Terran Dominion and known space far behind them.
Contracted by the Persian government to chart some of the unvisited systems of the Outer Rim. The very edge of the galaxy.
In the distance stretched the civilised worlds of humanity, the Via Lactea's only sentient children. A band of space three thousand light years wide, reaching from the Core of the galaxy to near its very ends, almost forty five thousand light years long.
Millennia ago at the dawn of the Renaissance, the newly convened Grand Senate, wrapped in all it's hubris, had decreed that Terran race would go forth and colonise their galaxy from the Core to the Rim.
In time, this had of course led to the Dominion's length hugely outstripping it's width. In order that the ancient decree might someday be fulfilled.
Back then a new wave of explorer ships had started to leave the old worlds almost immediately, arrogantly racing toward unknown stars in the names of their peoples and personal glory. And though the pace of their departures had slowed considerably over the centuries, it had never stopped. And thus the crew of the Zoroaster followed in ancient footsteps indeed. Or perhaps yet older, going back to the first brave explorers that had set sail for the horizon on the clear oceans of sacred Terra. Wide eyed in wonderment, and uncounted years ago.
Erra turned to leave the observation dome, it was time he took over from the captain on the bridge.
The heavy bulkhead door slid open with a hiss revealing the dimly lit hexagonal corridor that led down into the bowels of the Zoroaster.
As he walked, footfalls resounding, he passed Heliose, their astrometry and navigation officer. She looked down her aquiline nose and smiled gently at him as she passed, the folds of her white dress fluttering out behind her as she walked. To Erra Heliose was possessed of an icy beauty, a quality that he found at once attractive and repellent.
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a new aeon, alastair reynolds, alcubierre drive, alternate history, ambient industrial, ancient history, anthropology, anti-matter, arthur c. clarke, cryogenics, cybergothic, cyberpunk, cyborgization, dan simmons, dark ambient, david wyngrove, deep space, destiny, dirty space, energy weapons, exploration, faster than light, genetic engineering, genocide, hard sf, humanity, ken macleod, machines, polytheism, reading, redemption, reluctant heroism, robert a. heinlein, robert reed, robert silverberg, science fiction, soft polytheism, soft sf, space opera, space opera noir, space travel, syncretism, terra, the distant future, the galactic rim, the zoroaster, watching empires burn, writing
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