For the sake of pairing some of these adjuncts to the novel alongside their respective chapters, I am taking liberties with the Alphabet for the next couple of days and so we come to F and not D…

My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge is to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), will consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. Some 12 chapters are already written so I have a bit of a head start…
Please comment with any opinions good or bad – you have no idea how much I need feedback at this stage…

I have no time for people who say that they don’t read fiction – a slight sneer implicit in their assertion, as if they regard fiction as pointless and only non-fiction as worthwhile because it is true – factual. Such a limited understanding get’s my goat. The philosophy of Science as posited by Karl Popper tells us that there is no such thing as truth, absolute and unassailable for there is always the possibility that in some place in the universe, that “truth” will not hold and the best we can hope for, is to eliminate what is untrue and thus move towards the truth – whilst never actually arriving…

Fiction makes no such claim to truth and it’s raison d’etre is entirely other. Human beings are arguably defined by their story-telling – even if it is a by-product of our big brains – an unintended consequence of other evolved characteristics – if you can remember experiences and describe them to others – who is to say that what you say is true and not a complete fiction…

Science Fiction, or Speculative Fiction, is given licence to spin fantasies that are literally out of this world and they are, in consequence, allowed to be longer than other novels to allow for all the descriptions of new worlds. An ordinary novel (and of course there can be exceptions) is usually expected to be around 90,000 words whilst a science fiction novel may be allowed 120,000 or even more.

But the real reason why fiction, of any kind, is important, is that it takes us to new places and especially – it takes us inside another person’s head and shows us the world through their eyes, gives us a hint as to what it might be like to experience the world as that person. That said, the experience is filtered, mediated, shaped by the author of the fiction and who is to say that a man can or cannot imagine what it is like to be a woman or vice versa, what it’s like to have mental health issues, be rich or poor, what the other side of the world is like let alone what other worlds might be like.

So we embark on reading fiction trusting ourselves to our author/guide not to play tricks on us (unless they be enjoyable ones), to be coherent, to entertain us and most of all, to make us want to carry on to the end in order to find out what happens…

No time for fiction – merde!

Today’s chapter deals with a man continuing to deal with his world having changed utterly as well as telling us more about Hawaii 2 and Jack and Anna’s home there. What do you think, is it plausible? Please comment whether on this chapter or the whole story so far…

PinkStock Photos, D. Sharon Pruitt, CC BY 2.0   

<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 4
New Directions.

Jack and Douglas were back home together with Jack’s mother and a sister of Anna’s. It had been a painful return for Jack with all the reminders of his life with Anna and in particular, the return he had been anticipating following her trip to Hawaii 1. His mother had been staying at the house whilst Jack was in hospital as her own home was halfway across the continent in the cooler north and she had long ago taken down the more poignant reminders like the “Welcome Home” banner Jack had hung across the living room.
Jack and Anna had spent much of the first two years of married life building their home as many chose to do on Hawaii 2 and had built for a future in which they anticipated raising a family so there were several spare bedrooms as well as the little nursery space just off the main bedroom.
In a parallel to Earth there were coasts that were home to vast numbers of seabirds who fed on fish that boomed in the mineral rich currants that flowed up from the polar regions. The guano from these birds was mined early on in the colony’s development as it had been on Earth and used as a fertilizer, Brought in through the port of New Orleans it was combined with water from the mighty river to “green” the desert along the northern fringes of the New Sahara with forest species from native rainforest.
This project which had begun in the early years of the economy settlement had begun with a higher gantry of sprinklers to water the nascent forest but as time went on the forest began to change the very climate of the planet and rain was generated throughout the latitude and water abstraction from the great river reduced. Now the process of forest spreading into the New Sahara fringes was proceeding of its own accord.
Where Hawaii 2 differed significantly from Earth was that all the continental land mass was one in one piece bar a scattering of islands where volcanic mounts reached up through the vastness of the deep ocean that covered forty-five percent of the planet. Earth’s ancient Gondwanaland had been similar but this piece of data was one that had been lost to mankind, or at least, if it still existed in the fragmented data rescues from the dying Earth, it had not yet been found again. The mighty river which drained more than half the area of the Continent was not named the Mississippi after the river on which the original New Orleans was located but rather the Euphrates whose status as the possible location of the mythical Garden of Eden was a story that hadsurvived in multiple locations within the data matrix. This was because of the myth being the first story in the Bible the major document of one of the Earth’s great trees of religion the Judeo/ Christian/ Islamic tree and these religions had been carried out to the home worlds where they had evolved only slightly over the thousand years that man had been making his home among the stars.
So it was fitting that the rainforest project that surrounded New Orleans and had been so successful as a venture in climate change should be entitled the Garden of Eden. Interspersed with blocks of forest were plantations growing a mixture of tropical fruits both native to Hawaii 2 and from Earth but also crops such as rubber and palm oil which were used in various manufacturing processes. Many plastics on the home-world were made from renewable, carbon-neutral crops rather than the fossil fuels of Earth’s murky past that had led to The Destruction. It was not that fossil fuels did not exist on Hawaii 2 but their use was much more circumspect given the lesson of history and the new technologies that had been developed to avoid the use of hydro-carbons. If the original intent in colonising Hawaii 2 had been as a social experiment, it had turned out to be as much a model exercise in environmental practice too, geo-forming the world to reclaim the desert, making sure that the imported plants fit well defined niches and did not become weeds – genetically engineering them if necessary, to make sure they did not flourish like weeds. There were no high functioning sentient beings to take into account and most of the plants and animals were analogous to Earth species and their eco-systems, so it was decided that any amount of change to the planet was permissible as long as the choices made were sustainable…
By the time Jack and Anna built the tree-house, some 80 clicks from New Orleans, the trees were some 80 years old and it was amongst the buttress roots of the tree that supported the house that Anna’s body was laid to rest. She and Jack had talked about this idea for their final resting places but with the blindness of youth never imagining that the occasion might come so soon for either of them. Everybody on Hawaii 2 was buried in the soil except for members of a few religious sects who adhered to the ritual of cremation, or those who donated their bodies for Medical Research. The idea of nature recycling the mortal remains was mostly accepted as the best way and in Anna and Jack’s case, the idea that they would literally be incorporated into the fabric of the tree that they hoped the Descendants would continue to live in lent a special poignancy to the idea of supporting your family. If only it hadn’t come so soon thought Jack as they ascended to the house again following the burial ceremony. The house was thronged with friends and relations for the day, though most of them left before nightfall there being limited accommodation for such numbers nevertheless the coming together of so many people to offer their support and their memories of Anna was enormously sustaining for Jack, In particular he found that he was connected more strongly again to his life with Anna and before that even, a life from which he had felt curiously detached by the hiatus of his six month absence from the world lost in a coma. Being more connected to his memories of Anna allowed him to integrate young Douglas into the shared plans he and Anna had made. He had done more work on the house partly because he was physically more able but also because it interested him more than it did Anna whilst she was desirous to return to her studies of the history of technology. Towards the end of the house construction when it was mostly a snagging work, Anna had done just that and rapidly won the award of the research trip back to Hawaii 1 to search for data on the RAM jets that she believed she could make so much difference to Hawaii 2. The plan was that she would try and wrap up this research in the one trip and that on her return, house complete, she and Jack would start a family. Some of that Jack reflected ruefully, had come to pass and some most definitely had not. Another part of the plan had been that he would look for a job once Anna was pregnant, although there was no compulsion to work at all on Hawaii 2, everybody got given an allowance sufficient to keep body and soul together – most people did work, except for brief periods between jobs or when they were young and uncertain which direction to take. Jack had really enjoyed building the house and had been starting to think of a career in construction, engineering, or design, however, his science and maths skills probably precluded the last two and he would have ended up in construction. Now he had to think about Douglas. He couldn’t count on his mother or Anna’s sister continuing to live with him or offer the level of support that they had been whilst his strength was mending although neither of them had hinted at any time limits to their help. For a few weeks then, things drifted on as a routine evolved around Douglas and Jack, the two women sensitively deferring to the needs of father and son bonding as much as possible, nevertheless, they were as doting as any female relatives could be to both males and were clearly in no hurry to leave. And so it might have gone on indefinitely, or so it felt to Jack if it had not been for the visit one day, of an investigator.
Like many cities and features on the planet such as New London or the New Sahara, the capital of Hawaii 2, New Orleans celebrated the name of a city on Earth except that in the case of New Orleans, the “new” had been part of the original’s epithet. Picked because like Earth’s New Orleans, the city was built near the Delta of a mighty river and so like its namesake, the capital was an ideal staging post between ocean and river traffic. Without jet engines it was not only passenger planes but air freight that was not possible or at least jet powered, high speed freight. There was a redevelopment of airships which could carry freight wherever there were no navigable rivers that could be used as freight ways, but both airship and barge transport were slow and the settlers of Hawaii 2 adjusted their expectations accordingly. Many felt that the slower pace of transport had a beneficial effect on life generally and that other Home Worlds were frenetic by comparison and the people correspondingly stressed.
The house that Jack had built was in fact a tree-house, built around the still spreading trunk of one of the first trees to be planted in the Garden of Eden. The main living areas were on one contiguous level just below the point at which the branches forked away from the trunk and headed up into the canopy. The bedrooms above were built separately on different branches, but their floors extended and overlapped giving complete cover to the main floor below. An intricate system of gutters carried water into cisterns which the regular daily rains kept more than sufficiently topped up to supply the household’s needs. The climate was sufficiently equatorial to give a constancy of temperature further cushioned against extremes by the enveloping forest canopy so that only rolling screens were necessary to close the gap between ceiling and half-height walls around the edges of each platform. The judicious removal of a couple of branches not only allowed direct sunlight in early and late on in the day but opened some views out over the forest, the supporting tree being located on slightly higher ground within the forest. Most of the rain-forest ecology had been introduced into the newly formed forest, fortunately there were no dangerous predators and, in any case, the house was protected by motion-activated ultra-sonic animal repellents that kept those monkey-like creature that might become a nuisance from getting too close. The sounds of wildlife surrounded the house and gave it a truly enchanting atmosphere.