New

Evelyn York is back, and we've got her. You may remember her for "Paul," which she and Sharon Best (as Shadar was then known) wrote together, years before The Bright Empire came on the scene. On her own, she wrote a couple of stories for us, "Shopping with Katie" and "New Orders" (2005), and then... life happened. But after more than six years, Evelyn has her hand in again with "Fit for a Supergirl," a delightful piece of fashion statement that's true to our favorite fantasy, but from a remarkable woman's viewpoint... Then there's an extra chapter for "Walking Tall," by Jordan Taylor – not newly-written; rather, one I'd forgotten I had, and revised slightly here for continuity with The Popcorn War, in which the heroine Patricia will figure in events that take place before she goes solo in her own story. Another chapter for "When We Dead Awaken" was written not long ago by Matt, and seemed incomplete at the time. But it somehow looks better now with only a light edit; sure, it adds yet another wheel to what was already wheels-within-wheels plot, only... what the hell – the more conspiratorial twists the better, and we can still make further changes if Matt so desires.

Dec. 26 , 2011

Ever hear of Boxing Day? It's the day after Christmas in England and elsewhere, a day off from work and sometimes an occasion for additional gift-giving. For the the Bright Empire, two of these gifts are not exactly new: they are early stories by Jordan Taylor, originally posted at Ubergirls, Inc., which has been defunct since early 2005. "Crazy for You" is one I already had prepped for here; I can't remember why I didn't post it at the time – maybe I was nervous about the reaction to the idea of how unsafe sex could be with a superheroine, at least in a world where there isn't any gold gimmick to safeguard the unlucky man. "Supreme Power" was an attempt to get a round robin going, as indicated in a note by Jordan at the end; I don't think there were any takers then. Perhaps there might be now. Meanwhile, in "Imposters in Crime," Velvet takes on the syndrome of some writers turning famous writers into characters in mystery novels without doing the slightest research on those writers or their times. As usual, her scalpel is sharp.

Dec. 6 , 2011

I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for The Popcorn War. If you do a word search for "Popcorn" on this page, you'll see how far back the history goes on this one, which began in 2003 with an idea Jordan Taylor and I worked out between us. I've added a couple of updates since the section we'd worked on was first posted in 2007, most recently last March. I deliberately made that last a cliffhanger, but I didn't know how I'd be getting Romana out of peril or wrapping up the story. I'd had the idea of the Penis Swamp for months, but only in the last few days did I figure out what would happen there – and now I know how everything will work out, for Romana and Cristina and the rest of the Legião, for the other characters (new and old) and for Novo Recife itself. As usual, I owe a lot to Jecel Assumpção Jr., who has corrected my regional Portuguese and come up with local expressions like "carroça de carga" for pickup truck. But I managed to invent "levandor" for elevator – as with "carroça," abductees from the Brazilian Nordeste some two centuries ago couldn't have brought the modern words with them.

Meanwhile, Velvet weighs in with another of her insightful reviews, this one of a novel called Ed King by David Guterson, who has previously won critical praise for Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), which was made into a movie five years later. But unlike a lot of reviewers, she isn't intimidated by inflated reputations or works that don't live up to deserved reputations. You've seen that before in her take-down of a movie generally regarded as iconic, Meet John Doe; or a book as well received by others as Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning. A lot of reviewers, and even more academic critics, seem to judge works by their intentions rather than their performance. Guterson's latest is a retelling of the Oedipus story, and he seems to think his mythological theme is somewhat profound. But a myth can be as good as a mile, and Velvet shows why in "Two Modernizations."

Nov. 3 , 2011

Can we make book on the Aurora Universe? Or, more precisely, Aurora Universe books? There might be a chance of that, but the overtures are still tentative and neither I nor anyone else can promise anything at this point. But Shadar and I have both dreamed of this sort of thing before, and toyed with story lines worthy of commercial publication. I think he'd done that before I ever knew him.

Countdown to History is a novel-in-progress that I began about a year and a half ago as an introduction to the Aurora Universe for people who don't already know about it. The story takes place during World War II and the Manhattan Project, and there are a lot of real people in it, from Gen. Leslie Groves to President Truman. The idea I have in mind is to mimic the appeal of Dan Brown: embedding fake history in real history.

I was also intrigued by the idea that, when Kira finds out about the atomic bomb program, she is afraid it is something being engineered by the Aureans to bring even greater destruction to the world than the war itself. Of course, the Aureans are aware of the project, and so are the Russians - but that's another thread of the story. The Aureans are working with the Russians at this point, having given up on the Germans.

People who have read "Incident at Madstop" will recognize the Ironcastle name in the scenes with Sharon and H.G. Wells. But the meeting with Wells is actually based on one my father and a colleague had with him, pretending to be Very Important Scientists. My father had figured out about the atomic bomb, and for the same reason Ironcastle gives here. The bits about cucumber sandwiches and Wendell Wilkie are also authentic.

Resurrection, as those who have followed discussions at the Aurora Univers Readers Group will know, is my drastic revision of a story called A Matter of Love that Shadar began years ago, set in an alternative universe to the AU. As I've explained before, although he may well have a bone to pick with me about it, I think it makes a stronger story for XueLee to have a life of her own as a musician that she is being cut off from by her transformation into a superheroine - even if the only alternative is death from cancer. But I've tried to leave an opening at the end of this preview for Shadar to continue the story of Xsara Sylvan in somewhat the same way he intended. He had commissioned artwork for the story as a book, and maybe I can spur him into continuing with that goal in mind.

Finally, a hastily-written bridge chapter for When We Dead Awaken. Matt Reyes had started a new chapter about Caramel Fox... err, Adelheyd... and Brian Stinson. But he's apparently gotten distracted by Real Life, so to fill in I decided to introduce one of the villains - part of a group whose members get off on fantasies of superheroines being abused.

Oct. 17 , 2011

Real life has been getting the better of me lately, and maybe other people too. Still working on new stories, but in the meantime here's a blast from the past that I hope will augur a future classic: "The Challenges of Life," the first two chapters of the original version of Tarot Barnes' Linith and Faré series. L&F was good back then, nearly a decade ago, and it should be even better when Tarot gets it going again. We hope to offer a preview then or, if not (or, if Tarot rather woudn't have this version online) showcase something else.

Sept. 27 , 2011

It's been more than two months since I've updated any of the fiction here. I'm getting almost as slow as Shadar. But today I want to make partial amends with another chapter of "When We Dead Awaken." I hope to finish that and The Popcorn War by the end of the year, and then... we'll see.

Sept. 5 , 2011

Aug. 21 , 2011

And now for a guest rant! You've probably heard about Warner Bros. failed pilot for a new Wonder Woman series. Maybe you've even seen the bootlegged video of that pilot, which has to be about the sorriest excuse for a pilot ever. Did you feel burned? So did Tarot Barnes. But he, better than you or even me, can articulate all the myriad ways in which this venture was a stinker, with "Anything But Wonder-ful."

July 27 , 2011

It was seven years ago today that Velvet and I met for the first time. It was a marvelous turning point in both our lives. While I was away on business last week, she watched an episode of Bones, which is supposed to be a serious and intelligent series abour forensic science. The episode turned out to be anything but. Velvet wrote a rant about that show and another popular series, Glee, that had been recommended by a friend. I'd already been upset about the state of science fiction movies and it occurred to me that as a married couple we could marry our rants. So that's just what we've done in "Where Do They Park Their Brains?"

July 20 , 2011

Adding another chapter to "When We Dead Awaken," that round-robin story I began more than five years ago at Superwomenmania. I was hoping others at SWM might pick it up again, but no luck. So I've come up with some ideas of my own, and I've gone back on others' contributions for hints of other ideas to follow up on in later installments.

July 4 , 2011

Still working on some fiction projects, but I can't let the Fourth of July pass without a piece about the spirit of America, which seems to be misunderstood in a lot of contemporary acrimonious debates – whether in the nation's capital or our backyards. It's called "Truth, Justice and the American Way." It was inspired by some recent incivility in our particular backyard, but it grew in the telling, as you'll see. Meanwhile, on the Links page, I've added links to UltraSexy Heroines and to the weeks of Geek Seven and Alex "Pacifist" Vincent.

June 1 , 2011

Several small updates today. Since I last posted "Before Lara Croft," additional and more revealing pix of model-adventurer. Jane Dolinger have appeared on the Web, so I'm augmenting the file, so-to-speak. Same for my appreciation of composer Angelo Badalamenti; couldn't resist adding a link to a now available piece by him called "Opium Prince" that sounds very much as if it could have been part of the Nutcracker suite. Finally, an Occasional Blog entry about Shadar's latest vision of Velorian femininity.

May 26, 2011

If you haven't already noticed, Velvet has a sharp critical sense and an eye for essential details when she's writing about movies or TV. I think she wrote the best review of Atlas Shrugged, and I loved the way she skewered the reboot of Star Trek and the sacrosanct (to some) Meet John Doe. But she's right on about literary science fiction too, as with Connie Willis' Blackout/All Clear. That's how it is with Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi's reboot of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy (1962). Piper (1904-64) wrote at a time when genre sf was not a royal road to riches, and he had to struggle to make ends meet. He ended up committing suicide when it appeared he could no longer support himself. That was a tragedy, because he wrote some really good sf, including two sequels to Little Fuzzy – the second published only 20 years after his death; a couple of other writers had published authorized sequels in the meantime. But Fuzzy Nation may be the first authorized reboot of an sf novel, as opposed to a TV series or a comic book mythology. Was this trip necessary? Read "A Tale of Two Fuzzys."

April 18 , 2011

Dagny Taggart isn't a superheroine in our sense, but she's certainly one of the greatest heroines of modern fiction. Yet she isn't well served in the low-budget movie version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957). And as Velvet shows in "The Audience Shrugged," the movie is a disappointment on a number of other counts. Rushed into production with a no-name director and a no-name cast, it's being promoted by Tea Partyers as if it were revolutionary. That can be said of the novel, whether you love it or hate it; but the movie is only for purists who can thrill to Rand's message no matter how weakly it is presented. It's got a great futuristic train ride. though...

Meanwhile, on the small screen, it's the silly season at the History Channel – or should it be called the Hysteria Channel? Instead of real history, it's offering reality shows like Ice Road Truckers and Swamp People, but that isn't the worst of it. The "history" is all about Ancient Astronauts, the Mayan calendar that supposedly proves the world is coming to an end next year, and global conspiracies. The alien visitation stuff isn't even good science fiction, and Dan Brown can think up better conspiracies. And here I thought Fox News and the Huffington Post were bad! Well, one consolation in this update; I've replaced some outdated links in my tribute to film and TV composer Angelo Badalamenti.

April 1 , 2011

Just a brief update today, and not about superheroines (I'm working on that, and a volunteer at the Aurora Universe Readers Group named Matthew is working on new costumes for them). Going Mentalist is a love letter to one of my favorite TV series. One of Velvet's too; she thinks Simon Baker is really cool. Or hot. Whatever. Seriously, though, The Mentalist is a terrific show, and last night's episode, the subject of this piece, was awesome.

Mar. 7, 2011

When Jordan Taylor moved on to a new career, it was a happy turning for her even it it was a loss to us. Although she began work nearly eight years ago on "The Popcorn War," she never had time to continue. I posted the first few chapters in 2007, and added a few more a year later. I left off then, hoping she might have time to make a further contribution, but I know now that can't be. So I'm posting some more today. It's been so long that I can't remember precisely where we wanted the story to go, altough we were agreed about the secret headquarters of the Fernandistas and the enmity of Vitor. So I'm building on that, and leading into a cliffhanger – for now. I've also made a few edits to my own "Terms of Enhancement" and a few tweaks to Jordan's other unfinished story, "Walking Tall," so that they mesh better. But I don't feel qualified to finish "Walking Tall;" like the movie of the same name that inspired it, it calls for a kind of action I'm simply not good at. If anyone reading this thinks he or she is up to the task, feel free to get in touch.

Meanwhile, I've gotten around to revisions of The Mission, the series on which I collaborated with Rob Nagle from 2004 through 2007. Aside from updating references to the Empire from Arion to Aurean, I've toned down some of the more implausible elements. But I found that I couldn't change the overall tone of the series without rewriting it entirely – which hardly seems worth the trouble. Try to imagine it as sort of a military service comedy when you read the banter among Protectors with funny names like Mar'go and Can'dice – Rob may have missed a chance to call his Messenger Bil'ko. His own site, Within This Realme, on which he posted his unedited versions of six chapters, has disappeared, and I don't know what's become of him.

Because more people seem to come to the What's New page here than to the Yahoo page of the Aurora Universe Readers Group, I'm taking occasion of this anniversary update to promote the works of writers other than myself. I hope that any of you who missed them when they were first posted will enjoy them, and share your reactions at the AURG site.

Feb. 14, 2011

Another interim update here. An updated version of Ultrasybarite's Finding Sanctuary; his website seems to have gone down. Some broken links between stories fixed, and new ones added. But this being Valentine's Day, I want to appeal to all my readers: tell that special someone in your life that she (or he) is super. And for those who aren't already familiar with it, you should check out the Aurora Universe Readers Group:

We need new blood there, and maybe it can be an entry point for new writers. I was once one of those new writers. It was on July 7, 2002, that Shadar – then known as Sharon Best – made the announcement:

I have the great pleasure of introducing a new writer to the AU, one who's skill and imagination and talent excites me to no end. His name is Brantley Thompson Elkins, a pseudonym in the finest tradition of writers working outside their normal genre, and I'm so glad he's tried his hand at writing an AU story. His first attempt, more novella than story (145 pages) is available only in PDF format -- my choice as it fits such a finished work as this -- and you can either load it directly from the AU, or preferably, download it and load it into Adobe's free EbookReader. I guarantee either way, you'll enjoy Sha'Kira's story, a young woman who is Arion Prime by birth, but with some special genetics and a unique mission. One that she turns from, thus earning the name of Defector.

That's more than I could manage. But I do have an Other Voices section, and I'd like to give others the same kind of start Shadar gave me. It's all about paying it forward – an idea, incidentally, that originated with the great science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.

Feb. 1, 2011

An interim update here. After more than four years, I'm trying to get something going again with that Superwomenmania round-robin story, "When We Dead Awaken." I've also added a picture of Omega Girl – you may have seen it before; it may have been the very shot Spulo had in mind when he wrote Chapter V. Meanwhile, I'm uploading an unexpected revision to Empress of the Dawn: Tarot came up with a more detailed version of the Battle of Nesalonika, which I've tweaked just a bit. Tarot knows more about war in that kind of context than I do. Finally, a current events Blog entry that may be out of date in a few days, but the point about what's happening in the Arab world won't be.

Jan. 11, 2011

Also known as 1/11/11, it's the birthday of Velvet Belle Tree, who has been a life-saver – well, at least a story-saver – with Empress of the Dawn. Her contributions, from writing much of the first half of the story to her criticism and editorial assistance on the rest, have made it far better than I had ever hoped it could be.

Although I wasn't conscious of it when I began I began this story, I realize now that it is the story of Kalla Zavar'el growing into a job – without her even knowing what the job is. Yet her experience on Andros will come to define what it means to be a Velorian. That was at the back of my mind when I wrote her scenes for Homecoming II and "Incident at Madstop." Now it is front and center.

What you read today isn't the entire story of Kalla as Shadar conceived it more than six years ago; that's why it's subtitled Book One: Feodor. But it's the complete book, whereas what I'd posted for my own birthday Nov. 3 was only the first part. Skietra willing, I'll get to the Books of Jayar, Kyros, Nestor and Owen one of these days. Book One diverges a great deal from Shadar's original outline; later Books may follow it more closely. He's still the father of the Aurora Universe – the inspiration to the rest of us.

Speaking of inspiration, you've all heard of "inspirational fiction." What that means is a sort of weak-tea religious fiction. I have to wonder why its authors, if they truly believe, feel the need for a weak-tea euphemism. But it's a shame, because there are books and movies out there which are truly inspiring, as Velvet shows in "Speaking of History," an appreciation of a masssive two-part science fiction novel by Connie Willis, Blackout/All Clear and a British movie The King's Speech. One is the story of time travelers from the future researching World War II in Britain – and themselves being caught up in events there. The other is the true story of King George VI, who had to overome a stammer in order to rally the nation on radio during that war. What links them is that both are about people rising to the occasion, from ordinary ambulance drivers and air wardens to the monarch – all "doing their bit" in their country's darkest hour.

Is inspiration lacking in the very genre The Bright Empire represents? New stories seem to be few and far between, in the Aurora Universe and elsewhere. Has the genre simply run out of steam, or run out of ideas? It's a troubling question, but I can't avoid facing it in "Erotic Superheroine Fiction: Does It Have a Future?" I think I have an answer, at least for myself. I hope others will comment at the Aurora Universe Readers Group. Finally, my latest Occasional Blog entry has to do with inspiration still to be found in the 1943 movie version of Jane Eyre – but you'll notice I've been putting up other entries lately. I hope to make it more than occasional this year.

Jan. 1, 2011

Just a minor update today, my first blog entry in ages. But I'll try to follow up "Cooking the Books" with other short op-ed pieces, while working on more substantial projects.

Dec. 22, 2010

Happy Winter Solstice! "The Long Night," a Christmas Linith & Faré story by Tarot Barnes, is just the thing for the occasion. I'd been bugging him for an Other Voices story since he posted a gag at the Aurora Universe Readers Group about a shooting star seen over England having really been Linith speeding home from a mission to catch her favorite soap opera. But he couldn't manage to turn that into a story, at least not on such short notice. So he sent me a draft of "The Long Night," with some scenes and the conclusion missing. My apologies for briefly posting that version; I'd had the false impression that he couldn't finish it in time. But he's really come through!

A few other updates. The High Cruel Years has been re-edited to change Arions to Aureans. My entries in "Behind the Stories" are now in reverse chronological order, making it easier to find commentaries on more recent postings. I've updated the URL for Shadar's Tales of Aurora on the Links page. And here's a real treat: lawyers, as you must know, will argue about anything. According to a piece in the New York Times the other day, there's now a blog called Law and the Multiverse to take on the legal implications of weapons like heat vision.

Nov. 3 , 2010

Empress of the Dawn, the first part of which appears today, was inspired by Shadar's outline at his site for the background of a story he never wrote, about a Companion named Kalla working on the planet Andros, long after her indenture. What appealed to me was the idea of her living long enough to have pursued a number of different careers, and to help shape the progress of her adopted world. More about that in "Behind the Stories." But I also wanted to shape that imagined world for myself. I was a Byzantine history buff back in high school, and I used that background to imagine the people who called themselves Romaioi – although they weren't Roman – and the kind of society they might create when the Seeders brought them to a new world. Shadar had imagined a world peopled by Greeks from classical times; I had an entirely different idea. Of course, I was fascinated by Kalla herself – enough to give her guest appearances in Part II of Velvet's Homecoming and in "Incident at Madstop," while I was trying to work out the details of her early life. Velvet helped a lot with the opening chapters about her journey to Andros with the Scalantrans and her arrival and indenture and first days with Feodor.

But there's a lot more to this update than one story. I've been working on a novel, Countdown to History, that is set mostly during World War II and introduces the Velorians and Arions to Earth in my take on the Aurora Universe. Only "Arions" sounds just like "Aryans," although there isn't any connection between the two – in my first drafts, I had Arions hedging their bets by working with both the Nazis and the Communists against the West. So I cast about for another name – one acceptable to Shadar and Tarot Barnes as well as myself – and came up with Aureans. It has a certain resonance, because it sounds as if it comes from the Latin word for gold, and we could even imagine that the Naturalists who exiled themselves from Velor early on considered themselves the real Golden People. But making such a basic change meant going over other stories at The Bright Empire to do find-and-replace – and make other minor tweaks for the sake of consistency between stories. Nearly all of that has been done, from Throne of the Gods through "Incident at Madstop," but there are a few exceptions – notably The High Cruel Years and The Mission. In the first case, the confusion of "Arion" and "Aryan" was a plot point in the story and that has to be rethought; in the second, I'm not happy with the whole tone of what was a collaborative effort, and want to go over it more extensively... when time permits.

Another rant today, albeit a short one. "The Silly Season" is about odd news stories that are appearing out of season, and are not amusing. Also about the media's current obsession with celebrity trivia and the like at the expense of real news.

Finally, although it doesn't relate directly to TBE, I am happy to announce the resurrecton of Infinity Bridge. Created by the late Douglas W. MacBeth, who wrote much of the best Aurora Universe fiction ever, it was brought back by dedicated fans after his death in a plane crash in 2001. Lisa Binkley had been caretaker for the last eight years, but the demands of Real Life had gotten in her way, and there was a problem with the password that should have allowed for a change of ownership. Tyler Spivey donated a complete archive of the original site to the Aurora Universe Readers Group after the site went down, and Tarot Barnes registered a new domain and uploaded the files over this past weekend. It's all there now.

Sept. 1, 2010

One of the elements of Aurora Universe mythology is that the Galen themselves once walked the Earth, or at least created the pagan gods who walked it for a time and then withdrew or were withdrawn to other worlds. It is supposed that the Galen saw the error of their ways, and came to believe that Terrans should be left to find their own destiny. But they left behind the pagan mythologies they had inspired and, in "How to Succeed in Religion," their Proto agents (with advice from the Scalantrans) are trying to clean up after them by fostering another faith. It's a very sacreligious story, of course... But it also has some sex, and even a bit of heart at the end.

Velvet Belle Tree, meanwhile, commits a secular sort of sacrilege, taking down a film, Meet John Doe, that is widely regarded as a classic. After all, it was directed by Frank Capra, who was already beloved for screwball comedies like It Happened One Night (1934) and the idealistic political drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). He would go on to make the perennial favorite It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Neal Gabler, introducing Meet John Doe on PBS, rhapsodized about how "serious" and important it was. After she saw it, Velvet wondered what film he'd been watching. Get real/reel, she tells us in "Meet John Shmoe"

Plus I have updated versions of three essays. There's now a book out about Jane Dolinger, subject of "Before Lara Croft, Before Indiana Jones." The links are different, and the argument is elaborated in "'Peril' Revisited," but the issue is the same. In "Angelo Badalamenti: An Appreciation," dead links have been replaced with live links, and new links added, to give you a better impression of one of my favorite contemporary composers. "Behind the Stories" had fallen behind over the past year, without any notes on "Second Opinion" and "Close Orbit," so I've updated that, too. And as an added bonus, a look at the e-mail exchange that started my career as an Aurora Universe writer: "Losing Virginity." Of course, like some belatedly declassified CIA documents, it's redacted a bit...

Aug. 23, 2010

"Flare" isn't a new story, but it's a rediscovered variation of a story by Douglas W. MacBeth (1952-2001), who wrote as ST Mac and whose website, Infinity Bridge, was reconstructed and maintained for nearly a decade after his death, but has recently gone down. At this writing, Ed Howdershelt has created a Yahoo group to archive files retrieved from the Wayback Machine [Note: a new URL was later created for Infinity Bridge; see Nov. 3, 2010 update.]. As for "Flare," the version here dates back to 1998, but it is tagged as Version 1.7, whereas the one at Infinity Bridge is 1.0 and does not include edits by or credit to "Sharon Best," as Shadar was then known. I've gone through Version 1.7 to correct grammatical and spelling errors (Scalantran was "Skalantran."), but otherwise left it untouched.

July 27, 2010

Another mystery story this time, but a musical mystery. Ever wonder when and how a particular kind of music – or, for that matter, literature or painting or whatever – originated? It's the sort of thing that fascinates me as a science fiction historian, but "Musical Family Ties" has nothing to do with sf – or, at least, only in a teaser at the end that might or might not inspire somebody to write a variation of the alternate history story. What it's about is my own obsession with a particular kind of music – film noir jazz – and where it came from.

July 21, 2010

Murder on the Orient Express is a classic mystery novel by Agatha Christie that was brought to the big screen in 1974 and has been adapted for TV more than once. But in the latest British TV adaptation, which aired in the U.S. July 11, the mystery is as much about the story as in it: What possessed the writer and director to trash the character of Hercule Poirot, Christie's beloved detective? I can't find any clue in reference to their other works to suggest a hidden agenda, and yet their approach seems to be systematic rather than random, as Velvet demonstrates in "Murder of the Orient Express."

July 8, 2010

Countdown to History is a work-in-progress that takes place in 1944-1946, at the dawn of the Atomic Age. Kira is involved in it, and that's about all I'm going to say here because I don't want to give away the plot. That's because the whole story is one I might actually sell – I hope I can make it that good. But it's part of the Aurora Universe mythology, and specifically addresses how and where and when Kira "came out" to the President. In the extract here, Groves is Leslie R. Groves, the general in charge of the Manhattan Project, who has already been approached by Earth's Protector. He's shot a film showing her holding up a huge test casing called Jumbo, but it turns out that the President needs more convincing than that – and Kira isn't quite up to speed on some matters of protocol and colloquial English. But if you've ever wondered how the relationship between Kira and the U.S. government began, here it is.

I'm working on some other free stories for The Bright Empire, but they haven't quite jelled. Have patience!

June 5 , 2010

Flashforward was a promising science fiction TV series when it debuted last fall. Based on a novel by Robert J. Sawyer, it began with nearly everyone in the world having a blackout during which they saw visions of their own futures six months hence. They weren't all good futures; and some didn't have any flashforwards at all – meaning, presumably, that they'd be dead by then. It was a provocative premise, touching on serious issues like free will versus predestination. But there were problems from the start – such as why the the blackout had happened in the first place, and who was behind it. Complications were piled on complications, perhaps as teasers for a second season. Only there won't be a second season; the series was canceled, leaving frustrated viewers with a cliffhanger ending that will never be resolved. Reading the book doesn't help, either, as Velvet explains in an overview.

Not exactly new is Shadar's "McCloud's Daughters." But after he had trouble with re-registering his site, I made it available again here. There is one change; after he posted the story at AUOW, he decided to change the name of his hero from Ben Smith to Ben Shaffer – but he never actually made the change in his version. So I've changed it for The Bright Empire. Now you can read it, and go from that story to its sequels – my own "Bird of Paradise" and Ultrasybarite's "Finding Sanctuary."

April 2 , 2010

A rant this time, about what seems to be an epidemic of rampant stupidity. But while I'm at it, I want to remind readers of Tarot Barnes' Aurora's Tale, which didn't get much readership when it was originally posted. That was before his Alternate Histories site went on hiatus, so The Bright Empire is the only site hosting any of Tarot's writing at the moment. I think it's a great story, and it offers a completely different take on Aurora Fairchild than Shadar's original version at the old Aurora Universe.

March 8, 2010

It's been five years to the day since The Bright Empire moved to its current address, and seven years to nearly the day since it was created. That calls for a real update, not just dribs and drabs. First off, there's "Incident at Madstop," a story set at the interstellar conference that created the Enlightenment. But it's only tangentially about the conference itself; rather, it centers on a politician who was foolish enough to bring his children along to the hellish planet that is playing host. They get into trouble, of course, and...

Then, finally, there's the conclusion to Encounter at Westfold, the story of Kyreen – Arion born, who needs help from Rostran to bring her baby to term. But her world needs help, too, against the very people who sent her there in the first place. That too must come from Rostran, where you need a scorecard to keep track of the Supremis variants. It's decades after Shadar's Shore Leave saga, so you'll learn new things about that world, and about Alisa Liddell and her husband Andre Kalik, in the course of the story.

And speaking of Shadar, there's "Power of Blue," a previously unposted story he wrote five years ago that, because of its technological and social background, seems to tie in with the Rostran saga and with the post-Theel'dara reforms on Velor. So I made it so, with his approval. It's set on Varig, an Enlightenment world, where a touching romance involving a local cop and a Velorian brava turns on that invented background. It was intended to be the first of a series, and it might still become the basis of a police procedural series -- that would be something fresh for the Aurora Universe.

But there's more. Kalla, the Companion of Andros, makes an appearance in "Incident at Madstop." That and other matters of canonical consistency called for mostly minor but some significant updates to other stories -- including Homecoming Parts One, Two and Three, parts of Ordinary Velorians, "Pictures of an Expedition" and "Bird in Paradise." The most important change has to do with a certain social change that Kalla brings to Andros... Cosmetic re-edits to Emigrants and "Hit Me with Your Worst Shot" involve the timing of a space battle and mention of jazz. And the first part of Encounter of Westfold as well as previously posted chapters of the second have been gone over to create "native" Westfoldan words for foreign science, and to improve the story flow. Yet another change, this one only of title: "Relentless Breasts" is now "An Unsuitable Job for a Messenger." The original title was exploitive and just plain dumb. The URL remains the same only because I don't know how to get rid of old files at the remote host.

Feb. 15 , 2010

Just a President's Day blogatorial today, but there's a major update coming next month to mark the fifth anniversary of The Bright Empire in its second incarnation. A new story set at the Madstop Conference, continuation of at least one serial, and canonical and other edits to some previous stories.

Feb. 2 , 2010

Happy Groundhog Day! Whether or not Punxatawney Phil actually saw his shadow, the latest go-round about climate change has left us wondering whether we are truly seeing the shape of things to come or only the shadows cast by people who want to pull the wool over our eyes. But it's always a tough job for us laymen to judge "expert" opinion. Isaac Asimov addressed the issue once, and I address it again in "The Groundhog's View."

Jan. 1 , 2010

And Happy New Year! Tarot Barnes has already done a revision and update of "Christmas Presence," now called "A Velorian Christmas." That's a gift, and a challenge. I'm going to have to produce something new of my own, and I hereby resolve to post a new story or a completion of an ongoing story no later than the fifth anniversary of this generation of The Bright Empire March 8.

Dec. 25, 2009

Merry Christmas! But your present this year is a work-in-progress by Tarot Barnes about a Velorian Christmas. Sort of. But maybe some of you can help with edits and ideas to turn "Christmas Presence" from a work-in-progress to a showcase for the eventual appearance of a new and improved Alternate Histories site. Come one, come all!

Dec. 13, 2009

Four years ago, I wrote a script for an episode of Athena, a proposed video series for Steele Productions that never materialized. Like Throne of the Gods, it grew out of a plot idea I'd once had for a straight science fiction story, a variation on Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (1971). In that novel, filmed twice, George Orr has "effective dreams:" he can change reality through those dreams – so completely that nobody else knows it has been changed. Except, somehow, a psychiatrist to whom he has appealed to help find him a way to stop having those dreams – but instead exploits them to "improve" the world and his own standing in it.

It's a powerful novel about the temptations of power, but flawed by the fact that there's just no way that Dr. William Haber could have learned that reality had been changed. So in my own variation, Daymares, I imagine that Amy Burgess has the same power as George Orr – but only within the limits of her knowledge and understanding, and without truly knowing that her effective dreams have been anything but nightmares about events that never happened. Also without having changed aspects of reality she didn't know about. It's a loose end that motivates the story.... I think it began, for me, with a vision of the little girl who became Amy Burgess crying, "Make it didn't happen."

Nov. 30, 2009

Every once in a while I get disgusted. Now is one of those times. It's all about the exposé of climatologists who, according to hacked e-mails, may have been playing fast and loose with the truth about global warming.

What disgusts me is not only that scientists may be prostituting science for political ends, but that the news media have been reacting based entirely on political grounds – either to play up the scandal if they're conservative or play it down if they're liberal. Both sides are ignoring inconvenient truths – that the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) theory may an exaggeration or even a falsification on one hand; and that there may still be a problem (as indicated by polar ice shrinkage) even if AGW partisans are fudging the figures.

Either way, with the Copenhagen summit on climate change imminent, global decisions on public policy are at issue – and nobody in the news media seems to have the slightest interest in getting at the truth, whatever that may be. Read "No Nose for News."

Nov. 3 , 2009

One day this summer, Brantley sent me an announcement of a writing contest with unusual requirements. The story had to be a futuristic romance of 1,500 words and it had to use the following four words: amulet, amber, sword and dust bunny. Yes, I said dust bunny.

At first I thought, "what could anyone write using those words?" And then I got an idea and thought I'd have some fun with it. Some I took some pulp sf and mixed in some erotic romance and came up with "Stella Victorious." When Brantley read it, he was really rolling on the floor laughing his ass off, and I hope it has the same effect on you.

And the most amazing thing happened: I won the contest! Of course, I have no idea if anyone else entered ...

Sept. 7, 2009

Ever wonder how the Arion Empire discovered Earth? They weren't supposed to know about us, that was never part of the Plan – certainly not the Plan of the Galen. Tarot Barnes has a whole new take on that development in "Making Contact," a story that will in time become part of the background of his new version of the Aurora Universe at a reborn Alternate Histories site. It's like nothing you've read about the Arions before – but you can expect that from Tarot. And you're getting to read it here first!

Also of note: "Emigrants" (see below) is now illustrated. Also, I've added commentary at Behind the Stories.

Aug. 24 , 2009

And now for something completely different. "Emigrants" is an Aurora Universe story without any Supremis. Well, they're out there, but not up close and personal. They're essential to the background, and yet the foreground is occupied by ordinary humans and their Scalantran allies. Oh, and the Therans, too. Remember them from Lisa Binkley's classic Questlings?

The humans are natives of Belside, a world created by Binkley and used here with her permission. She had always had it in mind that Belside would fall victim to the war of the Supremis that has engulfed the Galaxy, and in "Emigrants" its destruction has come -- without warning, without even any clear motive. Among the survivors after the cities were nuked is Tuva Armaan, leader of an encampment of refugees in the Wild. Other survivors, besides those at his and similar encampments are the crew of the Asman -- a ship just returned from a trial run of the new Quantum Electric Drive that promises to revolutionize interstellar travel.

Armaan is recruited to go with the Asman on a mission to find help for those left on the planet or, barring that, to find... the fact that the woman with whom he finds love in the course of their journey is Prima Kelsor, granddaughter of the drive's inventor, should be a tip-off. Now, go and read how history is made!

July 3, 2009

Today is our anniversary, Velvet's and mine. What better way to mark it here than with a new story by her? "The Hunting Horns of Hades" is straight science fiction, nothing to do with the AU. But it's really good. Great. I love Velvet, and I love the way she writes. You will too, whether you've read her fiction before, or are new to it. This is like nothing you've seen before.

June 30, 2009

Evelyn Rose, a.k.a. U1trawoman, had a brief fling with the Aurora Universe a couple of years ago. She is currently a partner The League of Amazing Women, which specializes in photo stories of superheroines in peril from supervillainesses -- not my cup of tea. She also has some excellent superheroine art by herself and others at her Deviant Art Gallery. I consider the ten chapters of The Adventures of Vyr-Na she wrote in 2007 a welcome variation on AU lore, and they end on a note of hope amidst the peril. Maybe someday U1trawoman will take up the story again.

June 21, 2009

To mark the summer solstice, a couple more hot babes at the Gallery. Zanele's been seen before in in Tanzrobian Nights and Murk and Reprisal, but she might be seen again in a later story about the Madstop Conference. Reb'emarix, a Geheimite agent, will be seen there for sure. Also new in Real Life Heroines: film director Kathryn Bigelow.

June 15, 2009

Now for a blast from the past, but with an eye on the future. "To Be a Scribe" seems to have gone through several versions at the old Aurora Universe site. Shara'Lynn, known on Earth as Sharon Best, was both a continuing character and an alter-ego for the artist now known as Shadar -- and as a character she appeared in other writers' stories as well. But she hasn't been such much since the demise of AU-2 in 2003. I found some early episodes archived at a mirror site (from which they have since vanished, although some ancillary material remains).

For this edition, I updated the story as best I could in keeping with the current canon (especially about the nature of the Rites, and who takes part), but kept the original text intact for the most part -- including the kinkiest scene (I turned another kinky scenario into a dream, but only because Shara'Lynn wasn't wearing gold in the original veresion and it didn't seem plausible to introduce same.). Plus there's a classic and classy shot of our heroine. I hope there will be a revival of the Shara'Lynn; there could be lots of new stories about her.

Another blast from the past: a discussion from 2003 about the basic appeal of Aurora Universe fiction.

May 10, 2009

Star Trek! Is there anybody here who didn't grow up on it? Even the Aurora Universe grew up on it: the Prime Directive, the Enlightenment facing the Arions as the Federation faced the Klingons. Now there's a new movie version, which critics seem to think has breathed new life into the classic. We went to see it, Velvet and I, and came out underwhelmed, to say the least. So we both decided to write about it. I provide the overview in "Star Trek: Biography of an Institution," while she skewers the movie itself in "Star Trek: the Motion Sickness."

Apr. 11, 2009

Another work-in-progress this time, and maybe some of you superheroine fiction fans out there can help it progress further. "It's U-Girl and You Should Know It" was begun a couple of years ago as a possible e-book from outside the Aurora Universe: Ordinary Girl miraculously gets superpowers after being kidnapped for Kim Jong Il's harem and then buried with a nuclear bomb after insulting him. Back home, she's presumed dead as one of the victims of a serial killer. The only man she trusts is a former boyfriend, a computer security expert. An earlier draft was posted a year ago, and didn't attract much notice. But this time I'm adding an e-mail link to invite comments.

Mar. 13, 2009

Better a week late than a weak story. That's the reason for the delay in marking the sixth anniversary of The Bright Empire. I thought I had the continuation of Encounter at Westfold ready to go. But it wasn't ready to go, not by a long shot. I was so eager to meet an arbitrary deadline, and to take the plot in a new direction, that I overlooked basic problems like a lack of narrative focus, too many digressions and lengthy information dumps. But Velvet. my best critic, couldn't and didn't overlook them. So I had to sit back and rethink the story, and a good thing I did. Now the focus is back where it should be, on David and Kyreen, and even some of the digressions are closely related to them -- the scenes of Kyreen's foster parents John and Hillary Kiplinger, who had been mentioned in Part One but never seen. It's a much better story now, with new mysteries and a double cliffhanger at the (for now) end. You're going to love Part Two of Encounter at Westfold.

Feb. 14, 2009

Even Shadar can't remember the exact date, but from the copyright notices for his earliest writing, we know that the Aurora Universe was born in 1994 and thus celebrates its 15th anniversary this year. It occurred to me that Valentine's Day would be the perfect occasion to honor the birthday of our genre. Moreover, there has been much discussion of late, on and off the boards, about Velor -- not the Velor we know today, or even the Velor of the time of the Companions, but the Velor of its early years -- abandoned by the Galen, knowing nothing of the universe beyond it, primitive and provincial, struggling just to maintain a half-understood technology it could never create. Velor then was as unknown to the civilized galaxy as that galaxy was to Velor. And then, one day, the Scalantrans appeared, sent there without even knowing why, accompanied by humans from a Seeder world who had also been sent without knowing why. What they found, and what came of it, is the story of "Close Orbit." Thanks to Velvet for her scenes and for her editing and advice, which made this a far better story than it would otherwise have been.

Feb. 12, 2009

Still still working on fiction, particularly projects related to the 15th anniversary of the Aurora Universe. But today is the 200th anniversary of birth of Abraham Lincoln, widely regarded as the greatest American president, and a model for others since -- including Barack Obama. But can any president inspire the nation, or the world, after "The Death of Eloquence"?

Feb. 2, 2009

Still working on fiction, but meanwhle here is a rant called "The Blame of the Game," with my own take on the current economic crisis and "recovery plans." I'd been thinking of doing it anyway, but a friend of mine pointed out that today is the birthday of Ayn Rand, whom some commentators are actually holding responsible for the meltdown even though she's been dead for more than 25 years. That gave me one argumentative hook, but I've got plenty of others.

Jan. 25, 2009

"The Kitty Business" is a bit of fluff, and not entirely new fluff. The original version, called "The Feline Imperative," was written a decade or so ago by Shadar in his Sharon Best days. Although it didn't really fit into the AU-3 universe, I referenced Sol Estis and the kitty business as far back as Throne of the Gods, and gave Estis and his black Russian henchman a cameo in "The Rescue." Right now, with some new tweaks to the canon, I thought it would be nice to have the first story that refers, however fleetingly, to the alpha and beta states of Velorians. I kept the feline parts of the original story, but tweaked those a bit -- plus the general background.

But the primary reason for an update now is to introduce you to the Aurora Wiki, a new online resource for the Aurora Universe. It was launched Jan.15 by Tarot Barnes, and has grown like crazy since then with entries including an overview of the AU, notes on the species players -- Scalantran and Vendorian as well as Velorian, Arion and Diaboli -- plus the godlike Galen and Elders. There are also entries on the roles of Companions and Protectors, weapons and space travel technology, the universal calendar and more. Chances are you'll find updates just about every time you visit.

Finally, I missed this by a day, but Jan. 24 was the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh, the first personal computer with conveniences we enjoy today like mice and drag-and-drop. You can still find the classic Riddley Scott commercial that announced the revolution at YouTube:

Dec. 24, 2008

Can't let Christmas pass without an update of some sort, even if isn't a major one, and only one item has any connection to the holiday. That one is an appreciation of the late Bettie Page, who posed for thousands of nude and semi-nude photos in the 1950s but never more memorably than in a Christmas shot by Bunny Yeager wearing a smile and nothing else. She seems old fashioned in our age of silicone and crude explicitness, and yet her image of innocent naughtiness may hold a lesson for us.

"Second Opinion" is a vignette inspired by recent discussion at the AURG about a new generation of fraul'isets – cybernetic brains housed in Supremis bodies. Just how close to a living being could such creatures seem? Their bodies would be the easy part, but what kind of minds would they have? Could they think, and more importantly, feel like humans – Supremis, that is. Given that their mission is to pose as Arions and infiltrate the Empire, they'd better. If the Arions ever get suspicious... But this is only the story of a prototype. The design still needs some work...

Finally, Velvet Belle Tree offers "Thoughts on West Side Story." It was a hit musical back in the day, a hip musical. Today, it may strike some viewers as dated and naive. Yet it still has something to say to people of our day, who are no strangers to the patterns of thought that can lead us into hatred and violence and destruction.

Nov. 25, 2008

No turkey here for Thankgiving this week. At least, the updated version of Encounter at Westfold had better not be a turkey! It now includes the collaborative version of all six chapters posted in 2005 by Shadar. The story is still the same, but with the background details reworked, tweaks to some of the scenes and a flashback about the first close encounter between Dr. David Morrison and Kyreen Kiplinger -- he a respected academic, she the only survivor of a crashed Arion ship and a Tset'lar at that.

Westfold has feared a Velorian invasion ever since accessing the Arion side of the story, but now the Velorians have shown up -- with a different story, and different advice for scientists working on a genetic enhancement program. But a throwaway line at the end (unchanged from Shadar's version) hints that Kyreen knows more than she has let on. Does that mean she also knows what Alisa Kim'Vallara and Andre Kalik have figured out for themselves about Westfold itself? Did even Shadar know what was coming next? One way or another, there'll be a next, but not until Christmas at the earliest.

Nov. 3 , 2008

Birthday cheer for everybody! I'm 67 today, but I'm giving instead of receiving and trying to make a real occasion of it. My own "Birthday Thoughts" may strike you as surprisingly cheery for a man my age, but there is good reason for them. Meanwhile, too late to affect the election in even the smallest way, I sound off on post-election challenges in "Apres Le Deluge, Who? And What?"

"Judgment Day" is the final chapter -- well, my final chapter -- of The Mission, the long-running serial that began as a vignette by myself in 2003 and morphed into a collaboration with Within This Realme's Rob a year later. It's been eight months since my last contribution (See March 5, 2008 update), and I might have just let the whole thing die except that the story involved James Kim'Vallara and his wife Bidu Braga, who have become important to me and are part of a larger continuity I have in mind. But I couldn't summon the energy to go the last mile on The Mission until recently, and it wasn't a terribly rewarding experience. It was even less rewarding for Velvet, who did the editing. Still, it gave me a chance to tie together some strands of the Kim'Vallara saga and hint at stories yet to come. For the rest, I stuck as close to Rob's outline as I could, but he had an HEA (Happily Ever After) for Oon'ah and Xanthra on Binkley's World rather than Sanctuary.

Encounter at Westfold is one of the tie-in stories, and another collaboration, but not the same kind. Shadar posted the beginning of an earlier version in 2005 at Aurora Universe: Other Worlds, and I was intrigued to learn there that Alisa Kim'Vallara a.k.a. Liddell had married Andre Kalik, whom she had first met during the expedition to Rostran in Shore Leave, and that they had three children -- including a Protector. But Shadar never took it much further; moreover, it annoyed me that he'd made Westfold pretty much like contemporary Earth despite the fact that it had been settled 200 years ago and been kept isolated from the rest of the universe ever since then. As Star Trek's Mr. Spock would say, that does not compute. So I've been tweaking the background, adding elements of steampunk fashion and a speeded-up technological revoluton while sticking to the original story. Today's posting covers the Prologue and the first two chapters; the rest will come later -- including some sort of continuation beyond what Shadar wrote three years ago.

Another tie-in story is The Popcorn War, which was planned out by Jordan Taylor and myself five years ago. I posted as much as we had written a little over a year ago, in hopes that we might both add to it soon. Alas, Jordan is simply too busy with Real Life right now to continue with it -- but I still have printouts of our e-mails from October and November 2003 (Good thing, that, because the electronic trail was lost during a change in computers!), and a general idea of where things were to go in the undercover mission of Velorian Legionnaires Romana and Cristina to find and root out the insurgency on Novo Recife. I'd always intended for James and Bidu to reappear at the end, and they will -- just not in Chapters VII-X being posted today. There are also a few continuity tweaks to the earlier chapters, so you should begin at the beginning.

Oct. 15, 2008

Finally, a conclusion to "The Rescue." Originally inspired by a photo manip of Power Girl in a shower, the story has taken a number of strange turns since then, most of which I didn't imagine when I started it. The conclusion has taken me longer than I anticipated, owing to the distractions of real life and the complications of the story itself. The description of the Tyrrel Corp. building and Kira's offices comes from Tarot Barnes ("Grey November"). And it took Velvet to figure out where Jeff and Olga would be going at the end. But from a vignette of gratuitous sex, I think the story has grown into a worthwhile addition to the AU canon.

There's a link at my About the Aurora Universe page that must have gone dead long ago, or else never worked at all. It was supposed to be a link to an mp3 of a classical music piece that made me think of the Protectors. Since then, somebody at YouTube has put up a two-part recording of the piece I call a Velorian Overture, and you can find the links here.

Sept. 21, 2008

Three new chapters added to "The Rescue," with three or four yet to come -- perhaps later this week. This story has taken an entirely different direction again, just as it did in the second and third chapters. There'll be more surprises in the finale, but I think it will all hang together in the end, even if it changes the significance of the title.

Has this ever happened to you? You pick up a new novel by an author you admire, an author who has a track record of commercial success and even literary esteem. And you end up shaking your head. I know it's happened to me -- I remember how I couldn't believe that Frederick Forsyth, author of classic thrillers like The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File could come out with a dud like The Devil's Alternative. But I never picked up another book by Forsyth, although he's written a number since. Well, it just happened to Velvet Belle Tree, with Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning. She loved Tan's The Joy Luck Club, and enjoyed other books by her -- but this latest, as she puts it, is just "Drowning in Words."

Sept. 15, 2008

Nothing new today but a small rant about identity politics to my occasional (Very occasional; it's been three months now) blog. But it gives me an excuse to report on other things. I have figured out how "The Rescue" will end up; it's just a question of finding time to write it. I have in mind another story, as yet untitled, about the Madstop Conference and the creation of the Velorian Enlightenment, which has been the subject of recent discussion at the Aurora Universe Readers Group. I may pick up on Symbala, Shadar's first Tanzrobian character, for a story about the various stages of her life. There's still The Mission to finish, although I've left that alone for quite a while. Maybe another Velorian Legion story, although "The Popcorn War" should be finished first, even if I have to do it myself. And then there are long-dormant shared projects, notably Shore Leave with Shadar...

Sept. 5, 2008

Today, two more chapters of "The Rescue." Unlike a lot of my stories, this one I've been making up as I go along. It was only the night before last (with help from Velvet) that I came up with what Alfred Hitchcock used to call the maguffin, and just yesterday that I figured out how the third chapter was going to end. Despite the furiously gratuitous sex of the first chapter, this is a sort of Hitchcockian scenario -- a guy getting caught up in intrigue he can't understand. I found out that even Shadar didn't know who the shower scene model was, so the Vel now known as Dawn (not necessarily her real name) was out of the story. "Liz" isn't a Vel, but I know what she will turn out to be, anon...

Aug. 25, 2008

Nothing could prepare you for the denouement of Tarot Barnes' Aurora's Tale. Certainly nothing prepared me when I read the original draft more than two years ago. It's a heartbreaker, a tragic ending that none but Tarot would dare write. But it is the climax of a tale of incredible courage and incredible loyalty, on the part of Aurora herself and the Porturegans who fight with her and for her. Scenes like the battle for the spaceport and the final duel between Aurora and the Tset'lar Tala will be etched in your memory. With some final edits by Tarot, I am proud to offer the finale of what I am certain will be a classic of our genre.

Aug. 15, 2008

Herewith the second part of Aurora's Tale, Chapters 5-8 of Tarot's edit, with further edits by myself, almost entirely on matters of spelling, punctuation and style. The substance is Tarot's. Here the action moves to a new front, as the beleagured Porturegans pursue a strategy that doesn't seem to make any sense. Capture an Arion freighter? Only it does make sense; it's part of a plan that may be the only hope for Betah Stronberg. Yet Aurora, worshipped by many, is often kept in the dark by the military. It's a tense relationship, and an intense one. And for you, the readers, a suspenseful one: it's not just what will happen next, but what it will mean to the Protector and her protectorates?

Aug. 11, 2008

Real life, and another writing project unrelated to the Aurora Universe, have kept me too busy to update The Bright Empire in more than a month, or to add any fiction in more than two months. To the rescue comes Tarot Barnes, whose Aurora's Tale, a novel running to nearly 80,000 words, was being serialized at his Alternate Histories site when a rancorous thread at the Aurora Universe Readers Group led him to quit the group and suspend his writing.

I can hardly find words for how terrible I feel about that turn of events, and I hope that Tarot will see his way clear to return to the Aurora Universe community. In the meantime, he has kindly authorized me to serialize the whole of his epic -- and it is an epic. I had seen the rough draft of Aurora's Tale more than two years ago, and was overwhelmed by it at the time. I sent him some edits, and he has since worked with JH on refining the story. I had been afraid that most of that refinement had been left undone, but it turns out that Tarot had finished all but the last chapter, and he has advised me on how to complete that.

The installment being posted here today includes Chapters One through Four, which is one less than the version now at Alternate Histories. But the fourth chapter ends at a more natural break point. Moreover, I have put the text through Spell/Grammar check and made a number of minor corrections (mostly in punctuation and spelling, including Americanizing terms like "armour"), and also corrected the chapter numbers (Tarot somehow posted two chapters labeled Chapter 2.). But these were minor glitches in a powerful story -- the story of Aurora Fairchild and her struggle to save the world of Betah Stronberg from Arion conquest while herself being threatened by the Tset'lar Tala. It is a story of triumph and tragedy, of hope and despair, of great loves and great hatreds. It's like nothing you've read before. If you read any Aurora Universe fiction, if you want to know what greatness it can achieve, you must read Aurora's Tale.

I don't usually post partial drafts of my own stories, but I am making an exception here with "The Rescue" for two reasons. First, I haven't had enough time to work on it. Second, I have to decide, not the overall course of the story, but whether Jeff should be handed off to someine else in the second chapter. The story was inspired in part by a pict Shadar posted at the AURG of a supergirl in the shower. I don't know who the model is, and if I don't find out she'll make her exit and leave it to others to explain to Jeff how he's gotten into this mess and how they'll get him out of it.

July 2, 2008

It's two days before Independence Day. But the Declaration of Independence was actually adopted on the Second of July in 1776. Anyway, chances are that people will have other things to do than check out this site on the Fourth. And, after all the depressing things, I wanted to post something uplifting. "The Spirit of America" is about how some of the most unlikely people found common cause during a flood 15 years ago. Would that it could happen everywhere.

June 18, 2008

Friday the 13th turned out to be an unlucky day for NBC newsman Tim Russert, whose funeral was today. But do all the people who have eulogized him really believe in the standards he set for American journalism? Or was he perhaps the last of his kind, leaving nobody willing or able to hold our country's leaders accountable. Is it even "The End of Journalism?"

June 10, 2008

And now the news! But only the "fashion" news. What with Shadar and Redwulf putting up a ton of Velorian fashion statements at the Aurora Universe Readers Group and View from Helm, I'm inspired to do the same. But "Hot Numbers on the Runway" was also inspired by a photo manip I commissioned from Random FX several months ago. It was supposed to be for a scene in a new Velorian Legion story, with the legionnaire basking in the inferno she had made of an Arion base. Trouble with the result was, the outfit made little sense, and the sunglasses even less. So I put it aside, wondering what I could possibly do with it, until this whole fashion thing came up. Now I have a chance to use it, along with a related fiery shot (involving a common stage trick) that I'd come across last year. The commentary is pure fluff, with a few bad jokes and "in" references.

June 6, 2008

D-Day, and a new story has finally landed at The Bright Empire. But "Unrelenting Breasts" [title changed to "An Unsuitable Job for a Messenger" in a later post] isn't just a gag, as the title (taken from a novel announced but never produced by a French writer a century ago) seems to imply. While there is indeed a woman with relentless breasts in the story, it is really about a certain time and place: Belside, a world created by Lisa J. Binkley eight years ago, but set about ten years before her classic Questlings -- and centuries earlier than most Aurora Universe stories. The Enlightenment was young then, full of hope, and yet already there were dark clouds gathering, not all of Arion making -- as a Messenger dragooned into a sexual sting operation against a Prime discovers.

May 1 , 2008

My fictional muse still eludes me, but my combative muse is another matter. So I hereby offer a rant on the controversial issue of gun control: "Going Off Half-Cocked?" It's sure to offend a lot of people on both sides of the issue, and liberals and conservatives alike will probably say I'm full of shit. Maybe I'll even get some hate mail. Well, that beats getting no mail at all, which is nearly always the case with my fiction, whether the downloads are a hundred or a thousand. Fire away!

April 4 , 2008

I'd hoped to have more of The Mission, alias Not Safe for Work ready by now -- but real life and a new concept by Shadar have intervened. But I do have a new essay, "Remembering Stanley G. Weinbaum." Weinbaum (1902-35) was one of the pioneers of modern science fiction in terms of creating strange but believable aliens, heroic women characters and much else. His copyrights ran out at the end of 2005, so now there are new editions of his works, and free downloads of some of them at Project Gutenberg. Weinbaum's stories were great reads in the 1930's, when little sf aspired to literature, and they're still great reads today.

March 5, 2008

It's Not Safe for Work Week here at The Bright Empire. Shadar has taken to posting NSFW pictures at the Aurora Universe Readers Group, so why not NSFW stories? Moreover, at the AU-Otherworlds group, one fan complained that superheroine fiction was getting too literary, too respectable.

I'm not about to stop writing literary fiction, but I don't have have anything like that to mark the fifth anniversary of The Bright Empire. What I have, to begin with, is another episode of The Mission, that long-running serial which began five years ago with a vignette of my own, but has since been continued mainly by Rob, proprietor of Within This Realme. Only we had kind of a falling out some ten months ago when I jumped the gun on him with Chapter 7, after he'd twice done the same to me with Chapters 5 and 6. He never posted a Chapter 7 of his own, but did leave notes as to where he thought the story was going.

Rob's writing was always over-the-top, but he had some good ideas, so after nearly a year I'm coming out with a Chapter 8 of my own. Only, because he might have plans of his own, even at this late date, I'm posting it under the title "Not Safe for Work," with a brief synopis of what has gone before (Delays between installments that were so long readers lost track of the story were another complaint at AU-Otherworlds; I'm going to try to avoid that here and wrap this up ASAP in one or two more chapters.). I hope it's entertainingly over-the-top without being too bizarrely under the bottom. Lots of raunch involving a new Messenger (The pict of Mar'ek, who also figured in "Undercover Kitty," is the first of its kind for the AU as far as I know; hope the ladies like it. And thanks to Shadar for the pict originally created by the late S.T. Mac for a Lillith of Velor story never written.). Guaranteed to have no redeeming social value.

Then there's "It's U-Girl, and You Should Know It." It's the start of a non-AU superheroine novel that, whenever I get it done, might fly at Fictionwise. But it has nothing in common with While the Evil Days Come Not, my one and only e-published commercial novel, except the genre. It's raunchier, but the continuaton is going to be serious in a different vein: Rainey will be loved by many, and hated by many others, because she steps on too many toes crusading against social evils like child prostituton. There's no hint of that in the excerpt here; it's just in the back of my head. Incidentally, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il figures in the story -- and also in a recent entry of my Occasional Blog.

You want something safe for work, after all? There's "Varieties of Badalamenti," my personal appreciation of film and song composer Angelo Badalamenti. But maybe it's not safe for work, after all -- it's filled with video links (mostly from YouTube) to examples of his work. What if your boss wonders why you're looking at that sort of thing instead of naked women?

Feb. 15, 2008

It was five years ago today that Throne of the Gods first appeared at the old Sharon Best Aurora Universe site -- a site that was put on hiatus just two weeks later, and taken down for good a month after that. Time flies!

Not too many noticed that "Brief Encounter," a vignette about Ashotour the Kintz becoming a high-class courtesan, appeared the same day. Martha Nochimson, in a review of the longer story, had hoped to see more of "Ashotour, the quirky kintz," but that probably wasn't what she had in mind. I seem to recall that she once told me privately that her favorite kitty might become a secret agent. That got me to thinking, and a recent pict by Shadar of Halle Berry as an Arion ambassador got me to thinking further. So here it is, Undercover Kitty. It's a riot. Literally.

Feb. 14, 2008

Valentine's Day. How to celebrate it? Well, why not have Arish'ka, alias Marian Adams, doing some last-minute gift shopping for her true love George Gregory Grant? And running into trouble when chance places her in the path of a bullet intended for the proprietor of an art gallery? Big trouble, if the shooter or anybody else reports a woman being shot -- and not going down. But all's well that ends well, I can promise that. After all, "Hit Me with Your Worst Shot" is one of my Valentine's Day gifts to Velvet. It's got some philosophizing in it too -- just one of my things.

Jan. 11, 2008

It's Velvet's birthday, and I can't let it go by without treating you to her latest Arish'ka story, "Inside Passage." It's one she began working on more than a year and a half ago, as part of an abortive attempt by several Aurora Universe writers to produce ten new stories -- enough to get us a Fictionwise account. Only none of the other stories got very far.

"Inside Passage" is a romance, of course, but with a difference: the Terran is the kind of man you might actually expect a Velorian to fall for. In too many stories, male writers will have their superheroines grant their favors to garden variety shlubs who couldn't possibly appeal to them. And the sex is nearly always male viewpoint. It's time for a change, and Velvet Belle Tree is bringing it.

Of course, there has to be some Important Mission to whet the interest of devoted AU readers. I ended up supplying that; it's not really Velvet's sort of thing. But I've added a new twist: the object of the Arion conspiracy isn't anything like what you'd usually expect, and it confronts the Velorians with an ethical dilemma that Arish'ka appreciates better than even Earth's Protector Kira Jahr-ling (her first appearance in an AU3a story). But Velvet herself ends the story on just the right note, with Arish'ka and her hunk-historian lover George Gregory Grant: whatever happens, they're in this together.

Because it was meant for a showcase, "Inside Passage" incorporates more backstory than previous episodes of the Arish'ka saga (most of which are referenced by link). This might provide a platform for more Earth-based AU3a stories -- but I don't want to make promises I can't keep. To further celebrate Velvet's birthday, however, I'm offering two new essays -- "Fairness in Life an Art" and "The Perils of 'Peril'." The first consists of musings inspired by (Hereby be warned!) the surprise ending of the movie Atonement. It wanders a bit, but I do think it has the right sense of direction. The second is a rant on so-called "peril" fiction (my immediate ire being inspired by a trend in Japanese videos) -- something I consider to be a plague on the superheroine genre, although others may think it is only my equivalent of Mr. Dick's obsession with King Charles' head in David Copperfield.

Jan. 1, 2008

We all have our resolutions, but your first resolution should be to read Xoronewithnature's Wannabe Heroes. That's because, after more than three years, our mysterious author (I know hardly anything more about him than I did in 2004.) has finally resolved the story (or at least the first story arc) of Jessie/Geisha and the super soldier terrorists who have been wreaking havoc in New York. It's all there now, in a seven-chapter package of 30,000-plus words -- if you remember the first four chapters, posted here over the past two years, you can pick up with Chapter 5. Or you can read or re-read the whole thing from the beginning.

Jessie's like no other superheroine you've ever met, and Xor writes like no one else here at The Bright Empire. He's full of surprises in terms of story structure, supporting characters, action and dialogue. He's got it all. Perhaps his only fault is his modesty. He's always worried about not doing well enough, always wanting to do better. Well, if he does, we'll all be thrilled!

Dec. 14, 2007

It's always a pleasure to introduce a new writer to The Bright Empire, and it's a special pleasure to introduce "Island Mother," the first story by Betty Bontang. Betty isn't a stranger to those of you who have followed her posts at the Aurora Universe Readers' Group -- which are always intelligent and thought-provoking. I'd thought for some time that she had the makings of a good fiction writer, and I've been after her for some time to demonstrate it. Now she has, and with a story like nothing else that has ever appeared here or, to my knowledge, at any other site. It's a superheroine story, all right, but from a culture -- native Hawaiian -- unfamiliar to most of us, but familiar to Betty, who lives in Hawaii and is studying nursing there. Yes, she puts herself in her story, but don't we all? The point is to do it well, and she does that very well indeed!

Dec. 9, 2007

This would be the birthday of Jane Dolinger (1932-1995), if she were still alive today. Most of you have probably never heard of her, but back in the fifties and sixties she was a fave with a lot of young men who followed her exploits in Modern Man. And they were indeed exploits. Unlike other models in skin magazines, she lived an adventurous life, traveling to the wilds of South America in search of material for her books on Indian tribes and lost treasures. Modern Man illustrated short versions of her adventures with revealing shots of her killer body -- and it was thrilling to imagine making love to such a daring, intelligent and gorgeous woman. While she wasn't thought of that way at the time, she was a role model for women, and for the male imagination of women. A university professor is working on a biography of her; for now, you can check out "Before Lara Croft..."

And while you're here, check out Velvet Belle Tree's "Back to the..." Fredric Brown was a smart sf writer known for satirical novels like Martians Go Home and gritty stories like "Arena" -- the former was made into a movie, the latter adapted as a Star Trek episode. He was also known for biting short-shorts. But even smart writers can get the stupids once in a while, and here Velvet demonstrates just how stupid he got in "The Waveries," his story of what happens to mankind when an alien infestation eliminates electricity. I should have provided a link here when it was first posted some weeks back, but I got the stupids myself. Sorry, Velvet!

Nov. 3, 2007

Today I turn 66. For my birthday, I decided to do what my wife Velvet calls a "brain dump." Everything you were afraid to know about me and didn't want to ask. But "I Tell You This for the First Time Ever" isn't the usual sort of biography; you won't find anything about my family or my education save as it relates to my own appreciation of literature and the arts.

You might wonder what this has to do with the Aurora Universe. What it has to with the AU is to explain, in a very roundabout way, why I appreciate the genre that began with Shadar, and what I feel to be my own peculiar contribution to it. And as a working example, here is our collaboration, "Lifesaver ." It started as a vignette by Shadar, posted to the Aurora Universe Readers Group. Although it was a simple piece without any real backstory, I could see right away that it was set in the early years of the Enlightenment -- a period that nobody had yet written about except Lisa Binkley, long ago, in "Questlings." So I made some tweaks to the text, and added a frame similar to those of one of my favorite sf writers, Cordwainer Smith (mentioned in my brain dump). Shadar in turn made some more tweaks, supplied new artwork and -- voilà, a new chapter in our ongoing imaginary history.

Sept. 15, 2007

More than a year and a half ago, Velvet and I began writing what has finally become Part III of Homecoming. I think her "Ship's Life" chapter came first, and then my "Bleak Landing." But the writing came really hard for both of us. What were Ju'lette and Tassos supposed to do on the rest of their journey to Velor? And where were they to go afterwards? It was already in my mind that their mission would be a failure – I wrote the epilogue before any of the story, long before Shadar came up with the idea for First Protector, and before I came up with the idea of the Tanzrobian stories and linking them to Homecoming.

Bit by bit, we came up with ideas. Velvet's exploration of Scalantrans' cohorts and their sexual initiation customs was a brilliant stroke, and made for some of the best interchanges between humans and Scalantrans. And the Youthworld -- perfect. I wish I could say that my parts all started out as perfectly. For a while, I had the really cockamamie idea of a much larger party of Tanzrobians seeking some hidden world to settle; Velvet shot that down pretty quickly. While our contributions to the final text are about equal, moreover, I still consider her the lead writer: she has been a conscientious and exacting editor, catching me out time and again in matters of style, characterization and continuity. I've agreed with about 90% of her edits, I think, and dug in my heels over no more than a couple of scenes. Of course, I had some edits too -- I thought, for example, that the Wild River had to be a lot wilder than she originally described it to have a planet named after it.

But the bottom line is that Homecoming III, like marriage, is a matter of give and take – and all the better for it.

Sept. 3, 2007

It was nearly four years ago that Jordan Taylor and I undertook to collaborate on a sequel to Terms of Enhancement. She wrote the prologue, which gave me an education in some things military -- a "hasty" is an improvised, spur-of-the-moment firing position -- and inadvertently also inspired the title for "The Popcorn War"

We were going to alternate from there on, based on a loose outline I'd worked out, but after a few weeks Jordan didn't feel comfortable with the project -- it wasn't her world. She later began a solo Velorian Legion story, "Walking Tall," with a plot based on that of the movie -- but alas, she wasn't able to continue with that, either. At least, she hasn't been able to yet.

With her permission, I filled in the rest of an unfinished chapter in the manuscript as we'd left it to submit to a Superwomenmania workshop for collaborations, which had been really hurting for entries -- they had to postpone the deadline several times. Well, here's a version that also includes a pict of Xuxa I'd been meaning to use from the start. And it was a great start. I think that it could still be a great story. Anyone out there want to help finish it?

Aug. 21 , 2007

KeldStarwind comes out of the blue, but he's a hot new talent. "Aftermath" is a refreshingly novel take on the relationship between a Messenger and a Protector and will -- hopefully! -- become the basis of a series about Gabriel and Lysette. The first draft showed up in my mailbox Friday, July 17, with a message that began:

I've been following the AU on and off for many years now, and I've recently decided to try my hand at writing some fic. After digesting a lot of the info from the history links on the Bright Empire, I decided to start small with a quick story.

It was that same day that he joined the AURG. Maybe he'd been lurking there under another name, or names, for those "many years." Whatever, he's picked up on the basics and gone on from there. He's managed to pack a lot of background into less than 2,000 words, and blend the explicitly sexual with the tenderly romantic. Those are hard things to do.

July 27, 2007

It was three years ago today that I met Velvet Belle Tree. She'd contacted me ten days before that, through an online matching group to which I'd dropped my subscription because I'd been so disappointed with their matches. Only they not only kept me on their list, but shared my profile with another group she'd subscribed to. Such are the chances of life. Should I believe in fate? All I know is that I got lucky. To mark the occasion, here's her science fiction romance, "The Stars My Witness." She has a few things to say about it under Commentaries at her own page.

July 11, 2007

It was five years ago, give a take or day or so (And since I was away from home July 7, I had to take several days), that I made my Aurora Universe debut with The Defector. To mark that occasion, here is "Murk and Reprisal," a sequel to "Tanzrobian Nights" and a semi-prequel to Homecoming III (still in the works, and more a collaboration between Velvet and me than the first two parts).

I had earlier worked on a scene in which Zanele gave the Scalantrans an account of how she and the others made their escape. But that was tell, not show -- one of the literary sins that beginning writers are always warned to avoid. And with advice from Tarot and Shadar and most of all Velvet, I found myself reshaping the details of the narrative in ways that should, I hope, make Homecoming III more entertaining.

It was Velvet who steered me away from an implausible plot line that would have had a whole shipload of Tanzrobians seeking refuge on another world to practice genetic engineering on a millenial scale. It was she who created the name and personality of Pimponeous. And it was she who developed the romance between Mbali and Kobe, which will be continued in Homecoming III.

Also new is a Blog entry about the coming endgame in Iraq -- not something to gladden the hearts of either liberals or conservatives. And with the much-admired Daphne Orgone having not been seen for nearly a year, and not knowing whether her blog will even stay on the Web, I've added the rest of her entries to The Adventures of Super Daph.

June 22 , 2007

Summer is officially here, and with it an unusual update. Not a new story, but a lost-and-found story originally posted by Shadar nearly five years ago at the Aurora Universe 3 site, back in his Sharon Best days. "Protector" was an unusual story for him in those days, I think -- short and kind of Hemingwayesque in its simplicity, rather than pouring on the fetish elements and hyped-up prose. Here the nameless Protector is inspirational rather than seductive, sort of a Velorian Joan of Arc.

I must have read this when it first came out, but had forgotten about it until coming across it in a Wayback Machine archive -- pict and all (Archives and caches don't usually save artwork -- that takes up a lot of bandwidth.). But when I reread it, I was immediately reminded of another story, Tarot Barnes' Aurora's Tale. Only the first chapter of that epic has been posted thus far at Alternate Histories, but I think you'll see the resemblance. Perhaps it's pure coincidence, or perhaps "Protector" was the acorn from which a mighty oak has grown.

May 31 , 2007

I don't usually write rants about current issues -- there are plenty of people doing that already. But when it comes to Global Warming and Energy Independence, we nearly always hear from only the knee-jerk liberals and knee-jerk conservatives. Yet what really set me off to write "Hot Planet, or Hot Air?" was a story in The New York Times about a political boondoggle to end all political boondoggles -- a supposed "solution" to both problems that is so patently corrupt, so mindless, so totally vile in its motivaton (feed the coal companies that feed the politicians), so contrived to fail utterly in one of its claimed objectives, that... Well, even in a time of rampant corruption, I was shocked. And this disgusting exercise has won the support of liberals and conservatives alike. But I try to keep the rant itself, as opposed to this rant about the rant, clean and sober.

May 25 , 2007

You must have heard about Bionic Woman coming back to TV this fall. Maybe it will be good, maybe it won't. But it's hard to imagine it could be as good as Jordan Taylor's Bionic Girl, the first part of which appears here today. This has been a labor of love on her part; she began a very different version two years ago, but wasn't satisfied with it. The present version, with its introduction of rival bionic women whose fates are intertwined, appeared at Superwomenmania a little while back, but I've corrected a few minor glitches -- and added picts. Jordan herself chose the models, and she really knows what turns men on. She also has a good idea where the story is going -- but I'm not going to breathe a word about that.

May 21 , 2007

Well, this time I beat Rob to the Internet with Chapter 7 of The Mission. Things are finally coming to a head, politically. For all the sexcapades this series has been known for, my own and Rob's, our intention has always been to develop the story of Oon'ah and Xanthra as an opportunity for and a challenge to the Theel'dara Initiative of trying to win over the enemy.

There are already rumblings from conservatives back home, we learn early on. Colonel James Kim'Vallara thinks he can weather the storm, and use what he knows about the Vel-Arion couple to prove his case. But he's about to receive a shock from an unexpected quarter -- one that places Xanthra, the other Arions and his own career in extreme jeopardy. And Oon'ah's and Xanthra's outrageous behavior isn't helping any...

April 21 , 2007

Shadar explains it all in "Invulnerable to Labels," originally a response to a thread at the Aurora Universe Readers Group about whether there could be a handy catchphrase to characterize Velorians. No way, he says -- and he ought to know!

April 6 , 2007

Good Friday and good news: Part 4 has been added to Xoronewithnature's Wannabe Heroes. Xor (I have to call him something for short) is a true original, and so is his story. The heroine who calls herself Jessie (Other people call her Geisha.) and can teleport herself into and out of trouble, is like no one else in superheroine fiction, and the world in which she lives -- a world of strange villains and even stranger conspiracies -- is like nothing you'll see anywhere else. Depend on it. Some of you will pick up where you left off, others will start from the beginning; but all of you are in for a real treat.

Mar. 20, 2007

Spring has sprung. Daylight Saving Time has returned. And so has The Mission, after more than a year. Cast your mind back to Jan. 22, 2006. That's the last time there was an update here. Also an upset, because Rob had posted a version of Chapter 5 at Within This Realme which annoyed the hell out of me. Well, I put up my own edit, which doubtless annoyed the hell out of him.

We had a few contacts after that -- the last being in July, when I sent him some material for a collaborative Chapter 6. Then nothing until March 10, when he did it again -- posted his solo version without notice. I was royally pissed at first, because I thought some of it was silly as well as going against canon -- no big deal to him, because he saw the story line as satirical; but a big deal to me because The Mission was part of a continuity I'd been developing.

But after I'd had time to calm down a bit, I could see that there was a powerful story there -- Oon'ah and Xanthra and their work with Shad'rah. Outrageous, over-the-top, but powerful just the same. And I saw how I could keep the best of that, put in a few interpolations of my own and.... It took more than a week, but I did it. So here's my version of Chapter 6, posted sight unseen by Rob. Turnabout is fair play. I hope he'll understand.

Mar. 8, 2007

I hadn't originally planned on writing "Tanzrobian Nights," but the Arion conquest of a world seeded with African stock by the Galen themselves more than two millenia ago had become a climactic event in Homecoming II, and part of the runup for Homecoming III, a work still in progress. It is also part of the background of First Protector, a work in progress by Shadar. At some point, however, I realized that there was little or no background about Tanzrobi. To the best of my knowledge, no other stories have been set there, and the only significant example of the Azizi was Symbala in Shadar's "Return to Earth" a decade ago in his Sharon Best days. So I began sketching some characters and Googling shamelessly for given names, proper names and a veneer of "Tanzrobian" culture in Swahili, Zulu and other African language and culture sites. Zanele and her friend Mbali will appear in Homecoming III, anon, but here their experience with the Arion invasion can be a matter of show rather than tell.

Dec. 25, 2006

I wasn't really expecting to offer readers any Christmas present this year. But soon after I began making tweaks to The High Cruel Years in light of comments by Tarot Barnes that the story should touch more on the Reigel 5 war in general, Velvet began making tweaks of her own to Homecoming -- adding new material about training on Erin'lah and adding more color to the scenes on Andros. I'd been thinking of uploading my updates for New Year's, but Velvet was raring to go, and had hers ready early Christmas Eve. I finished mine just a short time later. As was her original wish, both parts of Homecoming are now in PDF Format:

Parts One, Two and Three of the revised version of The High Cruel Years are at their old URLS. Parts One and Two have new chapters relating to the ground war, and changes to other chapters in all three parts reflect that. There is also a new pict in Part Three -- one I'd meant to include in the first place but somehow overlooked. I'm not going to be any threat to Joseph Kanon, but I hope the new version strengthens the sense of history.

Dec. 18, 2006

An experiment suggested by Velvet. Today I offer a PDF version of her best Arish'ka story, "Rocky Mountain High." Her first AU story, Homecoming, was created in PDF format by Shadar when he did the initial setup for this incarnation of The Bright Empire, and is still by far the most popular work here. The sequel hasn't done as well, perhaps because it has always been in htm format. If the experiment succeeds, we may convert Homecoming 2 and other works.

Dec. 15, 2006

Just a couple of things today. The sight of Santa Claus in the Macy's parade got me to thinking about Thomas Nast, which got me to thinking about -- well, my latest blog entry is typical of the way I think. Then there was this guy named Tim Lewis who went to the same university I did, only years later. He took over the house paper I once edited, and one of his features was a comic strip called Frog. Years after that, Ross Chmberlain, the production manager at one of the trade magazines I worked for, redrew one episode for an article that never materialized. It surfaced recently among my things, and I think it's still amusing. Kind of a variation on Snoopy.

Dec. 1, 2006

Do you know what good comes out of?... Out of bad. That's what good comes out of. Because you can't make it out of anything else.

And now, Part Three of The High Cruel Years , with Shadar doing the showdown scenes with rogue Protector Zar'ya. But most of the story is mine, even though it began with an abortive story of his called "Lounge Singer."

It's been a long and complicated story, because I wanted it to be both personal and political. I wanted to play fair with the characters, a truly diverse lot: Harry Maclendon, and the Velorians Molly and Anya, who came out of Shadar's original concept. Returnees from Ordinary Velorians like Dr. Alex La'Reu and And'rea Cuppers, and more.

But I also wanted this to be a gritty political story. To do that, I had to introduce a number of new figures, including Siemsen Vozeh. They are faced with same dilemma of good and evil as Robert Penn Warren put in the mouth of his Huey Long-like leader. And yet I wanted a nearly hopeless situation to end on a note of hope, in a speech by Vozeh that paraphrases the famous address by Emperor Hirohito to his people at the end of World War II. And I wanted to create a resonance between the political and personal stories, as you'll see in the epilogue.

Besides that, I wanted to build on some of the ideas Shadar and others had thrown out. Shadar created the Jellutong; I gave them a backstory. I also added a bit more about the Christla, another invention of Shadar's that I had reverse-engineered in Companions. I wanted to give the Diaboli of Arcady -- strangers in a strange land -- a greater role in the story. And there were new concepts of my own, such as bringing in Dashiella as a Protector new to Reigel 5, but old enough to have known the Companions -- and even learned from them.

It was a little over two years ago -- Nov. 9, 2004, to be exact -- that Lisa Binkley announced at the AURG that she had placed a book review with SFReader.com. But rather than a new novel by Stephen Baxter or Harry Turtledove, the subject turned out to be Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which came out way back in 1957.

Most people who have read Rand's novel, I think, came across it in college or even high school. Some readers of that sort have become acolytes of Objectivism, as Rand called her philosophy of rational individualism; to them, Rand is the greatest writer and greatest genius of all time. Others have found Rand hard to take, to say the least -- some of them think Atlas Shrugged is the worst novel of all time, and its author nothing but a crank.

Coming to it relatively late, Lisa was able to see the novel in the light of greater experience than those younger readers, and her review may be the best ever written. She got the point, without getting all gushy or mushy -- she even placed Rand's novel better in the context of sf than I had. For I was one of those younger readers, one of those who loathed the book at first. And yet it got under my skin. It challenged my thinking. I never became a convert, for I couldn't stomach some of the things she and her acolytes said or wrote -- which struck me as neither rational nor ethical. And yet I came to share her general principles.

I tell that story in "The Road to Salvation?" Lisa's review led to some interresting discussion when it was posted. Maybe this will too.

"Al Sharpton's Cop-out" in my occasional blog is a more topical item than I usually post. But a bit of breaking news got me to ranting. I've recently created a new Links page, adding banners for some of my favorite sites. And Egoboo is devoted to flattering comments about my work here. It replaces some review blurbs for Throne of the Gods that ran below the story index -- the story index is now so much larger that probably nobody was noticing them any more. But speaking of large, this is one of the largest updates I've ever done. Consider it a holiday present.

Nov. 3 , 2006

Another birthday, and for a while I was afraid I'd have nothing to show for it. But then I got it into my head to do a spinoff of that "She's a Marvel" episode on Guiding Light -- despite the fact that it had infuriated soap fans and attracted little or no interest from superheroine and comics fans. I had this idea that Harley Davidson Cooper/Guiding Light represented a whole new kind of fantasy (I touch on that in my blog, and elaborate in "Behind the Stories."), so I wanted to see if I could do justice to it. I had only two days to write it, but here is "Electricity."

Some weeks ago, I heard from Xoronewithnature, that enigmatic author of "Wannabe Heroes" and "Asylum." He wanted me to look at two new chapters of "Wannabe Heroes," but wasn't sure he wanted them posted anywhere. Well, there were some typos and other things that needed to be fixed, but the chapters themselves were dynamite, revealing whole new perspectives on Jessie, his oddly-named Japanese-American superheroine, and the strange world of mystery and conspiracy that she inhabits. I did some edits, but didn't hear back from him after that -- until I appealed to him for a birthday present for The Bright Empire. It's been nearly a year since Part 1, which had a brief exposure at Ubergirls two years ago, was posted here. So I've put all three parts together at the old URL. Now the update is my present to all of you. If you already know how good this guy is, you'll be champing at the bit. If you don't, you're in for a treat. You've got to read "Wannabe Heroes." There's just nothing else like it.

Oct. 27 , 2006

Maybe you've heard about the upcoming (Nov. 1) creation of a superheroine on the soap opera Guiding Light, in a daring but risky collaboration with Marvel Comics. I might have made this a subject for Rants & Ramblings, but anything I say now may soon be discredited. So I'm making it a belated entry in the blog instead. Maybe I'll look prescient, maybe I'll look silly. But it will be fascinating to see how this genre crossover works -- or doesn't.

Sept. 28 , 2006

Like many of you, I saw My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Unlike many of you, I didn't care for it much. Neither did Velvet. Sure, it had some great scenes in it, including superheroine sex and the B&B fetish. But I thought G-Girl's whininess and pettiness were turn-offs. Well, Superwomenmania announced another workshop, this time on sequels. So I thought... Usually, I don't do pure fan fiction (One exception was "The Amulet of Raja."). But I had some ideas, and Shadar had just done a photomanip that would fit if only he'd tint the hair redder, which he did, and Velvet gave me a jump start. And so, "His New Super Girlfriend." It's got action, it's got sex, and it's got my usual arcana and in-jokes.

Sept. 24 , 2006

Yes, it's been a long time. But I've had a load of troubles with the laptop I use to manage The Bright Empire. A mouse gone bad; worse, a hard drive gone bad. I had it in the shop for weeks while the repair guy offloaded the files, put in a new hard drive, and reloaded the files. Then it turned out the Airport card wasn't working right and I couldn't access Velvet's wifi net. That was fixed, but then my Dreamweaver program told me it wasn't registered and it took me a couple of days to figure out how to take care of that problem. During those same two days, I happened to finish reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Cordelia's Honor, an omnibus edition of two of her best sf novels, Shards of Honor and Barrayar. There was a passage in the latter that jumped out at me and inspired the rant "Only the Necessary." It reflects my own mind and heart on a divisive issue now confronting our nation.

July 29 , 2006

Hadn't expected to add anything again until next month, but Daphne Orgone had a brainstorm the other day and came up with "Scent of a Superheroine ." Except for the title, she posted in at the Aurora Universe Readers Group. It's a scream, so I decided to give it a more accessible home here. And that scent? Let's just say it isn't honey and wildflowers!

July 27 , 2006

Velvet and I are working on some other projects right now, but in the meantime we have obtained the rights to mirror the original story line of Super Daph, the diary of a teenage supergirl named Daphne Orgone. The Super Daph blog was launched Oct. 26, 2005, but its author took a long break after Dec. 6, returning only June 19, 2006. Here's your channce to catch up on the 2005 entries, rearranged in chronological order for your convenience. I've rationalized a few datelines that didn't match the text, but left the story unchanged. I enjoy giving promotional support to young writers of merit like "Daphne." You can follow her blog to read more.

There's this porn novel called Ways of a Wanton Wench that I've had sitting around for about 35 years now. Porn novels aren't usually worth keeping; one is pretty much like any other, and the publishers as well as the books are generally here today, gone tomorrow. But the erotic tale of a woman warrior named Bradamante is different. I try to explain why in "Porn with a Pedigree." And in a much overdue addition to my blog, I take note of the failure of the latest attempt at a superheroine movie and the reasons for that failure.

June 21 , 2006

Just a short update to celebrate the Summer Solstice: a new chapter by Spulo for "When We Dead Awaken." Spulo had already done great work on another interactive story at Superwomenmania, "Transformatrix 4000," so I knew he'd come through and continue my story in the right spirit.

June 1 , 2006

What with the press of a demanding day job, a possible Aurora Universe showcase for disk or download, and other projects, I've neglected site updates of late. So I'm trying to catch up now, even though I don't have any fresh AU material - such as Part III of The High Cruel Years - in hand,

"As You Like It" started last year as a failed parody of the Xtreme Strength type of story, and as a possible entry in one of the SGI workshops at Superwomenmania. But I couldn't finish it in time, and as it stood the draft was too gross even for me in my sober moments. But there's still a readership out there for pure fetish fiction, and I still like to cater to that once in a while. So with some major writing and rewriting... Moreover, inspiration returned to me in the form of pictures of a gorgeous African- American model from 20 years ago. Don't worry, I'm not going PC on you, like the folks at DC Comics with their lesbian Batwoman and multi-ethnic heroes. But beautiful female flesh comes in all colors. Rest assured that there is no redeeming social value here -- if you want fetish fiction, that's exactly what you're going to get.

"When We Dead Awaken" started as an interactive story at Superwomen Mania, and it's still there -- my initial two chapters, and two more by Argonaut and CK. But there haven't been any further chapters posted there in ages, even though I uploaded a re-edit not long ago to try to revive interest. Maybe posting it here will get some action. Or not. The genesis of the story was two-fold: an attack on so-called "peril fiction," which I loathe; and a fascination with cross-time travel. Do any of you remember H. Beam Piper's Paratime stories, or Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium series, in which outlaws and lawmen travel between alternate versions of the present with different histories? Some of the SWM people do, and one of them was also well-read enough to know that I'd stolen my title from Henrik Ibsen's last play.

Back when I was watching the soap opera Port Charles (See "A True Story of a Writer Come Lately" ), I wrote an essay on the blend of soap and science fiction in a time travel-time paradox story arc called "Time in a Bottle." I had vague notions of placing it with some soap fanzine or even a scholarly publication. But nothing came of that, and nobody would be interested now -- the show itself died nearly three years ago. But for those who want to see what my science fiction commentary is like -- and I've recently revived my efforts in that field -- "Time in a Bottle:" Vintage Soap Meets Vintage SF is a relatively short and painless introduction.

May 15 , 2006

Nothing new for a while, but I've just updated Throne of the Gods, Ordinary Velorians and "Deer Meadow Shuffle" to reflect a consensus among members of the Aurora Universe Writers Group to remove the last vestiges of DC Comics references from the AU by changing the name of the Zor'El family to Jahr'ling and, in particular, Kara Zor'el to Kira Jahr'ling. A related change is from Rhea-El to Rhea'ling in The High Cruel Years.

April 1 , 2006

Just in time for the third anniverasry of the Aurora Universe Readers Group is "The Adaptive Intimate," a non-AU story inspired by a seeming throwaway scene at the end of Larafan and Stoneyman's "Ultrafemme -- Gemini," recently added to the Story Bank at Superwomenmania. More about that in Behind the Stories; suffice it to say here that my chance encounter with that story (I'd never looked at it on the Xtreme Strength site when it was posted there in 2003) gave me a chance to write a really different ubergirl story.

March 24 , 2006

This time, it's Velvet's update, with a non-Aurora Universe story she wrote for SGI Workshop 2.4 called "It Ain't Easy." Like my "Double Blind" and "Serious Radio," and Xoronewithnature's "Asylum," it had to tell its story within 1,000 words. It's a gem, like everything Velvet writes -- and her first short-short.

March 5 , 2006

It's been three years now since The Bright Empire made its debut, and more than five months since a major fiction update. The High Cruel Years has been my own most popular story of late, and it's high time you saw more of it. So here's Part Two, in which the situation on Reigel 5 continues to deteriorate -- the civil war turning into a dirty war. Molly and Anya are caught in the middle; Cher'ee and James are in the dark -- and the Reigellian government is more hindrance than help. Shadar, who began the story as Lounge Singer, contributed to this part with the scenes of Molly and Anya battling the menschenjagers, and And'rea luring a Reigellian minister to more than le petit mort.

In a somewhat lighter vein is "In the Penile Colony," which started as a joke but, as often happens with my fiction, grew in the telling (and in a hurry, too, to make the deadline for SGI Workshop 1.7). The title is a spoof of Franz Kafka's classic horror story "In the Penal Colony," but if he could read past the first line he'd be spinning in his grave. So would Aram Khachaturian -- you'll see why. You'll have a good time along with some good laughs. And some good sex which is, of necessity, missing thus far in The High Cruel Years.

When I posted his "Wannabe Heroes," I knew nothing about Xoronewithnature. I still know next to nothing. But I was crazy about his writing from the day I read his "Asylum" at Superwomenmania, it being an entry in SGI Workshop 2.3. Now you can see it here, with typos corrected and italics restored. It's one of the best short-short stories I've ever read, with unforgettable characters, an unforgettably moving relationship, and hints of an entire world in social breakdown behind the surface events. How'd he do it? Read and find out.

"Don't You Think He Knows That" is an essay I've been wanting to write for years, ever since I watched a TV show called 100 Centre Street and found the first episode lacking emotional honesty. But somehow I never got around to it, even though I'd had my arguments and citations running through my head from a day or two after I watched that episode. Well, I've finally done it. And it tells you something about my own approach to writing -- something I get very emotional about.

Serenedipity happens. Velvet Belle Tree doesn't have a new story this time, alas, but she does have an essay on the marriage of science fiction and romance in novels that have variously been categorized as Futuristic Romance, Science Fiction Romance and Romantic SF. For those who think sf has to be cerebral, or that romance has to be nothing but mush involving TSTL (Too Stupid to Live) heroes and heroines, "Science Fiction and Romance" should be an eye opener.

Jan. 22 , 2006

Every once in a while, Rob finishes another chapter of The Mission. I'd been waiting for the latest for several months. That was mainly because one of the scenes, James Kim'Vallara literally undressing Bidu Braga with his heat vision, was really inspired. I'd read it in partial draft all those months ago, and had a picture of Bidu to go with it -- supplied years ago by Ultragirl. Anyway, here's my edit of Chapter 5, not quite the same as Rob's version at his site. I have a proprietary interest in James and Bidu, you see, and wanted to tweak their part to suit myself. But speaking of seeing, check out the special link at the end of the chapter.

Jan. 15 , 2006

Maybe you've never heard of Xoronewithnature. When I saw his "Asylum" at the Superwomenmania Story Bank as an entry in the SGI Workshop 2.3, the name didn't ring a bell with me. But his story blew me away. When I googled his screen name -- which is still all I know about him -- I discovered that he had posted a story called "Wannabe Heroes " at Ubergirls back in 2004.

I don't recall seeing it at the time, but when I read it I thought: "Wow!" Not knowing even Xor's e-mail address (I still don't), I reached him through the message link at SWM for permission to post that story here (He plans a sequel, but Skietra knows when we'll see it.). What can I say? A brief summary of "Wannabe Heroes" would make it sound like a standard superheroine-comes-to-the-rescue story. Trust me, it isn't. This heroine isn't standard. Neither is the situation. Neither is the writing. Read it!

As another treat, a review by Velvet of a new book by a new author that you really should read. She got me to read Craig Johnson's The Cold Dish, and I hope she'll persuade you to do the same.

Jan. 11 , 2006

Big News Today! In a major reorganization of The Bright Empire, Velvet Belle Tree has been given her own page. What better way to celebrate her birthday? Velvet's Velorians & More under Other Voices will henceforth be the place to find all her stories and essays, present and future. Here's where you'll get to read the story of her literary life in her own words. Her new contemporary story, "Musings of a Rejected Woman," has been uploaded to further celebrate the occasion. It has a real bite to it as a new take on the scorned woman tale. My only contribution this time is "Serious Radio," a spoof about a Howard Stern-type making a fool of himself with ersatz supergirls and then a bigger fool of himself with a real one.

Dec. 29 , 2005

I've done it again! My Christmas Eve essay for Rants & Ramblings got such a response that I decided to try another, "On Becoming a Man." It's totally unrelated, except that it reflects my ethical perspective. It's something I've wanted to write for a long time, about a movie called The Last Prostitute which, despite its title, is really about decency and true manhood. But I wasn't entirely sure of my ground until I showed it to Velvet. She agreed with my argument. She said go for it.

Dec. 24 , 2005

This time, it's my first essay for Rants & Ramblings in a good long time. "Cultural Calvinism" addresses one of my pet peeves. Maybe it's one of your pet peeves too. Plus, I've updated my Blog with Christmas wishes.

Dec. 18 , 2005

Just a brief notice. While working on other projects, including Part Two of The High Cruel Years, I've begun a blog on the Rants and Ramblings page. It will be mostly thoughts and commentary on one thing or another as the spirit moves me -- nothing like a diary or fictional narrative. But I hope it will be entertaining and informative.

Dec. 1 , 2005

Pegasus Gate is not a superheroine novel. But neither is most of the fiction of Ed Howdershelt and Lisa Binkley. An e-book in progress Belle Tree, it tells the story of men and women from diverse backgrounds who have been chosen by lottery and by fitness to colonize a new wby myself and Velvetorld. They have good reason to leave Earth, for Earth some decades hence is not a pleasant place to live: there have been plagues, desultory wars, and general social and economic breakdown.

New Hope is indeed a world of new hope to the few chosen to settle there. And yet it is far from a paradise. Colonists must labor from dawn to dusk to wrest a living from the land, reclaiming it bit by bit from the native ecology - which can strike back at times in terrible ways. There is an odd mix of necessary primitive and necessary high technology, but luxuries are few and far between. Those of New Hope have no one to depend on but each other, as they strive to create a society that will - hopefully - avoid the mistakes that have plagued their old world.

We have each written chapters and revised each other's. "The Widower," in which an ordinary New Hope farmer faces personal tragedy, was begun by Velvet, and revised and expanded by both of us until it took its present form.

But to remain true to the primary purpose of The Bright Empire, and with Velvet's assistance, I have also updated Throne of the Gods, correcting previous unnoticed errors, tweaking details about the Scalantrans in light of her own contributions to the canon on that people, and adding a picture of Alisa-zar Kim Vallara

Nov. 3 , 2005

Well, here it is, another birthday and nothing to show for it from myself or the usual suspects. But serendipity has stepped in. Daphne Orgone, a new member of the Aurora Universe Readers Group, has been managing a role playing Yahoo group superheroine fiction site called Bronze Babe and Friends since the end of June. The central character, also named Daphne Orgone, is a college freshman with all the usual problems of college freshmen, plus some unusual ones -- being a young superwoman and all. I've culled several scenes from early posts and assembled them into a sampler about her first day at college with flashbacks to her high school years. Speaking of which latter, Daphne also has a blog devoted to her that has drawn favorable notice from AU fans. Daphne's a terrific writer, and she has able support from her fellow RPG writers. But a word of caution: her Yahoo group is invitation only, and its members are expected to contribute characters and scenes to the ongoing story. No lurkers!

Oct. 25 , 2005

Only one new story today, "Double Blind," already mentioned here when it was entered in SGI Workshop 2.2. But this version has been tweaked a bit to clarify some points that confused Shadar, and it includes the heroic nude that inspired the story (See more about that in Behind the Stories.). But I've done a few updates on other stories. Part One of Velvet's Homecoming is now available in htm as well as PDF format, with a link to Part Two that the PDF is missing. We hope that more people will read both parts now -- and Part Three whenever it comes. Also new are two mp3 music links: James and Bidu's love song in he final scene of Terms of Enhancement, and a snippet of Reddick Mallard's "angry music" in Chapter XXVI of The Defector. I may try more such embellishments in the future.

Oct. 19 , 2005

There's a famous story by Frank R. Stockton called "The Lady or the Tiger," in which an accused man is brought to an arena and asked to choose between two doors. Behind one, a beautiful woman. Behind the other, a man-eating tiger. But Lt. Ken Dahl has no such choice in Evelyn Y's "New Orders" -- it's the Lady and the Tiger in another chapter of her work-in-progress called Project SG, centering on the genetically enhanced Katie O'Grady. When Dahl's assigned to serve her needs, it may mean love or death or both. Meanwhile, I've got an entry in SGI Workshop 2.2 at Superwomenmania.com. "Double Blind" is a story about two people whose lives cross paths on a remote world, a man and a woman who work together but don't truly know each other until one fateful night....

Oct. 1 , 2005

The High Cruel Years is set on Reigel 5, not long after Ordinary Velorians. Begun by Shadar and continued by myself, it's a rather grim story and promises to become grimmer, because it's about the disintegration of a world in a cruel civil war fueled by fanatics. You'll recognize parallels with the fate of Yugoslavia, but the heart of the story is in the decent people -- Reigellian and Velorian alike -- who are trying to hold things together. For comic relief, there's "Shopping with Katie," a sample chapter of a work-in-progress by Evelyn Y, whose "Paul" has become legend and whose input to my Sleeping Beauty was crucial, but who hasn't been heard from for quite a while. What, a story about a shopping trip? Trust me, you'll love it! And Evelyn also shares her thoughts on the superheroine theme in a short essay.

Sept. 1 , 2005

Just one story this time, "Bird of Paradise." It's a sequel to Shadar's McCloud's Daughters and Scrumbles and a prequel to Andy's Finding Sanctuary, which made it really difficult to keep things straight and maintain some continuity in the lives of Ben Shaffer and the McClouds -- especially since even Shadar isn't entirely clear on some matters. But he has himself to blame for us writing it, because he announced the story at the end of McCloud's Daughters and then left it as yet another of his great unfinished projects.

July 20, 2005

Another double feature of Arish'ka to mark the anniversary of the first moon landing: Velvet Belle Tree's "Rocky Mountain High" and my own "Deer Meadow Shuffle." These being the first stories posted since our wedding July 3, they may satisfy some readers curious as to what the first Aurora Universe marriage will mean to Aurora Universe fiction. Both stories are raunchy, of course, but in a way we hope will appeal to both men and women. Aside from that, they stand apart even though they stand together -- Velvet's is tied in only with previous stories in this series, whereas mine is a much-belated sequel to "Mundane Secrets of the Yo-Yo Brotherhood" -- not about Charmin, whose destiny was revealed in "Sleeping Beauty," but the people she left behind in a small town in Washington. And there's a nod to the Diaboli of Andy Yakovsky....

June 29 , 2005

It's finally here! What you've all been waiting for. Part II of Velvet Belle Tree's epic story Homecoming. Part I was the most popular story by far on the new TBE, with more than 1,450 reads since it was posted March 8. But the continuation is even better, as Ju'lette reunites with Tassos on Andros and shares councils and counsels with the elite of that world -- including Kalla, oldest of the Companions -- on matters vital to the future of Terrans, Supremis and Scalantrans alike.

Meanwhile, things are also heating up on Binkley's World, where in Chapter 4 of "The Mission," Protectors originally assigned to the liberation of that world from the Arions are starving for a Messenger. Col. James Kim'Vallara receives a surprise visit from his wife Bidu -- but he has a lot on his mind, including the secret of Oon'ah and Xanthra. Should he confide in her?

June 15 , 2005

The Ides of June brings the first Aurora Universe story by Jordan Taylor, an exciting new talent first seen in "Obsolete." "Walking Tall" is the story of Patricia, a Velorian Legionnaire who has been serving on Novo Recife but longs to return home to Alguna Parte. But as we learn in Part One, her welcome home isn't all that pleasant.

Meanwhile... ever wonder what Shadar's stardates in Shore Leave actually refer to? Velvet Belle Tree has the answer -- a calendar that began with the Scalantrans, but was adopted and adapted by the Terran diaspora because it was the Scalantrans who first united the scattered human worlds, centuries before the Enlightenment and the Empire.

May 30, 2005

Chapter 3 of "The Mission," revised by Rob, is new today. I hope to have Chapter 4, which will be more of a collaboration and tie in more with the Ordinary Velorians cycle, ready before long -- if wedding plans and other distractions permit. Speaking of Ordinary Velorians, I am restoring pictures to the original serial that have been missing since The Bright Empire moved to its new home. And the About the Aurora Universe page has been updated with links to the new sites of Moxie and Uberepicure and the new URL of Julie and Friends. Further updates, including a link to Shadar's new version of Origins of the Supremis, are in the works.

May 1, 2005

The delay might have been longer if Velvet BelleTree hadn't created the delightful character of Arish'ka in "What's a Vel to Do?" But there were two other inspirations: Mandi Steele's photo set "Houseguest," in which a drop-in at some (lucky!) guy's house turns out to be Supergirl; and Sharon Best's "Evana" (recently rewritten by Shadar as "Evan'ya"), in which a Vel rewards an ordinary guy for showing bravery. In my own "Houseguest," I wanted to make the Mandi Steele fantasy come alive, do something fresh with the Sharon Best fantasy, and tell a story worthy of Arish'ka -- even though I don't use her name.

Which Velvet herself does in "More Than One Way to Skin an Arion," a sequel to "What's a Vel to Do?" This story is an entry in the latest Supergirls, Inc., contest. Since I'd put up Jordan Taylor's "Obsolete" when that was an entry in the previous contest, I can hardly deny Velvet a place at TBE before the voting. And it's a great story by one who writes AU fiction as if she had been doing it all her life -- a comic take on the ubergirl vs. ubergirl theme of the contest.

Charon MacDonald has sent a revised and expanded version of "Death is the Middle (Not the End)." We just can't praise Charon highly enough, and we hope more of you will read his brilliant take on life after death -- and the more-than-life-and-death stakes there.

With Shadar adding to the saga of Alisa Liddell at Aurora Universe: Other Worlds with "Encounter at Westfold," I thought it was time to update the Ordinary Velorians timeline. The new version also includes references to Andy's (formerly Leafblade's) contributions. Besides that, I've added a Vendorian history, AU-3 version, adapted from an AU-L&F version posted by Tarot Barnes at the AU Readers Group.

Finally, having belatedly learned the Velorian words for "I love you" ("Kai tamoor'sk"), I've done a few tweaks to "Sleeping Beauty" to add them. Altogether, what we thought would be a minor update has turned into a major event.

April 17, 2005

Charon MacDonald returns with his second story for Other Voices -- a tale of the supernatural that puts such famed writers as Stephen King to shame. In "Death is the Middle (Not the End)," as the title suggests, there are worse things than death. Gwenolyn's about to find that out --she has just been killed, and finds herself called upon to defend her fellow dead as well as avenge herself on her killer.

Meanwhile, taking time out from her stories in progress, Velvet Belle Tree turns to Rants and Ramblings to tell us about The Last Valley, a movie set during the death and destruction of the Thirty Years War -- a truly great movie that none of us should miss.

The Bright Empire is looking for you!

We've always got good stories and good essays. If you're looking for exciting superheroine fiction and intelligent discussion, this is the place!

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