THE UNPLANNED FUTURE OF PERSONAL FANTASY AND THE FICTION IT WILL SPAWN

A couple of months ago, I rather glibly announced that I was commencing work on what would be the fifth in my series of Victor Renquist novels. At the time it was perfectly true and, for that matter, still is. The only thing I failed to mention, since I tend not to talk too publically about works in progress, is that I had chosen what proved to be a decidedly grandiose theme. The nephilim were returning to Earth to check on the 12000 year progress of their genetic seeding that had not only created humanity in the first place but also various strains of by-product sub-species of vampires and demons. The added kicker was that if, when they got here, they didn’t like what they found, they’ll erase the entire human experiment. It seemed like a damned fine idea at the time, Renquist had already faced Cthulhu, Merlin, Reptile men and nuke-wielding Nazis in the Hollow Earth, so why not go for broke and have my non-human hero confront the creator aliens. I still have no problem with the concept, but – despite all efforts to pretend otherwise – I just have to face the fact that damned book is threatening to turn into an epic in which Victor Renquist is only one of a number characters through whom we watch the panic and disorder as the nephilim are observed making their majestic way in from the outer rim of the solar system. (And if none of this makes any sense, I can only suggest that you pick up a couple of my novels and sample the ride.)

Then there was also the matter of the nephilim themselves. I found myself moving in part into a more abstract fiction mode based on a grand misunderstanding of string theory. If the nephilim were so very superior, advanced, and different, they must also occupy a very superior, advanced, and different universe. They cannot merely be bio-entities in metal ships. They mutate into something completely different slipping in and out of multiple realities and forcing me to use skills honed in previous works like Necrom and Jim Morrison’s Adventures In The Afterlife. The fear is, of course, that this is just the aging author attempting to braid the multiple threads of his fiction at risk of some Justice League of America clusterfuck in which an author tries to integrate all of his fantasies into some spurious Farren universe. I think I’m too smart to allow that to happen, but I have to admit the whole project is turning into quite a mind-snapper (and will scare the shit out of a publishing environment at a time when most are too timorous to risk anything but celebrity cookbooks.) But my hope is that it will be truly great provided I live to finish it.

Here are a couple of snippets. This one is from the POV of a minor entity in the Nephilim Oneness…

Clear of the membrane and over the bridge, the Oneness inflated and multiplied. It sluiced off the black matter now it was no longer required, streaming it from the gaping dorsal and anterior nacelles in dense clouds of blood-like quark-particles, that sparked at their instant of annihilation. New dark energy scoops extended. The creaking hull fought massive interior stress and grew rigid, rapidly thickened against the New Vacuum. Newtonian gearing ground upon itself, only partially lubricated. The unyielding grated on the more unyielding, while interior bulbs reacquired their fluids, and the primal glands inhaled and extended. Flow-valves regulated the paths of liquid tides and the bore-courses of bright super-cold vapors. Massive pistons thrust deep into their receiving cylinders. Cells defined themselves and units detached in autonomy. Flares in the whiteness reestablished motion in sweeps of swirling convection and flurries of carbon snow. Flesh recognized its own nakedness, and the isolate minds of the bio-entity multitude gravitated to their assigned stations.

And this is from the very different POV of Gideon Windermere, a character who previously appeared in the novel Necrom.

As if in confirmation, he noticed her lace panties were still on the coffee table, draped over some empty beer bottles, the contents of which they had used to chase the absinthe/tincture cocktails. He could not totally remember how the undergarment had arrived there. By the time they had reached the stage of shedding their clothes, they both been high as kites and mildly hallucinating. He picked up the wisp of lace, but then had no idea what to do with it, and dropped the panties on the floor. He was already feeling more warm and fuzzy than he had before, and he didn’t want to think about Lucinda. The FedEx box was waiting for him, and Gideon Windermere reluctantly picked up the switch blade with the mother-of-pearl handle from beside his computer and snapped it open. The switchblade was something of a good luck token. He had acquired it on drunken night in Paris while he was still a young man, and, against all odds it had stayed with him ever since. With the open blade, he got down on the floor beside the box, approaching it with the kind of caution usually reserved for bomb disposal.

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The secret word is Phew