Iounelle

Iounelle Treelaughter Wendralorn Awaruaine knelt to check the signs in the dry autumn grass. Nearby, the bodies of five garonds lay dead.

Treelaughter was her elvish nickname. Wendralorn was her family name. And Awaruaine was the name given by the priests at her birth, a secret name, only to be told to her betrothed on her first night of marriage. Now that name was irrelevant. There were no other elves to be her husband.

The garonds were part of a larger platoon she had been tracking for several weeks. They were headed westward from the Holmwy River. These five had doubled back. It didn’t matter why to the elf. She would have killed them in any case.

Iounelle plucked a handful of the meadow grass and wiped the garond blood from her long, silver, crescent shaped sword. It resembled the moon in its last phase. Along the inner edge ran old elvish runes in a dialect of elvish so ancient the words made little sense to her. She could pick out the words ‘glory’ and ‘key’, but the phrasing was too old to readily understand.

The elf looked up at the cold, blue sky. The memory of the slaughter of the last elves in all of Wealdland constantly played before her eyes. She clutched her breast with the heart break. When the garonds, their age old friends, suddenly attacked, she had been knocked unconscious by her brother, and hidden in the trees near the walls of the ancient city of the elves, called Lanis Rhyl Landemiriam.*

That's how the book begins. we know instantly a little about our last elf, why she's the last of her kind, and how and why she is consumed with single minded vengeance.

Pretty concise. I think it's ok writing, if it isn't good writing.

I found it challenging to write for Iounelle. For one thing, she's an entirely alien being to humans. Another problem is her situation is almost too overwhelming. I found it hard to even entertain the notion of what it must feel like to be the last of your kind.

Extinction is real. It happens. We toss around the concept without considering how universally horrific it must be for the last of some species. Can you image the last of the dodos? Some bird calling, for the rest of its natural born days, calling for another of its kind who will never answer.

That goes beyond loneliness. That would eventually give you some kind of zen like, super, god like awareness. Or, you would simply go mad.

In any case, I found myself leaving Iounelle mostly to herself. I found I rarely wanted to know her thoughts, or feelings. I imagined they were just too big to understand, never mind her alien nature as an elf.

As her writer, I thought it best to just let her show what she felt and thought through her actions and dialogue. The advantage of print fiction is we can know a character's innermost thoughts and feelings in great detail. Iounelle's heart just seemed too, too vulnerable to explore with anything but the greatest of reverence.

cheers,

Kurt

*excerpt from The Last Elf of Lanis copyright Kurt Hargan 2010

Magic versus Science versus Magic

wow. Yesterday's blog was pretty scattered. I think I tried to express too many ideas too quickly. So I'll try to limit my topics to a single idea. Yesterday I said the theme would be magic versus science.

Okay. Magic and science. Both create an effect. "Hocus Pocus" or "throw the switch". What's the difference?

Science attempts to get to the verifiable source of reactions. If it can be explained and recreated in the lab, that's science.

So then magic is the opposite, right? I don't necessarily think so. If a magician sprinkles a mixture of sodium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal on an open flame, he'll get sparks. Does he understand the chemical reaction and the atomic weight of the compounds he used? Maybe not. That's gunpowder by the way. But our magician has identified compounds which will get verifiable results. He can do it again and again because he has a knowledge of powders and mixtures which get him his result. This kind of magician is more like an artisian, because his process depends on flash and patter. The guys who make their living doing this preferred to be called illusionists. Maybe because they don't hold any illusions of performing real magic.

So what about this real magic? The force? Summoning of spirits, elementals or demons? Most any rational person you meet on the street will laugh at the notion of real magic. We all know that the impossible things we see at the movies are CGI, and in books, flights of fancy. Okay, clearly there needs to be a delineation between illusion and real magic.

We could define real magic as some effect which, through the will of the magician creates an effect contrary to the seeming laws of nature. Yeah. That'll do.

But, less than two hundred years ago, the average person on the street couldn't tell you what lightning was. Maybe they would laughingly tell you that it was Zeus trying to kill a fly. Two thousand years ago, and that person explaining lightning wouldn't be laughing. They'd be serious about Zeus and the gods of Olympus.

So, it comes down to what a person, or culture understands about the world around them and how it changes from one state to another. The freezing of the river five thousand years ago was the magic will of the gods. Today we know it's due to the changing of the earth's average local temperature due to the seasons.

What if our person five thousand years ago saw something we couldn't explain today? We would both of us, ignorant man of yesterday and enlightened man of the future, would both consider calling it magic, only because we don't understand the process by which the effect occurred.

So science and magic come down to ignorance and knowledge. Maybe. Maybe not.

Can you explain to me how your microwave cooks your pasta? How your Blu-ray plays your Hi-def movies? We enjoy a lot of commonly owned things which we, mostly, understand only on the most basic terms. Kind of like magic.

And what if our science gets to a level where we can manipulate the world around us on an atomic level? Science may get to this kind of potence before you join your ancestors in the bone yard.

So when you create that living rabbit, seemingly out of thin air, from the molecules you've generated and arraigned by your nanotechnologic matter reconstruction matrix, just before you throw the switch, maybe you should say, "Hocus Pocus".

cheers,

KJH

Life from nanotechnology?

Look carefully at chapter three.

The Germ of an Idea

The first inklings of an idea for my novel The Last Elf of Lanis came after rereading the Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth time.

I'm a great fan of anthropology, particularly recent history, neolithic and early bronze age. I'm fascinated by the movements of humans in prehistory and the glimpses we have of their day to day life through archeologic digs.

The glimmer of the idea first came as a "what if?" What if Tolkien's Middle Earth were real? How would that reconcile with what we know of the eras intermediary to the present day?

This is when Wealdland began to take shape in my mind.

Wealdland is the fictional world of The Last Elf of Lanis. There is still a land bridge isthmus linking the British isles to Europe. This is a geological fact which existed in the Eemian period, approximately 140,000 years ago. The earth at this time was rapidly retreating from another ice age. The earth has experienced at least six ice ages.

At this time wolves were first becoming domesticated.

Also Neanderthal humanoids were quickly dying out, unable to compete with Homo Sapiens.

These then were some of the elements percolating in my mind as I shaped the world in which the characters struggle for their very existence.

In the realm of the purely fantastical, another "what if?" struck me. In Tolkien's world, the elves were leaving, and magic was fading. Well, what if we followed the story of the last elf to leave our world. This became the spark to set Iounelle, the last elf of Lanis, the mythical land of the elves, on her journey.

Wealdland, although inspired by Tolkien's Middle Earth, is as far removed in time, heritage, and mutation of language as the philosophers of Plato's Acropolis are from the professors of UCLA. You won't find names, places or events from any of Tolkien's works in mine. My conceit is that at least 500,000 years have passed since the end of the fictional world of the Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien's Third Age ends with the Return of the King, leading to the Fourth Age of Man. My novel assumes that that Fourth Age ended with the degradation of humanity to nearly bestial levels. With the passing of an ice age, the Fifth Age begins, in my mythology, with humanity barely able to survive with stone and bronze tools.

Meanwhile, the Neaderthal humanoids, in The Last Elf of Lanis called garonds, although usually nonviolent and shy, have been organized into vicious and efficient armies by the last dark lord of magic, Deifol Hroth.

One of the major themes of my novel is the transition from the magic of incantation and summoning to the magic of science. Which is the topic of discussion of the next blog.

K. J. Hargan

An article about the Weald, a massive forest in the south of prehistorical Britain, and the isthmus which connected it to Europe.

An article about the prehistoric animals of Britain and Europe.

cheers.

First day

This is my first blog concerning my novel The Last Elf of Lanis. Here I will chronicle my efforts to publish my novel and answer any questions.

Kurt J. Hargan