Bright Empire

I used to have a thread here. Thought I did, anyway. Hadn't updated it in a long time, but I want to point out some recent major items.

"Wannabe Heroes," a story by Xoronewithnature (author of "Asylum" at SGI Workshop 2.3) is now at Other Voices. It had previously appeared only as a post at the sadly now defunct Ubergirls. But now you can read it at:

brightempire.com/wannabe.htm

Speaking of Other Voices, my wife Velvet now has a page of her own there. You can access all her fiction and non-fiction at:

brightempire.com/Velvet.htm

I started an Occasional Blog recently under Rants & Ramblings. Nothing like Ultragirl's, but you may find it amusing. I also have a new essay there, "On Becoming a Man."

brightempire.com/Becoming.htm

What with the press of a demanding day job, a possible Aurora Universe showcase for disk or download, and other projects, I've neglected Bright Empire 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.

brightempire.com/Like.htm

"When We Dead Awaken" started as an interactive story here at Superwomenmania, and it's still here -- 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 at The Bright Empire 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 people HERE do, and one of them was also well-read enough to know that I'd stolen my title from Henrik Ibsen's last play.

brightempire.com/Awaken.htm

Back when I was watching the soap opera PORT CHARLES (See "A True Story of a Writer Come Lately" on my story index page), 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.

brightempire.com/Bottle.htm

I haven't posted here in a long time, mainly because I've been making my announcements at Yahoo's Aurora Universe Readers Group.

But Yahoo seems to be in serious trouble. Since last Friday, groups there have suffered repeated outages, with home pages showing "No Activity" and message archives "temporarily unavailable." The problems seemed to have been cleared up yesterday, although it somtrimes took hitting the refresh button to bring up the content. But today it's worse than ever.

A new Google Aurora Universe Readers Group has been created. At first, it seemed as if it was needed only as a backup, but now it may have to be a replacement. But there are only a few members, and it will take a while for the new group owners to invite members from the old Yahoo group.

If any of you are having trouble with other Yahoo groups, you might try faxing complaints to 408-329-3301 (Phone is 408-329-3000, but they won't put you through to anybody, and the e-mail complaint address they give you -- egroups-feedback@yahoo-inc.com -- doesn't work.).

For Bright Empire updates, check out:

brightempire.com/new.htm

That's it for now.

An anniversary update:

There are two inspirations for “Lifesaver,” the collaboration between Shadar and myself that he has kindly allowed me to post to mark my 66th birthday today.

The first was Shadar’s memory of a co-worker, who became the namesake of Muhammad’s wife in the vignette he posted Oct. 11:

<When I was living in a Muslim country, a woman named Nahlia worked for me. She was devoutly Muslim, one of the few women who left work to attend mosque on Friday afternoons (all men must do this), and she was the manager of my finance department. Between her work ethic (absolute honesty) and her delightful sense of humor, she was a real joy to work with. She was a beacon of what it means to both live in her faith and to live in the 21st century industrial world. She wore only traditional gowns, brightly colored flowing robes and scarf in the local tradition.>

The second was my recognition that the vignette was the first story set in the early years of the Enlightenment since Lisa Binkley’s “Questlings” nearly seven years ago. I wanted to expand on that a bit by creating a “frame” for the story in the manner of Cordwainer Smith for “War No. 81-Q:”

<For a few brief happy centuries, war was made into an enormous game. Then the world population passed the thirty-billion point. Acting Chief Minister Chatterji presented the “Rightful Proportions” formula to the world authorities, and war turned from a game into realities. When it was over, hideous new creepers covered the wreckage of cities, saints and morons camped in the overpasses of disused highways, and a few man-hunting machines scoured the world in search of surviving weapons.>

Smith died before he could elaborate on that prelude in other stories, but I hope that future Aurora Universe stories will elaborate on matters like the Madstop Conference (There is a joke behind that; in an early draft of his FIRST PROTECTOR, Shadar had called that planet Potsdam; I thought this was implausible and, by chance, ran it backwards to get the name of a world it would be map to stop at -- and Shadar went along.). And I did my usual superficial research to add to the background, looking up the Arabic equivalent of World of the Prophet (Kawbab an Nabi). I threw in a bit more about Nahlia herself based on Shadar’s recollections, and he threw in two new picts, and there we had it:

brightempire.com/Lifesaver.pdf

A long introduction for such a short story, but for really long-windedness there’s my essay, “I Tell You This for the First Time Ever,” 15,000-plus words about my thoughts on the art of fiction, movies and music. Velvet calls it my “brain dump,” and another member of our group has strongly advised me to break it up into several posts or do SOMETHING to make it go down easier. On the other hand, an academic friend of mine – the fun kind, not the stuffy kind – found it quite entertaining. And it DOES – at the end – get into Aurora Universe matters. Maybe you’ll like it if you’re the kind of reader who really loves to read and always has favorite lines and favorite scenes running through your head, because that’s the kind of reading it’s about:

brightempire.com/lit-rant.htm

I'm not blowing my own horn in this first post fo 2008, but two other great writers.

First, Xoronewithnature. Some of you have seen his short story, "Asylum," here. Way back in 2004, he started a longer story, WANNABE HEROES, at Supergirls, Inc. I rescued the first chapter when SGI folded, and he added a few more over the past coupled of years. Now he's completed thed story of the Japanese-American supergirl Jessie and her battle with a terrorist cult. It's terrific!

brightempire.com/wannabe.htm

Then there's Betty Bontang. She's terrific, too, and you can find her first story -- "Island Mother," based on the Hawaiian mythology of Pele, the fire goddess, who anoints one of her people to liberate the islands from alien conquerors:

brightempire.com/Mother.pdf

--Brantley Thompson Elkins

Everybody loves Velvet Belle Tree!

More than 600 people downloaded her "Inside Passage" from Friday through Sunday.

Find out why:

brightempire.com/Inside.pdf

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 AURG 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 posted this week 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

<http://brightempire .com/Aurora- 1.htm>

I don't usually post partial drafts of my own stories, but I am making an exception 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 another Velorian 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.

<http://brightempire .com/Rescue. pdf