After receiving feedback from individuals, I decided I should make available a place on the website for readers to post their reviews. Please feel free to comment on the books in any way you wish. I’m always interested in critical feedback.
Thanks!
M Ryan Hess
Far too often, the imagination of science fiction authors stops at the doorstep of alien life. The author’s universe may contain exotic technologies and perhaps strange physics, but too often, speculation on alien beings is hopelessly unoriginal. You might call it the Star Wars affect, where an alien is any human being with an animal head on its shoulders and maybe five-fingered hands.
In Source World Ghosts, a major emphasis was placed on conceiving of alien life that was distinctly alien. There are no humanoids in Source World Ghosts, except within the family tree of human subspecies, who all descend from the original human species. Rather, the alien life of SWG was designed with one thing in mind: evolution on planets with entirely different masses, chemistry and densities would follow entirely different paths.
Not even the usual starting point for alien life, DNA, is a given for all species of alien. Whereas the Skizan and Pladjin are DNA-based lifeforms, the molecular basis of two other lifeforms in the SWG universe is something else. With the mysterious Belemyolan, for example, the genetic basis (if they even have genes) is not assumed. Rather, it is inferred that nobody really knows, with the possible exception of the Freika shepherds that harness the space-shifting power of the Belemyolan. The other non-DNA lifeform is the Frijasunu, an Ammonera species that Yuen Ukura interacted with just before her death. Living on a world with ammonia seas and average global temperatures of -40 degrees Celsius, the biochemical reactions DNA-based life requires could not make life possible. Instead, other molecular chains were required.
All of these alien environments, even the most terrestrial-like of them, have produced wildly different biologies that are adapted specifically to the planetary conditions they came from. And these different evolutionary paths have not only resulted in stark differences in morphology, but also in consciousness. Such is the cause of considerable difficulty in communicating between aliens and humans. Even with the Skizan, the most similar lifeform to human beings, communication is approximate at best, left to broad interpretation and often entirely ambiguous. With creatures such as the Belemyolan or Frijasunu, complex understanding is completely impossible, due to the fundamentally different ways our mental systems operate. Indeed, it is often speculated that the Belemyolan do not even have a brain in the sense of the individual brain every human has. Instead, they are seen as possessing a hive brain and each individual to be as mentally complex as a plant.
For more information on the alien life of Source World Ghosts, see the Alien Section of the book’s website.
Have you wanted to share your thoughts about the books of Source World Ghosts? Or maybe you wanted to request an image of particular place, alien or character in SWG? You can now on SWG Facebook fan page!
Users can meet other fans of SWG, discuss the books and write reviews. And, you can communicate directly with the author. Enjoy!
The wait is over! The latest episode of the Source World Ghosts saga is now available for purchase.
Starting off, where Demons of the Nemenusu left off, Feh-la Ukura returns to her home world of Epsalore, taking with her the incredible truths she discovered on Allamadain. But as she knows very well, not everyone will welcome her return.
Waiting for her in the Imperial Capital World of Epsalore, the Oushlao will have to confront damning truths that threaten her power. The Salorean military leaders, too, must grapple with the rumors Feh brings of Pladjini movements in the Eos. And a rootless, disillusioned populace must decide if they will find fear or hope in Feh’s stories.
Will humanity embrace their own history or respond violently to preserve the falsehoods that have bound the Nodal Empires together for eons? In the crucible of the Kunsama’s story, can any empire, any people or even reason itself survive?
Six thousand years have passed since humans last had contact with the alien Pladjin. But now, rumors are reaching the Node that somewhere, deep in the distant starfields of the Eos, the enemy of humanity is on the move again.
The last battle between the Pladjin and humans is more legend than history now. The story goes that from the time of the Pictimoni Incident, when humans and Skizan began working together to fight the Pladjin, the tide turned slowly, but steadily in favor of humanity. But victory was hard to define in the closing centuries of this ancient conflict. The worlds of the Eos were left in utter ruin, many devoid of any life, human or Pladjin. And for most of the rest of the human Diaspora, civilization hung precariously to the tattered web of worlds still intact from the war. Many accounts hold that the Pladjin were equally wrecked and that rather than any single decisive battle, both sides simply lost the ability to organize attacks on the other.
However, such lackluster historical accounts are not dramatic enough to enjoy much popularity, so a suite of other stories are more widely known. Most popular of all, are the accounts of the Vesa people who sacrificed their own worlds in a heroic last effort to destroy the last active armada of the Pladjin. According to this story, the Vesa lured the Pladjini armada close to their home world, which they had booby trapped with spatial distortion arrays. The array of weapons were aligned with the gravitational fields of their world in such a way that when activated, the spatial energy present within the planet itself was instantly released in a colossal explosion that engulfed not only the Pladjini armada, but the Vesa planet as well. Experiments with this technique have never been successful, however, in reproducing such a chain reaction.
However the ware did ultimately conclude, an uneasy silence has fallen over the galactic neighborhood ever since. Occasionally, rumors and even panics do spread, but no sign of the Pladjin have been detected for six thousand years. Until now.
Readers of Demons of the Nemenusu will learn that the Pladjin are stirring and in the sequel, Crucible of Empires, firm evidence of this is obtained. So does this mean war? And if so, why do the Pladjin feel they have the power to take on the Skizan-Human alliance when they failed in the past? Stay tuned for answers in forthcoming editions of Source World Ghosts.
Time is the weathering that acts on memory. In the real world of historians, especially those investigating ancient history, resurrecting lost knowledge is their principle task, but one fraught with difficulty. And when the historian deals with the very ancient, the task is exceptionally challenging.
In Source World Ghosts, I took the endeavor of the historian and magnified its difficulty over 27,000 years and thousands of light years. In addition, I added biological technologies which form the principle geologic record left for Nodal historians to piece together.
The ancient civilization in question, the Ghost Culture, was built with organic materials and genetically-engineered “machines,” leaving few stone or metal objects behind, and where they did leave traces, few people ever venture to. Indeed, like many of the earliest modern historians, cultural and philosophical assumptions often lead the truth seekers in the wrong directions.
But a few, clever scientists always have particularly clear insight into the minds of men and women. They understand that even the murkiest of histories leave non-physical traces behind, often in the form of legends and myths.
A favorite example of the overlay of legend on top of history is that of the legend of the Minotaur of Greek Mythology. For centuries, scholars believed that King Minos of the legend was likely completely fictional, and that his bull-headed son, the Minotaur, was certainly of little historic value. And yet, in the early 20th Century, on the island of Crete, the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, unearthed King Minos’ palace, decorated in brilliant frescoes depicting bulls. Soon, it was concluded that, there were eerie connections between the Legend of the Minotaur and the true story that took place on Kephala Hill thousands of years before. Where the legend had hapless victims lost in a labyrinth suffering the hunger of a bull-headed monster, the historical record would show that a real King Minos did sacrifice humans to a bull-god.
Along these lines, Source World Ghosts, looks at how the legends of the Ghost Culture are directly related to true places and events, if actually quite distinct in the details.
The Legend of the Ghost Culture, the Yali Su, is that they stood at the summit of human progress, straddling a galactic empire the likes of which would never be seen again. They were masters of a great many, nearly magical powers, including the ability to pass through space-time at will. But due to a fatal flaw they were never able to overcome, they began experimenting with their own DNA until they had produced a great many subspecies.
Variations of the Great Decline, as it would be called, have the subspecies rebelling against and overcoming their superiors. Other versions say that no true humans were left after several generations of mutations swept the species; or that the few that remained, disappeared into deep space or to another dimension altogether. What is certain is that the subspecies inhabiting the Nodal Era, have no knowledge of their source world, their source DNA or the history that brought them to where they are now.
