This is my far-future fantasy, started about two years ago, almost finished. I know it is unusual and does not fit in the usual categories of far-future stories. Far-Future Glitz, with Amazing But Sinister Technology. Characters; slick powerbrokers, upper-class, educated, wrestle with ethic demons. Dash about among the planets and/ or galaxies to meet threats. Power Girl Top Scientist; brilliant investigator of experimental improbabilities, saves humankind. Dashes about among galaxies, foreign terrains. Upper-class, educated. The mass of humanity; suffering peons rarely seen. Down there somewhere.
My premise is that post-post-apocalypse humanity reverts to village-type organization. Avoided clichés of grunting ruminants in religious cults brandishing spears. Tried to be practical; I know how village-type organizations happen, and the basics of pre-electrical-power light, heat and toolmaking. Have become weary of the premise that in the collapse of what we know as ‘civilization’ (cool technology) people instantly turn into savages. At the same time, tried open the door to fantasy. I enjoyed writing this.
The Tavern at the End of the World
“The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters; and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.” G.K. Chesterton
CHAPTER ONE
His parents left him to die at the edge of the forest. It was late October, when winter was beginning and the warblers had taken all their voices and had flown south to some mysterious kingdom beyond the horizon. His mother and father lifted him from the cart in a hard, firm grip even though he held on desperately to the sides. They pulled his hands loose finger by finger. The house dog barked at everything from under his mother’s skirts, barking at the entire world because something was wrong and the dog felt it in the air and was sounding the alarm but the people around him did nothing but make high-pitched unhappy noises.
He felt himself dropped onto the ground like a sack of unconnected bones. His mother’s face was wet and her hands were in fists. She would not look at him. She was enormously fat. His father bent over and held him by both forearms and sat him down in the leaf litter beneath an oak tree and said that if he could walk through to the other side of the forest, there would be light, and a river and a pleasant land where he might despite everything find himself alive and well.