While I intended New Moonstone as a stand-alone story arc, it is actually only a late installment in a long series of stories dating back to my early adolescence. Though earlier portions had been polished over time in terms of concepts and plot elements, they remain at this time for the most part unwritten. I am making an effort to produce a story that explains as it goes; however, I have to find a balance. If I under-explain, I leave the reader confused. But if I over-detail, the work becomes just as hard to follow. I will confess that in the first story Memory, I chose to favor excess detail, because there was so much I wanted to include. I intended for the later stories to flow a bit more easily. I produced this supplemental set of production notes to help people jumping into New Moonstone to get an idea from where it came, as well as to help understand the characters, setting, and plot elements, as well as the underlying themes.
The Moonstone Role-Playing Game
The original Moonstone was a role-playing game I created in 1991 and a series of stories generated around that game system. The game itself remains in stasis as of October 2000, but it may someday be publishable. If so, expect to see it released online under the GNU general license. The play-testers of the game include Thomas Weigel, Matthew Weigel, Joel Rigby, Heather Varley (then Heather Rigby), Eric Stepp, and Michael Derr, as well as a number of guest players who appeared in one or two sessions.
There were actually two Moonstone story campaigns. The first, Haven, was set in a world resembling Victorian England, though it was clearly not Earth. Heather Varley played a number of characters that had Crossover powers similar to those of the New Moonstone lead characters. The premise of Crossover power was that people could manifest that which they imagined, or go to worlds by imagining them. Given the enormous potential imagination has, I discovered some of those abilities a bit unbalancing, but rather than removing crossover-enabled characters from the campaign, I chose to work with the added challenge, writing the excessive powers into the plot. I ran a number of gaming sessions based on the premise that other realms were intruding on reality as the characters knew it, threatening to destroy existence. One particular realm named “Psychocosm” had a particularly chaotic, dreamlike quality—people in that world might suddenly and unexpectedly teleport, change size, float in the air, or find themselves in bizarre settings that defied conventional wisdom. Eventually in the climax of the campaign, the laws of physics broke down and everyone became infinitely powerful. However, an escape clause came up; one of the characters imagined a new set of universes into existence, with a stable set of physics and limits to what Crossover could accomplish. The second campaign was set there, and focused on the interplay between a parallel Earth in early Renaissance and a neighboring Faerie realm known as “Fahri.”
Update: a revised version of the Moonstone roleplaying game is now available online here at this site.
The city of Collinwood is a vast metropolis that is fairly self-contained. Similar to “Gotham City,” “Metropolis,” and other such generically named places out of comic books, it has a vague, uncertain quality about its location. It is not on Earth, nor on any of the previous Moonstone world settings. For all one can tell, it could be anywhere from a heavily overpopulated, crowded planet to the only city left in the world. The name “Collinwood,” suggesting a friendly old small town contradicts the actual megalopolis setting. Greater Collinwood has a very vertical architecture, with layers of city stacked upon each other. Most readily visible on top are complex freeways and towers owned by large businesses. Intermingled in more open areas are clusters of apartments, malls, and general settings of life and activity. Hidden below these in the deeper layers are various counter-culture groups, almost literally underground.
The Morgana Residence is a sort of oasis amidst the dense city landscape, a community for people with physical intolerance of the metropolitan atmosphere. The mysterious process of “Awakening” has the consequence of rendering one unable to live detached from nature for a prolonged length of time as the general culture and landscape of Collinwood imposes. Those transformed often refer to themselves as Awakened, but the common description used by others is “adaptively impaired.” The community setting amidst a park offers fresh air and supplemental nourishment as well as a place for the displaced to huddle together.
No one knows what causes the Awakening, but a number of people in Collinwood have inexplicably transformed into strange, magical beings. Some of such people had always been around, such as members of the large Dreamsail family. The Awakening had on rare occasions also happened to people throughout history. However, its incidence has been rapidly rising, an epidemic. Those affected take on bizarre physical features such as Melody's third eye or Suidhne's forehead spiral horn. Pengarthe became a sort of satyr, while Nialle took on elf-like features. Those affected have in common a sensitivity to the unnatural atmosphere of Collinwood, though this can be alleviated somewhat with certain herbs. These adaptively impaired individuals also have to cope with the stigma of being afflicted with something unfamiliar and frightening to other people, who consciously or subconsciously fear its being either contagious or divine punishment.
I will confess that the “Awakening” is nothing new in my works. The very first Moonstone game session focused on a very similar transformation happening in the town of Tolinham. A number of people were inexplicably turning into elves. It was soon revealed that these elves, outcast by the superstitious townspeople, were all political dissenters transformed by the wizard Morvotzan. (It was later revealed that Morvotzan, apparently an old man, was in fact the young elf woman Morvotzana in disguise.) The same metamorphosis theme runs throughout another story of mine, the Genetic Wars, and in another story set before then; in my story with the working title Lycanthrope, Scott Gardener comes to terms with becoming a werewolf and with the realization that reality is not what he believed it to be. Though it is yet written, Lycanthrope has been through 69 imagined drafts since 1987, and it marks the beginning of my longest continuously running story thread. I also concede that the metamorphosis theme is quite heavily used in science fiction and fantasy today. I have noticed that the “Awakening” quite unintentionally resembles the “Chrysalis” from White Wolf's game Changeling: the Dreaming.
The Lykosan Empire first appeared in a play-by-mail game that my friend Thomas Weigel designed and ran around 1993, in which players portrayed civilizations that had newly gained interstellar travel capabilities. Each of us started off with a homeworld and home star system, and would send ships to other star systems to explore or conquer, depending on the personality of our own particular culture. I conceived of the Lykosan Empire as a newly unified world culture that had emerged from a long series of turmoil. They were in some ways a symbol of the human civilization—they had a long and bloody past much like ours, of dictators, world wars, and centuries of dark ages, as well as numerous great civilizations who rose above, only to collapse either suddenly or gradually through internal politics. With each step of evolution there would be periods of great optimism, such as the world unification some sixty Lykosan years before the start of the game. But, there would afterwards be a realization that the story of civilization had not yet reached the happy ending. Many of Lykosa’s prominent characters in the game were veterans of the System War, a war throughout the Lykosan star system that took place some fifteen Lykosan years before the start of the game.
The planet Lykosa itself was the second third of seven planets orbiting the orange giant star Noelykosa. It had three major continents; the northernmost housed the Northwestern Interterritorial Alliance, a federation of several nations. The middle continent housed three major groups—the Ikiras, the Inner Territories, and Saclordia. Ikira was in many ways Lykosa’s Far East. The Inner Territories was a sort of India—heavily populated with rich cultural heritage but limited wealth and resources. Saclordia was a large nation with a warrior culture. The lower continent consisted of the Southern Alliance, which was basically the nation of Vachtor and its satellite countries. The Vachtori were known for a rather dark culture, and were the most reluctant to join in Queen Moira’s unified Lykosan Empire. The other worlds in the Noelykosa system were satellite colonies of the homeworld nations, particularly the Northwest Alliance and Saclordia, the two major players in the System War.
Thomas used elements of another storyline, The Genetic Wars, as background elements in the play-by-mail game. The Genetic Wars was a story line Thomas Weigel and I coauthored together from 1986 to 1991, with additional contributions by my sister Alicia Coolidge, plus Michael Derr and several others. The whole saga runs over an epic 100,000 years of story arc, beginning with humanity repelling an alien invasion and attempting world unification. Following this humanity split into two major factions plus a number of smaller organizations. Thomas Weigel portrayed Thomas Shann, the leader of the largest faction, “C.A.T.” (The Control Administration of Thomas.) I portrayed a series of incarnations of Scott Gardener, the leader of the LGFF League and later a group known as the “Wolven Empire.” The timeline goes on to follow expansion throughout the galaxy and eventually into multiple universes. Thomas included some fallen remains of his C.A.T. organization in the play-by-mail game. My own Lykosan civilization could also be explained within the context of the Genetic Wars timeline, so I incorporated elements of it into Lykosan legend. However, I decided to keep Lykosa in an alternate timeline from the original Genetic Wars, in part because I would use the later incarnations of Scott Gardener in Moonstone, and I wanted to avoid an even more complicated storyline involving such things as having two separate incarnations living in parallel. I also wanted liberty with the Lykosan Empire so that if they made any major contribution to events in the universe, I would not have to backtrack and rewrite Genetic Wars to take that change into account.
Time had passed, however, both here in our reality and in my story. Since New Moonstone is set some five hundred years later than the prior Moonstone games, the same amount of time has passed in the Lykosan universe. (I decided against the needless complexity of altered flow of time between the Moonstone realms and the Lykosan realms. The math of converting to and from Lykosan years was a bad enough strain on my readers’ patience.) Nearly one hundred Lykosan years after the original play-by-mail stories, Queen Moira had now become a legendary figure, a sort of Goddess symbol. The Lykosan Empire had grown from a fledgling cluster of a few worlds to a substantial number of star systems. A long line of emperors and empresses has passed, and numerous other worlds have joined the Empire. Among the new entries in the Lykosan Empire are the Cunae Sidhe and their close relatives the Ehlan Sidhe, occupants of two neighboring worlds. Both have legends that suggest their origins having a possible link to the realm of Fahri. In appearance, they are very different, however. The Cunae are slender, graceful figures that are able to alter their skin texture much like a cuttlefish. The Ehlans are by comparison bizarre and grotesque, with split forearms with two separate halves of hands, as well as an almost skeletal body habitus. Their head design was based on something I saw in a nightmare of mine a number of years ago. However, the Ehlan Sidhe are even more capable shape-shifters than the Cunae, giving them the ability to act as doppelgangers.
Wolven One, the vessel that doubled as the Lan Laheen Mountain range in Sleeping Giants, originally appeared in the Genetic Wars timeline during the time of the Wolven Empire. A male and a female being each appear late in Sleeping Giants, representing the ship. They are “tracers” of a central consciousness—beings who have their own bodies but who share consciousness with the central mind. The “mindgrid” is a complex device that houses the central elements of that consciousness. (To you Net heads out there, the mindgrid is in a sense a central server, and the tracers are workstations, with the being as a whole as a high security intranet.) The biomechanical male tracer being was the likeness of Lukos Antropos, Scott Gardener’s eighth incarnation. (Suidhne Dreamsail, by the way, is the fifteenth incarnation.) The nude female was patterned after Elodea, Scott Gardener’s companion throughout numerous prior lifetimes.
Update: I have done additional work with the Genetic Wars since writing these New Moonstone stories. I have also finished the novel Lycanthrope, a prequel story referenced in some of Suidhne's flashbacks. The sequence of her flashback was inserted into the novel, but has since been revised slightly.
The term “Crossover” was one that both Heather Varley and I thought of independently of each other, before Thomas Weigel introduced us to each other at a role-playing gaming party. In my Genetic Wars storyline, Scott Gardener had evolved over thousands of years, until finally becoming Vlkos Rinan, attaining the “sufficiently advanced technology” that is indistinguishable from magic. After countless millennia of searching and experimentation, he attained the ability physically to enter other realms of existence generated by imagination. Heather, meanwhile, imagined an order of beings that had endured certain emotional hardships, which were given what amounted to the same power by a patron goddess-like figure. Parallel ideas happen all the time, but it was none-the-less startling that both of us had independently worked with the same concept, using the same terminology, even though we each approached it from such different directions. Of course, we thought it natural our world-travelers would meet each other, and our two sets of realms met as part of the backdrop of the Moonstone games. Thomas Weigel would go a step further and run a limited set of games in which we the players portrayed ourselves as characters suddenly given Crossover-related powers, going against his villain Jason DarKheist.
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Suidhne Dreamsail is a member of the Dreamsail family, a line of magically affected people who carry a hereditary Awakening. She was born Awakened to her magical nature and was raised outside of Collinwood's thick landscape. She is more accustomed to a setting similar to her tree house apartment in the Morgana Residence or the lush landscape of the botanical gardens at Keller University. As a Dreamsail, she has a family tradition of metaphysics, and thus she came to Collinwood and the university to get a degree in magic. She has numerous past lives lived on other worlds before her birth in the realm that houses Collinwood, and she has learned to draw insight and advice from flashes of memory of these lifetimes. In appearance, Suidhne is stark white with nearly black irises, lips, fingernails, and toenails. Her single most prominent unusual feature is her single, midline spiraling horn, suggestive of a unicorn. She prefers to wear light but elegant dresses or occasionally more Gothic street clothes, and makes no effort to hide the fact that she is Awakened. Suidhne is the fifteenth incarnation of the being that was previously Scott Gardener, Lukos Antropos, Vlk'rin, Running Wolf, and Scanlan, among others. Her appearance marks New Moonstone as the latest installment in my longest running story thread. In an effort to keep the ongoing saga fresh, I introduced some elements that broke my old formulas. For one, all of the previous incarnations of Scott Gardener were male; Suidhne is the first female one. I decided to have her remember her prior incarnations only dimly, rather than simply picking up where she left off with a simple change of bodies. (I also did this in part because the character otherwise would have a very unbalancing amount of knowledge and power. It is very difficult to imagine how a being hundreds of thousands of years old would think; such an entity certainly would have long out-grown human issues of identity and social life, and would have enough knowledge to alter dramatically the world-setting, with or without Vlk'rin's network of thousands of tracers or mindgrid.) |
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Pengarthe experienced his Awakening around the age of 20, ironically during a period of soul-searching. He took it in stride as the sort of thing that would happen, and even liking somewhat the effect it had on his appearance. Pengarthe has a strong outward form, but is at core an intellectual romantic. He is aggressive but a defensive player, preferring to err on the side of caution but willing to explore possibilities. He met Suidhne early on in his college years at Keller University, and has found with her a sense of purpose and direction. Pengarthe is based in part on an archetypal Pagan male image. He is the satyr-like figure sometimes depicted on modern Pagan literature such as Green Egg magazine. The image is one of Pan restored, one of a benevolent, wise being who happens to have horns and hoofed feet. Like this persona and like modern Pagan men, Pengarthe in being Awakened has the stigma of being demonized and the task of standing in defiance of the “devil” image. He dresses lightly and is unable to wear shoes because of his cloven hooves. |
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Nialle experienced her Awakening around early adolescence, while she was still growing into herself. At the time it frightened her; she dreaded the loss of a simple life. Nialle has very basic desires—to enjoy life from day to day without worry. Before her Awakening, she had a very routine childhood and adolescence, and before her transformation, she was simply concerned with popularity, social relationships, and body image. The Awakening forced upon her new responsibilities and made new contacts for her, ultimately motivating a renewed sense of focus. She remained by nature light-hearted and extroverted, but is now concerned with deeper issues. Nialle is based on an archetypal figure in my artwork, the tall, slender, feral elf maiden. Morvotzana of the original Moonstone games fit that template, as did at least one or two other characters. Such beings turn up a lot in my artwork, as one of my influences is the popular contemporary artist Brian Froud. I have lately backed away from this image somewhat, because the media here in the United States over-portrays very slender women in general, contributing to epidemic anorexia nervosa and self esteem issues. However, I am using such an image this time not as the desirable norm but as a variant. Aside from a very lean appearance, Nialle has an unearthly wide face with horizontal ears, perhaps suggestive of elves depicted in Anime. Her eyes are solid glossy black with no readily visible sclera or iris. Her choice of erotic Gothic clothing draws attention, a contradiction to her proclaimed desire for a “normal” existence, indicating that she still has some underlying issues. |
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Melody Dreamsail is the oldest of the major characters in New Moonstone, dating back to the early days of the House of Dreamsail. Where Suidhne remembers some of her past lives, Melody was nearby in person. In her youth, she gained Crossover powers from a circle of similar people known as the Ehtaehrians, and it is from them that she obtained her royal blue cloak. Since those days, the Ehtaehrians apparently disbanded and the House of Dreamsail scattered after their focal point, a place called Dreamhaven, fell from an attack. Melody became afflicted during the siege with a curse rendering her mute during that battle; before then she was an accomplished singer. At some point later, she broke the curse but now carries within her the presence of a powerful war goddess and the bizarre stigmata of a third eye. The Ehtaehrians are Heather Varley's creation; they are the original Crossover beings from her stories. Ehtaehr, whose name is an anagram of Heather, was the patron being who gave Crossover powers to certain individuals who had endured certain life experiences. Melody was my one contribution to a group otherwise consisting of Heather's creations. Heather tends to borrow from herself (just as I am guilty of such auto-plagiarism), creating characters around certain reoccurring archetypes. In the case of the Ehtaehrians; each one was a young human female who had a particularly troublesome life, who had finally experienced one or another form of particularly trying ordeal. Afterwards, each one drew the attention of Ehtaehr, who gave that person Crossover power and the symbolic blue cloak. Each one also had a male companion who gave support through trying times, who would go on to become a life-long mate. Heather, who otherwise wanted to keep the Ehtaehrians her own creations, allowed Melody as a member of her group in an effort to keep her storyline fresh with a new perspective. The House of Dreamsail was also in part her work. Spiritwalker Dreamsail, the founder of the family line, and his siblings and parents were characters of mine, but Heather extended the family tree a number of generations outward and created a complex series of interrelationships, producing numerous stories and potential stories for those up to the task of sorting through her prolific background. Melody was Spiritwalker Dreamsail's daughter, a character I singled out and developed from Heather’s expanded family line. (By this point she was already breeding enough Dreamsails to populate Manhattan.) Melody was a lot younger, more passive, and more naïve during this time when she first joined the Ehtaehrians. She, like her father Spiritwalker, was a musician and singer. Heather chronicled the attack on Dreamhaven and Melody's losing her voice. The events leading to her regaining her voice and acquiring the third eye have yet to be fully explained, but are related to her being prone to channeling a war-goddess. I wanted to keep New Moonstone fresh, but I wanted some elements to relate to the original Moonstone. When I first began contemplating ideas for New Moonstone, I considered bringing in Spiritwalker Dreamsail himself, my old Dungeons and Dragons character. However, he was not only too powerful but also a bit heavily overused in my works already. Melody, who also appeared in the original Moonstone games, however, had potential. She had a developed early background that was left hanging open. In keeping with the surreal, dreamlike quality I want to achieve with New Moonstone, I modified her with a third eye; at the time I first thought of this modification, I had yet to explain from where it came—I would explain it to myself later, too. The idea of the dark goddess came to mind shortly before I first wrote Memory, bringing New Moonstone from conceptual drawings and ideas to an actual body of work. |
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Danit of Cuna is a member of the Cunae Sidhe, one of two closely related races from the Lykosan realm of existence. Both races are members of the Lykosan Empire, and both have legends of having once arrived to their twin homeworlds from the realm known as Fahri. Danit is able to alter his skin texture and color in a manner similar to a cuttlefish, and thus he can have a number of appearances. He can mimic other people, hide in shadows, or form simple outgrowths. Usually, however, he appears as a slender, elflike figure similar to Nialle. (So similar, in fact, that a lot of people within the Lykosan realm mistake Nialle for a Cuna.) While Nialle’s face is broad, however, Danit’s is long and narrow. He typically does not wear any clothes, but instead decorates or covers himself with regions of fur when he is not mimicking the attire of those around him. Danit is a male version of Nialle's feral elf maiden archetype, and he, too, has parallels in my previous artwork. As stated before, the shapeshifter appears numerous times as well in my previous stories. |
As I wrote the pilot story Memory, I had imagined an extra sub-plot involving Nialle’s giving Danit Crossover powers in a rather erotic power play. Basically, Danit turns Nialle’s sexual expressions against her in an effort to avoid advances that he feels are influenced more by instincts than underlying motivation. He does feel motivated to accept her advances, but he does not wish to take advantage of her. She, however, does trust her instincts; enough to plan a response to Danit’s tactics in a second scene in which she arranges capture him. I felt both scenes at first were too explicit for some readers. I decided, however, that this was the Internet, after all, and there were far less tasteful and less aesthetic stories already out there, both online and in movies and other media. I reasoned that if bad sex scenes are in every other action film and sci-fi B-movie, and if every fifth item of Spam in my mailbox is for a pornography site, then I should not have squelch my own creativity as long as I let people know ahead of time what they are getting
into. It’s not a pornography story—it was a story that happened to have a raunchy subplot. In writing back in the additional scenes, I also went back into the rest of the story and focused more on something I did not emphasize before—Nialle was basically in her mating season and was dressed for the part. (Actually, I did include my sketch of Nialle in her skin-tight body suit subduing Danit in both versions.) I also expanded slightly the climactic scene in which the gheidei creature used its reality warping ability to disfigure a Lykosan psionist. I initially underplayed the details of the scene because I felt it was a bit grotesque and disturbing. However, since I now wrote an “unedited director’s cut,” I felt I could now restore the paragraph or two there as well. It’s still less gross than
Alien: Resurrection, by the way.
Will future stories have uncut versions? That depends on whether or not I feel I have to leave anything out for some readers. In Sleeping Giants, I kept Nialle’s dream sequence and the scene in which Suidhne’s past-life companion Elodea appears nude. In the former, I make reference to Nialle’s first cut scene and her erotic vinyl clothing. The later mentions nudity. Neither scene is particularly pushing the envelope, however. Though Nialle’s dream makes reference to the elements cut from the original version of Memory, one can none-the-less enjoy the scene without having read the extended version. (It is my hope, in fact, that one could follow Sleeping Giants as a self-contained story without having first read Memory, though I do intend to create an ongoing series of story threads.) I expect editing of future versions to be the exception rather than the rule.
Update: it has been more than two years since New Moonstone unofficially went on hiatus due to my numerous other projects. While I do intend to continue the story at some point, most of my plans for the immediate future involve Lycanthrope and the Genetic Wars. I have a number of story ideas in the back of my head that I'd like to see brought to fruition, but time constraints may limit how many of them I can develop. I have also entertained the idea of going back and revising New Moonstone in a new draft, but I feel I've already done that to death with my other works.
The third episode of New Moonstone began light-hearted enough, with my tribute to the opening of Star Wars. In fact, I intended most of the story to have a certain sense of humor. However, I had to make my comment on some of the issues the Internet is raising. We now have, through the course of human evolution, developed a new medium through which to convey ideas, and as a result of such, we are now deciding on a daily basis how to redefine things we once took for granted. For one thing, in 1950, one bought a record to get music, and that was the end of it. In 1985, however, you could buy the record (or one of those new CDs if you could afford a CD player), or you could have someone copy a tape for you. But, you could not copy the tape for profit without pirating. In 2000, however, the cutoff point between trading music and pirating music has become so blurry that our judges’ heads are spinning. This is in part because music turned into data that can be piped through channels. In 1950, a vinyl record was obviously an object. However, an mp3 is a file. Music is now caught in the same dilemma that light faces in physics—is it a particle or a wave? It is both and neither; it is whichever one is most convenient for you at the moment. However, the problem is, it’s more convenient for the R.I.A.A. to see it as a particle, while Napster clearly prefers that it be a wave.
“Blotster” is the Napster of New Moonstone. It, however, while presented as a forum for exchanging music, exchanges not only “dm5” music files (that world’s version of the mp3), but also video and multimedia files. The name “Blotster” is a tribute to my wife’s and my dog Blot, whom we sometimes call by that nickname. She’s an old black cocker spaniel with a cataract in her left eye. (dm5, by the way, stands for “digital media, version 5. It’s a universal virtual reality audio and video format standard in the Collinwood realm setting.”)
There is, however, an even greater issue at hand. The Federal government of Collinwood’s setting uses Blotster as one of numerous control mechanisms. The use of Blotster is ingrained into daily life for most people, and yet it is technically illegal in the Collinwood realm. It is one of many ways in which daily life involves or possibly even requires breaking a few laws. (Here in the United States, a lot of people borrow others’ prescription medications for colds, for example.) And therefore, just about everyone is a law-breaker, and thus just about anyone can have citations brought against them should the government feel the need to do so. Sounds a little paranoid? The story is supposed to be fiction, but sometimes I wonder. Here in the United States again, we use VCRs quite heavily to record and watch movies. And yet, when we rent a video, the tape almost invariably opens with a warning from no less than the FBI—the Federal Bureau of Investigation—about the consequences of copying tapes. All our CDs and cassettes have warnings from the R.I.A.A. about unauthorized copying as well, even though it was decided that copying for personal use or for limited non-profit distribution to friends was legal. Furthermore, it is a lot easier to track downloads of mp3s than it is to spy on copying tapes; computers keep dated and timed logs, and freely exchange information. (I recently discovered that several “free” programs including GoZilla and a Netscape plugin called “Comet Cursor” were tying up processor activity and Internet bandwidth sending advertisement preference information about me behind my back—and not justby way of “cookies” either.)
So, who needs to be the most paranoid under such conditions? Those would be the people who are out of favor with the main political factions. As a general rule, most people are safe, simply because they pose no threat and call very little attention to themselves. Some people are active threats, however—political rivals, foreign spies, terrorists, etc. However, the people I am worried about are the ones who are simply unpopular. Politicians can get a lot of votes by joining the discrimination against unpopular groups such as homosexuals. Gay men and women in and of themselves pose no threat to any government regimen. (Though a person who is a threat can happen to be gay.) However, Fundamentalist religious groups have led an ongoing campaign against homosexuals, maintaining an overall public opinion that makes homosexuality disfavored. Similarly, members of minority religions, particularly Wicca and Paganism, have been the subjects of propaganda labeling them erroneously as “devil worshippers.” The Fundamentalist religious leaders are in effect creating a scapegoat through which to gain favor by attacking. In a more extreme case, Adolf Hitler did the same thing with Jews, Gypsies, and numerous other peoples in order to gain favor among his Nazi followers.
Update: the actions of the RIAA have indeed become increasingly aggressive since the stories were written back in 2001. They have acted on their threat to sue individuals sharing files and resort to almost militant tactics. Likewise, following the terrorist attacks of September Eleventh, the Department of Homeland Security has come into existance and has engaged in a number of questionable activities, including questionable searches and detention of people of Arabic origin on questionable basis. Three medical students were once detained for several days because another concerned citizen overheard an innocent conversation, overreacted, and reported them to this agency.
Conspicuously absent is any section detailing the past of Melody Dreamsail. Though her connections with the Ehtaehrean coven of world-travelers comes up in previous episodes, I have purposefully withheld a more complete explanation of her, so that details can unfold later. In the original Moonstone and Heather Varley’s Crossovers stories and RPG game sessions, Melody was chronicled in her early adolescence, but she was a much more frail and soft personality than the one depicted in New Moonstone. Her most striking feature, her third eye, never appeared in the original stories; that aspect of her came about in a time period after the original works but before the beginning of “Memory.”
One aspect of the future often overlooked in most science fiction is the destruction of privacy. (I probably am vastly under-representing it myself.) It occurred to me as I began writing New Moonstone that the Lykosans would almost certainly have surveillance technology vastly superior to our own—and our own technology is pretty scary. If we can take satellite photos of individual people—and I have heard from more than one source that this technology does unofficially exist—then even a “third world dictator” like Viceroy Koheen would have technology at his disposal that would border on mind-reading.
One of my most discerning and interested readers, quite possibly, could be my own government. Here in the United States, there are numerous conspiracy theories suggesting the existence and use by national security agencies of computer programs that constantly scan the Internet for certain key words like “explosion,” “bomb,” and “presidential assassination.” As a tribute to these programs and our lack of privacy, you can find a number of such key words throughout the story. (They probably picked up on this page, too. Hi there. If you’re reading this, rest easy; I’m not a terrorist—just an author, and the only “secrets” I’m spilling are rumors based on second-hand information and conjecture. And, going after some guy on the net just for writing science fiction means risking bringing yourselves out in the open.)
Of course, this could all just be paranoia. But you can only be so skeptical before you start doubting the skeptics.
The working title of Episode 5, by the way, was “Nialle and Danit Play Royal Assassins and Icy Manipulators.” It’s a reference to a notorious card combination in the game Magic: the Gathering. Episode 3 also had a working title, “What Happens When You Download Pirated DM5’s.” The working title of episode 4 was the less original “Working Title.”
Dr. Jonathan Coolidge is an osteopathic physician who experiences his Awakening too early in the morning. To help him through the difficult and stressful process, he drinks his coffee black and takes his vitamins daily to help his body cope with the unnatural elements of the massive metropolis of the Beaumont / Port Arthur region.
If I dissappear suddenly, ask the government what happened to me, and bring plenty of reporters.
