Asterion: A Tale of the Monster of Crete

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Asterion is a Prince of the Realm, whose name means "star-like." He is also a grotesque freak, forced to live on raw flesh, both of humans and animals, in a maze beneath the Royal Palace of Knossos. His family and people have shut him away in the Labyrinth because they are convinced his birth was the result of a curse of the gods, who sent a marvelous bull from the sea to seduce his mother the Queen. In an effort to reclaim his humanity and pass the time in a gloomy pit, Asterion learns to write and resolves to tell the story of the people and events that brought about his bizarre birth. Throughout the book, he provides a series of third-person narratives of his own invention, interspersed with first-person commentaries on human nature and the absurdity of his fate.

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The novel focuses on the clash of cultures that lies at the base of European civilization, between the matrilineal, matriarchal, Goddess-worshipping Minoans of Crete and the patriarchal, hero-adoring Mycenean Greeks, who have brought their brooding gods from the north in an effort to "drive the Goddess from the land." As the story opens, the Cretan island realm is still a Queendom ruled by the divinely-descended priestess Rheia. Constantly at odds with her upstart consort Minos, who chafes at his subordinate role, Rheia devotes herself to the maintenance of age-old cosmic balances, cultivating medicinal herbs that grow from the flanks of her beloved Body Earth. Meanwhile, the ideas of the mainland Akhaians (Greeks) are slowly infiltrating Cretan culture, especially in the form of Daidalos, the Athenian artist and engineer who has been engaged to embellish the sprawling Palace of Knossos. The arrival of the mysterious bull on the beach throws the whole palace into confusion, leading to intense speculation as to which god might have sent it, or if the creature itself might be a god.

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All this is observed and commented upon by Asterion, the beast in the basement who yearns only for light, love, companionship and fine food, although, as he often tells us, he would not object to some acclaim for his creative talents as well. Baffled by his own existence and fascinated by the palace life that has been denied to him, but which he can observe through cracks in the floors and walls, he forges a bond with his sympathetic older sister Narkissa, an acrobatic princess who excels at the sacred Minoan sport of bull-leaping. We see her story through her imprisoned brother's eyes, as the shy and introverted young woman resists Queen Rheia's efforts to train her as a Priestess of the Goddess. Narkissa also witnesses the traumatic death of a friend during the bull-leap, while taking lessons in self-assertion from her mysterious, solitary, non-conformist aunt, the sorceress Kirke (Circe). When Narkissa's tyrannical father Minos usurps power in Crete and achieves his dream of ruling in grand style like a Mycenaean king, the princess finds herself imprisoned and condemned for a forbidden love affair with the poet Aiginthos, a man of lowly origin. At the climax of the novel, Asterion's wretched life takes on a new sense of purpose as he contemplates escape from the Labyrinth in the company of his sister.

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As in the case of most literary treatments of mythology, the aim here is to transcend the bounds of ancient times and attitudes in order to illustrate timeless truths about human nature. Asterion's metafictional story, concerning exploitation, degradation and power, as well as the desire to perpetuate the self through art, includes existential dimensions that recall John Gardner's Grendel, and also Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a deformed, misunderstood monster seeks to validate his humanity by observing family life through fissures in a wall. In creating this figure, I hope to communicate the notion that there is something of Asterion in all of us, as we strive to control the ways in which we are regarded by others, and at the same time give voice to the tumult inside our heads. Enclosed in a prison and unable to resist the insidious invaders, Asterion realizes his story will be appropriated by a people who will put it to their own nefarious uses. In fact, "Minotaur," the name eventually bestowed on him by the derisive, usurping Greeks, is never mentioned in this novel. Here we find Asterion's own version of the events, "a tale" of the Monster of Crete, not "the tale," the one we think we all learned in school. His voice remains the first, as well as the last, to survive from a people doomed to obliteration at the hands of our own ancestors.

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Harlots of Jericho

 

In a recent Internet search, I counted no fewer than fourteen novels in English concerning the character Rahab from the Old Testament Book of Joshua. Only the oldest, A Scarlet Cord: A Novel of the Woman of Jericho by Frank G. Slaughter (1956), ventured to tell her story from a non religious perspective. Of the remaining thirteen, eight were written in the past ten years, and all have an evident Christian/Inspirational orientation. For the most part, the emphasis in these novels is on Rahab as a romantic heroine, a woman whose faith in the God of the Israelites allows her to transcend a squalid career as a prostitute in pagan Jericho and find love and fulfillment as the wife of one of the conquerors of her city. Since the sign of her faith is embodied in the red cord that she hangs out her window, reminding the invaders that she and her family are the only people to be spared when Jericho is subjected to slaughter, no fewer than seven of the fourteen novels bear the title "The Scarlet Cord," or some variant thereof. My version of Rahab's story, Harlots of Jericho, is meant to provide a very different perspective.

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I grew up in a household without religion. Although I was taken to half the grand cathedrals of Europe during the year my family spent abroad, it was only because my father Robert Nissen, an artist and teacher of art, wanted me to gaze on the sumptuous works of man. I was never once bidden to pray about anything, or believe in supernatural processes. Even Santa Claus was regarded as pure myth in our family. Throughout a very impressionable childhood, with reading one of my principal forms of entertainment, the only religious text I had access to was a children's retelling of selected biblical episodes, Elsa Jane Werner's The Golden Bible: Stories from the Old Testament, with illustrations by Feodor Rojankovsky (New York: Golden Press, 1946). I was especially fascinated by Rojankovsky's paintings, including his depiction of the fall of the walls of Jericho. Impossibly high ramparts are seen crumbling while anguished men topple to their doom. In the simplistic view of history to which I was then inclined, I remember imagining that those men must have been "bad guys" who somehow deserved their fate, even if they also appeared to be helpless victims of some implacable might. I still have my battered copy of this book.

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I did not actually read the Book of Joshua until I reached middle age, after learning about the Canaanite genocide in Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto. When I did, I was astonished to discover the true ending of the tale, which is not even hinted at in Werner's retelling: after the walls had collapsed, everyone and everything in the city, including men, women, children and animals, were exterminated by the Israelites. These killers were acting on the direct orders of their god Yahweh, who was later to incarnate himself as the supremely benevolent Jesus Christ. Throughout history, most Christians have taken it as an article of faith that these two divine persons are one and the same, and that the commandments of one are meant to fulfill the commandments of the other. This never fails to astonish me.

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After reading the first six books of the Old Testament, I often found myself thinking about the wretched peoples of Canaan, subjected to what we would call today ethnic cleansing, sexual slavery and genocide on the part of the "Children of Israel." The essence of God's plan may be found in Deuteronomy 20:  10-18, where Moses conveys the rules of conquest in chillingly precise terms to his followers. Here are the verses in the Revised Standard Version:

   

   When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to

   you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with

   you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put

   all its males to the sword, but the women and little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall

   take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus

   you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these

   peoples that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save nothing alive that breathes, but you shall 

   utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the

   Lord your God has commanded; that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they

   have done in the service of their gods, and so to sin against the Lord your God.

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Although it is not entirely fair to condemn the Bible on the basis of a single passage or episode, given that it is a dense, complex document compiled in three different languages over a period of hundreds of years, I believe it is indeed fair to ask why such attitudes must continue to be inflicted on our post-Enlightenment culture. After all, genocide is commonly held to be the worst of the crimes of our modern age, the thing we universally condemn and seek to extirpate. From Armenia to Auschwitz, from Cambodia to Rwanda to Srebenica, it has always proved worthy of indictment before our highest war crimes tribunals. Thus, we should not expect to find even a trace of it in our "Good Book," the text that supposedly teaches ideal behavior. When I have tried to discuss these Scriptural passages with Christians, they either downplay their significance or profess to know nothing about them. Since Christianity is regarded in the West as the one essential, "perfect" religion, we are never supposed to question the Canaanite genocide, or indeed any other cruel decision of the deity that we inherited from ancient Israel. A believer has no choice: the Canaanites must be despised and regarded as unworthy of our pity. If God commanded such acts then we are compelled to accept their intrinsic goodness, for God is good and his every thought is eternally valid. After all, Yahweh is consistently presented as the paragon of sinlessness in a relentlessly sinful world. He transcends the very concept of sin: the rules that apply to the rest of us are meaningless to him, he can do whatever he wants. For some people in our nation today, this idea still makes plenty of sense.

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But if viewed rationally and dispassionately, the implacable Yahweh reveals his true nature as a heartless god of war. He promotes the needless conquest of a population which, by all appearances, is simply minding its own business on land it has cultivated for generations. Christians who have tried to justify such a mentality are reduced to composing outrageous apologies such as this one, which I have found in the Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible by Merril C. Tenney (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1975, vol. 3, p 707):

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   By 1400 B.C. the Canaanite civilization and religion had become one of the weakest, most decadent and most immoral 

   cultures of the civilized world. Many of its repulsive practices were prohibited to Israel in Leviticus 18. In view of the sexual

   perversions listed (i.e. uncovering various family members' nakedness, and sodomy, bestiality) it is more than likely that 

   venereal diseases ravaged a large part of the population. Hence stern measures were required to prevent decimation of the

   Israelites by the spread of these and other diseases such as malaria and smallpox. Contagion would be possible by sudden

   fraternization before immunity could develop. Yet in His control of history God grants freedom of will and motive to His

   agents. He is not therefore responsible for their greed and atrocities.

 

For the record, I know of no evidence that the ancient Canaanite peoples were especially given to sodomy, nudity or bestiality. Nor, for that matter, could they have been the least bit responsible for the prevalence of malaria (spread by mosquitos!) or smallpox anywhere in the ancient world. Moreover, nowhere is it written that Leviticus 18 was specifically composed in response to practices that the Israelites found to be rampant in their "Promised Land." The author of this passage attempts to justify genocide on rational, even scientific grounds, since the merely theological can scarcely satisfy the modern mind. Then, to cover all possible bases, he even exculpates the Lord by saying that the atrocities of his people are actually due to their exercise of free will, as if Yahweh never expected his order to kill every person in the Canaanite lands to be taken literally.

 

Nevertheless, it must be remembered that genocide is essentially a criminal act: it calls for the killing of people simply for who they are, not for anything they may have done. According to this author's view, some people (even their infants) are just too irredeemably decadent to deserve to live and therefore must be exterminated--a fine lesson for young minds in a catechism class, I suppose. 

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But I am moved to wonder: why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, sinless deity find it necessary to direct his worshippers to do such things? It should have been easy to find a homeland for the Israelites without resorting to such beastly measures. As the unchallenged Creator and Master of the Universe, Yahweh could have sent them to Spitzbergen perhaps, or the Australian desert, or the surface of Mars--indeed, to a million places where there would have been no need to massacre or displace anyone. The questions remain: how could this tale of heartless murder constitute the foundation of the compassionate, humanistic civilization in which most of us aspire to live? Of what possible benefit is such nonsense to our modern society? And finally, if called upon in a court of law, why should I ever rest my hand on such a repulsive text in order to pledge my word of honor?

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Consumed by these thoughts at the age of fifty-six, I had a sudden epiphany: I would write a fictionalized account of the fall of Jericho. However, for the first time it would be told from the point of view of the victimized people inside the city, not the conquerors. In fact, the invading army would remain entirely invisible to the hapless inhabitants cowering inside the walls. I was on a moral mission: I would restore the humanity of a long-extinguished people who have been deprived of their own voice, who have been consistently dehumanized by both Israelite and Christian propagandists for millennia. The Canaanites can no longer speak for themselves, and no one ever defends them. I would be the first to do so.

 

Although the narrative was conceived as a polemic, my aim, I must stress, has never been to denigrate any specific religion, only the attitudes of certain unimaginative adherents to religion. It has absolutely not been my aim to denigrate the contemporary Jewish people, the heirs of those who told the original story. After all, the Jews have never claimed that their god is benevolently disposed to all humanity, only to themselves. No, the true targets of my rancor have been those evangelical Christians who want to apologize for Yahweh even while they claim that he has nothing but the best interests of humanity at heart. Only they could have written something like that entry in the Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible, and then claimed that the god who commanded such horrendous acts was the same one who went on to incarnate himself as the all-loving Jesus Christ.

 

In a fever of inspiration, I spent September 2012 researching the ancient Canaanites in my university library, especially the twentieth-century archaeological and philological discoveries in Ugarit. Then I wrote a tragic play titled Only the Harlot Shall Live, completing it by December of that year. Later, in fall 2014, I expanded and improved the text considerably, and also composed three hymns to be included in the performance. When it occurred to me that the play was probably too cumbersome ever to be staged, I turned to prose fiction as a vehicle to express my ideas. In 2018 I converted the play into the novel Harlots of Jericho, retaining most of the characters and situations but changing the details of plot considerably. In December 2019, I published the novel as both an eBook and paperback through Amazon's Kindle Direct service.

 

Rahab is no longer a heroine in my version of the biblical episode, nor is she even the central character. Instead, I focus on the figure of Hayyuma, another "harlot" of Jericho who has known Rahab intimately since childhood. In this way, the reader sees Rahab through the first-person narration of a humble, common person with whom we can all identify. However, it must never be forgotten that Hayyuma has not been singled out for a special privilege by any divine power. She is simply another inhabitant of a city under the curse of God, and is thus destined to die when the city will fall. The entire narrative derives from the thoughts of a desperate woman's mind during the last twenty-four hours of the doomed city. Hayyuma's present-tense account is interspersed with past-tense flashbacks of her childhood initiation into prostitution and the birth of her daughter Tahuru. She also tells of the love affair that arose between her and Rahab when they were teenagers, their only recourse to transcend the horrors of life in an unfeeling brothel.

 

As the narrative progresses, Hayyuma is forced to come to terms with Rahab's fickle, self-absorbed nature, as well as her tendency to shift loyalties in terms of love, friendship and religion. After a period of estrangement, Hayyuma's efforts to ingratiate herself to Rahab in order to save her eleven-year-old daughter's life lead to her own act of betrayal, when she reports her former lover to the authorities for hosting the Israelite spies who have come to prepare the city for destruction. All betrayals--of love, faith and the city itself--come to a climax during the final day of the siege, when the fabled walls of Jericho are about to come down and all the inhabitants, save Rahab and her family, will be put to the sword.

 

So, who is Hayyuma? To some extent, I have intended her as an alter-ego to myself. Her vivid imagination conjoined to moral confusion, her occasional ineptitude and lethargic inability to act in her own best interests, are all modeled on certain regrettable characteristics of my own personality. But she is also Every-Human, meant to represent all of the billions of wretched little ones who have existed throughout time, powerless in the face of murderous, manipulative, overwhelming forces. Rahab may be selected to become one of the exalted "Children of Israel," but Hayyuma remains a true Child of the Earth. Even though her name in the Ugaritic language means "life," she knows full well she will never transcend her miserable existence of harlotry, never know more than occasional fleeting pleasures, never achieve anything of lasting importance. Her life seems, to her at least, utterly devoid of value. In the end, she can do nothing but devote herself to the happiness, indeed the very survival, of her precious, brilliant, moody daughter Tahuru. As the main characters will conclude in the end, saving Tahuru becomes a final gesture of defiance, an assertion of the worth of humanity in the face of unimaginable evil.

 

From the beginning, I have conceived Hayyuma's story as "humanistic biblical fiction," a kind of Uncle Tom's Cabin for humanists. Throughout the narrative, characters are continually yearning for certain knowledge of the gods who supposedly rule their lives, even though they hear nothing but a confusion of contradictory pronouncements from other human beings. Prayers spiral off into the void and sacrifices are continually proposed, but as Rahab tells Hayyuma in their final chilling conversation, the one true sacrifice will be the people of Jericho themselves, offered up to a bloodthirsty god who has inexplicably ordained their doom. As has been the case throughout history, humans desperately seek gods; but in the end, all they find are other humans, either those who love them or those who would exploit them for base purposes. What we see, in effect, is what we get.

 

To emphasize this point, at the precise center of the novel I have inserted an allegory of the human condition, an eleven-stanza song called "The Forgotten Goddess." It is sung by the tragic figure of Shihira, an aging prostitute who is about to outlive her "usefulness" and be cast out in the street. The goddess she sings about is similarly tragic and miserable, since she is unable to understand who she is, what her purpose might be or how she even came to exist. The Forgotten Goddess languishes in isolation in a primordial Mesopotamian swamp, sure of nothing more than her vague and unanswered yearnings. She is a "goddess" in the sense that we are all potentially gods and goddesses of ourselves, fitfully aware of our capacity to ponder and create and thus attain purpose for our lives. If there is meaning to our existence, we must forge it on our own, by means of godlike processes. The "melodious voice" that the goddess thought she heard once, and yearns to hear again, can ultimately come only from within herself.

 

As I freely admit, Harlots of Jericho was composed as a polemical narrative that is bound to offend certain people. However, it is my fond hope that it will inspire more than it will offend. To those who might complain that it demonizes the "Children of Israel," the ancestors of today's Jews and the spiritual antecedents of billions of Christians and Muslims worldwide, I only ask that they make some small effort to imagine what it would be like to find oneself trapped inside a besieged city awaiting massacre. I ask them to reread this part of the Bible in a different way, in a way that exalts humanity instead of divinity.  I ask them to do the most important thing that all intelligent, sensitive, compassionate people must learn to do, that is, place themselves in another's situation and look at familiar situations from unfamiliar perspectives. The Book of Joshua is supposed to teach us the rewards of faithful service to God, how the impossible can be made to happen for those who trust and believe. In other words, we are only meant to read the book from the conqueror's perspective. I would ask my readers to remember that there are two sides to every battle, and that there are always some pitiable people on the losing side. Just as more recent film treatments have sought to humanize the peoples that Hollywood had habitually regarded as our irredeemably evil foes (i.e. Native Americans, or the Japanese and Germans during the Second World War), I have sought here to redeem the supposedly irredeemable Canaanites, who committed the cardinal "sin" of worshipping "strange gods" and building cities on land that another (equally strange) god had inconveniently promised to someone else. The Bible never tells us that the people of Jericho were warned in advance that they must change their worship practices, or else pull up stakes and migrate on a Trail of Tears in order to avoid being slaughtered. God, for all his power and might, never troubled to arrange things so that a massacre would not be necessary. Instead, it really seems he wanted his people to commit such hideous acts in order to teach them how best to worship him, in order to make them into the people he intended them to be. In a compassionate, rational, orderly universe, a universe permeated with wisdom and sentiment, there can be no excuse for this.

 

If any general were to capture a city today and put all its inhabitants to death, then offer the trite excuse "God told me to do it," he would receive worldwide opprobrium and instantly be hustled before The Hague War Crimes Tribunal. Let us remember the lesson of Srebenica. If that is how things stand today, then I recommend my readers keep such realities in mind whenever they pick up "The Good Book" and peruse the section from Exodus to Joshua. My novel should move them to contemplate the rank evil that is presented in certain parts of Scripture, and ponder what it means to be a human being, any human being living anywhere, who is subjected to such treatment. Children were said to be massacred at Jericho (and in a hundred other biblical places), and yet we think it the highest virtue to offer these stories to our children to read. After all, the Fall of Jericho is a very popular subject for children's retellings, and for a few years it seemed that every third American boy was given the name of Joshua. Christ himself bore a version of that name. It may be a humble suggestion on my part, especially coming from a non-believer, but I would never recommend that the name of a war criminal be bestowed on any child.

 

Hayyuma could be any one of us, feeling and fearing all the same things we do, yearning for forbearance and safety and pity, aching for the fullness of life. If we cannot learn to think in this way, then we have no business reading the Bible, then demanding that others read it and obey its every dictate. With this in mind, I offer my Harlots of Jericho to the world.

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Haven of Dust

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Karima Makauskas is an idealistic, forty-six-year-old high school English teacher whose orderly existence in an Illinois town is disrupted by a massive predawn artillery bombardment. In the company of a few loyal companions, Karima is forced to flee across a nation at war with itself, suffering extreme hardship and deprivation, in order to rejoin her son who has been cut off from her in California.

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Set in the near future, Haven of Dust tells the story of Karima's year-long journey across America in the face of the Second Civil War, a contest that pits Red states against Blue after a major economic collapse. When refugee life in Chicago is rendered impossible by food shortages, social unrest and relentless aerial bombardment, Karima decides her only option is to make a desperate effort to find her twelve-year-old son, whom she had sent to stay with his father in California before the outbreak of hostilities. Because of the war, all communication between Illinois and California has been lost. At the suggestion of one of her companions, an African-American outcast named Jamal, Karima flees Chicago in the company of her emotionally unstable student Molly, Jamal and two others in an effort to reach the west by traversing the prairie provinces of Canada. Their aim is to bypass the Red states, where they would expect to be treated as enemy aliens.

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After running afoul of renegade Blue forces in Minnesota, the party flees into Canada in a snowstorm, attempting to drive across the country despite acute shortages of money and fuel. When the Canadian authorities deport them for entering the country illegally, they are sent into the wilds of Montana, a state controlled by the hostile Red government. With nowhere to go but forward, Karima and her companions try to forge a way across four Red states in an effort to reach a dubious haven in California.

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The novel describes the potential breakdown of a polarized American society, but it concentrates just as much on the character of Karima, a woman of mixed South Asian and Lithuanian ancestry whose confused identity and dysfunctional family have left her unsure of her ability to cope with hardship and war. Her often conflicted relationship with the headstrong, irreverent Molly mirrors the ideal condition of the country as a whole: they are at odds with each other, yet forced by circumstances to cooperate and coexist. Although citizens of a Blue state, Karima and Molly suffer abuse at the hands of men from both warring sides, and thus come to the conclusion that their only real enemy is the war itself. Moving through the ravaged landscape, often on foot when their fuel runs out, they have only tenuous access to food, water and shelter. In the face of a harsh winter in the mountains of Wyoming, they end up slaving for a visionary fanatic who runs a secret sectarian commune.

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Karima's experiences, and the lessons she learns about human nature, are meant to reflect the agony of a nation riven in two. As she travels, she takes refuge in a number of communities where groups of people have attempted to create parallel societies to offset the effects of civil conflict. In every case, these "pocket paradises," often exhibiting religious or pseudo-religious ideologies, provide no lasting solace to Karima and her companions.

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Haven of Dust is inspired by the current political atmosphere in the United States, where for the first time in my life I am hearing serious references to such terms a secession and civil war. To some extent, it also reflects my musings during numerous road trips between Illinois and California, the two states I have called home. The emphasis of this work is on the general tragedy of such a war and its effect on unfortunate civilian refugees who are caught in the crossfires, without promotion of any explicitly political point of view. I have conceived this work in the American tradition of the dystopian road novel, in which refugee characters make their way toward a vaguely defined geographical goal while gaining social and moral insights from the communities they visit along the way, in the fashion of Huckleberry Finn.

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Hyperborea

 

Although the first novel of this series begins as classic science fiction, it does not end that way, and indeed I do not imagine that I have any particular affinities for the genre. Instead, my aim here, as in my other works, is to place human beings in a difficult environment and see what they make of it. And also, what it makes of them. Hyperborea is, in effect, a fable about mankind, especially mankind's atavistic tendencies as viewed through an anthropological lens. All the themes that predominate in my other fictional works are evident here: religion, hardship, starvation, storytelling, linguistic confusion, a failed paradise, awkward or unsatisfying love relationships, characters who doubt their abilities even as they strive for social acceptance. When I began the original single novel (The Pastures of Hyperborea) that has now become two separate narratives, my idea was to conjoin it with Asterion and the tragedy Only the Harlot Shall Live in order to create a sort of thematic trilogy, "Three Tales of Madness and Religion." So, I suppose madness belongs in my list of themes as well: the madness of civil war, of Asterion's captivity, of the people of Jericho who look for gods in everything, and finally, the madness of the Hyperboreans who never want their miserable world to change.

 

Hyperborea is a frozen planet in orbit around a dying dwarf star, at the farthest rim of the galaxy. Migrations opens with an account of its discovery and colonization in the early twenty-third century, at a time when the Earth is relatively peaceful, unified and prosperous. Interstellar travel, made possible by passage through wormholes, is used by large corporations intent on exploiting mineral wealth on planets beyond the solar system. The unexplored Avernus Rift, a hole far longer than any yet known, allows Hyperborea to be reached and developed as a mining outpost, in complete isolation a hundred thousand light years from Earth. 

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The planet is extremely inhospitable, although the atmosphere can be breathed by humans. The temperature is constantly below zero, with active volcanoes looming over a barren desert landscape. The only available water is underground, occasionally appearing at the surface in the form of geysers, steam vents and thermal springs. A few large species of animals and some plants have survived, but in general life on Hyperborea is declining, along with its fading sun. However, the corporations, seduced by the planet’s fabulous mineral wealth, invest in the construction of a sealed settlement for ten thousand colonists so they can live and work in comfort, insulated from the harsh outside environment. This ideal condition prevails until the year 2230, when the settlement is abruptly assailed by a series of disasters. These include famine and social upheaval caused by a loss of contact with Earth, followed by a volcanic eruption that destroys the habitat and drives the colonists out into the wilderness, where the majority of them die from exposure, hunger and thirst.

 

A hundred Hyperborean years (about 75 Earth years) after the eruption, the survivors of the original mining colony have managed to cling to life in a region endowed with thermal heat. The standard of living is completely pre-industrial and even fire is unknown, since the meager plant life of Hyperborea provides an insufficient source of fuel. The old Earth machines are lying dead and inert, their power long since spent, their original functions forgotten. Although scrap metal salvaged from the devastated mining camp can be pounded or ground into crude implements, all other knowledge of metallurgy or advanced technology has been lost. Dwellings are small, low-ceilinged stone huts built over volcanic steam vents. Without sources of artificial light, the Hyperboreans are reduced to spending much of their time in near total darkness, their houses sealed to keep in the heat. Only a few Earth-manufactured plexiglass windows are still in use in communal work areas.

           

Three small settlements holding fewer than six thousand inhabitants remain, strung out on a trail that winds for sixty miles through the thermal region. The only Earth languages still spoken are English and Mandarin Chinese. The people survive on two primary sources of food: large underground tubers that thrive near sources of volcanic heat, and the protein-rich secretions of the domesticated herd animals known as “blumps,” which have three sexes and migrate in search of vegetation throughout the somewhat warmer summer season, then spend the winter huddled in torpor. The blumps themselves cannot be eaten by humans because the plants they feed on are toxic, but at the end of the summer they produce a substance called “blumpcake” with which they feed their young, and this can be consumed by humans. Thus, half of the population is engaged in harvesting tubers in horrific conditions underground, while the other half leads a pastoral mode of existence, following the blumps to distant frozen pastures during the Migration season, all the while fighting epic battles with sinister predatory arthropods known as “crabs,” which emerge from hidden tunnels to ambush the blumps. 

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The main narrative is built around the experiences of Nora, a woman of 37 Earth years who leads a solitary existence in the settlement of Good Hope. She is the last of the town’s Teachers, a social group once esteemed for its ability to read and pass on the knowledge of the original Earth-born Hyperboreans, commonly mythologized as “the Old People.” Regarded as a social misfit by her illiterate, unimaginative fellows, Nora is resigned to working in the tuber mines and living alone in a hut so small that she cannot stand upright in it. After the death of her mentor, Nora has inherited the last few printed materials and photographs that survive from the old Earth colony, which practically no one else in Good Hope can read or appreciate anymore. No longer able to regard earthly lore as relevant to their precarious existence and content to focus on the grim tasks essential for survival, the incurious Hyperboreans have largely forgotten the very name of Earth. Instead they devote themselves to a fertility deity known as “The Big Mother,” as well as a primeval shamanism that traces all human origins and purpose to a chthonic spirit realm beneath the local volcano. Good Hope is falling increasingly under the thrall of this spirit cult and its manipulative, unscrupulous founder, a charismatic preacher known as “The Guide” who beguiles his devotees with a dazzling oratory they can scarcely understand.

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Nora’s life changes when Desh, an exuberant, twenty-year-old male Teacher from the northern settlement of Mahapahara, makes the hazardous journey to Good Hope in order to complete his studies of Earth lore with her. The two misfits form an awkward friendship: Desh is homosexual, animated and enthusiastic about learning, whereas the heterosexual Nora, much older and more reserved, is inured to her hermit-like existence and given to misanthropic tendencies. Drawn together by their love of learning and devotion to freedom of thought, they stand in opposition to the Guide, whose mysteriously profound knowledge of Earth and ability to manipulate the populace with clever rhetoric makes him their natural rival.

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Nora is a tall woman, unsuited for work in the cramped darkness of the tuber mines. When she finds herself unable to dig or lift rock due to severe back pain, Desh takes her place underground while she goes off on the Migration as a blump herder, her first time ever outside the stifling confines of Good Hope. On the trail she earns the grudging respect of her companions by fighting crabs and overcoming the challenges of the unforgiving wilderness of Hyperborea. Despite her initial skepticism, she also comes to appreciate the comfort provided by the cult of the Big Mother, to whom the herders are devoted as the source of all life. During the season on the trails it becomes apparent that the environment of the planet is changing: the air is growing warmer, the hot springs are drying, the vegetation is diminishing, and the crabs are attacking with unimaginable ferocity. When the Migration ends, Nora and the other herders return to Good Hope only to find the town in a state of crisis: an earthquake has collapsed the tuber mines and the town is in the grip of famine.  The Hyperboreans have given way to fatalistic lethargy, unable to adapt to the loss of their comforting patterns of existence.

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Nora now emerges as a dynamic force within the settlement, confident in her ability to lead an expedition across the waterless and unexplored Eastern Plain in search of a more hospitable environment near Erebus, a distant volcano. Journey to Erebus tells the story of this arduous quest, in which Nora and Desh use their reading skills to follow clues left by the old Earth colonists. Their fellow travelers include the adolescent Leyla, the Guide's defiant fugitive concubine, Guna, a leader of the Mandarin-speaking settlement of Wanli-guo, and Wild Man, a champion crab-fighter who was born covered with hair and thus imagines he is the only true Hyperborean. Nora's experiences on the slopes and in the depths of Erebus will ultimately lead to fantastic discoveries, as well as her determination to create an enlightened new order for the pitiful human remnants of Hyperborea.

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Although my neighbors in Illinois may find this mildly offensive, the vision for this narrative dates back to my earliest reactions as a transplanted Californian. During the rigors of my first Midwestern winter, I remember thinking, "What would it be like if the weather were always like this? What kind of people would continue to live here, and consider themselves at home in such surroundings?" After I had completed the first draft of the book, I discovered Nietzsche's The Antichrist and found the Hyperboreans there too: "Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans, we know well enough how far outside the crowd we stand...  Beyond the north, the ice, and death--our life, our happiness..." My Hyperboreans are likewise satisfied with the life that they have made, to the extent that most of them can never imagine living anywhere else. This, I fondly hope, may stand as a lesson for all of us.