parent nodes: StarSpawn
Background and FAQ
Introduction
I wrote this small work to provide background information on the Star Spawn universe, as well has provide the rationale I used in creating the fictional universe.
In a way, a person may consider this the “hint book” to the stories. What you will read here will not necessarily be a “spoiler” to reading the stories for the first time, but it will provide answers to questions that I anticipate will arise from time to time.
The material is organized into several sections, some of which take the form of glossaries and charts, while the rest takes the form of an FAQ (frequently asked questions). It isn’t that these questions have been raised before (some haven’t), but I strongly expect to see them raised at some time in the future.
Note: This is still a work in progress.
Religious FAQ
Why the religious element?
A. Most science fiction stories ignore any element of religion. There have been notable exceptions: the Dune series by Frank Herbert, the films Metropolis and The Planet of the Apes, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and others. In the case of SF by the notable authors – Asimov, Heinlein, Anthony – and for the most part, religion was either not part of the culture or if it did exist, it was an elemental part of the culture. The writings of Wells and others recognize the “hand of God,” in governing the universe (as was the case in The War of the Worlds).
Few of the works that I have read or viewed have explored the concept of God as the supreme creator of the Universe. Occasionally, you’ll have a writer like Father Andrew M. Greeley (God Game) and Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) who have religious backgrounds and approach the subject from a philosophical point of view or provide a religious element as part of the background of the characters. Robert A. Heinlein mentions religious groups on a very limited basis in his novels.
When I created the Star Spawn race, I felt it was time to revisit the age-old story of a lesser race encountering an advanced civilization and seeing in that civilization, God or god-like beings. But I also decided to add the “what if” element and suggest that indeed, these are the children of the gods. To that end, the saga was written, providing a “coming of age” for not only one of the Star Spawn, but for the goddess of a future universe, and indeed, the mother of all living in that universe or “creation.”
This provides a mix of Judeo-Christian, Eastern, and Wiccan thinking. In studying various paths, I see related elements. For instance, the Biblical teaching that man is not without the woman and the woman not without the man in the Lord suggests that women have an important role in the eternal scheme of things. Some religions, like the Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS for short), teach that women share a place in an exalted state of god(dess)hood and have the potential to become goddesses next to their eternal mates, who become gods, all serving under a single “Most High God.”
Although some believe this view violates the “one and only God” thinking, there are Biblical passages that suggest multiple gods and lords, but one ultimate or “most high” god, to whom all allegiance is given. So, I took the path of “what if” there are more gods and goddesses, rejecting the non-biblical teaching of “one and only God” which appears to be extra-Biblical (i.e. introduced by a later generation, rather than within the Bible).
(Not to start any religious arguments, multiple god references are found in Genesis, Psalms, John, and I Corinthians.)
Having a race of beings (the star spawn) who can “jump start” stars into life is an interesting concept and while our “coming of age” star spawn mentions that they have the power, they do not demonstrate it within the novel. The gathering of the elements to form a new galaxy is suggested and by the very nature of observable galaxy groupings, that perhaps there is an eternal progression or evolution through mortality on to that of godhood. And so, each god forms its own galaxy and serves as that galaxy’s God, with his eternal mate giving life to all in that universe.
Are the religious elements from any particular religion?
A: No. Even my own religion’s doctrine does not have any teachings along these lines -- of beings gathering materials to form their own galaxies over which they serve as a god (or goddess).
Originally, I had a Milton-like story in the second novel, but that got pulled for several reasons: it interrupted the flow of the story, it didn’t advance any element from the first book, and it generally “got in the way” for people who have studied Milton and are familiar with his writings. I found that knowledgeable Catholics were the quickest to point out this “problem.”
Some of my readers, and I can only presume that they lack the background, weren’t bothered by the story. One related the 42,000-word segment to “angels” though that wasn’t what I had in mind. She called them angels, but she didn’t see them in the more traditional sense. And, given what takes place in Second Encounter, I think I have to agree with her assessment.
When I decided to pull the segment, I replaced it with a far shorter narrative that had a feeling of scripture similar to that found in the Christian Bible book Revelations. However, that bothered me, and so I created entries from a written journal of J. M., which he put together as he reached the end of his life.
This didn’t work either, mostly because I didn’t want to have a “flash forward” of the type Joseph Michael Strazcinski used in the Babylon 5 television series.
Unfortunately, this left me with some significant untold portions of the saga that take place during the second novel. I moved the 42,000-word segment to “The Final Battle,” but I found that unsatisfactory, too. I then pulled the sequence from that book, since it went down an entirely different course than I had originally planned. A final rewrite of The Stormy Island Incident I will likely restore some of the elements.
Back to the discussion. At first glance, one could say that elements of the second novel have a strong Christian background, but some of those same elements are present in non-Christian religions such as Zoroastrianism (according to some, it is their thinking that Christianity grew out of their teachings and not Judaism).
Part of this page on this site covers specific dogma and cites potential sources for such thinking. Most of it is Biblical in nature.
Will you cite those Bible passages in this text?
A. Up to a point, yes. But I am disturbed that it may give rise to the idea that these are debatable points. They are not. This is a work of fiction with a fictional race of god-like beings - in other words, fantasy. While many of the ideas were suggested by Biblical research, they are more speculative than anything else. The bottom line is that I am not opening this to debate. This is a work of speculative (fantasy) fiction and the scenario is one developed from asking “What if...?”
While most of the material came to me “on the fly” while I was writing it, I may be hard pressed to recreate or reference every text that suggested the path the saga has followed.
Getting back to “What if?” This technique is used to raise a question or problem or suggest a scenario, and let established (fictional) characters or personalities play out their actions. Some of the following questions are of this nature: What if there is a god at the center of each galaxy? What if that god is the off-spring of another god and so on back through time? What if we discovered or intercepted such a creature on its way to form its own galaxy?
While you may not have the full saga available, the various novels bring a lot of the “unfinished business” together and you will see how “the goddess of all that is” comes into being. This is the central theme of the saga - the coming of age of “the Goddess.”
The obvious question is whether or not I believe it? The answer is, of course not. This is fiction, is it not? “The Final Battle” does complete the story of how the Goddess comes into being, but it was a surprise to me to discover her role in the (fictional) Eternal scheme of things. And while I did not anticipate that part of the story, it was seemed natural that the events take place like they do throughout the saga.
The Bibliography will eventually contain some of the more influential passages, along with a number of non-religious references.
You seem to put down certain elements of religion. Why?
A. My characters are what I believe to be typical of a cross section of their fictional society. As such, a number of them have no opinion, while others are believers of one sort or another and still others are skeptics (doubters) to one degree or another. This mix is going to result in some negative and some positive thinking with respect to religion.
David, one of the Star Spawn, is negative toward religion.
A. I am anticipating that perception based upon what I know of certain specific views of what does or does not constitute the “truth” with respect to religious thinking. This has been a problem over decades with respect to films that incorporate religious interpretation of certain events. For instance, films depicting the life of Christ often are criticized because the film does not represent a particular interpretation.
With respect to David, if you reread his conversation with Stollack in the first novel (cut considerably from the early drafts), he criticizes society’s view of things that you and I identify as religious.
As it happens, that is also my view. I believe that society as a whole, including many of its religious teachers, do not have their collective act together and as such, often do things that individuals within society wouldn’t normally consider or tolerate.
Part of the problem is driven by the media, which tends to numb us to many facets of life, and they actually do a lot of damage to and show disrespect for many religions. But, if you stop to consider history, how “clean” are the hands of the religious? Religious persecution has almost always been at the hands of other religions and more often than not, that persecution is at odds with the persecutors’ own teachings.
Do you not respect religion?
A. I do not respect intolerance, regardless of whether it represents a religious view or not and regardless of its source. That does not mean, however, that I support all religious views. It simply says that I am intolerant of intolerance, regardless of its target or its source.
You don’t respect certain religions.
A. I anticipate seeing this question and it is a misinterpretation. I am not tolerant of intolerant religious views of others, especially when I find no evidence (within core religious teachings) to support such religious intolerance. Again, this is not unique to any world religion or segment of a world religion; it seems to be universal to many religions. And, I should mention, that it appears to be universal in politics and science, as well. It becomes a case of “us” versus “them.”
There have always been, are now, and always will be factions of the major religious, scientific, and political movements that are not in step with the base teachings of their larger group. Sometimes the antagonism has political or economic motivation behind the intolerance. Hitler’s Germany is one such example wherein religious intolerance toward Judaism was popularized. Some Christian sects have echoed this anti-Semitism. Today, Judaism in America is well respected and with a few exceptions, protected against religious “hate” crimes. However, with the relatively recent events of 9/11 and the “war” against terrorism, Islam has become the target of a number of so-called Christians who do not tolerate others.
Are you using the Star Spawn saga to promote your own views of what is ethical or religious?
A. I am raising questions about some commonly held ideas, whether they are religious, political, or are from a discipline of science. I consider no topic to be taboo or too “sacred” to be addressed in the saga. This includes everything from the nature of God to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
As to my own views, I see Star Spawn as a work of fiction, an entertainment, and not the basis of a religious, political, or scientific movement.
Shouldn’t you have avoided the religious issue?
A. If I wanted to avoid it, I wouldn’t have written and would not continue to write the Star Spawn saga. While many of us would prefer not to consider things that pertain to religion, one fact remains – we cannot get out of this life alive. And the ultimate question remains: What is beyond death? So, to me, if I am going to have life beyond life as part of the saga, it would naturally be viewed by some of the characters as pertaining to religion. We cannot escape that element and still have the Star Spawn saga.
Generally speaking, very few writers have made religion a central theme to a story or series of stories. I fully realize that this may kill the series, but that is beside the point. I didn’t write the series for anyone but myself. I enjoy reading the stories as much as I enjoyed writing them. I find myself caught up in the saga as much as almost any other reader, even with “behind the scenes” knowledge and knowing the untold parts of the story.
Would you ever consider sharing the untold parts?
A. They are being shared. This material is one example. Second Encounter is another example. One of the unanswered questions concerned the intruders. Why did they follow David’s direction and not communicate with Waken and its crew? What was David’s motivation? You’ll eventually find out the full story as you read the saga. Second Encounter was planned to be the intruder side of the first story, but that has been reduced to where we see only part of that first encounter.
What about published criticism? How will you react if someone publishes a “rebuttal” to the religious concepts found in Star Spawn.
A. As long as they follow “fair use” copyright laws, I’ll even be happy to help them. If someone has a question about how I view a certain topic, I’ll entertain their question, even if they put together a critical (or anti-) star spawn web site. I’m even willing to add a link to the site. After all, this is fiction and there is no reason not to encourage people to draw distinct differences in what is presented in the saga and their own reality.
General FAQ
The stories themselves do not seem to be complete.
A. That is because they are truly part of a larger story. One of my goals was to write reality into the story. Our lives, the effect of our lives on others, and the effect of others’ lives on us – these do not have neat beginnings and endings. We, meaning all of us, impact each other one way or another. While I may never speak with some of you, what I am saying here in this material may stay with you for a long time to come, or you may forget about it when you put this material down. The impact is largely yours to control. Nevertheless, there is no neat, clean ending or neat, clean beginning.
In rewriting The Waken Incident and The Stormy Island Incident, I went back to my original intention, to write a realistic story about life in space. There are a number of threads which do not have any closure in those novels and leave questions unanswered.
Is that also true of the saga – that there is no neat ending or beginning?
A. The beginning started a long time ago. The story that is wrapped in the third novel really starts in an unfinished prequel called Prime Contact. It is the story of Julie Stollack’s grandfather, William Franklin Stollack, and the first meeting with the Coceedn. His first officer was a fanatical follower of Emile Barzados.
The ending of the saga is told in Eve and yes, it completes the saga, but brings the story full circle. I’ll leave it at that.
It is difficult to keep track of who is whom in the stories. You have so many characters. Why?
A. Two reasons. First, I wanted realism and second, there is no such thing as night and day in space, which dictates the use of shifts. Time is almost meaningless, especially when it is not referenced to a specific surface of a planet. Also, having been in the military, I know that duty is not a nine-to-five job. It is twenty-four hours a day and duty positions must be manned at all times.
Since space is no respecter of planetary time references, it would not be unreasonable to expect events to happen at any time, day or night.
The standard warship has three crews that work approximately one-third of the day. Rather than confuse a common reference, I set up a twenty-four hour day, with each hour consisting of sixty minutes, each minute, sixty seconds, and so on. This really isn’t surprising, since it is all tied to planetary rotation and there are, in our thinking, 360 degrees in a circle. I’m not sure how our modern clock came into existence, but I suspect it has to do with the rotation of the earth and the number of degrees in a circle.
Finally, this isn’t the story of a ship or a place. It is a story about people and they travel from place to place. Life in the military takes one across the earth. It isn’t unusual for “lifers” – career military – to live in many different locations, in many different countries.
With one exception – the stories that take place on Eclipse (Update: and on Cleric One) – I use different locales for the stories. Along with the different locales are different peoples. In the first story, I concentrate on the military. In the second story, I deal with engineers putting the finishing touches on a grand experiment. The third (Update: the third and fourth books - Rebirth) story deals with political forces. The fourth (now fifth) story is planet-bound and doesn’t involve anything in space. The fifth (now sixth) story brings two societies together, and so on.
There is no way to tell these stories without introducing many, many characters. It is very full universe, indeed.
To assist readers with the characters, each of the Saga Novels has a section that lists the characters in the story and their part when they are introduced. Where a ship and shifts are involved, I’m also including a command chart. The one I published for the first story has been particularly helpful to my early readers.
Science FAQ
You bend the rules of science, especially with respect to FTL (Faster Than Light) travel.
A. When I set out to write the series, I considered no topic to be unquestionable or “sacred” – taboo. Not only did this include religious views, but also scientific views.
Therefore, I asked the question, “What if FTL were possible? How would the people of the universe have achieved something that we, as humanity, generally consider unreachable?” A lot of the thinking came out of studying Quantum principles. One of the conclusions that I reached was that we work within physical and metaphysical universes. The two appear to co-exist side-by-side and have a limited amount of interaction between each other. This led me to conclude that perhaps there is more than meets the eye, which, of course, is a truism that few professional (as opposed to amateur) scientists would argue. We know, for instance, that there are elements in the universe that make their presence known, but we cannot see or observe them in the normal sense of the word. Various names have been applied, including dark or black matter. It has been presupposed that this might even be “anti” matter, except that we do not see the results of any “collisions” between matter and anti-matter, black holes not withstanding.
But then, one might want to consider the “bang” of a nova. I wonder if that isn’t the result of some collision between matter and anti-matter.
So, there are plenty of things, ideas, and evidence of events out there that we don’t understand, but we can, to a certain degree, measure them or the results of some action by those things. Suppose there is matter that exists as faster-than-light matter? Suppose it is metaphysical matter that coexists with our universe? There are a lot of unanswerable questions involved with all of this.
And as such, we simply do not have proof positive that FTL travel cannot be achieved. We think we have answers, but even those answers are subjected to questions - even by the same people who propose the theories. Einstein, who identified the quanta, called certain quantum effects, “spooky action at a distance.”
When I ask the question, “What if we could achieve FTL travel?” I get the response that it is not possible. Far too many times, such response comes from people that consider themselves “educated.”
There’s nothing wrong with being educated. What you do with that education and how much you remember is another matter. What I find is far too many folks forget that most scientific “knowledge” is theory. Knowledge implies – by its very name – knowing and knowing implies having absolute facts. Theories do not represent fact. They represent what we believe to be true. And truth is a perception, not a fact.
In its own way, science is a religion. Until facts are established, scientists must exhibit a certain faith that their theories are correct. Very few facts (i.e., laws of science) exist.
And so I decided to ignore what many people consider irrefutable truths and question them.
Getting back to Einstein, a short biography of him reveals that the man knew his theories were incomplete. He spent the last twenty-five years of his life attempting to combine electromagnetic and gravitational theories into a single theory that he called the unified field theory.
Einstein’s life is full of examples where he kept working on and advancing his various theories. Not satisfied with his original relativity theory, he introduced the concept of the relativity of time, a special case in his relativity theory.
This begs the question of how I can ignore the work of this great physicist.
One of his formulae, e=mc², presents a problem. In English terms, it says that energy is equal to mass times the velocity of the object squared. And therein lays the problem.
Understand that I’m not saying the formula is wrong. It became a founding principle in developing atomic energy. But I believe that we have applied it incorrectly.
We limit ourselves, by the nature of the formula, to mass and speed. There are similar formulas that say that we cannot exceed the speed of light because the energy needed to reach the speed of light is infinite, regardless of the mass. The long and short of it is that reaching and exceeding FTL speeds are impossible.
But what if the theory is correct, but the concept is wrong? A lot of additional formulas have been constructed from Einstein’s thinking.
But there is a relation with sound which I feel needs to be examined. Take a simple experiment of using a mobile source of a single tone – 1,000 Hz – and progressively increase its speed toward a stationary point, where the transmitted tone is measured.
As the speed increases, the tone increases in frequency. As the mobile source passes the stationary object, the measured tone drops in frequency. This, of course, is the Doppler Effect. (A simple examination of speed effects on light produce similar results, but with respect to the measured “wavelength” portion of light.)
Now, take the same mobile source and stationary object and place a radio transmitter on the mobile source and a receiver at the stationary point. Repeating the first experiment, the same tone is generated, but instead of being transmitted through the air, it is transmitted through the radio.
The result reveals that speed does not affect the measured tone. There is no increase in frequency or Doppler effect.
What happened to the relativity theory? The theory hasn’t changed. We have changed the conditions.
If we can change the conditions with respect to the speed of sound, and ignore those parts of the theory that relate to sound, then what if we did the same thing to the speed of light? Arguments still abound, the most important of which is that we don’t have an example of defeating the limitations of light through some repeatable demonstrable means.
We use radio to demonstrate that the speed of sound can be exceeded. It doesn’t use the same medium (air) to transmit sounds from one point to another.
The star bands provided me with the means to exceed the speed of light. The theory is that they operate outside the realm of the physical universe, just as radio waves operate outside the realm of air (through which sound travels). In the first Star Spawn novel, David explains that he followed a star band “thread” from the warship Waken to Admiral Scott’s vacation cabin.
And, just as we cannot detect radio with our ears, the Dracs could not detect radio with the star band communications system and the Intruders could not detect the star band communications with their radio receivers. At best, the two systems detected splatter, but no more.
With star band communications a Star Spawn Universe reality, FTL is entirely within the grasp of Drac science. Likewise, detection of FTL objects are also within the grasp of Drac science in the same way that radio transmissions of various types are detected by our human sciences. We use radio telescopes to detect sources of radio frequency energy and potential communications over light years of distance.
The Saga
I need to provide some background on the saga itself. It is, in essence two stories.
One follows Jules Ann Stollack (SPOILER) as she dies and is "restored" by the "Eternals." The restored Julie has all the abilities of the Star Spawn David and Spawn. The restoration is really her creation as a future goddess, just as David indicated that he might be seen at some future time as a god. The stories involving Julie are her "coming of age" story.
The other story follows James Matthews who appears as a sleazy astrophysicist in the first story. It is about his rebirth, if you will (SPOILER) and the revelation of his true place in the Alliance, followed by his forced exile on Cleric One, wherein he learns his true position in the present existence.
Both of these stories grew out of the stories as I wrote them. I did not plan them that way.
Page created April 14, 2007
Page updated April 14, 2008