Sky Writing: A New Epic Novel
In 2021, I began working on an epic fiction work that spans 2,050 years of history, will have 2,050 chapters and several hundred thousand words (perhaps half a million words or more) and hundreds of pages of a Prologue/Introduction and Appendices in addition to the primary narrative of 2,050 chapters.
It is inspired by the epic history-styled fiction work of The Silmarillion (J. R. R. Tolkien), the inventive thriller/sci-fi dystopia of That Hideous Strength (C. S. Lewis), the daily life realism of Cannery Row (John Steinbeck), the mythology and hidden space themes of The Chronicles of Narnia (C. S. Lewis), the historical events of the Bible, and experimental fiction genres that use combinations of alternate history (where history is retold in a “what if” mindset in which different outcomes to key events occur) and science fiction (especially time travel and quantum mechanics).
This project will likely never be released or published publicly on this side of forever, but it is a wonderful spirit-nourishing hobby.
The book is called Sky Writing. It contains, among many things, other books I wrote in 2021 and 2022 (which I published briefly online as blog previews and samples before un-publishing them as I continued working on the material) such as Lunar Dark and The Quasar Mystery, and it blends all these elements into a single epic narrative that tells the true story of the last 2,000 years — the secret history of humanity that has churned and lurked under the surface of publicly-known events but has never been revealed openly until now. (That, of course, is the alternate history element mentioned above coming into play.)
Despite the epic length and complexity, Sky Writing has a simple thesis behind it: the often boring and un-magical world that we see around us is a lie. The true nature of the world we live in is full of myths-come-to-life, magic, miracles, and wonders like what we find in all our favorite adventure stories, tall tales, and mythologies. All the legends are true, in other words, but they’ve been cleverly hidden from our surface awareness of reality for thousands of years. Sky Writing reveals the truth about what has been happening behind the curtains of what history books report, and it does this methodically by telling the true stories behind every year of history from the year 0 AD (CE) to 2050 AD (CE). In this way it dips a little into futuristic genres of fiction. The years between 2024 and 2050 turn into speculative science fiction.
It stops at the year 2050 because the late 2040s and the early 2050s contain a series of global cataclysms that, when combined with other major historical events of those years, actually result in a good outcome for humanity — a eucatastrophe, as J. R. R. Tolkien would call it. Similar to how Tolkien’s Middle-Earth has its Three Ages, the year 2050 for humanity marks the end of the current age of human history that began in the year 0 CE (AD). The year 2050, in other words, is not the end of the world, but the beginning of something entirely different and new for human history and Planet Earth.
