The Future's Vale

A 'sequel' that takes place hundreds of years after The Pale Dragon of Kaloret.  It is much darker in tone, and uses themes of mystery, adventure, epic, thriller and horror.  The original intention of writing this novel was to establish the capability of the world to incorporate a tone entirely unlike the previous novel.  I came to want to do this because I wanted to establish Finitelize (the continent) in a darker sense.  This will help me when I write the next three novels/trilogies (each of them take place hundreds of years apart from each other), which I intend to be more 'serious' in tone than The Pale Dragon of Kaloret.  Similar to how J.R.R. Tolkien has both The Hobbit (a light-hearted fairy tale epic about slaying a dragon that has destroyed the dwarves' lives) and The Children of Hurin (a dark epic about slaying a dragon that has destroyed Hurin's family) take place in the same world with no direct connection between the two (they are also separated across hundreds of years), that is my intention for this new novel.  

More importantly, the idea behind this novel is that it is a contemplation of humanity's relationship with technology and our tendency to create new technologies without contemplation.  I felt that during The Pale Dragon of Kaloret, I falsely paint technology as a morally poor activity to partake in or even 'sinful' in some way.  The 'prophecy' or expectation of humanity in the novel is that they will encounter The Great Filter if people make new technologies.  The idea is that if we reach a certain level of civilization of progress, there may be a filter in front of us that will prevent us from passing it.  This comes from the Fermi Paradox, which proposes that we may be in front, or behind, the filter and that this filter explains why we have not encountered any lifeforms outside of Earth.  My novels will not include aliens, don't you worry.  But I do illustrate technology as this doomsday mechanism when I actually am a big believer in technology.  I believe in technology in the same way Isaac Asimov did: technology is not the enemy, but our use of technology is.  This novel seeks to explore whether we can truly create new technologies without falling into the trap that almost everyone has had to endure throughout human history.

After having finished writing the novel...  Things turned out to be different than what I intended it to be.

In the end, as I finished writing the novel at 193,000 words (roughly 500 book-print pages), the story turned out to be more akin to The Stand and The Faerie Queene with its sense of adventure mixed in with a dream-like, surreal story.  The story has a lot more to do with dreams and the sense of identity than scientific philosophy.  In the protagonist's case, pertaining to who/where she calls home and who she associates her fragmented perspective of herself with.  There is a greater sense of what this world has to offer, as portrayed in this novel.  Perhaps not in the sense of The Pale Dragon of Kaloret introducing different peoples/creatures/places, but more so about what tones and themes may persist throughout the following 3+ novels I have planned for the series.

This novel became my longest novel I ever wrote.  I don't expect I will write another novel this long if I can help it for some time.  Most of my novels, like the Muneral Inc. novels, range about 60,000 words.  The Pale Dragon of Kaloret was 152,000 words, and that novel had a (sort of) episodic nature to the storytelling, since it was in the style of The Hobbit and The Odyssey.  I think most novels (this novel included) do not need to be as long as they are, and I typically try to write more shorter/medium length novels as to not include any 'filler.'