Around the time I first started working on the
project that ultimately became Annah and
the Exiles and Annah and the Gates of
Grace, the second and third books of my Children
of Evohe science-fiction series, I had an idea for a story about a young
man stationed aboard a starship, whose job it was to monitor transmissions from
space and respond to it, and about the habit he had of collecting
conversations; a confluence of event and habit that would lead first to a
series of conversations with, and eventually to a relationship with, a young
woman named Rynn Handel, aboard another ship, somewhere.
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The “twist”, as they say, would be that Rynn was
a cyborg—a being comprised both of human tissue and cybernetic parts—but in
Rynn’s case, without a humanoid body, or really a body of any kind beyond a
kind of mechanical casing. I thought the
story would be an interesting metaphor both for online communication and the
relationships that develop online in the current Internet age, as well as a
commentary on the challenges of life with a disability, especially as the story
developed, and I ‘discovered’ that the young man, named Northrop Wynn, had a
disability of his own—a (fictional) neurological condition called thalamic
hypercognition. North’s condition allows
for accelerated cognitive function, but this acceleration takes a toll on other
functions of the body, to the point that by the time he’s in his late twenties,
at the beginning of the story, he can’t walk on his own, having to use either a
wheelchair or a cybernetic brace which enables him to walk, but cuts off his
hypercognitive functions. Ultimately,
North’s condition also promises to cut short his lifespan, leaving him with a
life expectancy of around fifty years at best.
These challenges give North a unique perspective from which to
understand Rynn’s struggle with her own condition, one that she didn’t ask for
any more than he did.
As I said, I conceived The Conversationalist with only the basics of the situation and the
names of my two characters in place, and I didn’t start writing it when I first
had the idea, for a couple of reasons.
First, I was deep into writing the Annah
sequel, which later turned into two sequels, and I’m not a fan of veering
off-course into another project just because I have a neat idea one day. Secondly, I had no idea what Rynn was doing
on board the ship she was on, or what would cause Rynn and North to ultimately
meet ‘in real life’ so to speak. So I
took a few notes in a MS Word file, titled it “The Conversationalist”, and set
it aside.
Later on, when one Children of Evohe book had become two, and I was midway through
writing the second of those, Annah and
the Gates of Grace, I had a situation in the book where Annah and her
friends found themselves in a prison underneath the surface of a planet called
Holdfast; a prison which, it turned out, was run by a cyborg intelligence
installed for that purpose by the prison’s administrators because they wanted
someone to run the prison who wouldn’t die, and they didn’t want a simple
computer, because computers can’t truly reason or feel. When I arrived at this point in the story, it
was clear that the cyborg in charge of Gracegate Prison had to be Rynn Handel,
even though I hadn’t planned it that way to begin with. Rynn’s part in Gates of Grace both fleshed out her backstory, established her
motivations and personality, and also explained what she’s doing on the ship
called the Broken Road, where readers
of The Conversationalist will find
her, whether they’ve read Gates of Grace or
not.
Once I began writing the story, I discovered
things about both Rynn and North that I had neither thought of, nor planned
on. I didn’t know about North’s
hypercognition until I sat down to write, and I had no idea about Rynn’s quirky
sense of humor or her obsession with the twentieth-century Earth rock group ELO
until I started working in earnest on the book, either. I also didn’t know about North’s friendship
with Connor Reynolds, a man who was the head of the Earth government in the
first Children of Evohe novel before
he is assassinated, or the role that friendship would play in North’s being on
the run in space when The
Conversationalist begins. All of
these things became important aspects of a project that would once again turn
into two novels: The Conversationalist:
Out of the Blue and The
Conversationalist: Mission on Mercy Prime.
Fundamentally, I hope The Conversationalist, like most of my novels do to one extent or
another, makes the case for the outsider, and particularly for the disabled
person. Like Annah, Rynn and North are
disabled people, or, to put it a better way, differently-abled people, who have
vital things to offer to their culture and to each other. I think the genres of imaginative fiction
stand in a unique position to model a vision in which the marginalized are no longer
so, because the margins of society will be widened and adjusted to shape a
world that reflects all the unique things they can bring to it. If my fiction has a mission, that’s it. Rynn Handel’s story is one more step along
the road of that particular mission.
Clay Gilbert says he’s always liked
stories, and that from the time he knew there were people who told them for a
living, that’s what he wanted to do. Clay’s
work in various genres has been in print since his first short science fiction
story, “The Computer Conspiracy,” was published in Scholastic magazine when he was just thirteen. Clay is the author
of the science fiction series Children of
Evohe, including the novels Annah and the Children of Evohe, Annah and
the Exiles, and Annah and the Gates of Grace. He is also the author of the YA dystopian
novel Eternity, as well as the vampire novel Dark Road Paradise .
He lives and works in Knoxville , TN.
PLACES TO FIND ME:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/claygil2015
Author blog: https://portalsandpathways.wordpress.com/
Official “Children of Evohe” site: https://childrenofevohe.com/
Email: claygil1971@yahoo.com
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