Primitives

Prehistoric humans of various sorts have shown up in some of my stories. Although the dwarfs and trolls of my fantasy work would seem to be related to Neanderthals, we ignore this in the tales so I’ll do the same here.

We do meet Neanderthals in my time travel science fiction novel, ‘When Man Was Young.’ These are straightforward denizens of Italy, c.60,000 years ago, so there is no fantasy element involved. I endeavored to be realistic with them instead, and probably succeeded reasonably well.

Then we have the Larnagians in the sci-fi novel ‘Alienese’ (written as Oliver Davis Pike). These are the descendants of ancient Earth humans who learned how to teleport via their brain power and went off to colonize elsewhere, forgetting the way home. A hundred thousand years ago? Two hundred thousand? Who can say? They definitely look like humans of an earlier time, heavy of brow, robust of build (especially the men). They could be Homo longi (Denisovans) or perhaps they come from around the time when Heidelbergensis morphed into ‘modern’ humans. All these I consider to be races* of Home sapiens, actually, and the Larnagians are mutually fertile with Earth humans.

Now the ‘First Children’ of the Malvern novel ‘Valley of Visions’ are almost certainly Heidelbergensis, or closely related. Again, able to breed with modern humans. And, as the Larnagians, not quite as bright** as us, on average (but not that far off). These are a much more gracile sort; that may be their ancestry or they might have evolved that direction during their residency on Exura. The Wizard-Lord Hurasu has kept them under his protection in a sort of reservation high in the mountains, but all are gone — at least from that spot — in a couple thousand years.

They, and the Larnagians, are dark of skin. Not so the ‘beast men’ encountered on an island in a later Mora novel, ‘Warrior of the Moon.’ These are rather hairy with pale skin beneath. With the protection from the sun provided by a heavier pelt, plus a somewhat dim forest environment, dark skin serves no particular purpose (as with chimpanzees). They are far more primitive than the First Children, building rude huts and not knowing fire. Probably some sort of Homo erectus? That would be a good guess but I’m not saying one way or another. After all, who knows what sort of humans and near-humans exist out there in the infiniverse?

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*True races or sub-species — all humans today are one race, from a scientific view.

**This was for the sake of the stories. I would not be at all surprised if the real ‘primitive’ humans were every bit as intelligent as us — or even smarter.

Utility

Utilitarianism believes in the greatest good* for the greatest number of people. This is something with which I totally disagree. Every person is equally important. Their needs are not to be subordinated to those of some hypothetical ‘humanity,’ but neither should they be elevated over those of another.

This is, to be sure, more difficult in practice than in theory. We are bound to place the needs of our loved ones ahead of those we don’t know. Humans have a certain amount of built-in tribalism, both for better and worse. The dynamics of all this is certainly useful fodder for the fiction writer. I rarely write of actual politics in my stories but one can probably detect an undercurrent of a left-libertarian (that is, anarchist) viewpoint.

Fortunately, most of my protagonists are practical sorts and can work with this.

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*Not that anyone can agree what this is. Some say ‘happiness’ but I can be quite happy being unhappy at times.

Lifetime World Building

I’ve been world-building all my life. Or, at least, going back to when I was four or five and laying out large scenarios with my toy soldiers and dinosaurs and usually a few native Americans too. I could find roles for all of them.

I’m told when I was seven or eight I was creating similar fantasy worlds for my playmates at school. I do not believe they took them as seriously as I did. A few ideas took on more concrete form eventually. I think the first to actually ‘exist’ as a world, one where I wrote things down, drew maps, etc. came when I was about fourteen. That would have been the South Seas fantasy world. Basically a ‘lost world’ sort of thing at that point, an undiscovered island. I was encountering such worlds in my reading, E.R. Burroughs and others.

Then there was my apocalypse world, post-atomic war style. It grew in all sorts of directions and became fairly well-developed eventually, with quite a lot of it on paper. Did I attempt to actually write stories in either of these worlds? Sure, but I never really followed through very well on them. I suppose I just wasn’t ready to write fiction yet (poetry was quite another matter and took much of my attention for a long time).

In time, I abandoned the post-apocalypse concept in favor of another world, and went to moving all those ideas there. And, since there was room for it, the South Seas ideas followed them. So was born the ‘Izan’ world (or infinite worlds, actually) in which the bulk of my fantasy is set.

Thus my Mora novels (beginning with ‘Coast of Spears’) derive fairly directly from that earliest South Seas world-building. Before I wrote any of them, however, I turned out the four short novels (or one long novel — one can look at it either way) that make up Donzalo’s Destiny. There’s no denying that my maps of the region in which they are set were originally based on the southeastern USA. I changed them quite a bit, including flipping east and west, adding mountain ranges, and so on, before the geography became set. And, while I was at it, I drew up the rest of the world.

Too late to change any of that now — I’ve set too many stories in that world. To be sure, I’ve built other worlds since, some for multiple novels. Any well thought out world should be capable of supporting almost endless story-telling.

Incidentally, I still have the map (included here) I drew of the unknown island when I was like fourteen or so. And it is the basis of part of that complete world map. The beautiful Polynesian princess I imagined then also survived. All that’s in the tales; best to just read them if one wishes to learn more.

 

Wholesome, a poem

Wholesome 

To make my writing as wholesome
as a loaf of whole-grain bread,
I stir in some moral fiber,
and keep the reader well fed.
Oh, I could feed them pastries
and sugary treats instead,
but I’d rather keep them regular
as it passes through their head.

Stephen Brooke ©2026

a bit of light verse I threw off in a couple minutes for a prompt on Mastodon 

A House on the Beach

The Morris house in ‘The Dictator’s Children’ and the Summerlin/Salas house in the Women in the Sun novels — written as Sienna Santerre — are variations on a theme. They are similar houses in similar locations on the Naples FL beach. They have similarities in their history. Indeed, when I first started on ‘One Summer in the Sun’ I considered making them the same place, tying the two series together. It just didn’t work with the established chronology of the Wilk books nor with the projected date for the ‘Sun’ novel. That is one reason I chose to go with the pen name, to provide some separation.

In both incarnations it is a not overly large two-story ‘cottage’ near the pier, built before WW2. Some of those remain in Naples; some have been demolished to be replaced by more grandiose houses. Even at the time the novels are set, the beachfront property beneath them was more valuable than the homes themselves. Of course, I have drawn up floor plans for both houses. I do that sort of thing for most of my fiction.

‘The Dictator’s Children’ and the two Women in the Sun novels are available at the Arachis Press site (arachispress.com) in print or as free ebooks.

Mist

‘Mist’ (Niebla) by Miguel de Unamuno is one of the first great novels of the Modern era. By ‘Modern’ I mean from around 1910 to — well, whenever one wishes to cut it off. We were into the Postmodern by 1960, but I’m inclined to see that as simply phase two of Modernism.

The story was being written at about the same time as Proust’s first efforts toward the novel, somewhat before Joyce and other well-known Modernists were making their mark. It is certainly an Existentialist novel, as was de Unamuno an Existentialist writer and philosopher. One of the first ‘Catholic Existentialists,’ in fact, despite his bouts of agnosticism.

De Unamuno had criticized the Spanish novels of his time as all reading like French novels. ‘Mist’ does not; it feels closer to Modern English authors in some respects. The description and characterization is spare, and rises from the narrative. There is a tongue-in-cheek absurdity one finds later in such authors as Huxley and Waugh. But it also slips in some serious philosophical questions — even if they are not treated so seriously.

I had known Miguel de Unamuno’s essays and was definitely impressed by them. Now, I am almost equally impressed by his fiction. ‘Mist’ is a novel that should be more widely read and appreciated.

Trust

Some confuse faith and belief. Faith is trust. I trust there is a meaning to my existence. I trust there is a reason to choose right over wrong. This is my faith.* All the rest is not so important.

*or at least what I try for