What Bird Calls
I know not what bird calls across the dusk;
seeking southern forests, it will sing there tomorrow.
Silent wings beat through my darkened skies; in dream
only can I fly, to distant sun-lit lands.
Sleep now; morning comes and I must once more
prepare for winter, not expecting spring.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
somewhat in the shape of a sijo
Flat
Once, the Earth lay flat. Horizons marked
the rim of life; the world goes this far
and no further. Sail away, young man.
Seek out those isles that swim along the edges
of the sunset, following from star
to star until the world rounds itself.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
Beard
This beard, I complained,
makes me look too old;
I shaved my chin clean —
yes, I felt quite bold!
A glimpse in the mirror
should show a new truth —
a face that revealed
my lost inner youth!
I turned and I twisted,
examined it well;
damn! I still looked
older than hell!
Stephen Brooke ©2026
We Go
Our seasons here are nearly run;
it’s time to seek the Southern sun.
In the fields the farmers mow;
we gather now in each fence-row.
We go, we go;
this is all we know.
Heeding Summer’s fading song,
telling all we not have long;
when the cold winds start to blow,
when the weather cocks all crow,
we’ll know, we’ll know,
it’s time for us to go.
Dawn comes late now, chill and gray,
as leaves scatter, borne away,
and we too must join the flow;
our world has been ever so.
We go, we go;
this is all we know.
In night’s darkness voices sigh;
brothers passing through the sky.
Far below us, stag and doe
make their passage through the snow.
we know, we know,
it’s time for us to go.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
possibly for a children's book, should I write any more of them
Hill
Paradise is found beyond that hill.
I climbed it once, to look upon the golden
and secret distance of horizons I’d
not dare. It lies there, that land, in the mists
of every morning, in my stars of night.
A glimpse I had, no more, before descending
again to worlds known, those journeys never
begun. Climb if you will; climb, and cross over.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
The End
The end of the world
has come once again;
was it just last week
it vanished in flame?
I’ve lived through it thrice
at least, I am sure,
though I could be dead,
a ghost, nothing more.
We’ve scheduled the end
again for next month;
perhaps on a Tuesday
nobody likes those.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
doggerel of the day
Recreation
Though I destroy infinite worlds, infinite worlds remain. The goal is not destruction itself but the infinite joyous act of destruction.
Elsewhere, infinite others revel in the act of creation. Each of us wields our hammers to our own purposes and our own purposelessness.
We adorn the courts of timeless kings. See how well that illusion hangs? Tomorrow and every tomorrow it will be torn down.
Yesterday and every yesterday it will be recreated. The word erased remains written on infinite pages.
It may leap from the first book you open, ready to your desires. It may hide in fear of such gods as we.
Let it go. There are infinite others of its kind.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
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.
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.
____________
*Not that anyone can agree what this is. Some say ‘happiness’ but I can be quite happy being unhappy at times.
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
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
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’ (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.
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
Wild
The wild words can be observed
in their natural habitat, yes,
but I pen them with fences made
of meter for you. Lines and rhymes
(at times) hold them, the monkeys in
their house, the reptiles safely behind
their glass. They can not hurt you, reader.
You can say you saw them, one
Sunday afternoon. The kids
read the signs explaining each.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
Easy
Forgetting is too easy. All the faces
I painted, all the women I loved, have blurred.
Yes, even yours. Do you still have that portrait?
Perhaps I could remember should I see
it hanging on your wall. Or even tucked
into some closet. For a little while
I might remember then. You know I shall
forget again, though, don’t you? Nothing lasts
and soon I find forgetting is too easy.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
this started out as a bit about my aphantasia but grew into something rather different
I have always veered away from the concept of telepathy in both my fantasy and science fiction writing. Why? Because it doesn’t work in the real world so I can find no basis for it to work in a created universe.
Of course, I’ve found ways to get around that. There is ‘assisted telepathy’ in the Jack Mack SF stories (written as Oliver Davis Pike). That is, thoughts can be ‘read’ by a computer via sensors and passed on to another person by reversing the process. This requires being attached to relatively bulky units and is not generally practical. It is, however, the means by which jump pilots communicate with their drive computers when traveling from star to star, so I had to include the ability to use the process for human-to-human communication.
That does open up uses for the technology which I have yet to explore. Maybe someday!
Then there is the ‘talking afar’ that has been part of my Izan fantasies from the start. This is something wizards and gods can do, and is essentially sending a part of ones physical being to another world to speak with someone. To be sure, they also have to have this ability (although one can, if talented and powerful enough, send nebulous dreams to those who lack it).
This meshes with the infinite worlds (or universes) that make up existence. Some humans have the inherited ability to enter those universes — not permanently — and interact there. Gods, for the most part, can travel through them without much restriction, but that’s another subject. Gods can also send part of themselves roundabout through other worlds to peep into mortal minds via a sort of melding. That is, the minds or brains occupy the same space simultaneously. Just surface thoughts, mostly, can be ‘read’ in this manner, but it does give them the ability to pick up any language almost at once.*
That ‘two-minds-in-one-place’ is the closest I come to true telepathy, and it generally requires the cooperation of both individuals, and that both have the ability to enter other worlds. Yes, a truly powerful wizard might be able to force it, and I’ve gone that way a few times. It is to be noted that both will know each other’s mind when it’s all over, so it’s not always an effective way of learning someone’s secrets. It has, perhaps needless to say, definite dangers for both.
For the untrained, or those who do not know they have powers, all this can lead to madness. One ‘hears’ the voices of other worlds, with no knowledge of how to shut them out. The tragic (more or less) King Hara’a of the Malvern Trilogy is one such.
Although I could, in theory, drop telepathy into unrelated stories, I have chosen not to. As I said at the start here, I don’t think it works and I’d rather not make up pseudoscience to explain it. I am not at all big on mental powers of any sort. Telekinesis? Nope, but a wizard might reach through another world to move something. Precognition? Well, I have dropped in prophecies and explained them, again, as wizard powers. If one can send oneself to other worlds, one might — if one had the rare talent for prophecy — also seek worlds through time. Again, this is not a mental power but an actual physical phenomenon, a part of the body traveling ‘elsewhere.’
And not a bit of it has anything to do with brainwaves or electricity or any other of the usual explanations for telepathy.
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*For a long time, I chose not to tell how they knew languages but did finally provide this explanation. There may be just a bit of retcon to it, but it does fit with the other rules I’ve laid out in my world-building.
Fade
Love will fade until you are not sure
you ever loved. Try to believe you did.
It is the lesser of hurts. Believe the moon
remembers. It, too, kissed her once and passed
on into the night. It whispers names
you have forgotten. Names that fade like love.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
This is the route of Wilk on his journey east from Russia to China in 1919 (in the novel titled, appropriately enough, ‘Wilk’). Both the Russian and Chinese names have shifted some from what I used (and varied, for that matter, at the time the story is set) but one should be able to follow this route on a map.
We first see Wilk at a flight school somewhere in central Russia. He heads east by rail, in Spring, to a base and depot fairly near the front, then further east, nearer to Sarapul. He then flies south to Ufa, then further to Orenburg on the Ural River.
He then travels easterly by train toward the Aral Sea with his companions. They have to abandon broken tracks shortly after the Aral, at Kazalinsk, and fly on to Tashkent. They take train north through Aris and Alma Ata, and across the ‘high bridge’ (Ili River?), unloading in the vicinity of Lake Balkash, and joining a caravan east in the truck, through the Dzungarian Gate into China.
From Dzharkent on the Russian side, they cross the border to Wusu, and travel to Tihwa (capital of the province) in China, then to Hami, leaving the caravan there, and continuing south to Ansi, and then a little east to Yumen: “One travels through the Jade Pass and beyond it lies Yanguan Pass and the corridor into China’s heartland”.
Wilk and companions reassemble their airplanes and fly from Yumen to Suchow, then Kanchow and the Great Wall, through the high pass (Wushao) to Liangchow, and on to Lanchow on the Hwang Ho. They fly on South and East to Sian (after faking a course toward Chunking), across the highlands, and south along the Han Kiang, to Yunyang. They move along toward the Tungting Lake area, passing Wuchang and Kanchow, and finally south to Canton by Autumn.
WILK (and, of course, all my books) is available in print or as free ebooks at arachispress.com
Passages
You may wander my rooms,
yet not find the secret
passages. Believe
they are there, Believe
they lie hidden. Tap
paneled walls. Seek
cryptic clues along
dim-lit cobwebbed halls.
Any traps you find
are of your own setting.
Stephen Brooke ©2026
