I have decided that on Mondays I will post a section from a novel I am writing set in Pam Uphoff’s Wine of the Gods series. If you haven’t heard of this series I heartily recommend it for sheer entertainment. Don’t be put off by the number of books – a lot are relatively short.
This is the first book. You can start elsewhere but The Empire of One is a good place but really, the beginning is the best place to start.
https://www.amazon.com/Outcasts-Gods-Wine-Book-ebook/dp/B005VFXN3U/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2CXFF6S6NS1QR&keywords=wine+of+the+gods&qid=1653894870&s=digital-text&sprefix=wine+of+the+gods%2Cdigital-text%2C277&sr=1-1

now to the first section of Ostraya part 1

Chapter 1

The dirt path that ran along the edge of the cemetery was not used by most people. The two-meter brick wall and occasional crypt upper works made it a gloomy place with its east-west orientation. When combined with the dense scrub, mostly lantana, that encompassed most of the path’s right-hand side, it meant the path was only used by the brave or desperate.

Andrew Harris walked along it steadily, hoping none of the small group of bullies that frequently made his life hell had noticed him duck down the track. The wall that surrounded the cemetery curved to the right just past the end of the track, so if none of them saw him duck right, then they would expect to see him around the curve of the wall. The track itself turned right about three meters in for about two meters, then returned east-west till it emerged on Franklin Street. The odd dog leg was obviously due to some ancient change in land boundaries at the western end, where there were two meters at one alignment and then the rest of the block at a more southerly alignment. It meant the block with the scrub had once been two blocks, really, now that he thought about it.

He glanced around before emerging onto Franklin Street, but he seemed to have escaped the other boy’s attention, if they had come after him at all, rather than just yelling abuse at him from a distance. He could deal with them if he had to, but he would rather not. Too much trouble and awkward questions if he got into a fight and beat up the four of them. Yes, he took karate lessons, irregularly as his mum could afford them, but his blue belt would not seem to be advanced enough to account for his taking them down. Better not to have questions asked by avoiding trouble.

Eight hundred years after the nuclear war, a lot of people had a few of the engineered genes in their DNA, and no one really cared. Andrew, on the other hand, had a lot. By the time society had rebuilt to the point they could actually test DNA easily, the genes had spread so widely from the few modified survivors that had escaped the holocaust in the northern hemisphere that there was not a lot anyone could do about it. In fact, there was a growing movement where people started proclaiming how many of the engineered genes they had like it was some sort of scout’s honor badge or something.

Two main groups were leading the charge, the Tallies and the Purples. The Purples were a group that had a gene that induced a purple shade to their skin and hair. It was not that common, and the purple coloration was extremely faint, but it was definitely there. The Tallies had an engineered gene or genes that gave them great height. Mostly in the plus two-meter category, sometimes approaching two and a half meters. They weren’t the same as normal tall people who tended to be thin, lanky, and somewhat ill-proportioned. The engineered Tallies were proportionally shaped for their height and made up a considerable proportion of the teams in sports that required height, like basketball, and strength, like football.

The second book set in Ithria is out. Kyron is contemporary with Taroniah although he starts out at the other end of the world.

While I wait for my artist to finish the cover of Kyron the Swordsman (gggrrr) I thought I’d give you all the benefit of my thoughts on time travel – and the problems therein.
As I see it there are three types of time travel –
1: The easy type where the hero (sic) travels to an alternate reality so he can change the future without any problems of causality. (Arturo is an example of this)
2: Magical time travel where the problems of causality may or may not apply but the magical method of travel gets around the practical problems of mechanical time travel.
3. Mechanical time travel. HG Wells is the father of this sub-genre with the classic story The Time Machine. The problem with the the stories of mechanical time machines is that they almost never address the physical location problem that time travel inherently involves. The only time machine I can think that indirectly address the problem of location is the Tardis.
The problem with most time travel stories is that their machine may well be able to move backwards and even forwards along the time stream but they rarely, if ever, address the issue of physical displacement. If you go backward in time an hour the Earth will be in a different location. The earth is rotating at 460 m/sec and it is revolving around the sun at 30 kilometers per second and around the center of the galaxy at 220 k/sec and our galaxy is moving through space at nearly 1000 k/sec.
so in an hour the earth with have moved roughly 4,503,000 kilometers . This is roughly ten times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
basically it means that unless you have some way of moving your time machine and your self some four and half million kilometers back where the Earth came from your machine will emerge in the vacuum of space.
Go back a day and the distance you need to move is 108 million kilometers. Go back a week and you a most of the way to Jupiter. Travel backwards a year and you are a third of the way to Alpha Centauri.
And so on – This question of the sheer distance the Earth moves through space is almost never addressed in time travel stories. Trying work out where the Earth would be a hundred years ago would need a supercomputer, a big supercomputer!