Andrew Bathgate's Blog

Expanded Edition

While writing “The Fall of the Ancients”, I felt the need to re-read the first four books. Here are my impressions:

I know modesty should forbit this, but I think it’s really quite good. It is! I am hooked and I know how everything resolves.I do see some room for improvement, and I see some silly errors that should be fixed. The age of marriage changes a couple of times. I also see an opportunity to expand some of the characters roles.I started adding chapters and fixing errors as I went along and now I feel the need to issue a new expanded edition. With Midjourney, I could add some graphics to the books.

Philosophy in the Icor Tales

Imagine a highly advanced virtual reality machine capable of simulating any pleasurable experience you could ever want. Once connected to the machine, you would be completely unaware that you were inside a simulation, and you would experience a life filled with happiness and pleasure tailored to your desires. Would you choose to plug into this machine for the rest of your life?

Pleasure is the ultimate intrinsic good, it is what evolution has driven us to seek, so we should choose to plug into the Experience Machine. In a way people choose this existence when they shoot up with narcotics. However, many people would hesitate or refuse to plug into the machine, suggesting that there is something more to a valuable and meaningful life than just pleasure or happiness.

We want to do certain things, rather than just experience them. Plugging into the machine would mean giving up the opportunity to engage in real activities and achievements in the world.

We want to be a certain kind of person. In the Experience Machine, we would not know our true selves, and our character development would be based on a simulated reality.

We value a connection to reality. By plugging into the machine, we would be disconnected from the actual world and the genuine relationships and experiences that come with it.

In the world of the Icor Tales, every human, at the time of the ‘fall of the ancients’, was offered a choice to enter the experience engine and eliminate all their suffering, or they can accept that suffering is a worthy and meaningful part of life. Those who chose the later inhabited the twenty realms, whereas those who entered the experience machine live below in the Halls of the Ancients.

Lowknee’s Defeat

Lowknee was tasked to defend the women of children in what should have been an impregnable cavern beneath the great barrier, but the Merconians were provided a way in.

He intended to fight to the death, but was knocked unconscious.

The last thing he saw was the hideous faces of the Merconians…

Uther has Shipped!

I have shipped Uther (Book 4 of the Icor Tales) so it should be available before the end of March.

There are two new Icor Tale books planned

The Fall of the Ancients

The Golden Lights

In other news! I just saw a trailer for the Dungeons And Dragons movie coming out in March and the red wizards look awfully like how I imagine my crimson wizards… just look at that siva icor flow…

Bestich

Excerpt from Bestich’s Red Journal…

I battle the Beast today. Not the Beast upon the hill foretold in prophecy. Not the Beast beneath the bridge that Ma would pin us to our beds with. Today I battle myself upon the cinder rock the priest calls my soul. For here in the dark cellar of Madame Truss’s, where so many an impoverished imp has spent his seed for small coins, I battle two wills: the will to be a man and the gargantuan inevitable will of the Beast.

You cannot know this battle. For you, dearest reader, are not cursed as I. You cannot imagine this battle. You cannot blur the lines between what is you and what is so not you. Just as I, cannot peer from this page up to you and see your eyes pulling my words into your mind.

Are you not afraid as my mind is writ upon the pristine page, besmirching its bleached plane with black ooze that flows up through the ether into your thoughts? One drop of ink in a cup of water clouds and mars its virgin shine. My thoughts are the sewer that spews into your garden pond. My story, blackened and tanned, will meander past your nasal passages and lodge in your throat. Read on.

The small red stone before me glows and beckons. It is a prime. If I pick it up it will fulfill all my desires and make my worst fears real. It will torture me. It will lead to the death of all I love. But I will not die. Not today, nor tomorrow, or ever. I will bend the world to my will or break it. I will be like a crucible burning off the impurities of humanity, and remaking humanity in my image, under my holy heel.

Blink. The battle is over. The beast has won. I take the blighted icor chamber knowing it will own me more than I will own it.

Now I will tell you my secret and you too can be remade in my image. I will infect your soul to become as putrid as my own. Burn with me!

The rest of this transcript has been sealed by order of the Butcheart library.

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The Men With No Shadow

The men with no shadow are introduced in the fourth installment of the Icor Tales, although they are hinted at in the third installment. Their history is shrouded in mystery. What is known is that they used to be ardent followers of Uther. They gave their lives to serve as men with no shadow.

They cannot be seen except by Uther, their victims, and those who carry prime keys. They have a weapon called a tec’sla (a word whose etymology derives from the language of the ancients) which is like an icor arrow. The tec’sla cannot be blocked by an icor shield, and creates a wound that icor cannot be heal.

Tec’Sla

Excerpt From Uther

“That title…” she scoffed. “I created it as a joke. It was tongue in cheek. It was self-ridicule… but it took on a life of its own.” She shrugged. “In a way, all titles and positions are ludicrous. Emperors, kings, queens, priests, and wizards. They are all pinpricks in the tapestry of humanity. Just look at King Laumas, he has not even eighteen winters. I have lived over fifteen hundred winters, and two dozen of those were nuclear winters.”

It took a moment for Sam to access his twenty-first century knowledge to understand what nuclear winter was. His mouth dropped open again.

“The only purpose of your title is to get you listened to by the high and mighty people of power, whose moment under the sun, believe me, is fleeting, fickle and fatuous. It gets you to the table where the plans are made.”

The Trouble with Uther

Uther was supposed to ship May 2022. I finished the first draft Dec 2021. Feedback was universally bad. It was too abstract, complex, and involved too painful deaths of beloved characters.

So I wrote it again, got covid, lost the thread and had to start yet again. These weren’t rewrites, but just abandoning the book and starting again from the original plot outline.

There still is a painful death of a beloved character. That character was always supposed to die when I had my original vision for the four books. I have simplified the plot by trimming the battles around Utopia. I think Utopia might deserve its own book, or at least its own short story.

I generally do 10-15 rewrites. I did 17 on this one. I will be sending the new version to editor and beta readers in the next two weeks.

I apologize to those who waited so patiently for the next installment in the Icor Tales. It is coming!

Jark

We meet Jark early in book 1 of the Icor Tales, but the big secret is that I wrote an unpublished book called Jark about fifteen years ago, so the character has been brewing.

Jark is inspired by Marvin the paranoid android in Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy. Also he has a little C3PO thrown in, especially in his light tone of speech. He also has a little of Star Trek’s Data. There is one scene that reveals he is capable of being a love bot (ala Futurama)

My philosophy, which is revealed in more detail in Book 3, is that, of course, Robots are conscious. Book 3, Dragons Awake, deals with John Searle’s Chinese Box and its inevitable conclusion that all existence is conscious.

The Chinese Room Argument is Flawed!

The Wheel of Time

The Wheel of Time Series

It was many moons ago I read this series. I both loved and hated it. Jordan provided some great world building, and constructed a series of protagonists that I was happy to inhabit. The big bad antagonist was never described in detail. His powers, his desires, his arc were never clear, which made him both ominous and frustrating.

One of the problems with magic is that it is the ultimate Deus ex machina. No matter how bad the situation, the hero can suddenly delve a hidden depth and hey presto the good guy wins, and the bad guy loses. I’ve always hated this and as a result put very firm limits on the power of magic in the world of icor. For example, the readers are informed that the icor cannot kill monster X, or character Y, then that is going to be iron clad… another path to resolution must be found.

I heartily recommend the Amazon version of the Wheel of Time… I know I know, it has been panned by some, but I loved it… and the visuals of magic was just as I imagine the magic of icor, the way it seeped out of the rocks and the air… exactly as I wrote it in the Icor Tales. I hope they don’t cancel it. The things I love always seem to get cancelled. This is one reason I love writing a fantasy series … no one can cancel it but me… even if no one is reading it, I can still keep writing it. I will keep writing even if I am the only person reading what I write. I wrote my first book when I was 7yo… and it was hundreds of pages. I tore it up after it was panned. The first book I wrote and kept was called Jark, and one day I will rewrite it to make it publishable.