March to Other Worlds Day 8 The Hunter and the Sorcerer by Chris L. Adams
March to Other Worlds Day 8 The Hunter and the Sorcerer by Chris L. Adams
As we enter the second week of the March, I’m excited to turn to the work of Chris L. Adams who takes his love of grand adventure stories and pours it into a short novel that plays homage to the old masters while producing a thoroughly modern tale.
Bru the Hunter’s whole life is falling apart. Gla, the worthless fire-feeder, has just tricked the tribe into thinking he killed Tysk, the mighty tiger, and now Bru’s love Oona is to be married to Gla. To make matters worse, when Bru objects, the tribe turns on him. Outcast, Bru doesn’t think things could possibly get worse, but he is about to discover just how wrong a hunter can be.
Kidnapped by an alien creature from an extraordinarily advanced society, Bru will be tortured into becoming something radically different than he began—an extraordinarily intelligent well-educated man. And that is where this story truly begins for to return to his people and the woman he loves, Bru is going to have to go head to head with the galaxy’s most advanced civilization. They haven’t got a chance!
I found a lot more in this novel than the simple adventure story I thought I was reading. So brace yourself! While there’s plenty of adventure, you’ll also find heaping helpings of culture clash, hypocrisy and prejudice, and ultimately you’ll be forced to think about what it means to be human.
I’d also like to point out that the multi-talented Adams painted the cover to this novel himself—but did the idea for the novel come first or the painting? With someone as creative as Adams, even he might not know the answer.
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It's just amazing how ideas spark and grown into such incredible works!
The idea for the story stemmed from a dream that I had several nights in a row of a stone age hunter climbing a mountain; he enters a cave, sees strange things and flashing lights, and is suddenly overcome and wakes up in a cage. He has been captured by a man from the future whom, in his simple mind, he thinks of as some sort of sorcerer. The stranger is kindly to him, and teaches him his language and . . . that's where the dream would end, with the savage still sitting in the cage.
I told a good bud of mine about the dream and that I was considering writing a story with that as the foundation. Pretty soon after, I did begin writing H/S, although I took a slightly different route with the caveman meeting the sorcerer, and fleshed out the many plot related things missing from the dream---such as why the man was in the mountains to begin with.
I had started painting a new landscape in this same time frame, and after I painted the mountain in the distance with it's great fanged peak, I decided to use it in the story, naming it the Fang of Tysk, with "tysk" being the caveman's word for the saber tooth tiger. The painting began to influence the story at that point. And, as I was both writing the yarn and painting the landscape at the same time, I also began adding elements of the story in the painting, such as the lake, a mammoth skull (recall, the Skull-Rite), and of course, Tysk since Tysk the Tiger plays a huge part in the story.
In short, they influenced one another, and at some point I decided I wasn't merely painting a landscape any longer, but I was painting my cover. And I hope to do the same with Prehistoric 2. Thanks, Gil! Really appreciate the posts on The Hunter and the Sorcerer!
~The Hunter and the Sorcerer