You Are Here

You’re in My Light

A blog about my upcoming novel

One of my reasons for wanting to write this book was the story of how religious freedom has evolved in the United States over my lifetime. There are some good sociology books on this topic and plenty of polemics from one side or another as well as those who say they have found a middle way. I hope I’ve avoided any of those types of presentations. Instead, I follow two people who were born in the middle of these changes. 

I don’t ever mention the attack of 9/11 in the book. The Orions arrive on earth in 1999 and that event does not occur in my fictional timeline. Anything before alien arrival is factual, to the best of my ability. The two main characters grow into adulthood in a world where cross cultural relations are improving. The Orions focus on the more basic causes of conflict, like resources scarcity and fair distribution of technology. Cultural divides are in their distant past. Their one continent world developed sustainably and much more peacefully than ours. 

When Dave in his early thirties. His father divorced his mother because she wanted her son to go to church. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but she felt there had to be something that created the universe, and churches seemed to know what that was. He meets Suzanne, whose mother never had a relationship with her father. Her mother disdained organized religion. So she grew up in a community based shunning tradition, unless you call witchcraft and psychic phenomenon a tradition. 

The two personalities that result clash, but they gain respect for each other as they are riding across Indiana. The book begins in the middle of their journey, when they come across a conflict that is playing out with weapons and claims on territory. That conflict, of people with traditional values against a government they don’t feel represents them anymore, reflects the conflict that I see many people going through in this real today, of their values versus the world of powers and economics. Through flashbacks to how Dave and Suzanne ended up in the middle of a cornfield that is in the middle of a battle, we see how the world has ended up in the conflicts we experience now. 

We also see some of my thoughts, which are informed by better thinkers than myself, on how the world could have ended up differently. In the lore of the Orion world, in an early chapter, we find out that one of their early leaders fought to prevent the spread of the idea of land ownership. When they come to this planet, before they build their spaceport, they work with farmers who are barely able to feed themselves. When the spaceports are built, they offer an entire continent on a planet near their home planet. This essentially solves our current dilemma of not having a Planet B. 

As the heroes travel, we see the world as it has developed for 17 years of improvements to agriculture, reduction in population, and opening of borders. Non-motorized traffic is everywhere with some roads repurposed for pedal power only. Work is flexible and requires fewer hours. Families have more time for each other. Manufactured goods are being recycled into the new economy. By focusing on the poorest in the world, want has been reduced, and that has reduced conflicts and increased cooperation. And yet, not everyone is happy. 

With those needs met, the questions of where we came from and why we are here are freely asked. There is no powerful organization that can claim authority by claiming to have those answers. Almost no one feels that they need to give to such organizations to help procure a place for themselves in the afterlife. There is one character who offers religious advice, and her role, her job, includes meeting their physical and medical needs. 

I don’t offer much in the way of answers in this story. I hope reading it opens questions about what you might do if you had more choices and a clearer sense of where you were in the universe.