The Farris Channel. Jacqueline Lichtenberg
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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2011 by Sime~Gen, Inc.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To the souls currently living as Salomon, Ernest, Naomi Gail, Becca, Paul, Deborah Ruth, and Julia Summer. Whoever you may be when you read this, know that you are loved, respected, admired, and cherished.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I never intended to write this book about the founding of the House of Zeor. But as Star Trek fans became immersed in the Sime~Gen universe, at first via the first novel, House of Zeor, then the first award winner, Unto Zeor, Forever, both about men who headed up the House of Zeor, they kept asking questions about the House of Zeor, the Farrises, the concept Sectuib, and how it all happened.
Being Star Trek fans, they wrote stories to argue for their own answers, Sime~Gen fan fiction stories. That body of fan fiction is now much larger than the professionally published novels, and available online for free reading via Simegen.com.
Jean Lorrah was particularly curious about how the channels ever became channels, and kept asking, none of my answers putting the matter to rest for her. Finally she wrote up a piece of fiction that incorporated my answers to date, gave it to me at a Star Trek fanzine oriented convention. She then posed more and more questions. Which I answered until I got laryngitis.
So I did what any self-respecting member of science fiction fandom would do, I told her to write her story up as novel. She did. It was terrific (she was already a professional writer, not to mention a Professor of English—she could write, oh boy, could she!). So I presented it to my editor at Doubleday, and they bought it. That novel is First Channel.
Thus Sime~Gen has two main entry points which are crafted to let you absorb the complex background by osmosis, without pausing as you read the story, House of Zeor and First Channel.
House of Zeor is for veteran Science Fiction readers, especially Star Trek or Vampire Romance fans who love to be challenged by a very different reading experience. First Channel is for general fiction readers who may be a little leery of science fiction, or who prefer to start reading a “series” at the “beginning.”
All of the Sime~Gen novels have a love story at the core of the plot, and some, like Jean Lorrah’s To Kiss or to Kill, are Romance Genre. Unto Zeor, Forever is a “doctor novel romance.” My ambition is to have a Sime~Gen novel in each of the recognized genres, to illustrate how Science Fiction is not a genre at all.
Despite being published as a Series, Sime~Gen is not a series, but a Universe. The novels are not all about one character, though if you pay attention you may find certain souls that reincarnate, having learned one lesson and now face yet another new lesson.
The Sime~Gen novels were framed as the story of The House of Zeor and the impact of its legend on the course of human history. It’s the story of a group of loosely affiliated souls who struggle with issues bigger than they are and apply various philosophies to their problems in different eras and epochs, including eventually space colonization.
All the previously published novels can be read in any order, and should be re-read in different orders to get the most out of them. They are re-readable books, books which reveal something new with each re-reading.
This novel, The Farris Channel, about the founding of the House of Zeor, assumes the reader has read a few of the previously published novels and needs answers to questions.
So here I must acknowledge all those who asked these questions that led to this novel. They number in the hundreds.
I must also acknowledge the contribution of Jean Lorrah who wrote First Channel and Channel’s Destiny, the two direct prequels to this novel, chronicling what happened when Rimon Farris discovered the trick of “channeling” and how this eventually led to the founding of something as odd in human history as a Householding. Those two novels made this novel absolutely necessary.
Now Jean is more interested in writing about her musician characters, Zhag and Tonyo, who appear in the short stories in The Story Untold and Other Sime~Gen Stories as well as the novel, To Kiss or to Kill. If you pay attention, you’ll find prior incarnations of those souls in The Farris Channel. The descendents of Zhag and Tonyo and the film/video industry they found, have as profound an impact on the course of history as the House of Zeor does.
But there is another story set chronologically between Channel’s Destiny and The Farris Channel. We call it “Companions,” because it’s about the Gens of Fort Freedom and their role in the burgeoning growth of the Fort until it becomes such an irritant to the junct Territory that the Fort is destroyed, the survivors scattering to form the Forts you will read about in The Farris Channel. Because Companions has so much explosive action, flame-and-glory writ large, we are debating whether would make a better screenplay than novel.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
June 2011
THE STORY OF THE FOUNDING 400
As the list of Sime~Gen novels grew over the years, it was becoming very difficult for new fans to scrounge up copies of the Sime~Gen novels which were scattered across various publishers in hardcover and mass market paperback. So one of the editors of the Sime~Gen fanzine Ambrov Zeor, Anne Pinzow, who happened to work for Toad Hall, a publisher at that time, sold the idea of doing reprints of the novels along with a large, new novel.
But publishing was in dire flux (so what else is new?) and Toad Hall did some figures and decided the new novel needed a pre-publication subscription sale of 400 hardcover copies before they could publish it. We had been selling about a thousand copies of each of the Sime~Gen fanzine editions, so we thought that would be possible.
Jean Lorrah and I went to the fans, who at that time mostly connected with us via snailmail, though we had begun moving online to Simegen.com. It took a few years to get signed pledges from each of 400 people saying they’d pay $25 for a hardcover copy of The Farris Channel. Signing up also gave you the chance to have a character in the novel named as you’d wish. Some of those names have been used here.
By that point, the publisher had closed up shop. Even though The Farris Channel was mostly written, it wouldn’t get published.
But by then, we were well ensconced online, and with a form people could sign to join the 400 (list faithfully kept by Ronnie Bob Whitaker and Karen MacLeod). We forgot to take the form down from the Web. We ended up with over 500 subscribers, but no publisher.
So once again, we were shopping Sime~Gen around. We had a screenplay on the market by Anne Pinzow (yes, she’s a professional at that, too), and Jean was working on an e-book novel for the Romance e-book market. Fans were still writing Sime~Gen stories and novels and cooperative fiction (a kind of online gaming). New fans were introduced via the fan fiction, scouring online bookstores for used copies of the published novels.
Meisha Merlin approached us with a good offer, and we signed a deal with them for omnibus reprints and new novels, and they brought out the first volume, Sime~Gen: The Unity Trilogy, with a genuine trilogy of novels—House of Zeor by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Ambrov Keon by Jean Lorrah, and Zelerod’s Doom by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah.
Those three novels are all about the same characters living the same lives, re-engineering society around them.
I wrote Personal Recognizance for one of those omnibus volumes and rewrote The Farris Channel to Meisha Merlin’s specifications.
But Meisha Merlin folded before they could bring out any more novels.
Then, at a convention, Robert Reginald, who runs the Borgo Press imprint of John Betancourt’s Wildside Press, approached us out of the blue. They wanted the novels.
We worked a deal, but it took a few years to get all the technicalities in place. Wildside already had two of my reprint novels, Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends successfully marketed as e-books and paperbacks. They were releasing reprints