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Author Notes
- University Press of New England
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AUTHOR NOTES First a thank you to friends who read various drafts of this novel and offered helpful suggestions: Dayton Duncan, Terry Pindell and members of my writing group, the Fubarians, Dawn Andonellis, David Akins, David Chase, Jack Coey, Stacy Greer, John T. Hitchner, Norm Klein, Sean McElhiney, and Ken Schalhoub, with a special nod to Kathy Medvidofsky who introduced me to a writing world in Keene, nh. I also would like to thank Chip Fleischer, who got this project started with a suggestion he made, and singer and songwriter Ian Fitzgerald, who vetted Tahoka’s song, The Only Friend I Got. books in the darby chronicles The Dogs of March features Howard Elman’s feud with Zoe Cutter (who later adopted Heather). A Little More Than Kin is the tragedy of Ollie Jordan and his brain-impaired son Willow. We are introduced to Estelle Jordan. Whisper My Name is a tale of personal and town identity, and a love story between an aphasic girl, Sheila “Soapy” Rayno and a news reporter, Roland LaChance. The Passion of Estelle Jordan is a hard story of love and redemption. Besides Estelle, the story features Trans Am, who later appears as Origen in Howard Elman’s Farewell. Live Free or Die is the tragic love story of Frederick Elman (later F. Latour) and Lilith Salmon that ends with the birth of Birch Latour. Spoonwood covers Birch Latour’s peculiar upbringing and Frederick Elman ’s maturation as F. Latour, poet and shaper of wooden spoons. Howard Elman’s Farewell references three other books I have written that are not in the Darby series. Web Clements, one of the writers in Darby Doomsday is, as an adolescent, the protagonist and narrator of Mad Boys 274 and, as an adult, the narrator of I Love U, which features co-protagonists Willard “Wiqi” Durocher and Luci Sanz. The Connissadawaga Native American tribe first appears in my historical novel, The Old American. notes on the video game darby doomsday The time period is the near future in the small town of Darby, New Hampshire . Two major political parties—the Biophilians and the Transfers—have replaced Democrats and Republicans, which have been rejected by the voters . A third group, The Edge, is a terrorist organization that has grown in power in recent years. Philosophies of the Competing Political Parties Biophilians represent a coalition of traditional liberal and conservative thinking. They are existentialists, environmentalists, constitutionalists, and just plain folks. They believe in human beings as biological creatures who are basically good. They believe that, in working through science and traditional culture models, human beings have a fifty-fifty chance to save the world’s forests, oceans, grasslands, and deserts, necessary to carry on the human epoch here on Earth. Some Biophilians believe in God, some don’t. The religious people among the Biophilians believe that human beings are evolving to a plateau where they will find God. The Biophilian motto is: “All Can Be Saved.” Transfers, the minority party, believe that changes in Earth’s climate will make the planet uninhabitable to human beings, because human evolution is too slow to keep up. Their solution is that human beings have to change themselves in order to adapt. They must abandon biologically based bodies. Transfers are working toward a technology to “transfer” human identity into computer chips. People will still enjoy the pleasures of food, drink, sex, exercise , and work; they will see, they will hear, they will experience touch, they will smell the roses; but their sensations will be virtual. Some individuals will choose to inhabit fabricated bodies, replacing parts as they wear out; others will exist only in cyberspace as “spirits.” Since parts are replaceable, a “transferred” human being for all practical purposes will be immortal. Members of one branch of the Transfer party see themselves as colonists of other worlds in artificial bodies designed to thrive in unearthlike [3.95.233.107] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:10 GMT) 275 environments. That group plans a rocket to Mars as a starting point. Most Transfers are atheists or casual agnostics. They are heavily funded by wealthy old people who don’t want to die. The motto of the Transfers is: “LiveOn.” A third group, outside of the mainstream, call themselves The Edge. They are on a mission to prepare the way where only a chosen few will remain to restore Earth. They believe that the idea of human-caused global climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the...