Hello, bonjour, guten tag, my name is James B. Mielke—take the ‘B’ and call me Ben, please. I’m writing because I have recently completed my first novel, a work of science fiction. I call it Cardomon—Mellisa Shannon, a History and a Tragedy, and it has almost 154,000 words. Let me tell you about it:
We are in a far future, where
‘Earth’ is merely a word for soil, and people colonize new planets every day.
It’s all by the book, no surprises, just stick to the plan. But if your plan
doesn’t account for a native fungus that consumes human flesh in moments, or a
volcanic eruption that obliterates ninety percent of your population base, or
the fundamentally predatory nature of the human species, you may experience
difficulties. Meanwhile, families
bond, babies arrive, people make love, they make music and they make whiskey.
We meet scientists, astrologers and lumberjacks, vigilantes, aristocrats and
athletes, beloved teachers, runaway slaves and psychopaths. And a mysterious
new intelligence watches.
Starting with arrival on the planet
and construction of a Firstown and finishing with a ragged battle for freedom,
Cardomon brews numerous threads and characters through experiences silly and
sobering and examines the foundation of civilization, and its lapse.
The first of an intended four part
series that documents five hundred years of human settlement and the evolution
of the mysterious being—a planet wide fungus awakened into sentience by
encountering people. Part One, Mellisa Shannon, follows the arc of a polarizing
pioneer colonist and sees the establishment of two rival communities linked
through a shared school. They clash on the athletic field, in wilderness
conflict and over a development project imported by a Galactic merchant, a
slave trader.
Part two will take off running in
the aftermath of the first part’s action and turns its lens upon the
children,
one disturbed boy in particular. There is the uncovering of sex traffickers and
the rise of a criminal Law Court to challenge the vigilantes. The new mind
grows through Its traumatic infancy and into troubled youth.
In part three we see the climax of
the pioneer years, a three way clash: Firstown against Homestead and mercenary
forces of the slave trader are on the move. The followers of the new mind establish
a Wilderness Order, the children seize control of their school and It evolves
into a being of power.
Part four will be a return, five
hundred planetary years later (almost a thousand of our years). Through a
miracle of technology pioneer colonists long thought dead are revived and
encounter the developed world. The ancient conflicts have simmered for ages and
come to a fresh head. The new being is a mature intelligence, It makes a long
prepared play even as the slave merchants are moving toward a coup of their
own. At stake: the entire Galaxy and the future of evolution.
Ben Mielke lives on the fringes of
the hinterlands of Northern California’s Sacramento Valley, not far from Thomes
Creek Gorge. He grew up due east of the Golden Gate Bridge in a fantasy land
called Berkeley in a mythical period known as ‘the Sixties’. He was educated at
People’s Park and in a few schools, with a degree in Geography from Sonoma
State University. He is experienced as a carpenter, gardener, cartographer and
barn cleaner. He started writing early on but other realities prevailed for
most of his existence, resumed the craft upon return to formal schooling in the
aftermath of the World Series Earthquake (formally called Loma Prieta).
Cardomon was conceived in 1991 in a creative writing seminar at Diablo Valley
College (and Ben wishes to thank Professor Gus Gustafson), but extensive work
on the opus didn’t begin until 2011.
Ben is the younger son of noted San
Francisco Jazz musician Bob Mielke and is related to corporate executives,
sawmill workers and a pioneering aerospace engineer (George Smith). He is
wistfully unmarried but is very fond of his dog, a canine senior citizen named
Zora Neale Hurston.
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