- What is The Silurians?
- A collection of short stories by Connor Coyne.
- What are they about?
- Like all of the short stories I know, they are about creatures and thoughts striving against obstacles. The chacters will seem familiar: scientists, custodians, teachers, health-care workers, students, journalists, mechanics, and so on. The situations are will seem familiar: problems of unrequited love, of fear of loneliness, of architecting a legacy and instituting political justice, of self-control, and of impending mortality. The setting itself is exotic.
- What is the setting?
- A community of fifty human beings is accidentally transported over 400 million years back in time to the end of the Silurian Period. It is a time when the atmosphere is almost toxic, when the only land-plants are a few mosslike stems growing a couple centimeters high, and when the largest preditors were a species of giant sea scorpion. With a limited knowledge of their surroundings, and no hope or returning to the present, these isolated humans can only do what all living things are programmed to do: try to adapt and try to survive. Thus while the characters and their situations will seem familiar, there is a constant play with an environment that is more alien, and certainly more inaccessible, than even the reaches of outer space.
- How do you know enough about the Silurian to write about this?
- I don't, on my own. It is only with the help of many friends and associates that I have been able to begin work on this project. I will furnish complete acknowledgments when finished, but at this stage I must thank Dr. Pat Wilde, Dr. Armand Ryden, Mr. Christian Kammerer, Mr. Michael Milligan, and my wife, Jessica.
- How can I read the stories?
- I will be drafting these twenty-four stories during the month of June 2007. I am "revealing" several to interested readers on a basis of one story per week during that time. I will post a few paragraphs each selected piece on this website. Anyone interested in the text of the full story should contact me. Likewise, contact me if you are interested in reading the complete texts of all stories, or of referring The Silurians to a publisher.
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