aSG: Chalandra Harkness: The Bloodchip Matrix #1 (0/1)

Gary W. Olson swede at novitious.com
Mon Mar 1 04:06:12 PST 2010


     Normally, I like to let my work speak for itself, for better or
not-so-better.  But this will take some explaining.
     In the fall of 1993, I was a busy boy writing for Superguy.
'CalForce' was starting on its path toward the 'Songs of Darkness'
storyline, and I was also working on 'Renegade Anarchists II' for
SfStory.  You'd think that would be enough.  But I guess it was not.
     At the same time, I was subscribed to another e-mail list -- the
vampyres list at guvm.  Fiction writing mingled with discussions of
assorted vampirish things -- television shows, movies, fang length,
that sort of thing.  For the most part, unlike with Superguy, the
stories did not take place in the same universe, and had little in
common save for the use of vampires.  I decided I wanted to write
there -- because, you know, I wasn't yet *constantly* typing.
     I'm not sure how I arrived at this story.  Its beginning predates
'2035' -- Sabre's Superguy series set in a dark, tech-heavy future and
also featuring Chalandra -- by roughly a month, so it can't have been
that (though I'm certain '2035' influenced me as things progressed).
I think one of my guiding desires was to write something different
than a lot of what I was seeing on the vampyres list at the time.  So
I conceived of something I had not seen in fiction up to that point
(not that I could, or can, lay claim to anything resembling a good
survey of what was out there to be seen): a tale of vampires in a
cyberpunkish sci-fi future world.  And, because I could, and because I
wanted to write her in a non-Superguy setting for once, I made
Chalandra Harkness my lead character.
     This is not the Chalandra Harkness from Superguy, of course.
Except in all the ways that matter.  I wrote about six chapters in the
fall of 1993, then put the series on hold -- probably because I'd
actually reached the 'Songs of Darkness' storyline in 'CalForce' at
the time, and I found that even I, super-speedy-writer-boy, had to cut
some things out to focus.  I didn't return to it until the spring of
1994, when the requirements of collaboration for the 'Industrial
Revolution' storyline meant I had to slow my main Superguy series of
the time, 'Radian & Shadebeam,' way the hell down.  I revised the
first six chapters of this story somewhat, then produced four more.  I
had just one more chapter to go, then the story would have been done.
     Except I never wrote that last chapter.  To this day, I still
don't know why.  Maybe I was thinking of further revisions.  I know I
was thinking of how to expand it to novel-size (something I'm not
seeking now, else you would not be reading this).  I'm not sure if I
was thinking of posting it to Superguy; I'm sure I was hesitant on
this point, as it would have suffered in comparison to '2035' (though
that series had much more going for it than Chalandra, and was in many
respects a very different story).
     When my computer crashed in December 1996, it took the story with
it.  Most of my stuff I had backed up on disk; for some reason, this
story was not (along with a few 'Road Race from Hell' fragments and a
couple stories for the never-posted 'Punk With a Gun' anthology).  I'm
not sure I even realized it was gone for a while, so thoroughly had I
put it out of my mind.  Or maybe I just thought I'd have time to
retrieve it from the guvm archives, then forgot about it.  But by the
time I realized I wanted to see it again, it was gone, and the
vampyres list was gone from guvm as well.
     Forward to 2009.  In some fit of nostalgic googling, I started
searching for the story.  More generally, I searched for archives of
the vampyres list.  I'd looked before, but never found them.  This
time, I did, and the list with them -- long since moved to
the-institute.net.  While this story was not in the public archive,
the list owner did have it in his offline archives, and I once again
had the story.
     As far as the prose is concerned, it is generally at the level I
was at in 1993 and 1994 -- some good turns of phrase, some overly
purple turns of phrase, some kind of 'wtf' turns of phrase, some
overuse of commas, a tendancy toward inexplicably odd character names,
and not enough description overall.  Plus my usual (for the time)
misspellings, which (save for formatting) are the only parts I've
edited.  I was mildly alarmed to see how many 80's cyberpunk cliches I
managed to jam into it, and some of it gives cause to howl now (20
gigabytes of memory, considered an inconceivably huge amount -- way to
go, predictor-of-the-future me!).
     And yet... and yet there was something there, buried in what I
was not yet skilled enough to express.  A consideration of what it
might mean for a race of near-immortal beings to see their advantages
be subsumed by technological progress, and what they might do to avoid
losing their superiority.  It is, for all its flaws, a vampire science
fiction story (as opposed to a vampire story with a sci-fi background)
with something to say.  Were it not, I doubt I would be posting it as
for the Superguy list, the presence of Chalandra or no.
     But Chalandra is here; not the Chalandra of Superguy, but not
much changed, either.  Other Superguy-derived characters show up in
the course of the story, with more alterations than Chalandra
required.  Because of this, I've elected to designate this an
Alternate Superguy tale, set in altiverse 998SUPERGUY (far away from
000SUPERGUY, where Rad, The League, New Exarchs, West Coast Defenders,
Aurora, and most other Superguy tales take place).
     I think I can actually finish it this time.
     Enough yabbering.  On with the story.

(continued in part one...)
--
Copyright (c) 1993-2010 by Gary W. Olson.  All Rights Reserved.
--
Gary W. Olson
swede at novitious dot com
Superguy LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/superguy_list/
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