Mansfield Park
Though Jane Austen was writing at a time when Gothic potboilers such as Ann Ward Radcliffe's
The Mysteries of Udolpho and Horace Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto were all the rage, she never got carried away by romance in her own novels. In Austen's ordered world, the passions that ruled Gothic fiction would be horridly out of place; marriage was, first and foremost, a contract, the bedrock of polite society. Certain rules applied to who was eligible and who was not, how one courted and married and what one expected afterwards. To flout these rules was to tear at the basic fabric of society, and the consequences could be terrible. Each of the six novels she completed in her lifetime are, in effect, comic cautionary tales that end happily for those characters who play by the rules and badly for those who don't. In
Mansfield Park, for example, Austen gives us Fanny Price, a poor young woman who has grown up in her wealthy relatives' household without ever being accepted as an equal. The only one who has truly been kind to Fanny is Edmund Bertram, the younger of the family's two sons.
Into this Cinderella existence comes Henry Crawford and his sister, Mary, who are visiting relatives in the neighborhood. Soon Mansfield Park is given over to all kinds of gaiety, including a daring interlude spent dabbling in theatricals. Young Edmund is smitten with Mary, and Henry Crawford woos Fanny. Yet these two charming, gifted, and attractive siblings gradually reveal themselves to be lacking in one essential Austenian quality: principle. Without good principles to temper passion, the results can be disastrous, and indeed,
Mansfield Park is rife with adultery, betrayal, social ruin, and ruptured friendships. But this
is a comedy, after all, so there is also a requisite happy ending and plenty of Austen's patented gentle satire along the way. Describing the switch in Edmund's affections from Mary to Fanny, she writes: "I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people." What does
not vary is the pleasure with which new generations come to Jane Austen
Pursued by an enchanted knife that eventually kills his best friend, Odin Far Seer begins a quest for vengeance against the knife's owner that pits him against the deadliest beings from Norse mythology.
Far Edge of Darkness is the first half of an unfinished story that was meant to continue in Unholy Trinity. Why isn't the story finished? I plead a combination of ill health and financial need. Far Edge was originally written before my first professional sale and became my third published novel, after Sleipnir and Time Scout, plus the anthology Bolos 3: The Triumphant. I was editing Far Edge and writing Wagers of Sin (Time Scout #2) when a major illness shattered my health and left me unable to write for three years, with a contract for a major series unfulfilled. Wagers of Sin limped its way into print during this time as I struggled to finish the last third of the book (which I have no memory of writing). Jim Baen and Toni Weisskopf stood by me as I put my life back together, an act of faith and kindness for which I will bless them forever. My health remains fragile, which limits my production speed, as does the day job I must keep to hold onto utterly necessary health insurance. That is where the situation stands at present. I'm committed to the Hell's Gate "Multi-Verse" series with David Weber, which must be my highest priority.
If you have read Far Edge of Darkness and enjoyed it, thank you and please accept my apologies for its unfinished state. (I, too, want to get my literary children off that cliff they're plunging over!) If you haven't read the book yet, I will say this in warning: the book's action is constructed so that every single chapter ends on a cliffhanger, including the last one. If you want "the rest of the story" to exist before you begin reading a book, you'll probably want to skip Far Edge of Darkness. But if you are willing to overlook the lack of an ending to the overall story (there is closure of some major plot threads), you're welcome to step onto the roller coaster. Just hang on, because that last drop is a real dilly...
Biggest World Secrets by David Icke
We are on the cusp of an incredible global change. A crossroads where we make decisions which will influence life on Earth well into the future of what we call time. We can fling open the doors of the mental and emotional prisons which have confined the human race for thousands of years. Or we can allow the agents of that control to complete their agenda for the mental, emotional, spiritual and physical enslavement of every man, woman and child on the planet with a world government, army, central bank and currency, underpinned by a microchipped population.
