James Swearingen – författare

Yori Kashimoto, child of the generational Starship Galatea, is banished from the only known community of rational beings in the cosmos. No one knows what happened to the home planet Ulro, but technology has saved a remnant of humanity that now faces the question of how to turn a life-support system into a political order on Planet 2314. Yori has argued the wrong side of this issue and lost. Now condemned to live or die by his own ingenuity in the wilds of an unexplored planet, he takes shelter in a cave where no human has ever been and is suddenly addressed by the voice of a woman. That moment, in a story of hope where there is nothing to hope for, constitutes a new beginning in the ancient struggle between life and the life worth living.

Years later, Yori will leave a manuscript in that cave called History of a Dying Planet, that will prove to be an "archeological" account of failed Planet Ulro. That manuscript, alongside Starship Galatea and In the Hollow of Time, will constitute The Galatea Saga as a cycle in reverse chronology that finds its end in its beginning.

What happens to the once and future creatures who escaped the death of Planet Ulro and embarked on a generational star-ship to find a new home in the galaxy? Ishmael Kahn, historian and a nineth-generation survivor, tells the story of problematic collective life on this sacred and profane time machine. Two and a half centuries after its launch; anxiety, boredom, and despair provide clues to an unrealized vision of human being. The tensions of everyday life in space feed competition between an authoritarian Starship Command and a stubborn political resistance in the Council of Elders. When an inhabitable planet is discovered, the strife between "bare life" and the "good life" erupts into a cloak-and-dagger struggle for the soul of a new colony.

This second volume of The Galatea Saga is a prequel to In the Hollow of Time-History of a Dying Planet is prequel to this tale. Read in any sequence, the effect is to contract future and past into the present moment of reading.

Why did the only planet "known to evolve a species capable of bringing nature-if not itself-under rational control destroy itself? What wasn''t done that might have been done differently? For readers, the problem has two faces: archeological and teleological. In this narrative history, Opeyemi Adawale, Nigerian-American political historian, and UN official Wu Mai Bao participate in a secret project to save a remnant of humanity from destruction. All the while the author, Yori Kashimoto, once Governor of the first human colony in the Milky Way, researches the last days of Planet Ulro for what, if anything, that history might teach a human diaspora in space.

The Galatea Saga begins and ends with History of a Dying Planet. It is a prequel to both Starship Galatea and In the Hollow of Time. Read in the order vols. III-I the saga is a chronological tale; read in reverse chronology I-III, it is teleological (and conceptually less challenging); vol. II read first situates the tale between past and future.

In The Valmont, a posh condo development in New Orleans, once an Ursuline convent, seven residents-a real estate developer, a Russian ballerina, a legal secretary, a TV personality, a US Attorney, a French professor, and a Jesuit priest embody the classical vices. Their intertwined lives pass through bedroom and theatre, carnival and courtroom, exorcism and suicide, as the narrator studies the infirmities of modern life with an eye to a cure. Meanwhile, the inexistent voice of angel or spirit or daimon haunts the Valmont, finding the moral diagnosis itself curiously symptomatic of the current state of the human soul. Maladies is a philosophical novel for readers with lively minds, keen on hope in dark times.