The Outlaw God

By Dolores J. Nurss

Volume 0, Chapter 0
Introduction

This tale is close to one of the best I’ve ever penned. It also shocked me in the writing. Sometimes I could only write a couple of lines a day. It explores Til’s Shadow more deeply than I wanted to see. But dreams do not care for our scruples. Anyone who does not wish to explore Til Noir can gracefully leave right now and I wouldn’t blame them a bit. But it does have impact on future tales.
 
Unlike “The Harvest of Young Minds” or “The Poison Gamble”, this story has no core dreams, but rather consists of a mosaic of hundreds, maybe thousands of dreams (I’ve never counted) covering several decades of my life. Often I’d find the story too much and put it aside to concentrate on writing something else. Whenever I picked it up again, the dreams would resume. Or the dreams would resume and prompt me to pick up the story again. It would not let me go.
 
Except for some slow early chapters (unavoidable in bringing everyone up to speed) it has a faster overall pace than those posted previously. And yet, be warned, it also gets rather dense. Each of the four volumes covers roughly a week of internal time, with many characters weaving in and out of each other's lives.
 
This story also convinced me that I could not tidily stay inside any specific genre in the writing of these tales. “The Poison Gamble” clearly fit in science fiction. This one seems far more appropriate to fantasy or horror. Yet it happens to the same characters, in the same world, following the same rules. I can best reconcile it by saying that the technology of Novatierre goes beyond our own to the point where it seems like magic to us, while Alroy and Archives, in their long competition, brought things to a level where they seemed like magic to the Tilián–or maybe it is magic, and the two things, science and marvels, exist simultaneously in Novatierre, like any other world. But try explaining that to a publisher, who has to decide which part of a bookstore would best stock a book for maximum marketability. Another reason to bypass the industry.