“The passage of the mythological hero may be over-ground incidentally; fundamentally it is inward, into the depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.”
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces
This is a hard science fiction story written originally in the spring of 2020 as a series of related short stories that gradually evolved into a single, longer story. It starts in 2025 and takes place over the following 150 years beginning with a romance story, followed by a short political vignette, and then a detective story with follow-up vignettes and additional chapters featuring the children of the main characters or their contemporaries.
It is about the cause of climate change; not CO2, not logging in Malaysia or Brazilian cows or melting ice caps but rather how the human brain works. It is about evolution, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetics, philosophy, and more.
They say a writer should write about what they know, so the story is set in Victoria B.C. Canada, on Vancouver Island where I grew up and still live. I worked at various ministries in the BC Government over a couple of decades and for some years in the role of the main character, as a personal assistant to the Premier. In my youth I was a member of the Victoria Naturalist Society and as an adult hiked much of Vancouver Island. I practiced Buddhism for many years.
To help with imagining the characters, I have included my own “casting” using well-known actors. The casting is not based on their respective bodies of work or their personal lives but purely on their physical appearance which I found useful during the writing process but subsequently grew attached to.
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— August, 2020
The Shepherd 