Hey, welcome back. It’s good to see you here. The Interim Shorts are awesome this year, I hope you’re not missing it. Darker was just snatched back from Oblivion, and I hear our Rebel in Residence, Maxwell Roberson, will continue Lost in Space soon. He’s pulling double duty in March; look out for the third Interim Short series, Ascension, from him next month.
I enjoy being the editor of the PRL Serials. It’s the only job I have that I look forward to, and when I’m here in the offices of the PRL with our amazing contributors, I feel like my life is complete. There are things that I’m still working toward, things that I think will fill out my life and make me truly happy, but the PRL Serials has become something very special for me and I’m honored to present the works that we feature here. And you, dear reader, you are our reason for being. Everything we do here, we do in order to find what works so that the next thing we present is everything you didn’t know you wanted or needed. It’s definitely been that way for me. If I have any talents as a writer, I owe it to everyone who took the time to read what I’ve done and have a reaction. So thank you, for being here with us.
That was unexpectedly candid. But very true.
Moving on, I wanted to give some background on the 2020 Interim Short period. It seems that every year when we sit down to prepare for the upcoming volume, we not only review where we’ve been and make a rough sketch of where we want to go, but we also amass a bunch of material that we use for research and inspiration for the types of stories that we want to do for the volume. That’s how the Interim Shorts came about back in 2015, when Volume II stalled because we hadn’t planned ahead and were hoping to wing it. We had been reading a lot, but when the first issue rolled around, we hadn’t reconciled our new ideas with the story we had, so we did the Interim Shorts to alleviate the burden of advancing the linear narrative of the Epic. The shorts weren’t necessarily even in continuity then, we were just exploring how the things we were reading would impact the stories we wanted to tell.
By Volume IV, the shorts were more closely aligned to the Epic, and we were using them more explicitly to preview what was coming. All of that was before we debuted on Medium.
Volume V was different, the Interim Shorts read almost like a Volume before the Volume, a smaller narrative that occurs before the continuation of the bigger one. But that structure has been there since we did the series Approaching Eternity back in Volume III. Approaching Eternity debuted as an Interim Short and continued in the Volume as a frame for the serials, reinforcing that volume’s title Tales from the Aeternus Machina. Volume IV had POWER to reinforce the Resurrection, and V had the Ascendant who are part of the Theogony.
At VI, we are Lost in Space, and by now, you can read the Interim Shorts as one story told over five separate short series; the continuation of the True Start of Everything as background to the Lost in Space parts that are expanded with the shorts Oblivion and the soon to debut Ascension (and there’s one more after that).
Lost in Space so far has been inspired by many things. I’ve been dealing with a breakup. I don’t know if I can really call it that, but it feels like that. It feels like what I imagine a protracted divorce to be, only instead of separating physical property, we have to separate a mental space that we created together. The “relationship” I was in was a very inspiring one and I owe a lot of what I’ve done in the serials to the inspiration I’ve felt from that interaction. But it’s over now and I can’t lean on that anymore. I’ve felt unmoored, lost in myself, and I think that was the most direct inspiration for the main series of this Interim Shorts period. I was clinging to what I had, unwilling to admit that it was over, but nothing was the same, nothing was what I wanted it to be.
I talked it over with the contributors and being lost seemed to fit with the Epic narrative. Maria was sure she was going into space at the end of Volume V and we hadn’t really planned what that would mean, so the slate was pretty clean.
Max is a big fan of the Lost in Space remake on Netflix. It’s a cool show, the effects are nice and there’s a lot of tension in the narrative that pulls you forward. That show was probably the biggest inspiration for the crash of Eakran’s ship that the story hinges on; it’s a dramatic way to open the series and it’s meant to really get your heart pounding from the start both in the TV series and in ours. The cool thing is exploring how that single action of the ship being attacked has so many repercussions that we’ve only just begun to see.
Of course the remake and the original show were inspired by literature, specifically the class of stories known as Robinsonades, inspired by the story of Robinson Crusoe. The Robinsonade is a story about a man stranded on a deserted island and the sci-fi equivalent is being stranded in space on an unfamiliar planet.
Recently I was reading Lord Byron’s Cain, a play that isn’t meant to be performed as a stage play, a type of play known as a closet drama. It’s about the Cain from the Bible, the one that killed his brother, and I only read it for the scene when Lucifer takes Cain into outerspace. It’s a metaphysical journey and reminded me of those stories about people moving through dreamscapes, like in Dante’s Inferno. And I think Cain’s frustration with his parents for essentially dooming him to his tragic fate when they were booted from Eden, inspired Darker’s feelings of hopelessness and resignation in space and on an alien planet. They’re both frustrated by circumstances completely out of their hands on the backdrop of the cosmos, though Darker doesn’t seem to be angry, more overwhelmed and just staying alive.
The five parts of Oblivion are numbered and there are sections with titles that link to songs on Spotify. The music playlist story is a PRL classic pioneered by Wesley Livingston, and he’s the architect for Oblivion, as well as Max’s March and his April short. The relationship between the songs and the story is complex and it isn’t always a literal translation. Sometimes the songs work in a literal way, other times they just work as a good soundtrack. Hopefully they add something to the work if you’re able to enjoy it all together. There is an Oblivion playlist on Spotify with more songs that fit the mood and feel of the short serial Oblivion. But the story is good without the music, if I do say so myself.
Get ready for the Ascension. It’s coming at you soon or soon enough.
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