Writing Realm.com

The Writing Realm.

Home of science fiction, fantasy and many other wonders! 

 The Overman's Folly

is my new book. Click on my Fiction page and follow the link.

I'm Lisa Agnew, a writer of speculative fiction and some non-fiction.  Writing is really time and labour intensive so, if you're that way inclined, you've got to be prepared to strive, strive, strive! There will be knock-backs aplenty, so develop a thick skin, but learn to take criticism constructively. Then you may get lucky (because luck is also always a factor).

I'm also fascinated by many facets of science, and often incorporate them into my writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Case in point - Blow your mind with the Reality Carnival site. This link is actually on the site, but I've put it here because it is relatively easy to miss. Have a look!  It is so mind-blowingly awesome, it actually made me hyperventilate!

 This website is not just about writing. It's also about my other consuming hobbies. Genealogy is probably the foremost of those hobbies at the moment. My research is going so well that I'm constantly updating my files. I've managed to find out that I'm directly related to King Alfred of the Anglo-Saxons and that, along with 75% of the British population, I am related to William the Conqueror and subsequent royalty. All well and good, but it's the lesser known people that are more interesting  - making the links and discovering my roots in areas of England (and my roots are still mostly in England) that I have never even visited before. I also have direct links to some of the better known mediaeval English families. Lots of nasty knights, including William Tracy, who helped in the murder of Thomas a Becket as well as Richard Empson, a corrupt politician who was beheaded by Henry VIII. My Wiltshire/Gloucestershire stock are ordinary folk (except for some quite well-known exceptions - the builders of Bradenstoke Priory and the lords of Sudeley Castle). A large portion of the London branch are Huguenots who fled persecution in France and there are branches in Kent, Sussex, Suffolk and Derbyshire. If you're interested in British genealogy, check out my page. I've added some more information about names and places, including results of my mtDNA analysis from the Genographic Project! I've also got new stuff on my Archaeology page. Join me on Facebook.

Moving on to other things -

This is just so, so cool and uplifting! 

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The passage below, written by Carl Sagan, puts life, the universe and everything into perspective for me.

This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

Credit: NASA/JPL.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely indistinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994.

Here is a similar sentiment expressed by the late, great Arthur C. Clarke.

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the earth as a pale crescent dwindling against the stars, until at last they look for it in vain.

-- A. C. Clarke 1917-2008.

Check out my In Place of God page, where you'll find much varied information about atheism and see how the subjects of cosmology and religion are connected below in this brilliant YouTube clip of Michio Kaku talking about parallel universes (the multiverse).

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"It can happen. It does happen. But it can't happen if you quit." - Lauren Dane.

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