When an author writes a
story, creates a world and the creatures in it, does the literary world
actually come into being in some parallel universe? Joshua Gordon, creative
writing professor and writer of pulp fiction thinks so and is in fact so
convinced it is true that when he is diagnosed with a terminal illness he sets
out to find a protégé who he can convince to take over as the creator god of
the world. He finds that protégé in the person of John Fisher.
EXCERPT: World Without End
Joshua Gordon, The Creator,
was fifty-eight years old when he felt himself beginning to die. He was of
medium height with graying hair, brown-gold eyes, a face pleasantly marked with
smile wrinkles and a body with a tendency toward plumpness in the middle. The
feeling was just an odd little twinge at first; a sort of pinching at the base
of his neck, producing a barely perceptible weakening in his legs, gone almost
before noticed, not to be thought of again until the pinching became stronger
and the weakness more pronounced. His medicos said the condition was a genetic
defect, accelerated neuro-myelitis, but when Gordon began questioning what the
hyphen bearing Latinate gobbledygook meant, they hemmed and hawed, provoking
him so he lost his temper.
"You mean you have not
the foggiest notion on God's green earth what is wrong with me! Am I
right?"
"Take it easy
Dad," Joshua's son Lucian said, putting his hand on his fathers shoulder.
Lucian, the very image of his father at the same age, had driven Joshua to the
doctor, pushed the wheelchair Joshua did not really need down the hospital
corridors.
"No sir! It does
not!" the young doctor protested. "We know the sheathing around your
nerves is growing thinner, at some places it has thinned to nothing. Without
sheathing, the signals traveling along your nerves are diverted or scrambled."
"In other words, I have
a short circuit in my electrical system because the insulation around my wiring
isn't any good?"
The doctor smiled at his
question. It was so typically Gordon and the doctor had been a fan of Joshua
Gordon's books since he was a child. "Yes sir. Pretty accurate
description," he said.
"So, why is it
happening, and what can be done about it?"
Now the doctor was not so
quick to reply. "I can't answer those questions, Mr. Gordon. We don't know
what causes it yet, and because we don't know we don't--"
"Yeah, OK." Gordon
said holding up a hand to stop the doctor. "How long?"
"Mr. Gordon,
it’s--"
Gordon held up his hand
again. "Just go ahead and say it. A year, a day, an hour-and-a-half,
what?"
The doctor hated what he was
about to say, he knew the reaction he was going to get, but there was no
avoiding it. With a mental shrug he said, "We don't know."
Gordon opened his eyes wide
in disbelief just as the doctor had seen him do on countless talk shows. He
knew it always preceded the skewering of some pretentious asshole.
"You don’t know?"
Gordon said softly.
"No sir."
Obviously holding in an
explosion Gordon said, "Then get me a doctor who knows something."
The doctor blushed.
"Your privilege and I recommend it, but they will all tell you the same
thing, Mr. Gordon. They will say it differently, but it will boil down to the
same thing. There are several related genetic conditions and we have no cure
for any of them. There is an experiment going on now in Scotland where some
Vets are trying to re-grow or create new myelin sheathing in dogs born without
the sheathing, and there are several genetic studies going on, but there is no
way of knowing what sort of success they are having. And as to how long--it
depends on the rate of degeneration. Your onset was late in life, which may be
good-"
"But it may be
bad."
"Yes."
"So I could live
another sixty years, or I could suddenly collapse with the galloping shakes and
kick over in the next couple of minutes."
"You probably will not
live another sixty years..." the doctor said with an earnestness which
pinked Gordon in his twisted, ironic wit and caused him to smile despite the
situation.
"Can't ever tell
Doc," he said. "Can't ever tell."
REVIEW:
Review by C. L. Kraemer
Dragons Of The Ice
5 Angels
Serpents and Doves
by
G. Lloyd Helm
His view of life is vastly opposite of those living in the
deep South and he learns, quickly, what he believes can garner him mountains of
trouble.
G. Lloyd Helm has put his finger on the feel of the era,
bringing the angst of the War and confusion of Civil Rights to the forefront.
As a girl who was uprooted from California and thrust into Alabama a month
after Dr. Martin Luther King's march, I empathized with this character. I, too,
grew up with myriad nationalities. My father was a career Marine and in our
household there was only one color—green. I spent my time in the south in a
state of confusion and silence.
I highly recommend this book. It is well thought out with
lush characters and visuals of the surroundings. Anyone who might have wondered
about the turbulent times of the sixties will get a great insight with this
read.
BLURB
The
title “Serpents and Doves” comes from the warning Jesus gave to his disciples
as he sent them out to preach the gospel, knowing the dangers they were going
into. He said “Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” Stephen Mitchell
learns first-hand what that warning means when he goes to a Tennessee church
college in the midst of the turbulent sixties. He learns about friendship, war,
protest, the sexual revolution, and civil rights.
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