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Lynda Williams and Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzon
102 Plays17 days ago
In this episode of Re-Creative, Joe and Mark dive into a fascinating conversation with author and publisher Lynda Williams, the "obscure Canadian Tolkien." Joining the lads from Prince George, B.C., Lynda shares how she balances her academic background in Artificial Intelligence with her sprawling, ten-novel epic, the Okal Rel saga.
They explore Lynda’s unique approach to collaboration, where she invites other writers to play in her sandbox rather than protecting her turf. They nerd out on the physics of "reality skimming" (her version of faster-than-light travel) and discuss how her universe evolved from a passion project into a collaborative literary ecosystem.
For her "homework," Lynda chose Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes series. The three have a frank and illuminating discussion about the Victorian and colonial influences of this early 20th-century classic, and how those "larger than life" archetypes eventually seeped into—and were subverted by—Lynda’s own bioengineered cultures and dramatized philosophies.
Support Our Guest
Lynda Williams is a powerhouse of Canadian science fiction whose work bridges the gap between hard science and epic space opera. Her ability to maintain an arc from beginning to end across ten novels has earned her a dedicated following from Germany to the Maritimes.
Beyond her fiction, Lynda is a pioneer in the Canadian small-press scene and an educator who understands the intersection of technology and storytelling. Many of her co-collaborators have ensured that all aspects of the Okal Rel universe-everything from faster-than-light travel and fencing-are grounded in scientific logic and reality.
Lynda currently hosts a blog called Reality Skimming, where she continues to foster community by hosting guest posts on a wide range of intriguing themes.
You can explore the vast Okal Rel universe and find all of Lynda’s work by visiting her blog at realityskimming.com or her official series hub at okalrel.org.
For more information, please check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at contact@donovanstreetpress.com
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Transcript
Impact of Daylight Savings Time on Sleep
00:00:09
Speaker
Mark, kanoi chi wa? I am good. Actually, I'm not good. I'm so tired. Why are you tired? Well, I don't know when this is going to be airing, but we're recording this the week after falling back, daylight savings time. And I don't know why, but this year, it's just kicking my ass and it should be fine. it's but i thought So that's my question. How are you doing with the the time change? Or do you get time change where you are? Because I know there's a few provinces that have wisely decided to stay on daylight savings time. Yeah, no, here in New Brunswick, we're definitely still, we're doing the time change. This year, it it snuck up on my wife and i completely. we We woke up in the morning and the the radio come on and the guy was talking about the time.
00:00:54
Speaker
yeah i kind of groggily, you know, came awake and and realized, what did the time change last night? And then of course it meant that we had a whole extra hour. Yeah. And it should be fine. And actually it was the the morning of, because I was at, I was in Kingston that weekend at a Queens players reunion and we were up quite late doing Queen's players-y things. And I was quite glad to have the extra hour of sleep. But yeah, it just didn't seem to translate to the rest of the week.
00:01:22
Speaker
so So I, okay, I don't understand that you're to have to elaborate. So you got an extra hour of sleep, but you somehow are behind in sleep. I feel like that. Yeah. I feel like it's just, there's something about the circadian rhythm of the, of the dark happening so much earlier in the day that just, it's just making me super tired, even though it's really not that late. It's just weird. Yeah. Normally it happens the other way around. Like normally when you're springing forward, that's like getting a little bit of jet lag.
00:01:51
Speaker
Okay, now I'm going to take us into a tiny little bit of a rabbit hole before we turn to
Introducing Linda Williams and Her Work
00:01:56
Speaker
our guest. We should turn to our guest because I'm sure she's got thoughts on this too. Okay, but I'm going to add her into this, but I just wanted to ask you, maybe I'm getting too personal. Do you ever get blood work done?
00:02:08
Speaker
Yes, yes, on a pretty regular basis. so yeah Okay, so everything's cool there. I'm cool, I'm cool, yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, just wanted to make sure that our co-host is healthy. Oh, I'm healthy. It's just, it's I don't know what it is about this year. It just seems like this year it's dark, dark, dark, really early.
00:02:26
Speaker
Oh boy. Okay, what about Linda Williams? Welcome to our podcast, Free Thank you. Thank you for having me. And you're farther north than both of us, so how are you doing with this this year? It's yeah dark is It's not too cold in Prince George, but it's dark. So, yeah, ah we we do have the dark problem.
00:02:49
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. Okay. So before we go any further, we've learned a lesson in our fourth season of doing this podcast to introduce our guest. So Linda Williams ah is a is a fellow writer.
00:02:59
Speaker
And i think we've been aware of you for a long time. You're the author of the Okol Rell saga. Yeah. which is unique in that I know that you, and we'll talk about this, you bring other writers into that universe. A lot of writers kind of protect their there's their turf, but you take a different approach. And I'd love to discuss that that later on. Is there anything else that our listeners should know about you?
00:03:25
Speaker
ah Well, in my latest incarnation, I am still promoting my universe, but I'm also running a blog called realityskimming.com. Reality skimming being the faster than light method of travel in my books. But on that blog, I am hosting posts by other people as well on themes. So you appeared in the about the story thing theme, yeah which we are now fully booked for through the end of the year. And then in the new year, We'll be doing posts on the theme of governance, viewed through a fictional lens of some sort or through storytelling of some sort. Ideally sci-fi, but not 100% necessary.
00:04:08
Speaker
That's very cool. Yeah, that's fun. And you're up to how many books have you written now? ah The novels, there's 10 novels in the series. And I also wrote multiple novellas.
The Okolrel Saga: Origins and Themes
00:04:19
Speaker
i I have a ah kind of, I call myself the obscure Canadian Tolkien Because like Tolkien, I worked in academia and I did this as ah as a passion. And I did it with other people always. So I was always doing it with someone. um lot of it in the end with Alison Sinclair, ah who is my co-author with book four of the series. And it was sort of a natural thing to to knit people into it in in different ways because it was always, it just evolved out of play. Yeah.
00:04:50
Speaker
But you take it through adult adulthood and various degrees in education and life experience, and and then it it becomes a 10-novel series. So, ah yeah, it's it's not like I always made a living doing other things, not writing. Yeah.
00:05:06
Speaker
It was a passion project. And people, when they get into it, can really get into it and you know write me from Germany to get book seven, eight, nine and 10. I've had people read through it in a week, all 10 novels and go, where's book 11? That was it. It was an arc from beginning to end. that so So yeah, it it' sort of comes from a different place.
00:05:29
Speaker
So tell us about the Okolrel saga. What do we need to know? ah Well, I think the easiest and fastest way to explain it is sort of character driven, dramatized philosophy, I suppose. Like it it's it's space opera.
00:05:44
Speaker
And I'm going to be very honest about some of my in my influence fiction tonight that I'm going to talk about um for good and ill. Now you got me really curious. and yeah yeah no yeah but it's It's epic and it's heroic.
00:06:00
Speaker
I was always a fan of the epic poem and my dad used to read me epic poetry from the 19th century. And then, you know, I was, I was into adventure Zorro and, and a Lone Ranger and everything, you know, some of which feels very politically incorrect these days, but um it, it was something that i always was just and the ancient greek Greek myths and this business of, of, ah of stories dramatizing things about human nature. And then as ah as I got older, I got interested in various themes, and so I would project those through the universe. Early on, the things about um gender, I was sort of a um science, math person as a woman. didn't you know i mean I had some feminist friends as a teenager telling me I had a male mind. you know i thought okay I've had three children. I think I'm female. Wow.
00:06:49
Speaker
um and And so there was some of that. And and then there's also, you know, the threat of nuclear wars growing up in the 70s. And you go, okay, how can we come up with a governance system or some method of regulation that if we have the power to destroy irreplaceable habitat, that we won't do it? um And so I developed two methods for doing that in my universe. Of course, they're incompatible with one another. So when they bump into each other, a lot of the arc of the stories roil through that. And culture conflicts.
00:07:21
Speaker
with the with the characters and the the worlds they come from or the cultures they come from. And they're bioengineered, some of them, although they don't believe that. So there actually are kind of extreme versions of humans in certain directions.
00:07:34
Speaker
And if you want to know how all that happened, you can read the Laurel experiment or listen to it on YouTube. So yeah, and there's a lot, but it's, ah so you either get into it or you go, this is really weird. Well, that, yeah. And I think ah many of us who write that sort of thing frequently encounter that kind of reaction. um Yeah. Yeah, this was too weird for me or, yeah, not everybody's brain is is wired for this kind of stuff. So those are the ideas that that are that drive your fiction.
00:08:05
Speaker
What actually happens? Okay, but in the first book, from which is called Courtesan Prints in Editions 1 and 2, and then in the third edition, we're calling it Second Contact, which actually more accurately describes what happens. But the synopsis that Alison came up with actually was from two worlds that should never meet come four people who do. So the two sides of the universe a thousand years from now in the future...
00:08:32
Speaker
You have the egalitarian, compute-communist, arbiter administration of Ryer, which is um a very enlightened um culture that is spanning multiple planets and underpinned by AIs that can't be corrupted, which is important. And the other side is a neo-feudal society that came from this bio-engineered races that were developed to reality skim for humans. So they're kind of created as a slave race, but they don't leave that anymore in the humans or the commoners there. So you have this kind of neo feudal multiple races like your elves and your dwarfs and things, but it's the Vrelish and Demish and other stuff. And then um over on the other side, you have these highly advanced, very sophisticated, um egalitarian complex, advanced technological society. And they have completely incompatible systems of thought and how you prevent blowing things up if you have the power to do so.
00:09:30
Speaker
wow And they they did meet 200 years before, and that didn't go well. The place where it happened is now called Killing Reach. And both sides have mythology around what happened there, but nobody really knows for sure.
00:09:44
Speaker
So it strikes me that both you and Mark both write very thoughtful, contemplative, philosophical science fiction. Oh, well thank you. I mean, I like to think so. I call it intellectual mind candy. And I had like people would ask me all the time, you know, well what is this for? What kind of niche is this for? Well, I said, well, I have 12 year olds reading it, although I didn't think they should.
00:10:07
Speaker
And I have PhDs in computer science and religion reading it. So I don't know. And teenagers of all kinds and and geeky people who are computer programmers and i I don't know who it's for. It's for whoever likes it. So, yeah, I mean, but it's I like to kind of cast it that way because I think I was doing a lot of thinking over many years with my friend Allison as well, who's very well educated young woman. Well, old woman now. I mean, she's like my age. But um you know between us, we had about five postgraduate degrees. Yeah.
00:10:39
Speaker
But in fact, there's a lot of sex and violence and love and war and conflicts and sword fights. So it's really character driven. It's very hard to explain it without talking about the characters. But once you start talking about the characters, it's hard to get to a high enough plane that...
00:10:56
Speaker
But a lot of the, there's scenes people would laugh out loud when they read. um i had one young reader throw the book across the floor at one point because of what was happening. And then because she was in a wheelchair, she couldn't get it back. Oh, goodness. And she regretted that that was her decision. So, yeah, characters, people love the characters when they get into it, if they get into it.
00:11:18
Speaker
This does sound like something I would be interested in, to be honest. Oh, that would be lovely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I i kind of, in the beginning, i was, you know, very much talk about marketing and everything. I used to have to drink two beers before I could try and sell books. Because if you've been doing something for, I call myself, the obscure Canadian Tolkien, know, what if you ask Tolkien, well, what's your story about? You've got six words, make them all crisp. Yeah. I don't know. don't know. like So, you know, I am looking now for the people that might get into it, be interested and also perpetuate the sort of spirit of the thing of collaborative, engaged, doing things with people kind of work.
00:11:59
Speaker
So Tolkien, his his ah fantasy came from a very deep place ah in terms of his actual life as an academic, right? Like he was ah of he studied all of the Germanic lore and so on. So is there a similar kind of connection to your academic background that – Well, yeah, you your i I invented reality skimming while I was studying space time physics and and in an enrichment course as a high school student in Bellingham, Washington, and I never did go into astrophysics. But then I ah invented arbiters when I was doing a master's in artificial intelligence.
00:12:38
Speaker
And my friend Allison is a PhD biochemist and physics student, PhD in those kind of combined honors thingy. And then she got an MD because she felt she wanted to do that instead. So the science, it's it's I call it science fiction with a fantasy field because like I couldn't get away with stuff. I wanted these satellites to be really good at at maintaining high Gs and be regenerative. And so I i had that.
00:13:04
Speaker
I went and did some research on all that kind of stuff too. But then I would say to Alison, I want them to do this. And she said, okay, well, they're going to faint when this happens. And you know, So so we yeah we have that, but it's in the background.
00:13:16
Speaker
So when there's things about plagues and stuff, that's Alison's wisdom. I did a lot of research on the sort of sociological side. When I wanted to, I wanted to create the Vrelish or one of my groups of characters, one of my several eight cultures, and they're bioengineered. So they are not regular humans, they are, they were bioengineered, they originally were all male. And then um because they didn't wind up wanting to breed ah with the available females that were also several eight, the the masterminds involved ah kind of made ah ah a female version. So the the VRs became the Vrelish and they had to create a female version. So it's it's basically a bit of a a religious sort of ah echoes there. But
00:13:57
Speaker
But the idea is that although they're kind of Amazons, they like like hyenas have as much testosterone in their bodies as as the males do. um And they kind of have ah parallel cultural roles. I didn't want Amazons where the men were not important. You can be a male or a female relish leader.
00:14:16
Speaker
It was interesting because then that biology derives different things about the culture. So my civilite races are all sort of bioengineered in one direction or another. And I just wanted to to sort of test the boundaries of, you know, how far can you go before people don't identify as human?
00:14:32
Speaker
Sci-fi always talks about being different. and being strange, but it isn't really a lot of it's pretty basic stuff in terms of the sociology. yeah So I kind of push that in a few directions, different directions, and then have them all interact with each other, and which is where some of the hilarity results. And once you get to know the characters and the situations, that's where people burst out laughing because of some situation.
00:14:55
Speaker
But anyway, it's, um and they're all a bit larger than life because you have to be that way to successfully reality skim. You have to be regenerative enough to survive the radiation and that sort of thing. But you also have to have what's called grip, which is like a strong personality, any direction whatsoever. But you've really got to get back into the game and not time slip into an indefinite future.
00:15:16
Speaker
So I actually want to kind of nerd out on that just a little bit because I'm working on something where at a certain point it occurred to me that, oh, I need to figure out, you know, some means of faster than light travel that, you know, that hasn't been done before. So you've obviously done that to a huge degree with the reality skimming. Yep.
00:15:33
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about how you derived your means of traveling faster than light. Well, talking to Dr. Quigley at myat um when I did my advanced enrich science campsing and thing in high school.
00:15:48
Speaker
So, i mean, it is still sci-fi. It's still hand-wavy. But the idea is that there's shimmer and there's gap. And GAP is the intermediate dimensions, like the universe at the time, they were talking about it having 10 dimensions in the universe, but only four of which we deal with. In space-time physics, you're working with those four, which is why there's time travel in my universe, but only forwards, because it's the...
00:16:10
Speaker
and it's a from my special relativity background at that time when I was inventing it. um So you can time slip, but that means you come out of reality skimming in the future relative to your own clock. The idea basically is that with the shimmer in gap, gap is how much of the of the gap dimensions you absorb.
00:16:30
Speaker
And that's what you have to psychologically, your consciousness has to resist it. And it's it passion, emotion, sense of belonging and purpose are what matter. And so the AIs aren't very good at it. They kind of tend to lip out.
00:16:44
Speaker
And then the ah the shimmer is the physical stress of how often do you, and you've got multiple times a second, you go clickety, clickety, clickety, in and out. But then if you manifest in space where there is any matter whatsoever, you get splattered against the inner hull of your spaceship. So there's physical hazards beyond just the exposure as well.
00:17:04
Speaker
And they they're very, very ah strict about their space lanes. You know, you don't want to mess up space lanes. That's an ultimate sin if you're satellite. So there's a whole lot that's gone into the whole thing and religion, the societies, the governance system, the sword law. Yeah.
00:17:18
Speaker
I read many, many books about the use of combat, personal combat, as a means of settling things without having a war.
Exploring Conflict and Influence in Writing
00:17:26
Speaker
And, uh, disguided, you have to have a shared culture. in the Oklahoma universe, you have to sort of have shared legions, you know, all the ways that people would try and game the system and how you would try and defend against that and, Yeah. Well, you know, I've got, I could go on forever on all of these themes. So I'll, I'll stop there.
00:17:44
Speaker
It all sounds multifaceted. It's well-developed, deep and wide. It all sounds deeply informed. And fun also. And fun. Yeah. I mean, it's sounds fun too. You know, um really sexy male characters that are very powerful that pass out having sex because they have high blood pressure. I can thank Alison for that. And, um, And, and you know, like ah cultures where you're trying to negotiate treaties and one side wants a marriage and the other side goes, we don't marry. but That's against our culture and our women will kill us if we do that because the reproductive approach for the Vrelish is very different.
00:18:18
Speaker
And so you can imagine some of the complexities there. Okay. so So this is your work. A question that we always ask at a certain point is, have you done your homework? but but Oh, way too much. Of course. She's a professor. Of course she has. Yeah. All right. I digested books about egalitarianism in order to develop a recent system of governance. and yeah I don't mean about your homework, about your work.
00:18:42
Speaker
Oh, my homework. Yes, did. For the podcast. I did. I did do my homework. And I had so many things I thought would be a lot more impressive to talk about. but But I decided I really should go with something that the first thing that sprang to my mind.
00:18:58
Speaker
Okay. Good call. Yeah. And we don't know what it is at this point in the conversation. So I'm, I'm hugely curious. yeah Okay. It's Tarzan of the apes and also the post-adar by Edgar Alice Burroughs. Yeah.
00:19:12
Speaker
Edgar Rice Burroughs. Oh my God. I've been waiting. I've been waiting for this. Tarzan. wasn't a lady's man. Yeah. Pellucidar yeah. I love Pellucidar. That was my favorite of his series. Yeah. Yeah. It was, I did like Pellucidar as well. And there was one thing I particularly liked about it, which is if you're Pellucidarian, wherever you are under in the, in the hollow earth, you could always find your way home. And I'm G, I can't like all the women in my line are completely garbage at navigating. um My mother's to blame. I'm sure in her mother.
00:19:49
Speaker
but all the females in my ground in my mother's line. Why then did you choose this? I mean, so apart from the fact that it was the first thing that came to mind. Well, Tarzan of the Apes was my passion as when I was young. Like, I don't remember how young exactly. I remember reading all the books. I remember gobbling them all up with excitement and then having this sort of, hmm, moment when I thought, you know what? I think the first one is the best and the rest are kind of all going down the hill. there as I got older, you know. yeah So it's something that you think about more at different times in your life. But some of the themes, I've read some of the background about Edgar Rice Burroughs and, you know, he was into eugenics, right? Like he believed that Tarzan was superior because he was born of British aristocracy. And I think it was his father's family came from that background. And that's why he was going to be inherently superior. um And, you know, that does resonate with some of of my mother being from an English background. You know, she never said it in so many words, but you kind of get that feeling, my grandmother and my mother. And then my dad was from the other side of things, you know, the coal mining side of Wales.
00:20:58
Speaker
My mother's family were Welsh, but got co-opted by the English and said, yes, we'll be upper class. Thank you. um You know, so there's all this ah resonances. And then the the engine of the bioengineering, I...
00:21:10
Speaker
came to several lights out of that. And, you know, now people are actually doing that kind of thing. They're looking at repairing jeans or changing jeans to improve things. So that was a preoccupation in my youth. And maybe there was a bit of an echo of that in Tarzan, but I wouldn't have noticed it at the time. The Derry-Doo, the, you know, the Law, who was the woman who wanted him that he never wanted, but she was powerful.
00:21:35
Speaker
And ah my name, my middle name's Jane. So, you know, Tarzan and Jane, to get teased at school, you know, where's Tarzan? and and then And there's just a lot of things about it that when I go back and look at it, even though I can't entirely remember all of the stories, I i think, yeah, you know.
00:21:54
Speaker
I really loved that stuff. And some of the epic, the hand-to-hand combat, the ah the visiting different cultures and discovering that people. and And then you go back and look at what he was actually sort of projecting through some of that. And you think, okay, I'm glad I grew out of that as well. Yeah.
00:22:14
Speaker
you take away from it what what you bring to it. So, you know, I mean, i yeah I never, who knows, maybe because of that book, where there were oppressed males, I didn't want the ah the relish to have ah to have the males be subordinate to the females in that matriarchy thing. But all of those experiments that he would do with different cultures and So you feel it it did seep into your later work? and Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, like i I used to get asked by some feminist writers or or women. that was funny. The first three books, are first three or four books, maybe the first five books were out. They would say, why are you writing about men?
00:22:53
Speaker
In the later books, although they're not as much out there because it was towards the end of my days with Edge and there was only like 200 books or so made of each of the later ones. But the women feature far more because by that time I was in middle age and starting to think about more complex issues, right? So I still have my sexy guys sort of rampaging through the story. But why were there so many sexy guys? Well, I mean, come on. I was i invented most of this when I was teenager. So, you know.
00:23:23
Speaker
I used to like watching Tarzan movies. yeah Which I believe starred Jock Mahoney, if I'm not mistaken. There were so many of them, yeah.
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah, i was I was just, when I was preparing for this, looking through some of the video footage, like on YouTube of the different Tarzan iterations, and it really struck me too how, like, the last one I looked at, it was really a sort of a, oh, I'm going to, Jane's going to fall for him because he's not, he's a black Tarzan that, um, and they're going to save the environment together, right?
00:23:59
Speaker
So, you know, these things, they all evolve. Yeah, interesting. Trying to pull it out of the 19th century, yeah. Well, yeah, mean, that's maybe what he was influenced by. I mean, he was writing in the 1912, 1915. Yeah, it's a very Victorian almost, though, the aesthetic those stories. Yeah, his influence. And Puritan.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah. you know Did you have the same experience I did? I think I, I ripped through the Pellucidar series and then like I read the moon ones and then I got into John Carter Mars and I, i felt like I shouldn't read Tarzan cause that was my kid brother's thing.
00:24:35
Speaker
So I didn't want to steal any of his books. So, but eventually, but eventually I got through them all and I said, okay, can I read your books? Yeah, fine. And i I think I was like the second or third Tarzan book and he went, wait a minute.
00:24:46
Speaker
These are like, I was 12 or something. These are all essentially the same story. Yeah. i Sometimes it's really good. Yeah. Sometimes it flips, right? Sometimes it's like the female character has to save the male male character, but it's usually, yeah. more often The civilized one says saves the uncivilized one. That's yeah the story. Yeah. And then I kind of went, oh, that's disappointing.
00:25:11
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I'm very colonial, very colonial. yeah hundred percent it It's super Victorian. Yeah. and And he's also, there were other ways, I remember being, thinking, okay, so Jane and Tarzan, you know, great specimens of mankind, and they get married, they love each other dearly. They only have one kid.
00:25:29
Speaker
ah You know, like, what's that about? and um I remember that bothered me for a while. And I remember at some point as a kid thinking, just a minute, Tarzan's got a grown son.
00:25:39
Speaker
He's got to be at least 40, you know, or close to it. you're still going to be swinging through the trees. yeah know we're like, is Tarzan with the dad bod.
00:25:55
Speaker
So, yeah, you know, you don't understand when you're absorbing that sort of thing, like kind of breathing it in as a kid. Yeah, yeah. You don't understand the complexities and the and the you're you're in it for the romp.
00:26:08
Speaker
And definitely by the time I had got to the end, I was starting to think. I used to feel sorry for La. I would think, you know, I mean, she's not all bad. Yeah, she sacrifices the odd person, but she really does love him and he's just being, you know, really, you know. Obstinate.
00:26:26
Speaker
Now, wanted to ask you, were you at all offended, as so many people were, Tarzan fans, by the Crash House Demi's song that I was singing in the in the beginning when you mentioned Tarzan? Superman's song.
00:26:39
Speaker
Tarzan. Oh, if I'd seen it, I might have been. But no, I will probably wouldn't. I don't know. like Tell me, what what what is it about? Well, we don't want to pay for we don't want pay for the song rights.
00:26:50
Speaker
ah We can get away with that. Okay. got 30 seconds. Okay. Yeah. Well, the the first lines of the song are, um Tarzan wasn't a ladies man. He'd just come along and scoop him up under his arms like that, quick as a cat in the jungle. And then he goes on to say, Clark Kent.
00:27:07
Speaker
There was a real There was a real Jinn. Yeah. He wouldn't be caught in no jungle scape. Jungle scape. Dumb as an ape oh Yeah. Dumb as an ape. So all the Tarzan fans were deeply offended by the sign. But I guess you. No, no. I think that, you know, it's fair game. You you get to be that well known. And it's Tarzan's been resurrected in so many different ways that I don't think Edgar Rice Burroughs would recognize that. I think it's pretty much a meme in the world these days.
00:27:34
Speaker
and That's what's going to happen. but Yeah. Okay, now you guys, you also mentioned the, what are they? The Pellucidars. So I'm not as familiar with the Edgar Rice.
00:27:45
Speaker
Tell me about, what is that all about? A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Oh, well, I've seen that movie. yeah it' so the there There's a guy in the Sahara Desert, ah David Innings, I think it was. that right, Mark? oh And he he yeah look it up you finds a a guy with a, he's got a a mole, um he inherited a mole from a mining thing. And he drills down into the earth. Like, I don't know why you just decide you're going to drill down into the earth if you've got a mining mole, but he does. And he discovers that there is a lost ancient world of ah prehistoric monsters and humans ah living in the center of the earth, in the hollow earth.
00:28:27
Speaker
And of course, there's a beautiful woman. the earth's core was the first one. Yeah. And then, um and then he yeah, he's got a friend that a scientist who goes down there with him to help out.
00:28:40
Speaker
So yeah, many adventures are had. Again, it's this land of many different cultures and um speaking animals, like animals that have a human culture. This was a popular theory for a while ah before it was disproved that the earth was hollow and that there was another whole prehistoric world in there. One of the books. Stone comic books, which was also based on that idea. Yeah. And one of the books, they go to the, i think the South Pole and there, there's a, there's a way in. Yeah. Hollow earth to the South Pole. Right. And that's how the humans got in some some that south got in. Yeah. Some of the bad humans, I think they were descended from bad bunch. Yeah.
00:29:18
Speaker
and they're They're pretty exciting. They're called the Mahars that are actually intelligent ah beings that are based on pterosaurs. And they've enslaved the humans.
00:29:30
Speaker
And I've always been fascinated by this idea of, you know, a race and a master race and a subordinate race, and then it gets flipped. Or, um you know, what if there's a good Mahar and they're trying to help you and you befriend it, but then you're going to exterminate its entire species. Yeah.
00:29:48
Speaker
you know like got I resonated with that with your book, Joe, about the, you know, they're talking about, well, I know these guys have been gilling everyone and slaughtering the cats and everything, but, you know, they are slimy, but they're, there' we're going to be committing genocide here if we kill this last guy, you know? um You know, I mean...
00:30:05
Speaker
that That idea has always fascinated me. What about the the enemy where there strike a common resonance between enemy and and and your own
Challenges in Marketing and Publishing
00:30:15
Speaker
kind? and And can't we find a better solution than we just got to wipe out one side?
00:30:20
Speaker
And so that's in my work too. And and I was you know looking back to the Pallusidar stuff and discovering the Marhars. Yeah. you know What about the good Marhar? Yeah.
00:30:31
Speaker
but We want to kill them all. He's got to be really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but there's that that oversimplifying. And even Edgar Rice Burroughs, who's presumably now interpreted and probably truly was, you know, like racist and all those kind of things. Yeah. um Even he, you know, he has some of these people from the inferior races or people from the bad guy group that that are befriended by Tarzan or by one of the protagonists in Pellucidar and then help the good guys. And i always felt very strongly that if there's people like that, they should get rewarded somehow, that there should be some education going on there about, well, maybe what your species is doing is wrong, but we shouldn't exterminate you. um so Some justice. Yeah. Yeah, some kind of, some bridge, of universalist bridge of some sort. So ah there's characters in my universe that are all about that.
00:31:27
Speaker
So you're kind of, in a way, your work is is building a little bit on on this, on these oversimplification. Maybe reacting against the extermination of the Marhars, yeah. And then once they exterminate them, of course, then he has to bring back a few that haven't been exterminated yet because he needs the bad guys. You know, it's like the Daleks with Doctor Who.
00:31:48
Speaker
We got them all. Oh, no, not that one. Now there's another million. Yeah. yeah And that always bugged me as well as the, you know, why doesn't Tarzan have more children?
00:32:00
Speaker
Because I just thought, well, you know, can we just, if we defeat an enemy that's incorrigible or whatever, can we just be done with that and not just bring the same ones back? Like, can find a new thing to to go after? Somehow the emperor returned. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
00:32:17
Speaker
It does seem like these um super successful famous writers do often return to the same formula. I've been wondering recently if that has hurt other writers, you know, who don't do that, who who do introduce more complexities. Does that make their stuff actually less marketable or saleable?
00:32:36
Speaker
I think so. I mean, I do think, I think Tolkien lucked out because his son worked for a publishing house and he got his books into circulation with the ah sci-fi cons at a period when that movement was growing.
00:32:49
Speaker
Right. Because it's pretty dense. I mean, i I was a pretty avid reader and pretty sophisticated reader. And the first time I tried to read Tolkien, I gave up. And then I picked up again another, you know, five years later or something. Right.
00:33:02
Speaker
I don't think my stuff is quite that dense in terms of, you know, being a you know going through the minutia because he's got such complex, beautiful background stuff. But I do believe that the market, like when I was in the professional published world and I was going to these events and they would tell you, okay, so how you've got to describe your work is it's Bambi meets Godzilla or it's it's Harry Potter but set in cyberpunk.
00:33:29
Speaker
yeah And I thought, I just don't know how to do that about the Okovel universe. And I don't know why I would, because I wouldn't read Harry Potter set in cyberpunk. you know But people want to see and they want to connect with things they're familiar with.
00:33:42
Speaker
I was out selling books yesterday. And because I'm aware of the... of the reaction to to my work and and other work that that is similar, I find myself wanting to say to people coming to the table, you know, they'll pick up a certain book that's on the table. And i'll say i want I want to say, you're going to need a brain and imagination to appreciate that book. yes That's anti-sales. Yeah. But, you know, maybe it isn't because I always felt there's no point trying to sell, like, the Oakville universe to somebody who wants a quick murder mystery with not much characterization and wants to be able to recognize the setting as real life, you know? What's the point of that? Yeah. You don't really want the wrong people. Yeah. And I thought, that sounds horrible, the wrong people. But, I mean, people that...
00:34:33
Speaker
aren't going to like it or appreciate it because that's not going to help anyone. This is not your kind of thing then, you know, I mean, um I, I've had great reviews by people who said, I, I would never have bought this book just based on the cover, but I really enjoyed it when I read it because of this, this, and this, you know, so people have a lot of preconceived ideas. And if what you're doing is really quite different,
00:34:55
Speaker
yeah It's hard, you know, I mean, I could, I could say it's, it's Star Wars meets Tolkien or something, but what am I really saying about, about it by saying that? Not very much.
00:35:06
Speaker
But you know, I've had an idea and we, you know, maybe we'll do this one. Maybe we could figure out how to do this together somehow as publishers. And that is doing things where people react to getting into a more complex story. Yeah.
00:35:19
Speaker
So, you know, if you're reading your book, for example, and you were to do a little video clip of, okay, this is where I'm at. I've got these two paragraphs, three pages in. Here are the questions I had. This interested me. You know, just, and then go through the whole book that way in little vignettes and pump those out on the internet because people have a short attention span. Yeah.
00:35:41
Speaker
And maybe if it was somebody genuinely getting into a thing that was more complex, I might like not like everything they said about the Ockerville universe. But at least that way there would be some exposure of some of what's inside. Right. Instead of just trying to constantly try and find some oversimplification or something somebody can immediately understand. Right.
00:36:02
Speaker
I don't know. it's ah i'm I'm exploring in my own mind these days how I can try and break it down. I've always had people want to try and do things with it. have people who have recorded for it and the on YouTube. You can listen to people reading it.
00:36:17
Speaker
I have a friend right now who's looking at trying to do it as an AI-generated little mini-videos, and I don't know how that's going to work because I really can't see it. But anyway... Is that even acceptable? these Because there's it such a backlash against the use of ai for anything to do with storytelling or generating imagery. Yeah, I suppose. I suppose. I i think i don't think it would be if it was like you know brand new, maybe, but if it's trying if it's being used as a way to get people to notice and maybe get interested in some of the ideas that they would either otherwise not encounter because they won't read past the first paragraph. I have this thought that is that
00:36:57
Speaker
instead of the media is the message, that the message can play in all media. And if you can recast it in a different media, yeah, if you get somebody who never reads, they might look at it and and take what they can get from that and never pick up the book. But if they have a friend who does, they might tell them about it and they might pick up the book. you know it's ah I've got to get all my books rebooted pretty quick here, but you know before I die kind of thing, which you know how to write. So that I'll actually be able to provide the whole set. Right now they're only available, the complete set on Kindle, Kindle on Amazon. at time
00:37:33
Speaker
And the the books, the later books in the series, book seven in particular, which is the one that books one to six are fairly available secondhand and book seven isn't. I used to go out and buy them and then I'd sell them to people who wanted the next book in the series when I went to a con and um with the ones I'd rebooted so far. And I'd sell them to people for 20 bucks because, you know, it was the cover price originally. But to get book seven sometimes now, when I look for it online, they want $135 for it.
00:37:59
Speaker
Oh, my God. So you're saying that your books are not available in in print now? No, not not only the Edge ones, the first editions. Oh, because they originally came out in Edge. And yeah don't have the you don't have the rights back to them? or I do. I bought my rights back.
00:38:15
Speaker
Okay. So you could reprint them. I'm working on that. Yeah, that's that's that's doable. I've got the first two reprinted in the third edition. yeah I had a second edition that was just three books, the first three.
00:38:28
Speaker
And then the artist that was doing with it me with it with me kind of went away. And then I got a very enthusiastic, Michelle Milburn, who is the, um she's graduate of Emily Carr, great artist.
00:38:39
Speaker
Okay. And a very computer geeky person. And she she and I teamed up as Reality Skimming Press and we started rebooting the third edition. I've got to pick up on pace on that because yeah I can't keep buying the later books. Yeah, that sounds expensive. Yeah. I'm not buying my own book for $135. I have some advice it's out of interest because I've got the rights back to my first novel, which is now out of print. No, I have it. It's available as an e-book. But I thought, well, I'm going to do another edition. I might as well – I'll open up the hood.
00:39:08
Speaker
and see what's under there. And then six months later, I'm in the middle of this crazy rewrite. Well, basically I've pulled the whole thing apart and I'm rewriting the whole book. and It's like, oh oh boy, boy, yeah that was a mistake. because Yeah, i've I've now abandoned that because I'm like, i i don't I have other projects that are new I need to finish. There's always things you could, but the whole thing is sort of a tapestry from book one to book 10 that evolved over like 40 years.
00:39:36
Speaker
you can't really change too much. case A lot of it. It's, it's, there's things in book one that aren't resolved until book 10. Yeah. So there's not a lot of wiggle room in that. If I ever write again, as opposed to doing the publisher thing and and and getting things rebooted. I might write something set in the Oklahoma universe, but if it's kind of entirely different nature in a different time.
00:39:58
Speaker
Right. ah but yeah But we'll see. We'll see. Sometimes I think I might do that. And sometimes I think I'd rather just, you know, like a lot of the actors do, retire to the director role and and do the publishing um thing and and the figure out how to how to share with the world and get people interested in the Okovel saga so that it's a I can find those people that will love
Creative Collaboration and Legacy
00:40:22
Speaker
it.
00:40:22
Speaker
Now, I wanted to ask you more about um the the collaborative nature of it. Can you tell us more about that? Like who has toiled in that universe? Okay, sure. What have they done with it? Yeah, I mean, when I was researching the Tarzan thing, there was actually bit of a resonance there because, oh, I think Edgar Rice Burroughs at the end was a bit of a hack and he was doing it for money and he actually said disparaging things about the very magazines he tried to publish in. But his daughter married one of the first actors in...
00:40:51
Speaker
ah for the first Tarzan movie, I think it was, and became a voice actor for Jane. And his son became an illustrator for some of the books. So there is that kind of in family involvement.
00:41:02
Speaker
And I had that definitely. I used to read. ah Well, i first of all, I never stopped playing. I used to play imaginative games with my family and my friends at school. And I'd invent games and we'd ride our bikes around the universe, saddled up like horses, and which probably not a very safe way to ride a bike when you're tied a skipping rope to the handlebars and are steering it that way. But anyway, like we would play these games based on TV shows, you know, that we'd seen and stuff. and um And I just kept doing that with Barbie dolls as I got older, with one friend in particular. By that time, the Okovali Universe was sort of emerging.
00:41:36
Speaker
And then when I went to university, I met Alison. And she and I were doing it pretty intensively for many, many years, like decade or two, on and off. She's the one who hooked me up with Edge and we we put out book four and then we went back and did one, two, three, but then she wasn't wanting to be part of it anymore. But there's big chunks of Alison in some of the later books. that was stuff we'd written already before she decided to leave. And um she just said, oh, you go ahead and use whatever you've got of mine. I'm not fussed about it.
00:42:05
Speaker
right and um And then once the books came out, because I was reading them aloud to my family and the as I was writing them, um My daughter and her friends and my my daughter's friends, both both my older daughters, they would come and listen on the on the weekends too. And one of them, Chrissy, she actually made up a little song about, the only end. It's this golden demish guy who's a virgin at 83 because they're bioregenitive. They don't die and The Golden Demas are very particularly Puritan in some ways. Anyway, it's one of those long stories that won't fit. But um ah she would make songs about him. i went out to schools and I did presentations. And I had um a teacher here in Prince George who had her English class doing dramatizations from the Okoval universe. And then she said, you know, I have an idea for a story. Or somebody else would be reading the books when I went to sci-fi cons. And they'd say, well, what about this? What if this happened? And said, well, why don't you write that?
00:43:05
Speaker
And so we started doing anthologies of stories set in the Okolwell universe. And Edge put out through Absolute Express, they put out six of those that I edited that were stories by other people set in the Okolwell universe. And then Hal Friesen, who is a physics student here at UNBC when I was working here pre-retirement, he had ah he did two or three stories like that. And then he wound up doing a novella.
00:43:30
Speaker
about the character that um that was in those short stories. And Chrysia did anthology, she did two ah novellas about her character that was in those short stories. And those characters, both Hal's and Chrysia's, are in the later books. They have cameos and they appear in the series later. in the series in an appropriate way.
00:43:50
Speaker
um So there there was that. And then there was ah people would do fan art. And I'd put that up or I'd even use it in in some kind of a handout for a con or something. Michelle got involved doing art and wound up doing some of the covers. It was all that that kind of stuff was just burbling along and yeah in kind of the spirit that it developed in, which was we're playing were're playing games. And then as it got more and more sort of ah harder to pull strings because it's the the tapestry is pretty tight knit, people would do spin-off things. So I did the um anthology with the Jeff Dalton, the anthology that is the Mega megan Anthology. And Mega is a a very early Earth world. like it's ah
00:44:36
Speaker
I say pre-Cambrian in in one of the descriptions of it, which is wrong. It's much later than that. But it's pre-dinosaur kind of world. And um the idea is that they crash land there and how do people survive, the the people who wind up stranded there. So people wrote different separate stories.
00:44:53
Speaker
And then there was a guy called Craig Bowlesby, who also wrote short stories and novellas for me, who was my fencing advisor, because sword law in the Sevelate side of the universe is ah in personal combat sort of gig, but it's a legal system. So it's something that's very regulated and observed and there's rules and everything. Anyway, he yeah he rewrote all my fencing scenes. So I do the politics and the characterization and the setup. And then I'd say, okay, now write this, Craig, as if it's a real sword fight.
00:45:24
Speaker
Because he taught fencing. And so ah any any realism to do with the fencing in Oak La Wall universe is owed to Craig. Is there any of that activity still going on? or Are people still riffing off the overall saga? Not really at the moment. There's a little bit. I had somebody record Righteous Anger, and that's actually, it's book two. It's actually available to listen to on YouTube for free. um So that was fairly recent.
00:45:50
Speaker
And I'm just kind of coming back up out of hibernation, having been sort of creatively anesthetized by ah five years of middle management at SFU University. Yes. yeah it That'll happen to you. Yeah. so as we wind up, is there anything else that you would like to leave us and our listeners with about the work that you're doing?
00:46:14
Speaker
um Just the idea that everything's connected. You read Tarzan as a kid, you morph it through various life experiences into an Okolwa universe. And the being the writer and being the reader, I think about one in a hundred people who read the Okolwa universe created something for it um or wanted to, and we tried to accommodate that.
00:46:34
Speaker
It's a very, i think, good time these days to for for people to get involved in creativity without feeling that they have to be superstars or make a million dollars to do it. That's getting struck by lightning. you know like it's It's okay. It's good. It's important.
00:46:51
Speaker
If it means something to people, does it have to mean something to 3 million people? Or is it cool if it means something to 3,000 people, right? I've had thousands of people read my books. You know, I think I should be proud of that, not cringy about it. Absolutely. You should be proud of And that's why I call myself the obscure Canadian token.
00:47:10
Speaker
Because I got so tired of people saying, oh, I read your books. They ought to be they ought to be ah a TV series. and Yeah, you know, you got a million dollars to fund that? You know, like, I'm sorry, I haven't turned them into a TV series, but I'm not that well endowed. But so great that they love your work so much that they, you know, want to. Yeah, but then enthusiasm, you know, then there's no 11th book and the enthusiasm dies out. but But then I, you know, some of them I could at that, average and I'm hoping I will do anthologies again of the books 7, 8, 9, and 10 before I die. Because, you know, I'm on a clock now.
00:47:46
Speaker
I'm going to be 68 February. so um So getting them all rebooted and getting them out there and getting people engaged in helping me share the story to get people into it and participating in the community of writing and reading and and in sci-fi and out um is is my my kind of mission in the world at the moment.
00:48:09
Speaker
Mark, any ah last ah thoughts or questions? I'm just thrilled we finally got to talk to yeah about ERB. It just seems like we've had a lot of people on the show who've definitely read Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially if you write any kind of adventure, science fiction or fiction. like he He's influential.
00:48:26
Speaker
And it's so disappointing when you find out he didn't even respect his own work. Yeah. and that And he was like kind of a dick as well. like Yeah, kind of a dick. you know yeah and and a real marketing. you know like He was all over the – he formed his own company early on. you know it was 19, 23, I think it was. Yeah, yeah. He formed his own. And then he started divorcing wives and marrying younger ones and all that crap that you get into when you get too much power. At least he had his kids involved in the creativity. Yeah, that's true. Okay.
00:48:56
Speaker
perhaps Perhaps we should leave it there. Linda Williams, thank you very much for being Thank Thank you. Lovely to meet you. Pleasure. Pleasure to meet you.
00:49:27
Speaker
You've been listening to Recreative, a podcast about creativity and the works that inspire it. Recreative is produced by Mark Rainer and Joe Mahoney for Donovan Street Press Inc.
00:49:38
Speaker
in association with Monkey Joy Press. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney, web design by Mark Rainer. You can support this podcast by checking out our guests' work, listening to their music, purchasing their books, watching their shows, and so on.
00:49:54
Speaker
You can find out more about each guest in all of our past episodes by visiting re-creative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. You can contact us by emailing joemahoney at donovonstreetpress.com.
00:50:08
Speaker
We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.