Tales of the Vuduri: Year One Read online

Tales of the Vuduri: Year One

  Michael Brachman

  Copyright 2014 by Michael Brachman

  TALES OF THE VUDURI: YEAR ONE

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2014 by Michael Brachman

  Cover art copyright © 2014 by Bruce Brachman

  V1.01.0001

  Also by Michael Brachman

  The Rome’s Revolution Series

  Rome’s Revolution

  The Ark Lords

  Rome’s Evolution

  Dedication

  First and foremost, I have to thank my brother Bruce. He is my go-to guy when it comes to the world of the Vuduri. Not only is he my editor and artist and the inspiration behind MINIMCOM, but he is also fiercely protective of the Vuduri culture and characters. Bruce creates the amazing covers, the astounding book trailers and makes my writing so much better. Bruce, none of this would exist without you.

  I want to thank my wife, Denise, for putting up with the endless hours of hiding in the basement, cranking out these stories, articles and so on. I could not have done it without her patience.

  Finally, as always, I would like to thank my heroes, Rome and Rei. They have supplied me with endless material of a future not yet born.

  Introduction

 

  World-building is hard. My Rome’s Revolution series takes place in the 35th century and involves new physics, planets, architecture and aliens. Worse yet, the people there normally don’t even speak. In the far future, they travel faster-than-light and deal with issues that are so far outside our realm of experience, they are difficult to fathom. But to make the science fiction seem realistic, I had to figure out not only the science, culture and politics but also everyday life. Like what do they eat? What do they wear?

  I’ve spent the better part of 40 years working on the details of this future universe. To be successful, the novels Rome’s Revolution, The Ark Lords and Rome’s Evolution have to be entertaining but to be considered hard science fiction, they also have to be well-thought out. I have mountains of research and notes that either don’t belong in books or had to be cut out.

  I first thought about putting all this extra material in a wiki. In fact, I built one called Rome’s Revolution: The Science Behind The Science Fiction. However, I quickly discovered this wasn’t practical. Presenting the backstories and research a little at a time was much easier using a blog format. Tales of the Vuduri is that blog. I selected Goodreads as my platform and created my first entry on December 23, 2012. I knew from experience that people only come back to blogs that are constantly updating their content so I made it my goal to post an article every day for a full year. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite hit that goal. I missed three days!

  Regardless, blogs make an excellent forum for not only little-known facts, previously unrevealed secrets, backstories but also musings and even the occasional rambling. It is not necessary that you have read the Rome’s Revolution series but it probably helps. There are many, many references within the articles to events and characters that inhabit those books. But there are also some amazing scientific facts and amusing articles that transcend the trilogy. Since the series is about more than just our 21st century hero, Rei Bierak and his beautiful 35th century Vuduri wife, Rome, I decided to call this collection Tales of the Vuduri because most of the entries are relevant to the 35th century and the people known as the Vuduri.

  Here is a partial list of what you’ll find in these entries:

  Backstories

  Tidbits

  Scientific articles

  Secrets

  Alternate scenes

  Deleted scenes

  Teasers

  Random thoughts

  Ramblings

  Humor essays

  Amusing images!

  Detailed explanations

  Apparent contradictions resolved

  Reasoning behind certain scenes

  In-depth analysis

  Mechanics

  Physics

  Scientific principles

  Sociology of the future

  Futurology

  Economics

  Astronomy and astro-geophysics

  You can watch my development as a blogger as the entries move along. Over the course of time, you’ll see the general introduction of hypertext links, first to the novels themselves, then later to previous posts and external articles. I also found that putting in little illustrations or images made the entries easier to follow. There are places in the text below where hypertext links were featured in the original articles. When you come across them, they may appear out of context so I have taken the liberty of adding an underline to the links so you will know that was their sole purpose. The rest of the entries are exactly as they appeared on Goodreads although I will admit I did fix typos when I found them.

  As far as a general plan for the content of the blog, while I have not been dogmatic about it, I have tried to follow the general flow of information from the original long form of Rome’s Revolution and I am only up to Chapter 8! That means there will definitely be a Tales of the Vuduri: Year Two if my fingers and imagination are up to it.

  In the mean time, here are the first 366 entries. I added one extra post just in case you read this during a leap year. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.