FICTION comes from the Latin fictio, (from fingere - contrive) meaning to fashion (SOED). It evolved through old and late French and English, and is related to the word feign (meaning to invent or pretend, as in to feign interest). Bizarrely, it's unrelated to the word finger (which apparently came from Germanic languages). This is despite the fact that fingers write and fashion things ("The moving finger writes..." hand-made, etc.). An example of where downstream words converge in form and meaning, even though their origins are very different. Fashion (fingere) and five (as in 5 fingers), in this case.
Such ideas are played with in the book LETHE'S ROAD, where modified dictionary entries reveal the transit to an new reality. The characters remember different words or meanings, and become suspicious that their world has changed. This idea was triggered by such weird etymological shifts in real life, of which there are many examples. Personally, I recall quite vividly several words with clearly remembered origins. These were obvious and sensible etymologies, too. When I checked, their origins were quite different from what I thought. Even in an old dictionary. Rather than assume I'd lost my mind, I preferred to believe that history had updated (re-printing the dictionaries as it did so) or that I'd moved to a parallel existence, where words had evolved differently. Hence Lethe's Road... Incidentally, words run, like ants, in TIME AERIALS. So it's an abiding concern that we can't pin anything down. Even things that seem permanent, like printed words in real, paper books.
But it's not just etymologies that mutate. Taxonomies heave and shift, too. Sometimes because of updated scientific knowledge that leads to new classifications, and sometimes to massage or hide meanings, or to reattribute credit for discoveries (e.g. Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, used to be called Pasteurella pestis...).
In YESTERDAY MAKERS, I visit my old lizard, a South African zonure (Latin zonurus, from the Greek zone (girdle) + oura (tail) SOED. The old pet's Latin name was Cordylus cataphractus. Cordylus comes from the Greek for bump (referring to their rough skin). Cataphractus comes from the Greek kataphraktes to coat in mail (as in a coat of amour's chainmail) SOED. This glorious creature, an armoured thing that (in the wild) curls up and grasps its tail in its mouth like an armadillo, has suffered a name-changing indignity. The species was first described by the herpetologist, Rose, though no one, apparently, believed him about it curling up. Anyway, it's now called Ouroborus cataphractus. Unpronounceable, I'm sure you'll agree. Still, Ouroboros is the mythical snake or serpent that eats its own tail (Greek oura, tail + boraein, to eat, see CHAMBERS DICTIONARY). Ouroboros is a perfect icon for books about time loops and reincarnation. Still, I grieve the name-loss of my beloved C. cataphractus. He's gone the way of Brontosaurus, poor thing (nominally only, C.c is endangered but not extinct-yet). Yes, Brontosaurus went out of fashion as a name (subsumed by Apatosaurus). But now, Brontosaurus is back! A rare case of a backflipping taxonomy. Not so, my long-lamented Red-Eared Terrapin pets, Pseudemys scripta elegans, now known as Trachemys scripta elegans. See how the words run like ants...
The domain, Fiction.red is a play on words (red being a pun on read, as in Fiction I've read). It's over nine years old and originally held a blog (of fiction I'd read). Now it showcases my books and some of the ideas that lead to them. Each cover below leads to the book's own page, where you can read the beginning and get a taste...
Such ideas are played with in the book LETHE'S ROAD, where modified dictionary entries reveal the transit to an new reality. The characters remember different words or meanings, and become suspicious that their world has changed. This idea was triggered by such weird etymological shifts in real life, of which there are many examples. Personally, I recall quite vividly several words with clearly remembered origins. These were obvious and sensible etymologies, too. When I checked, their origins were quite different from what I thought. Even in an old dictionary. Rather than assume I'd lost my mind, I preferred to believe that history had updated (re-printing the dictionaries as it did so) or that I'd moved to a parallel existence, where words had evolved differently. Hence Lethe's Road... Incidentally, words run, like ants, in TIME AERIALS. So it's an abiding concern that we can't pin anything down. Even things that seem permanent, like printed words in real, paper books.
But it's not just etymologies that mutate. Taxonomies heave and shift, too. Sometimes because of updated scientific knowledge that leads to new classifications, and sometimes to massage or hide meanings, or to reattribute credit for discoveries (e.g. Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, used to be called Pasteurella pestis...).
In YESTERDAY MAKERS, I visit my old lizard, a South African zonure (Latin zonurus, from the Greek zone (girdle) + oura (tail) SOED. The old pet's Latin name was Cordylus cataphractus. Cordylus comes from the Greek for bump (referring to their rough skin). Cataphractus comes from the Greek kataphraktes to coat in mail (as in a coat of amour's chainmail) SOED. This glorious creature, an armoured thing that (in the wild) curls up and grasps its tail in its mouth like an armadillo, has suffered a name-changing indignity. The species was first described by the herpetologist, Rose, though no one, apparently, believed him about it curling up. Anyway, it's now called Ouroborus cataphractus. Unpronounceable, I'm sure you'll agree. Still, Ouroboros is the mythical snake or serpent that eats its own tail (Greek oura, tail + boraein, to eat, see CHAMBERS DICTIONARY). Ouroboros is a perfect icon for books about time loops and reincarnation. Still, I grieve the name-loss of my beloved C. cataphractus. He's gone the way of Brontosaurus, poor thing (nominally only, C.c is endangered but not extinct-yet). Yes, Brontosaurus went out of fashion as a name (subsumed by Apatosaurus). But now, Brontosaurus is back! A rare case of a backflipping taxonomy. Not so, my long-lamented Red-Eared Terrapin pets, Pseudemys scripta elegans, now known as Trachemys scripta elegans. See how the words run like ants...
The domain, Fiction.red is a play on words (red being a pun on read, as in Fiction I've read). It's over nine years old and originally held a blog (of fiction I'd read). Now it showcases my books and some of the ideas that lead to them. Each cover below leads to the book's own page, where you can read the beginning and get a taste...
TIME AERIALS: A Time Travel Diversion. My first and longest book. Two years to write and a nightmarishly complex timeline to map the shifting worlds and times and characters. A central theme is that minor changes to history would have massive consequences (a kind of amplifying butterfly effect). The squamaflies are, in essence, a tribute to those Earth-moving insects... The Grandfather Paradox is explored in The Time Machine Detective.
YESTERDAY MAKERS: A Story from a Time Machine. This book started as a short story which I withdrew and expanded. It has a complex plot with a new take on time travel. A light-hearted romp through some of time-travel's common paradoxes, and explores the origin of consciousness and philosophical zombies.
LETHE'S ROAD. An alternate and dystopian Canberra awaits a small family, with new realities signalled by changing words. Lethe was a goddess (and a river in Hades) famed for making souls forget their past lives. Reincarnation or other progress would be hindered by a hankering for a lost, past life. In this book, it's the road (crash) that triggers the forgetting balm of Lethe.
Click on the book's cover to read the start of the story and for buying information.
Quali, Pierce, & The Time Ship, takes Qualia (a main character in YESTERDAY MAKERS) and turns her into an unfulfilled housewife. Pierce (also from YM) is her gaslighting husband. And so we enter a rollercoaster of multi-dimensional marriage therapy as the couple suffer their personal roads to enlightenment. The archetypal psychiatrist, Walden (from TA) figures as a perverse and untrustworthy doctor and guide. Walden also appears in in Retro Virion.
GLOBAL REPLACE & Other Stories is a collection of short stories. Two scolding wives share a house divided, making the husband's life a misery. A writer writes himself a sexy new partner. A backseat driver's trapped. An elevator runs out of floors. And clothes control the man. Jab your mind with these philosophical sci-fi quick reads. Only 17 pages. A great introduction.
CAFE STREET & Other Stories. A busy street becomes an eerie café. An unimportant man chats to his television. The best-laid plans for a green and vegan world go wrong. A man wakes up as a woman, or so he thinks. A plague party with neighbours. A bad-news addict, a doomscroller, gets his comeuppance. And a grandfather writes a book in code. Sit in Café Street and sip the heady brew. But hurry. You don't have long. Click on the cover to go to the book's own page and read the entire short story that gives this collection its name.
RETRO VIRION: A Tale of Lunacy & Loss. A man spirals into madness, believing he's in touch with prehistoric animals, the unborn, and the dead. The world around him teeters on a knife-edge, threatened by a nightmare virus that destroys everything in its path. The unreliable narrator, who's immune to the plague, takes you on a journey into the broken heart of existence, to a fractured consciousness as big as the universe itself, and as small as one man's mind. But is he really mad or is he right? Or is he the hallucinating survivor of a devastating pandemic? This covers a lot of personal ground, including a mad belief that animating a virus in an underground studio triggered a pandemic in the real world. This is a haunted and altered version of my home town. And that most unreliable psychiatrist, Walden, makes his appearance again...
FICTION.RED showcases Russell Kightley's literary fiction, philosophical science fiction, satire, & time travel stories. From full length novels, through novellas, to short stories, these books explore the nature of consciousness and reality. Available from the author and all main retailers. You'll find weird ideas and light-hearted wordplay in many of the stories. Ideas are dissected and explored, altered landscapes from my past (and present) are populated with strange and sometimes ghostly beings that slide in and out of fiction. Each main book page let's you read the start of the book, so you can get a feel for the style. You can buy either e-books straight from me or from most of the major retailers (and library suppliers, if you've a mind to ask your librarian to order them for you). TIME AERIALS and YESTERDAY MAKERS are available as paperbacks. For reviews, please see my AMAZON page.