The Wheel, the novel, is a book that will take your imagination on a journey across the cosmos.
Here are 6 reasons The Wheel is an amazing book.
1. Amazing Characters. Meet Levi, Slate, Sundra and all the rest.
Musings...
Chapter 4 introduces us to the "black and oil" that extends "the breadth of the cosmos and beyond." Deeper into this (very short) chapter, we read that "a giant finger the width of a star system stretched forth..."
What!?! A finger the width of a star system? Who could believe that?
Lol! This is science fiction! I love concepts that are out there (literally in this case) and blow my mind with, What If?
You know, if this could be true, then maybe something else could be true, and anyway, we don't know, because we're not out there.
It's a matter of belief, faith, trust in crazy concepts that can drive other crazy concepts, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Like (for those of you from the day), she told two friends, then she told two friends, then she told two friends.
Once Slate is back on the Tree in Chapter 19, we find that the minister's quarters are very large.
Doesn't the Tree have limited space? How could they justify allocating an inordinate amount of interior volume to one man?
The answer is that the minister's quarters weren't originally designed for one man, rather for a Family, with a capital F.
Remember Larstrun? Slate's and his great grams were interconnected. Slate came from the lineage of a Great Family, while Larstrun descended from a slightly less elevated line.
The Stoker-Kirk drive is the main propulsion for the Vandian class ship Enterprise III in The Wheel.
Newer ships (such as the Guantanamo Bay) sport the vastly superior Sagan-Armstrong power plant, but speed and distance don't cut the mustard when you need to travel across half the galactic arm.
The Enterprise III has the weapons needed to blast any enemy from kingdom come.
Hey, you guys! I just finished rereading The Wheel and enjoyed resolving a few typo issues that were overlooked in the earliest versions.
Whew! You'd think these things would have gotten resolved before the book hit the market a couple years back. Lol! I enjoyed it as much as when I wrote it, and I encourage you to get a copy and read it if you haven't already done so.
Farley Dunn
I've always been fascinated by springs.
All sorts, in watches, screen doors, and the sort attached to garage doors. They help us tell time, automate our activities, or lessen the effort it takes to complete a task.
One of my earliest and favorite was a toy that came in a cardboard box, the Slinky. My first one was steel, with the ends attached to the main spring with a metal clip, so children didn't spear themselves on the sharp metal. Later, I had plastic varieties, often purchasing them for children's party favors, one to a child.
Climate change is the buzzword of the day.
Yeah, even in the real world, we scrabble about the changes brought on by man's interference in the natural order of our world's weather pattern.
We clear cut the rain forest, and we get global warming. Fossil fuels threaten to tip us over, also, or will we double-tip into an ice age? We've seen that movie, The Day After Tomorrow, whose premise is that global warming will trigger such a catastrophic weather shift that an ice age will devour much of the world as the earth tries to balance the extremes of our human interference. (If you haven't seen the movie, what are you waiting for? Who wouldn't want to watch New York flooded by a tidal wave of immense proportions, then have the flood freeze the buildings into a block of ice? Pretty cool, in my opinion.)
The lights are glowing, and still the table is blank.
On p 202, things have changed. The fire dragons are ominously missing. No one attends the table. "Its surface shifted, with colors upon colors creating ever-shrinking points of light. Slowly, oh so slowly, they began to look like star systems, then clusters, then galaxies."
The very viewpoint of the cosmos was shifting. The fire dragons were no longer in control. As the text states, it was "a universe run amok." The fire dragons could no longer use the table to direct the dreams of creatures far across the universe in the hope that they would create an avenue of forward motion for creatures too inept to do anything except be a parasitic boil upon the rest of creation.
Old people sometimes forget what it's like to be young.
And being young is special. Of any age a person can be, there is no better choice than seventeen.
Sure, it's great to be a child. When we're younger, say eight or ten, our problems, while monumental at the time, are very much focused on us. We don't worry about world peace, the impact of pollution on the ozone layer, or whether suicide bombers are awaiting us at the airport. There are no problems the trusted adults we look up to can't handle, and we know, we just know everything will be right with the world when we open our eyes each morning.
"That's how you do it!"
That's what Slate says to the kid when they're at the Burning Crevasse. He slams the hand of his mining suit into the ground, and the heat-stressed rock shatters. Then rock and dust fly through the air as he whips the hardline cable from the rock-encrusted soil.
Slate didn't choose to come to Purgatoria because he loved the scenery. As fantastic as the Crevasse was, and as amazing as it was to walk effortlessly across the planet in a giant, metal suit, he was running from his past.
Dang, those mining units are massive!
Think of it. Each one's the size of a 10-story building.
What else is the size of a 10-story building? A giant iguana? Ha! Only in a Japanese Godzilla movie, or King Kong, maybe. Yeah, that's it.
Except.
King Kong in 1933 was only 24 feet tall. Not exactly overwhelming. I mean, that's big, but a real monster? Hardly.