Discontinuum Schema by DMFW
The diagram above shows my current schema for the Discontinuum. Each box is a world, with the evolutions and their historical timelines shown in blue whilst the realised archetypes are depicted in orange. The lilac horizontal bar divides the two types. The closer to the top of the diagram, and the deeper blue, the more stable the world, whilst at the bottom are increasingly abstract archetypes in increasingly deeper orange.
Completed stories from the Discontinuum are shown in black italic, work in progress is in aqua italic, indicating that at least something is written (although it may only be a simple and small amount of content), whilst pink italic is used for projected stories that exist only in the hazy hinterlands of my imagination. The lines between the stories mark notable realm transfers and where they are annotated they correspond to a named track/chapter within a story or an article describing the nature of the link.
The oldest piece of work in this schema is "Another Green World" which was the first sustained piece of writing I did after I'd moved down to Southend and was completed in August 1986. Inspired by the Brain Eno album of the same name, it takes the titles of the tracks and weaves them into a visualisation which builds on the individual themes, turning them into little tales within a greater story. It's a great album; understated, minimal and oddly beautiful with little melodic instrumental gems between the lyrical and quirky pastoral songs. It's the kind of music that encourages dreaming and imagination and I'd often fall asleep to it, which is actually a recommendation rather than a condemnation.
The core story is "The Autumn Country", a tale which derives much from the ideas I explored in Another Green World but pushes them further with a more ambitious plot line, expanding on the idea of the Discontinuum, although it is not yet called by this name within the story. It's novella length and was actually not completed until February 2000. In between those dates I've included two shorter stories, "Here Come The Warm Jets" and "The Secret Of The Universe" that weren't necessarily conceived as connected to these two when they were written but fit quite nicely with the overarching theme, so make natural additions to the site.
"The Galactic Tourists" is a very long and older story which sits somewhat outside of the main themes of the Discontinuum and is more closely related to the Bubble, although it is certainly not inside the Bubble timeline. I have chosen to think of both the Bubble itself and the universe of the Galactic Confederacy (where "The Galactic Tourists" is set) as distant aspects of the Discontinuum, not explictly connected to one another and to the main theme in the way some of the other stories are, but hanging around in a remote orbit of the whole schema.
"A Gift from the Sea" was envisaged as a (very) oblique kind of follow up novel to "The Autumn Country" and has been a work in glacially slow progress, more or less since "The Autumn Country" was finished.
What happened was that sometime in the early 2000's I started to become interested in digital art and rather than writing stories I found an artistic outlet in making pictures. There's more about the technicalities of this in my other notes article. I've never entirely stopped writing but in more recent years I tend to write mainly as an adjunct to illustration and no longer as an initial means of expression. At this transition point, I was in need of some back story for "A Gift from the Sea" and I reached deep into some old memories and pulled out Klane Kalonia. The tales of his exploits, imagined as a legendary cycle, would be a common currency within the culture of the peoples I was writing about in "A Gift from the Sea" and I thought to illustrate them with 'a few short images and a bit of text' right from the beginning. The images and text grew enormously until the back story had become much longer and more interesting to me than the foreground one and now swamps the material created for the story set in its future. At some point I hope to get back to the so called "main" story but at the moment (where "moment" is defined as the last ten years!) I am enjoying creating Klane Kalonia's legends rather more and plan to add to them first.
About Klane Kalonia
Who is Klane Kalonia? I've been creating illustrations for the Legends of Klane Kalonia as shown on this site for a little more than ten years now, on and off (more off than on, perhaps!) but his origins go back even further. In his first incarnation, Klane Kalonia was the invention of a school friend of mine who conjoured him up and pictured him as the hero of a movie. Glyn was a much better artist with traditional materials than I'll ever be. Pen and ink illustrations of Klane's adventures adorned his sketchbook with some storyboards too. I've since lost touch with my old friend and as far as I know Klane's been in retirement for more than 40 years but in reviving him, my own stories and art are a kind of tribute to that original creative effort.
I can't remember any of the details from Glyn's original concept of Klane's story, except for his name, which oddly stuck in my head and the fact that he was a solitary wanderer and warrior over a depopulated, cratered and grassy Earth occupied by strange monsters. I have preserved these basic elements in my own imaginings so I hope Klane's reinvention finds himself at home in my universe! All his new adventures, both the writing and the illustrations, are completely from my own imagination and it's only the name and the flavour of the original concept which I have used as inspiration.
The Legends of Klane Kalonia are a story within a story and they won’t necessarily have cast iron mundane consistency because legends don’t. The luxury of a dream logic is enough for them, so temporal order and continuity within future episodes is not guaranteed! However, I have a broad story arc for the Legends as a whole and most recently I've finished the illustrations for the final story, the text for which had been sitting waiting for these images for a few years. I would eventually like to go back to the intermediate "missing" legends shown in the schema above and do something with them, but it's not a priority. The release of this World Anvil content is, perhaps, a good point to pause Klane's story and work on other things. We'll see. At any rate, I hope Glyn will forgive me for the appropriation of his character's name and that if he ever reads this he'll find Klane's new adventures true to the spirit of the original.
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