To Forestall the Darkness: A Novel of Ancient Rome, AD 589
By Vann Turner
()
About this ebook
AD 589. Italy moans, scarcely breathing. Industry, agriculture and city life had stopped, all of it erased by decades of war and the plague. The Romans are hangdog, defeated, and Titus moves among them.
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But what can he do under such brutal overlords? An educated man, he publishes books in his scriptorium for sale to the Eastern Empire. He observes what has been lost and laments it.
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The King, having given him the responsibility for his Roman subjects, reserves to himself any authority to act. Titus reports abuses, the King takes no action and the people taunt Titus for being in cahoots with their oppressors. But what can he do?
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But then his friend is castrated--publicly castrated--on the cathedral steps. The question becomes not what? but how?
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Armed uprising is futile, the people hangdog and cowering. But then he sees in their downcast gaze the answer. They would regain what has been lost by rebuilding the people's confidence, their technologies and crafts. They would sell their output to the rich East. He would work to rebuild the optimism that had made Rome great.
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Titus opens his estate to those fleeing Verona. He builds kilns for the potters. He parcels out his 6,000 acres for those wishing to farm and instructs his overseer to teach them to farm. He starts building an Academy to replace those the Pope closed in Rome. He buys scholars to teach in it.
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Betrayals come, hostility and distrust, but he presses on to forestall the coming darkness.
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But he is rash and goes too far. The overlords arrest him.
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You know from your history classes that the shroud of the Dark Ages did befall. The world retreated into the cloister and prayed for the dissolution of the whole world. They called it by a pretty euphemism, the End of Days. What they meant was the destruction of everything.
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Isn't that a horrible thought? Isn't the world and civilization worth fighting for?
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Join Titus in his efforts *To Forestall the Darkness*, a dystopian tale of an idealist in a brutal world. Read it today.
Vann Turner
Although author Vann Turner was born in West Palm Beach, FL, he cannot call that home. He attended thirteen different schools, in thirteen different locales, before he graduated from Pensacola High School in 1966. His parents thought the best graduation present would be a suitcase. Vann took the hint and left. By tending bar and cooking he earned his BA in English (Latin minor).He went on to teach high school one year, became an avid backpacker, did a stint in the Army, was domestic chef to British nobility in Greenwich, CT, became an amateur bodybuilder, used his medic training to work in hospitals, then went on to transcribe medical dictation using WordPerfect 5.1. During this time he wrote three gay short stories. The first magazines he sent them to bought them. Maybe he could tell a story and had something to say besides.He then began working on his first novel, completing it in 1992. That novel came close to acceptance by a major publisher, but in the end it was no cigar. He told himself he needed to write full time, but he needed an income so he could quit his job and write. If he had something to sell on that new fangled thing, the World Wide Web, that'd provide the income he needed.So he learned coding. He wrote and sold medical transcription software, MedPen, on the internet. But that decision did not pan out as he had hoped. It sapped all his time and creativity and he wrote not a word of fiction until he sold the business in September, 2009.The next day his long-time partner (and future husband when it became legal in 2014) asked him what he was going to do with his time. He said he was going to write. Bob nodded and asked him to dust off that 1992 novel. Vann responded that he had other stories to tell as well and he was going to write a novel set after the fall of Rome but before the solid onset of the Dark Ages, a time ripe with conflicts, Roman tradition versus Germanic custom, Christianity versus the old gods, the human heart struggling against itself and external constraints.Vann has always been a shy person and now is something of a recluse in his mountain home with his dogs. (His husband passed in May of 2017.) He is not on Facebook or Twitter. You see, the mindless and anonymous blather there gives him the heebie-jeebies. But he loves interacting with people one on one. So if you’d like to send him an email, he will answer you.vann@vannturner.com
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