Johnny Worthen is joining us today to talk about his novel, Fresh Start. Here’s the publisher’s description:
On the edges of mankind’s domain there is a penal planet called Fresh Start where a sentence is at best exile to five generations, but more likely death in its harsh unforgiving wastes. It is to this planet the empire sends the worst of the worst and it is on this planet that Qays Mendoza searches for his old captain.
The galactic empire is falling, civilization contracts. Fresh Start is abandoned. Without oversight, the planet is wild, without guards; the Oubliette, the supermax prison on the supermax planet, lies open, and the Butcher of Raznak, a killer worse than the one Qays seeks, is on the loose.
With the help of a street waif called Patience, Qays seeks answers. His soul is stained with guilt and his spirit broken by complicity. Religion did not have the answer; duty did not explain it. Birthright and station were not enough. His answers lie somewhere on Fresh Start.
What’s Johnny’s favorite bit?
They heard it before they saw it. The Brown Drown, or the Brown River for those don’t know. It was too thick to drink, too thin to plow, and too fast to touch. It was as much a landslide as a river. If anything lived inside it, it ate rocks, and wore armor that any marine cohort would envy. From where they stood, Qays guessed it was a hundred eighty meters wide and traveling at the speed like a horizontal avalanche. Loud and full of broken things. Debris tumbled on its top, submerged, re-surfaced, spun skyward as if gasping for air before sinking again. Whole trees raced by, grabbing at the shore as if trying to save themselves, branches torn off in piercing echoing snaps second only in din to the cacophony of the pulverized pebbles, ground grit, and ruined rocks screaming from the torrent itself.
“Are you kidding me?” said Qays.
“This is much worse than I remember,” Patience said. “I saw it downstream. There’s it’s just awful. Here… I don’t have words.”
This is the moment that Qays and Patience come across the Brown Drown, a river in form only. Their quest has taken them from settlement to train crash, across parching deserts and snow-packed mountains, here to be stopped in the wasteland by the planet’s most imposing obstacle.
What I love most about this scene is the sheer awesomeness of it. I can think of no other word. A permanent landslide, unrelenting and unending. Grinding. A never-ending rough rock tumbler. It is alien and familiar at once. Science fiction and western in a single feature.
I can see the scene now as clearly as when I wrote it. It was one of those Muse moments where an idea comes into one’s mind ready and clear, formed as a memory. A gift from the writing gods. It was all there—all senses, all the meaning and import. The rolling sand, mud, boulders, and debris flowing by in a crushing swell, a din that echoes for miles and deafens nearby, the hot smell of crashing rocks—that bright metallic smells I remember from the days of crashing rocks as child. It was all there.
Symbolically it shows the menace of Fresh Start, the untamed penal planet where the story takes place. At the far end of the now-abandoned empire, the planet houses only criminals and descendants of criminals who’d managed to survive the harsh place. A river, usual symbol of live-giving water, here is made hard with tumbling stone. Water there is, but at what cost? Those who can find it are those who can survive and they must be as tough as the come. The are realists. There is no compromise with the river. Good intentions will not let you drink from it, and crossing it is an act of defiance requiring desperate courage the soft will never know.
Qays and Patience seek a settlement farther downstream where the Brown Drown, or just “Drown” as it’s called down there, softens to a flow of just sludge instead of ferocious tumbling boulders. The town is still some distance, so our heroes rest for the night.
It is then, upon the banks of Drown that they are set upon by marauders. Under the cacophonous roar of the river, crashing violence scenting the air in copper and quartz, Qays faces a reality beyond what he’d gleaned in the greater galaxy. Even as an officer of the empire aboard faster-than-light warships patrolling parsecs of space and humanity, even as a favored son of a Senator, trained, and over-educated, the stark truths of existence are learned only on the bloody banks of a perpetual landslide known as the Brown Drown.
It is a hard hard lesson, bought with Patience’s blood and Qays is slow to learn it.
Yeah, I love this scene. It’s my favorite part.
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BIO:
Johnny Worthen grew up in the high desert snows and warm summer winds of the Wasatch Mountains. He graduated with a B.A. in English, minor in Classics and a Master’s in American Studies from the University of Utah. After a series of businesses and adventures, including years abroad and running his own bakery, Johnny found himself drawn to the only thing he ever wanted to do – write. And write he does. Well versed in modern literary criticism and cultural studies, Johnny writes upmarket multi-genre fiction, both traditionally and independently published. “I write what I like to read,” he says. “That guarantees me at least one fan.”
‘The Books of Coronam’ is Johnny’s bestselling epic science fiction series. His recent apocalyptic novel ‘The Gaia Chime’ witnesses the global chaos of a planet in repair. Like Johnny’s many other titles, it is available wherever better books are sold.
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