The Karmora Papers
A WORD ON THE DIFFICULTIES INHERENT IN WRITING MODERN DAY LITERATURE
ocumenting this story certainly hasn’t been easy, you know. Ordinary methods of dealing with
characters -- their introduction through to their eventual disposal -- simply don’t work here. Why,
even guaranteeing that a particular character stays in one place, or even stays dead, is
staggeringly difficult. Charles Dickens or F W Dixon, I’m sure, never had to contend with their
protagonists capriciously teleporting themselves out of inescapable dilemmas or, worse,
regenerating their one-time disposed of bodies so that they might reappear featured in a later
chapter.It’s all quite perplexing and burdens the author with new problems of how to insure that a character, once predestined, stays that way. So you can appreciate that no small amount of research on my part has been necessary to keep the story flowing smoothly, logically and, most importantly, with a minimum of escape clauses and loopholes.
But however tight and accurate story I like to think I have presented here, rest assured that whom or whatever somehow eludes my fate-wielding hand this time will be promptly and efficiently wiped out in the sequel.
ith sequentially flashing retrorockets and humming anti-grav projectors laboring to slow the
plummeting spacecraft, Mad Luigi’s armed space trawler managed only a ‘close shave’ crash
landing on Boondock. That translated as ‘all personnel alive -- vehicle ready for astroscrap
pile.’And sure enough, Mad Luigi was quite alive, if somewhat confounded for, like me, he had no idea of how he got there. As he struggled to free himself from the buckled instrument panel which was wedged against his astroboots, he discovered a note pinned to his gravity shawl. It was addressed to him in Astroanto, a form of Intergalactic Laymans Language. He tore it open. It read:
"Dear Mad Luigi... by now you are on Boondock with little or no recollection of having left our planet, Tum’s World. That sequence of events shall now be explained to you.
"We are the Latent Hemroids of Tum’s World. We have chosen to stay out of this story until this chapter, and we probably could have avoided this one, too, if you had not been so cheaply victimized by the Astro-Oracle several pages ago.
"We have been monitoring the progression of this narrative from the "third blim’ " the very beginning " and, while we didn’t always approve of the activities, we nevertheless remained out of the picture. But yesterday Mr. Gesamte was ready to call it quits... he was going to neatly dispose of you out in the deserted tracts of our fine planet.
"That could not be, Mad Luigi, for you are not yet destined to die; you are the salvation of this story, the atypical anti-hero who must bring the tale to a logical, satisfying conclusion.
"So we rescued you from your predestination, transported you back to your spaceship, and launched it on a course for Boondock.
"You are free at last, Mad Luigi! Go now and seek your own destiny!"
Mad Luigi was flabbergasted. Was this sort of trick? Were alien forces plotting to lure him away from his goal of galactic conquest into some new story? Well, he was alive... there was no doubting that. Perhaps as long as he was on Boondock, he should at least check out things.
Shakily, he freed himself from the control panel and opened the hatch to the outside... and gazed upon Boondock -- his destiny, his future. Slowly, he clambered down the ladder and scanned the horizon. No one in sight. Was he supposed to find his way alone or would there be more assistance, he wondered.
As Mad Luigi cautiously began to walk away, the armed space trawler, not quite settled on the
wacky Boondocko anoground, tipped over. And, destiny notwithstanding, it squashed him.
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