G. Lloyd Helm Boeken

"Are the gods truly gods or just powerful humans?" The question still echoes through the city of Peshar even six hundred years after the coming of the gods. Garith Balal, a successful scribe and fair witness in the city, is pulled into the resistance to the gods through influence of a slave bought to satisfy his wife's social climbing desires. Alvis, the slave, a human from another world of the Cadeki empire, has roots in the planet Archlea where he is now a slave. He is a believer in "The Design"; the belief that all things in the universe are controlled to an unknown end by the Great Designer who created the universe.

Most of the people in these stories are at least tangentially based on real humans. Big Dave was a fellow I worked with many years ago and his description in the stories is accurate. The reader should also notice that all these stories start and mostly end in a bar somewhere. I don't play adventure games but, I am told that most of them start in bars as well. There are still several Big Dave stories to be told, and I am working on them, but I just couldn't get them done in time to come out in this book. Many elements of these stories are true. The fun and the trick is to figure out what is true and what is fantasy.

When an author writes a story, creates a world and the creatures in it, does the literary world actually come into being in some parallel universe? Joshua Gordon, creative writing professor and writer of pulp fiction thinks so and is in fact so convinced it is true that when he is diagnosed with a terminal illness he sets out to find a protege who he can convince to take over as the creator god of the world. He finds that protege in the person of John Fisher."