Oliver Smith Bio Fractured Paradise
The Welsh Foundation


Fractured Paradise: A Novel In Progress

by Oliver Smith
OliverSmith@CyberPoet.com

< Addewid Index Page




Why Welsh?



When one considers writing a novel on the afterlife and attempts to present an existence that includes all humans who have ever lived and all of the mythologies that they have, in their creative experiences, developed, one must ponder a number of daunting issues:

  1. How many people have been born since humans arrived on earth?
  2. What are all of their mythologies like? Even those before writing was developed?
  3. How will people from different times and geographic locations on earh communicate with each other?
  4. What are the governing laws of this "mythical" place? Who establishes those laws? Who enforces those laws?
  5. Who created the earth? The universe? And why?
  6. And who created the creators? And why?
  7. How would people from some many diverse contexts relate to each other?
  8. What kinds of technologies would be available to those in the afterlife?
  9. What kinds of technologies could be developed by those in the afterlife?
  10. How much of one's earth memories would one bring into the afterlife.


Obviously, none of these questions, nor the plethora of other questions that come to mind can be answered by any one individual, or within any one collection of works, or by any specific view of the universe (physical or spiritual), but Fractured Paradise is my way of working through all of these areas of concern.

One particular aspect of this process is which language to use for the purposes of naming objects, places, ceremonies and other artifacts specific to Addewid, the eternal plane that existed before the universe, and humanity, existed, and to which all humans (in the Fractured Paradise mythology) will return?

Here are the options as I saw them at the beginning:
  1. Make up a language (as did Tolkien with the Lord of the Rings).
  2. Use english (my native language).
  3. Use a mixture of earth languages.
  4. Use a specific non-eanglish earth language "as is" (same spellings, pronunciations, etc).
  5. Use a specific earth language, but adapt it to the sounds that are comfortable for the english-speaking reader.





Poetry / Writing / Home / Addewid Pages


www.CyberPoet.com

Copyright © Oliver Smith 2002