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  DRYLAND’S END

  by Felice Picano

  The City on a Star Trilogy

  Book I

  ReQueered Tales

  Los Angeles • Toronto

  2021

  Dryland's End

  City on a Star Trilogy, Book I

  by Felice Picano

  Copyright © 1995/2004 by Felice Picano.

  Foreword to 2021 edition copyright © 2021 by Felice Picano.

  Cover design: Dawné Dominique, DusktilDawn Designs.

  First US edition: 1995

  This edition: ReQueered Tales, March 2020

  ReQueered Tales version 1.35

  Kindle edition ASIN: B0xxxxxxxx

  ePub edition: 978-1-951092-36-8

  Print edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-37-5

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  Also by FELICE PICANO

  CITY ON A STAR TRILOGY

  Dryland’s End (1995)

  The Betrothal at Usk (forthcoming - 2021)

  A Bard on Hercular (forthcoming - 2022)

  NOVELS

  Smart as the Devil (1975)

  Eyes (1975)

  The Mesmerist (1977)

  The Lure (1979)

  Late in the Season (1981)

  House of Cards (1984)

  To the Seventh Power (1989)

  Like People in History (1995)

  Looking Glass Lives (1998)

  The Book of Lies (1998)

  Onyx (2001)

  Justify My Sins (2018)

  Pursuit: A Victorian Entertainment (2021)

  OTHER FICTION

  An Asian Minor (1981)

  Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love (1983)

  The New York Years (2000)

  Tales from a Distant Planet (2006)

  Twelve O'Clock Tales (2012)

  Twentieth Century Un-limited: Two Novellas (2013)

  MEMOIRS

  Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children (1985)

  Men Who Loved Me (1989)

  A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay (1997)

  Fred in Love (2005)

  Art and Sex in Greenwich Village (2007)

  True Stories: Portraits from My Past (2011)

  True Stories Too: People and Places From My Past (2014)

  Nights at Rizzoli (2014)

  FELICE PICANO

  Felice Picano is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano also began and operated the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. His first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he’s been nominated for and/or won dozens of literary awards.

  A five-time Lambda Literary Award nominee, Picano’s books include the best-selling novels The Book of Lies, Like People in History, and Looking Glass Lives as well as the literary memoirs Men Who Loved Me and A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay. Along with Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Edmund White, and George Whitmore, he founded the Violet Quill Club to promote and increase the visibility of gay authors and their works. Originally from New York, Picano now lives in Los Angeles.

  Praise for Dryland's End

  This book is further proof that Felice Picano can succeed beautifully in any genre of fiction. Here we have the colorful originality that is found in the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers, the wide-ranging imagination that creates not only fine writers, characterization, and gripping plot, but also fabricates entire worlds—worlds rich with warrior women, space travel, mysterious gods, political intrigue and rebellion, biological warfare, and sexualities both subtle and shifting. In other words, like the best speculative fiction, this book provides the lucky reader with both an escape into the extraordinary and a mirror for humanity’s deepest issues and concerns. In the exotic settings of this novel’s distant planets, we recognize familiar compulsions that collect, collide, and disperse in our own hearts: the centripetal tug of love, loyalty, and courage, matched against the centrifugal forces of greed, ambition, and strife.

  — Jeff Mann, Author of Edge

  Associate Professor of English, Virginia Tech

  *

  Set so far in the future that the exact location of the home planet of the Humes (humans) isn’t remembered, this book examines relationships between the sexes, and between species from a new perspective and with more than a touch of levity. The ruling class of women in much of the galaxy, the Matriarchy, in power for several millennia, is suddenly facing challenges on many fronts, not the least of which is a rebellion of the Cybers (android like machines and computers) who have a designed a virus that could wipe out hume-kind.

  Ay’r Kerry Sanqq’, a virtual orphan in a society that valorizes Motherhood, is sent in search of his father, a biologist who was banned from research and disappeared shortly after Ay’r birth. His avocation (no one has a job per se just interests they pursue) as a Species Ethologist, allows Ay’r the background he needs to engage the indigenous people on the planet Pelagia – over 90 percent ocean – where his father is rumored to be.

  In the meanwhile, pitched battles are fought intrigues are developed, and treachery abounds in the rest of the galaxy as entire species face extinction. New alliances sometimes surprising, are formed, as the stultified social order begins to collapse. With its subjects of cloning and genetic manipulation, same sex marriages and other controversial issues, Dryland’s End remains as pertinent today as when it was first published.

  In full-fledged sci-fi form, Picano has created entirely new civilizations, species, even new language forms for his society. A phenomenally well-written book.

  Virginia Gazette

  DRYLAND’S END

  by Felice Picano

  For Andrew Blechman

  and all the rest of you Dryland’s End fans!

  Introduction

  “Of course we three would be Alphas!” was my arrogant, twelve-year-old commentary on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. My interlocutors were the Caruso twins, next-door neighbors in the Long Island suburb where I grew up. They were older – nineteen – architecture students at Pratt Institute, and they’d given me my first adult book to read. Over the past several weeks I’d read it and they were quizzing me about it – not just how did I like it or who the characters were – stupid classroom questions. Instead, they asked me hard questions: Did I think the world would ever become the way Huxley wrote of it? Not even a little? Wasn’t it already somewhat like it? And if not like that, then how did I see it becoming? And who did I see myself as? What classification according to Huxley? And them? And my siblings? And our neighbors?

  I’d been reading since I was four and a half years old, but I’d become bored with reading. This was probably because the books they gave us to read in school were disconnected to our lives – that is when they weren’t just old and boring – and partly because I’d already read all the books in the children’s and young teens’ sections of our little local library, and my parents’ grown-up books didn’t really attract me; partly because it was
summer and I lived on and for roller skates, bicycles, and – when I could get there – the beach.

  In one afternoon, the Caruso brothers taught me several lessons that have been with me all my life:

  1. There was a kind of book that could be intensely emotional and also intellectually gripping, generally what today we call speculative fiction or still call Sci-Fi.

  2. Books could contain philosophies or theories and, like arithmetic, they would then “prove” or “solve” those theories.

  3. Books weren’t solid, prejudged pieces of knowledge, but instead like “problems,” to be discussed and evaluated by various criteria – and at times found wanting.

  4. Most important, as a reader I possessed rights: not only could I discern and discuss and accept or deny what was in a book, I could potentially write my own book, a better one than the one I was reading.

  That summer my family went away again to a New England beach town resort, where I immediately located the local library, assured the librarian that I was reading adult stuff – hey, Brave New World, piece of cake! – and, with the proviso that she could overlook my reading material, I got my first adult card and in two months went right through that small but mighty science fiction library book shelf.

  At first, I took out collections of short stories, since I was, after all, twelve and on vacation, into biking, skating, and the beach – and full-length books took forever to read.

  Several of these stories blew the top of my head off – metaphorically. We’re talking about the mid-1950s here, 1956, 1957, a high point in the genre. Concepts behind these stories by Clarke, Asimov, Van Vogt, Blish, Pohl, Anderson, Simak, etc., took me to times, places, and, even more important, inside minds and bodies utterly different from anything I’d ever imagined. As I grew an inch or so in height that summer, internally I grew about fifty feet.

  Having exhausted the anthologies, I girded my loins and took out a novel, the shortest one there, with an evocative cover and copy line. Unlike the Huxley book which I’d found brilliant but cold and never that involving, this book would speak to me completely, personally: I would connect with it as with no book before.

  It was set in the far future on Earth, long, long after Huxley’s predicted era – a time so far in the future that humankind had gone out to the stars, and then come back; so far ahead, that machines were the size of cities – were in fact cities – and the dwindling human population had conquered disease and war and illness, so people lived as long as they wanted and were cared for by their machine-cities. The hero of this book was a teenage boy, the first human born in several thousand years, and as a result quite unique and of course also uniquely alone – virtually ignored by other people – although of course he had everything material he could ever want. The book was The City and the Stars, written by Arthur C. Clarke.

  Twenty-two years later, Clarke and I exchanged letters. He first wrote to me, to my utter astonishment, to say he was amazed and pleased that I was writing so well about being gay and being myself so openly gay in my work and my life. My thrilled response told Clarke how his novel had been my first touchstone of consciousness about how I was different from others around me. His letter back to me said that he was gay, too, but his generation in the United Kingdom wasn’t, couldn’t be, open. He mentioned how he’d finally “come out” in a novel, and “no one seemed to notice.” He wrote that until then, his book The City and the Stars, and this fictional, solitary young man I’d so identified with, was the only possible way he could express how very different and how very alone he’d felt being a young homosexual man.

  So from the beginning, and without my ever consciously realizing it, being gay and science fiction were inextricably connected. And thus it was that I promised myself – and Clarke – that one day I’d write a book like that, a book that presented another unique-in-the-universe young person who I hoped would become a touchstone for others who felt unlike others and who wondered why.

  That book is Dryland's End – first published in 1995, republished by The Haworth Press in 2004, and now re-re-released by ReQueered Tales. Dryland’s End is still one of my most least-known, least-written about books, and at the same time one of my most ardently beloved books. On my Goodreads.com author’s page, it is now the second most read of all my books.

  The reason I can write that Dryland's End is one of my least-known and least-written-about books is simple: it came out a month before my gay epic novel Like People in History in the spring of 1995, and when that book became a critical smash hit and then a gay and later mainstream best-seller in America, the U.K. British Commonwealth, Germany, and then France and French-speaking Canada, any chance my sci-fi novel might have had pretty well vanished. The gay saga was published by a large mainstream house – Viking hardcover, then by Penguin in trade paperback – while Dryland's End was a product of a new line, Richard Kasak Books, a very small, very unmainstream press, Masquerade Books, and was mostly distributed along with magazines and often to a porn or soft-core porn marketplace.

  In the years since then I have located only one printed review of Dryland's End, which is reprinted here for the first time: and it’s a honey. This anonymous reader got the book, in its parts, and its entirety. The book was a finalist for the Lambda Book Award that year, losing out to a Samuel Delaney autobiography oddly also nominated in science fiction category. I did a few readings from the book around the country, and the novel eventually racked up the lowest sales figure of any of my titles, except for a limited edition poetry chapbook from a university press. Within five years, Dryland's End was out of print. Das ende. Fini. Or so you’d assume.

  But everywhere I did readings or appearances, and at conferences and benefits, people would come up to me to tell me it was their favorite book of mine, asking, would it ever be reprinted? Also asking, would I ever write a sequel, as it seems set up for a sequel. It has become a recommended book in its field and has gathered around itself a small but vocal cult of readers. Dryland’s End is set in the far future, and the society it represents has changed significantly from the one we live in. In fact, the society it represents is a result of decades of historical reading along with thinking and speculation I’ve done about what our future could turn out to be.

  Unlike a lot of current pop-speculative film and fiction, I believe humankind is far too egotistical and far too ruthless to allow machines or aliens to take it over. A recent book suggests that humankind’s proliferation on this planet against so many odds and despite so many stronger species was “accidental,” following Darwin’s theory that evolution is unplanned and fortuitous. That is a potent indicator that outside this planet, in competition with other species, we’d probably end up being far more dangerous and treacherous than any creature Sigourney Weaver encountered – sort of the intelligent, armed cockroaches of the galaxy.

  I believe that we will encounter other kinds of intelligent life-forms (if we haven’t already) and that we can and shall accommodate them, especially if they thrive in climates and places we can’t live in comfortably, and that they will eventually become allies. Thus, the Three Species of Dryland's End: One insectoid – the Bella=Arth.s – the first word meaning “warlike” in Latin, whose expansionism is checked, who are defeated and later absorbed into the Hume galactic empire. They generally live in gigantic nest cities on their home world of Deneb XII or in colonies on Hume worlds that come equipped with recreational air-parks. Thus, also, a third species, the Delphinids, a dolphinlike species who require water worlds, and who live in water-park colonies among Humes. Both Bella=Arth.s and Delphinids interact commercially, politically, and personally (although interspecies sex and reproduction are supposedly taboo) with Humes. The water creatures have genetically propagated a new subspecies, the Ambassadorial class, who can live long periods out of water.

  There are also two “constructed” not-quite individual species in the City on a Star series. The Equo Homs (Centaurs) of Dryland’s End, and the Pamps of The Betrothal at Usk. The origi
ns of the first are not known, and they are a very small group. We do know the origin of the Pamps, but they rapidly evolved and thus became both sentient and a social problem.

  One series of books I had read over the years that helped me determine what the particular possible future to be detailed in Dryland’s End would be like was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. In that amazing work, Spengler (who is currently out of fashion but should be heeded in studying current events, especially those in the Middle East) spells out in great particularity exactly how civilizations grow, expand, reach fullness, and then eventually decline. Spengler shows that without exception they pass through specific stages of development, from pastoral to agricultural, from city-state to republic to quick Caesaristic rise and fall tyrannies and then to full empire.

  To plot out my sci-fi universe, I simply sent Spengler’s pattern into outer space. First comes lunar and local planetary colonization, with colonies becoming self-sufficient, then a period of “pastoral” exploration and wandering, followed by one of “agriculturization” (via terra-forming) until governments form that proceed to grow in power and make alliances – say, the moon and Mars colonies and those on all the moons of the solar system forming one group versus Earth. Later on, via trade and war and stellar expansion, governments would grow and solidify into what we call representative republics, opposed by individual states, possibly owned by Star-Barons, giga-trillionaires, who would form their own league and alliances and seek greater power, only to be defeated by the republics that would form into a temporary empire. That would fall apart as soon as it had succeeded into a new, more extensive republic and would probably lead to power-hungry monarchs or governments vying for the greatest power, coalescing into a real empire. That might last long, but eventually be beset by revolutions and schisms, turnarounds, and interim republics, etc., etc. If you follow the historical pattern in Dryland's End as discussed or even just mentioned via terms such as the “Treaty of Formalhaut,” the “Defeat of Vega VI,” the “Wars of the Crystal Cult,” etc., there is a true Spenglerian pattern at work that can easily be deciphered.