A Map of the Rat Queen Universe
Even though Elijah Dove is not the first volume in the Rat Queen series, it comes first chronologically. As the prequel, you actually can read that before the other ones, but the series was designed to start with The Rat Queen, about the little girl in a rat infested space station that thought she was a rat, and how rat-kind began to evolve higher intelligence.
That comes first because it follows the train of thought of the author (that’s me), as I was coming up with the story, followed by its sequel, then another sequel, and then a prequel, and finally the very first prequel, Elijah Dove.
A few of the books include a dim memory of a mysterious person named Elijah who called fire down from the sun, which ended the technological age for Old Earth. So, I decided to write about him, showing how he was nothing more than a simple bloke from a backward rural area, and how he remained just a simple bloke in spite of his great achievements. That’s called humility.
But the series begins much later in history with a planet about to be destroyed by an asteroid, with people trying to evacuate; how Elton ends up on a ship by himself along with a baby girl, as the auto sequencer accidentally trips on, and the ship takes off with only the two on board. After a year of flying aimlessly through space at near light speed, they’re captured by galactics. Elton is taken prisoner and wee Becky, now about one and a half, gets lost in the air vents of the space station.
If you want, you can read that first chapter free here.
By beginning at the first in the series, The Rat Queen, you begin learning galactic history and geography gradually, along with the main characters. You slowly begin to become aware that there’s a galactic war on humanity, and that one of the weapons of mass destruction is asteroids and comets.
As we grasp more of the whole picture, we become aware that there are a number of galactic species, or nations, most of which have it in for humans. That’s because of the way humans have been acting since they went into space.
If you begin with Elijah Dove, you learn your history from the opposite end. You’ll see Elijah Dove warning them not to act like that, as that will turn the whole galaxy against them, and humanity could become extinct.
And see? He told them so.
But when all else seems lost, hope for humanity comes from the rats. Thanks to Becky, a sympathetic galactic being, and a space-time anomaly, rat-kind begins evolving into a higher intelligence. You really have to read the first in the series to understand all that.
Not all the galactic nations have it in for humanity. There’s one group called the Pzinskiti. They never went to war with humanity, but are generally the ones that appreciate life in any form it comes in, including human.
“Pzinskiti”, is the plural form of “Pzinsk”. It’s a Pzinsk that first begins to show Elijah the facts of life of living in the galaxy. He was the galactic ambassador to Earth, and his office was located at Area 51.
Both this Pzinsk, and another one who appears later in the series, fit the role of the “Gandalf/Dumbledore figure” that I talked about in a earlier email. He passes on a lot of good things to Elijah, including a list of which star systems have habitable planets recommended for humans, and which ones are off limits. The ones that are off limits are reserved for other galactic nations. Elijah’s mandate is to make sure every human agency going to space knows which parts of the galaxy are off limits. In return, they also know which planets are deemed suitable for them. There’s plenty to go around.
But do they listen?
There are other space creatures as well, some that are not so nice.
Later in Elijah’s career, the Pzinskiti are replaced by one of those of a not-so-nice species as ambassadors to Earth. These are the Kriirgiti. They are generally quite nasty. However, the one named Strrruptl seems nice at first. But we realise quickly, he’s putting on a front to deceive.
Galactics enjoy a long life expectancy. Strrruptl also appears in the original trilogy a few hundred years later, as a powerful villain. There’s also another Pzinsk, named Plron, who helps Becky along, and even does something to her head to enhance her ability to squeak and understand rat-squeaks, which begins the uplift of rat-kind.
Plron also appears in the first prequel, The Planet.
The Planet also begins with the destruction of a world - actually one of the first planets that humans began sending people to settle. This is about three hundred or so years after Elijah Dove’s time, so life has gone on just fine in the meantime. Those living on the planets usually don’t travel much and don’t receive much news of what happens in the rest of the galaxy. They only learn at the last minute (or few months) that a stray asteroid is in a collision course.
And who is destroying the planets? In the course of the series, we learn that it’s another species called the Kozootiti. They are antisocial creatures, who have special abilities to control gravity. They look like the cross between a giant centipede and a spider. The impression of one of my very young characters is, … the likes of which, had he seen it at two inches long in the bathroom at night, it would have made him scream. They have compound eyes, but only one of the receptacles in each eye is what we’d call visual. Thus, they have severe tunnel vision, which enables young humans to evade their line of sight. The other receptacles receive other energy waves and even gravity.
While the Kozootiti oppose humanity by brute force, there’s another that uses more subtle ways. They are the Nagashiti. They are actually native to Earth, but were, for the most part destroyed at the climax of a galactic war, when the Kozootiti sent the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs, to whom the Nagashiti are related. Thus, they the Nagashiti are bitter enemies of the Kozootiti, as well as of humanity.
Some Nagashiti survived, mostly in outer space. While the Kozootiti use brute force, the Nagashiti use deceit, flattery and cunning. It was one of them that convinced Eve to take the forbidden fruit.
Where do we learn this? From the sun.
Stars are sentient. I bet you didn’t know that. They remember all the way back to the Big Bang, when God said, “Let there be light”. The sun remembers being that light, and then becoming many instances of himself as God said further, “Let light be separated from darkness,” and gravity waves began pulling light into various pools that became galaxies and individual stars. The Sun remembers all of history past and future from where he sits. In the chapter titled, The Chronicle of the Sun (in the original trilogy), he describes it to Plron, who needs wisdom in helping humanity overcome the diabolical plans of Strrruptl.
And the sun remembers Elijah Dove. He remembers being commanded to emit a solar flare that destroyed all of Earth’s high-tech communications. That also destroyed the Kozootiti ship that was poised to send yet another asteroid to destroy the Earth. The destruction from the massive EMP put an end to nation states of Earth, putting humans back into the dark ages (there’s some technology, just not enough synergy to keep it all going). Thus, they were no longer a threat to the galactics. So life went on quietly, as another ice age began, until humans and highly evolved rats began filtering back to Earth.
One recent change I’ve made is, the whole Rat Queen series is now available in ePub format from almost all the venues, Smashwords, iTunes, Kobo, B&N, etc, through Books2Read.com, as well as Amazon. However, they’re no longer a free read with Kindle Unlimited (that’s the choice I had to make). You can link to all of them from my website, www.RobbyCharters.co.uk
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