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Introduction
My interest in history, science, art and religion has always made me wonder about the origins of human civilization. Language and the written word can only tell us about ourselves, for as long as we had possessed those attributes. Beyond that, only art and science can help us to deduce what people were like before history was written. Religion is a dominant part of the human spirit, which has existed before perhaps even art. Indeed, art most likely was the expression of humankind's first awakening of self-awareness and its mortality. The science of archeology has revealed its own story about us, beyond the written word with prehistoric works of art such as the ancient cave paintings of France and Spain, or the 40,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf, from Germany as well as through the many tells and digs around the world. More is always being learned, but I doubt that we will ever discover our true origins as so called civilized beings.
This book is a fantasy novel about two cultures that coexisted across a sea from each other in a time so removed from the present that art and religion were in its infancies. I take great poetic license with the characters and places. They are a synthesis of my imagination and my observations of humankind today. I remember looking up at the night sky when I was a child and saw its terrible infinity for the first time, and began to ponder my own existence. I cannot help but think that this experience has been going on since the awakening of the human mind long before art; religion or science was dreamed of. In this book I try to capture the essence of the experience of the struggle towards whatever it is to be human. Science fiction deals with those same aspects but into the future, with optimists such as Gene Rodenberry and Carl Sagan.
"Hearts of Change", as the title implies, is about personal dramas intertwined with a general struggle towards an uncertain future. It is not based on history, art history or anthropology, but is total conjecture of what might have been. I am writing this ongoing saga in a tradition of story telling for entertainment and thought provoking ideas that relate to humankind of the twenty first century.
Hank Wilson.
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