The Legend of Sam Miracle, Outlaws of Time, Book One

by N. D. Wilson

INTRODUCTION—THE LEGEND OF SAM MIRACLE

As you may or may not realize, I’ve been working through many of the suggested authors recommended by visitors in their response to the post So Many Good Writers, So Many Good Books. In some cases I’m featuring the recommended book, but in many cases, like today, I introduce one of the author’s more recent works.

If you aren’t familiar with N. D. Wilson, he writes middle grade fiction for the general market.

Sam Miracle has always been different. An orphan who lives in a group home, he often blanks out and finds himself in vivid dreams that seem almost real. Sam is also disabled; his arms were shattered in an accident he cannot remember, and though they are healed, they are immobile and painful at times. He soon discovers he is part of a small group of people who can walk through time and that he has lived the same life over and over—dashing around time trying to live long enough to stop an evil outlaw who wants to end the world. Now the time of the final conflict approaches, and with the help of another foster kid, a girl named Glory, and his companion through time, Father Tiempo, Sam sets out to meet his destiny.

THE LEGEND OF SAM MIRACLE — EXCERPT

SAM

There’s a kind of heat that can peel lizards, even in the shade. Heat that sends every creeping thing slithering under rocks and into graves, heat that floats the crows up and away to find whatever cool whispers of mountain air might be trickling in over the painted mesas.

If you’ve ever felt heat like that, you already know that the only thing a person can do is go looking for a basement and a cold drink or an air conditioner with enough courage to rattle and hum and battle the sun without so much as a minute to rest.

On those days, days like today, when even the cacti would be crying in pain if it didn’t mean losing their water, the boys of St. Anthony of the Desert Destitute Youth Ranch were actually happy. Because when the sun was in a killing mood, there could be no chores. And when there were a dozen boys and no chores, they would pour into the Commons—the mostly empty concrete-and-cinder-block building where they did their reading and resting and recreating when the sun was down or deadly. Then Mr. Spalding would unlock the Ping-Pong table and turn on the old pinball machine and fill two coolers with ice and Cokes and open the little library of paperback westerns and science fiction comics. And if Mrs. Spalding was feeling pleasant, they would even allow a little music on the old record player.

At SADDYR, those boys hoped for 115 degrees in the shade like most kids hope for Christmas. And if you lived there, you would, too.

Twelve-year-old Sam Miracle was tipped back in an orange plastic chair, perched as still as a stone. His desert-blond hair had been chopped short, but it was fighting back. He had a colony of freckles scattered across his lean sun0dirty cheeks that looked like little brown ants who had finally given up trying to keep his face clean. Stare at Sam for longer than a few moments and you’ll see that he might be young, and his skin might be smooth, and his teeth even whiter than the sun could make them, but he didn’t seem young. Sam was more like something new made from very old things. Timber fence posts sunbaked to rot. Tangles of barbed wire more rust than steel. Boots cracked and dry and missing soles. Things once useful now with usefulness lost. He didn’t look like those things . . . he felt like them.

“Sam!” The name had bounced all around the rocks thrown by the voices of eleven different boys searching eleven distant places.

Sam hadn’t felt himself fall in the heat. But his head had ached when he’d finally opened his eyes and the bright sky above him had come into focus. And in the sky, dark wings, descending in a circle. Three pairs. Black.

Vultures.

The scabby bald birds had shrieked and hopped as they’d touched down on the boulders around him, assessing his weakness.

A flying stone had sent the biggest bird tumbling in a squalling, flapping cloud of feathers. And then a long boy with broken glasses had hurled a boulder and kicked the next bird all the way out of Sam’s range of vision.

“Here!” he had shouted. “He’s here!”

Ten more boys had followed, urgent and angry and lofting stones after the disappointed vultures. Sam had been lifted and carried back to the ranch, where he’d been propped in his orange chair and filled with fluids. And after much scowling and irritation, Mr. Spalding had declared the workday over due to heat.

Sam rolled his neck. There was a little patch of dried blood in his hair from today’s collapse out on SADDYR land. And it itched. Like crazy.

Sam’s plastic chair was just beneath a badly painted mural made up of St. Anthony of the Desert—a bald man with a beard that looked more like a waterfall of noodles—alongside the giant words that Mr. Spalding though were inspirational.

BE SADDYR!
S is for SAINTLY!
A is for ACTIVE!
D is for DILIGENT!
D is for DETERMINED!
Y is for YESNESS!
R is for RESPONSIBLE!

Sam turned his head to the side and ground the itchy scab spot against “R is for RESPONSIBLE!

All Around Sam, the little rectangular Commons echoed with the violence of Ping-Pong, laughter, and the blip and ring of the pinball machine. Two of the boys were rotating through Mr. Spalding’s antique disco records—squeaking one quick beat to a stop only to start up another identical one.

“Sam?” Peter Eagle, the tallest and toughest of all the Ranch Brothers, pointed his Ping-Pong paddle at Sam from across the room. His dark hair looked like midnight polished into glass, and his eyes were volcanic even when he was happy. “Need a drink? More water? A Coke?”

Sam shook his head just as Peter spun away, smacking his opponent’s stealth serve back across the net without looking.

“Ha!” Peter slapped his chest with his paddle. “Nothing sneaks past this! Nothing!”

– – – – –

AUTHOR BIO—N. D. Wilson

N. D. Wilson is the author of Leepike Ridge, a children’s adventure story, and 100 Cupboards, the first installment in a multi-world fantasy series. He enjoys high winds, milk, and night-time. He received his Masters degree from Saint John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, is the managing editor of Credenda/Agenda magazine and is also a Fellow of Literature at New Saint Andrews College. His writing has appeared in Books & Culture, The Chattahoochee Review, and Esquire

SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was the backdrop of the 1997 movie Contact, where the desire to find intelligent alien life in the cosmos via radio messages actually finds an alien signal–which in turn gives instructions on how humans can build a machine that in the story projects the protagonist to another star system. Where she meets a benevolent and paternal alien.

Contact, twenty years old now, is unique in that it was based on a fictional novel written by a prominent astronomer, Carl Sagan, and adapted into a movie. Since there are no other science fiction stories by astronomers adapted into movies that I know of, perhaps that explains why no other film has expressed so clearly the deep longing to find extraterrestrials that some humans today feel. The satisfaction of that longing is expressed in a memorable scene from Contact summarized in the two pictures below, but which also can seen in an imgur.com post I’ve linked:

In this scene, an alien manifests itself in the image of the main character’s (late) father and discusses how meeting other alien species gives deep meaning to their existence. Doing so, “makes the emptiness bearable,” the-alien-in-the-form-of-daddy explains.

I think Carl Sagan meant the emptiness of the vastness of space with this line on making “emptiness bearable,” but it’s easily possible to see much more in that statement. Which of course reflects not how aliens feel, but how Sagan himself and many other among our race feel about meeting aliens. SETI isn’t just a matter of mere curiosity for some people. For some, the desire to meet aliens expresses a deep emotional longing–a response to pondering a vast universe only inhabited by us humans, which fills them with a sense of intense loneliness–or even dread.

Since I believe this deep longing that inspires SETI is very real and important to many people, I expected when writing this post that there would more recent movies than Contact on this theme that I’d simply never seen or wasn’t thinking of. I searched for them, but I could not find any as clear on this topic as Contact was, though Star Trek: First Contact and some other films have touched on this. Perhaps this is mostly because not many movies are written by astronomers–though I believe there’s likely another reason why we don’t see many movies that openly express a deep longing to meet extraterrestrials, a reason I will bring up again in a bit.

First it’s important to mention I found plenty of evidence of people taking about this issue in a way that parallels Contact. But they’re mostly talking about it in non-fiction formats, in YouTube documentaries and in books such as Paul Davies’ Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications Of The Discovery Of Extraterrestrial Life. Or in TED talks, such as a TED talk on SETI by Jill Tarter in 2009, in which the she offered the following statement (starting about 4 minutes from the end): “The discovery of intelligent life beyond Earth would eradicate the loneliness and solipsism that has plagued our species since its inception. And it wouldn’t simply change everything, it would change everything at once.”

So the kind of people talking about this issue are the “nerds” who are into pondering the ultimate nature of the universe (which is the kind of nerd I am), people who are not merely curious to find intelligent alien life. Many if not most also believe that SETI can profoundly transform the human race. These serious astronomers and philosophers of the cosmos, at least some of them, look to aliens as a means to eliminate what I could call the “cosmic loneliness” of our species.

Yet if this is such a big deal for many, why isn’t it reflected in fiction more often? Why doesn’t science fiction ask the question, “Are we alone?”–that is, the only intelligent species in the universe–more often?

Maybe it’s because Guardians of the Galaxy, Men in Black, Star Wars, Star Trek and so many more science fiction stories have in effect already answered the question: “No, we are not alone–aliens are everywhere.” Maybe in the popular imagination it’s not necessary to pine for the discovery of aliens to alleviate our cosmic loneliness, because aliens are for the most part already accepted as existing. Any sense that a vast, empty universe would be disturbing is alleviated before it even forms, by ubiquitous fictional aliens.

Please note that I do rather agree that the idea of a vast universe only inhabited by human beings would be depressing if not disturbing–but the universe is not empty other than us. The presence of God permeates every place that exists, just as God is available to all who seek him from any place here on Planet Earth. If somehow we humans were able to travel to each and every one of the 100 billion or so galaxies known to exist, we would not be truly alone in any of them, even if we never find any extraterrestrial intelligent life there, because the spirit of God is in all of those places.

By the way, I should mention here that I do not know if intelligent aliens exist or not–I don’t feel I have enough evidence to know either way. Note that I am not one of those Christian thinkers who eliminates the existence aliens in advance. On the contrary, in a blog post of mine on aliens I argued just the opposite, saying that I believe aliens can in fact exist.

But I am not very much troubled by the question–I would not be disturbed if there are no intelligent aliens–if SETI never succeeds. Because whether there are aliens or not, the universe is not empty. God is there.

The desire that some people feel, a desire for a connection with something other than humanity, the urge to meet aliens, I think is in fact a substitution for the innate desire God put in people to know him and seek to understand him. These people feel despair at the thought of an empty universe–yet that thought should cause them to think about God. They feel longing to contact a mind that is unlike the human mind–never realizing that God is in many key ways not like a human being.

What they are really unknowingly longing for is a relationship with the transcendent God of the Bible. Not with the overly-simplified (and tamed) God of some people’s imaginations, an old man with a beard sitting on a throne, a sort of Santa Claus in space, but with the real God, the one who invented both relativity and quantum mechanics. The one who can think in ways we can make sense of and in ways we will never grasp. The One who is beyond us. Who is transcendent. And yes, who is everywhere–even in the most distant galaxies.

In the next (and last) installment of this series I will drive home the practical application, the “so what” of the idea of that fictional aliens teach us important things about God.

But in the meantime, what do you think about this topic? Do you think SETI is a substitute for a search for God? Do you believe aliens have replaced God in the popular imagination? Other thoughts?

So I was thinking about what might be a good or at least passable topic and suddenly I realized: this post will go live on St. Valentine’s Day. It seemed appropriate, then, to write a post themed on this great holiday of love, and anyway I was having trouble scraping up passable topics. Whether this post will be pro- or anti-Valentine’s Day will be up to you.

First of all, we should consider how ironic it is that the holiday of romantic love is named after a Catholic priest, a class of people who are ideally preoccupied with other concerns. Second, we should consider the intersection between romance and speculative fiction. As a fan of SF among other fans, I’ve seen a fair share of hostility directed toward the romance genre. Christian fans, at least, seem sometimes to regard it as the (regretfully ascendant) rival of Christian SF. But romance looming so large in human nature and human experience, it inevitably finds its own place in speculative fiction.

Yet a place shaped by the contours of the genre, and not always a proud one. Science fiction, in its young days, was a man’s genre, and the woman of the old stories was inevitably young and inevitably beautiful and inevitably belonged to the hero; she was also the daughter of the sage old man, and the sage old man and the strong young hero spent all kinds of time explaining things to her. In another vein, not a very deep one but at least bright, girls were tossed in along with all the other things a healthy-minded boy could desire: a quest, an adventure, a cool weapon, a fast ship, a righteous cause.

Fantasy, molded by the ancient traditions of fairy tales, has been less male-centric but not necessarily more sensible. Even moving away from the eternal puzzles of the archetypal fairy tales (could the prince really not identify Cinderella except by her shoe size?), certain ideas have thrown long shadows over the genre – true love that is instant and unmistakable, fated love that can’t be thwarted or resisted. Being rescued from a tower or a dragon or an evil wizard may seem like a clear sign, but on sober reflection, it may not be the soundest basis for a lifelong relationship.

When it comes to balanced and realistic portraitures of romantic love, speculative fiction has not, as a genre, clothed itself with glory. Neither has romance, but that is not our topic, just an aside I couldn’t resist. Over the years, science fiction and fantasy have made progress away from the old tropes and stereotypes. I’ll offer no predictions on where the genre is going.

But on this Valentine’s Day, I wonder – where do you want it to go? What, in your ideal book, is the intersection between romance and speculative fiction? Would you, on this St. Valentine’s Day, cast a vote for or against romance in speculative fiction?

It’s time for our winter writing challenge!

Because winter encourages indoor sports, now is the perfect time for our Spec Faith writing contest. When you’re not busy watching the Olympics or working on your own writing projects or reading the latest speculative story that has captured your attention, why not add to your winter writing and reading joy?

As we have for the last several years, Spec Faith is holding a winter writing challenge, a type of writing exercise, with rewards. There’s feedback from other Spec Faith visitors and there’s the potential for a $25 gift card from either Amazon or B&N. And for readers, there are stories or story beginnings to enjoy. It’s all very win-win!

As a refresher, here’s how this winter writing challenge works:

1. I’ll give a first line, and those who wish to accept the challenge will write what comes next—in 100 to 300 words, putting your entry into the comments section of this post.

“What comes next” may be the opening of a novel, a short story, or a completed piece of flash fiction—your choice.

In keeping with Spec Faith’s primary focus on the intersection of speculative fiction and the Christian faith, writers may wish to incorporate Christian elements or to write intentionally from a Christian worldview, but neither is required. Likewise, I’d expect speculative elements, or the suggestion of such, but entries will not be disqualified because of their omission.

2. Readers will give thumbs up to the ones they like the most (unlimited number of likes), and, if they wish, they may give a comment to the various entries, telling what particularly grabbed their attention.

By the way, I encourage such responses—it’s always helpful for entrants to know what they did right and what they could have done to improve.

3. After the designated time, I’ll re-post the top three (based on the number of thumbs up they receive), and visitors will have a chance to vote on which they believe is the best (one vote only).

4. I’ll again sweeten the pot and offer a $25 gift card (from either Amazon or Barnes and Noble) to the writer of the entry that receives the most votes (as opposed to the most thumbs up). In the event of a tie, a drawing will be held between the top vote getters to determine the winner.

And now, the first line:

Jenni fidgeted with her ring—the one only she could see—while she waited to hear the verdict.

Finally, those silly little details we all need to know:

• Your word count does not include this first line.

• You will have between now and midnight (Pacific time) this coming Monday (a week from today) to post your challenge entries in the comments section.

• You may reply to entries, giving thumbs up, this week and next. To have your thumbs-up counted to determine the top three entries, mark your favorite entries before midnight (Pacific time) Sunday, February 25.

• Voting begins Monday, February 26.

Feel free to invite any of your friends to participate, either as writers or readers. The more entries and the more feedback, the better the challenge.

Edited to add: apparently the “thumbs” have been replaced with + and – signs. I will count the number of +’s to determine the top three for the final poll.