Other
by
, 05-08-2017 at 11:51 PM (17888 Views)
Been re-sending the Childe Cycle, from whence my sobriquet originates, and am surprised anew by how appropriate it is.
I picked the name Bleys because I thought it was cool, but I have a lot in common with Bleys Ahrens.
Ahrens lives in a universe in which humanity outside of Earth has divided into 3 main "splinter cultures": the mystical Exotics, the militaristic Dorsai, and the fundamentalist Friendlies. He is part of a group called the Others, which are people descended from two or more of the Splinter Cultures. He's part Exotic and part Friendly. That is me to a T--I am the perpetual hybrid, at once belonging to both sides of a dichotomy and neither. That's a paradox, not a contradiction.
I was born in 1980, which makes me too GenX to be a millennial, but too millennial to be GenX, yet I'm both. I was born in the Maritimes and raised in Alberta, so I'm too Maritime to be Albertan and too Albertan to be a Maritimer, yet I'm both.
Ahrens' youth has strong parallels to mine. He was raised by his Friendly uncle Henry MacLean, who is a carbon copy of my stepfather--Brad was also super religious, and I spent my formative years desperately wanting to believe in God and failing. He had his older half brother Dahno, I had my Aunt Patty.
(At this point I'm trying and failing to remember if Ahrens killed Henry, Dahno, or both. I'm not going to kill anyone though)
There are differences, of course. I'm not a genius (quite the opposite), my mother never neglected me, and, of course, I don't think everyone living on other planets should return to Earth because I'M NOT BLOODY MENTAL, but I do think that Others are the future of humanity and any different outcome will be an unmitigated disaster culminating in the destruction of the human race