Start Here to Access the Backstory

 

I’ve written an acclaimed stand-alone novel titled The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time. It has been suggested that some new readers might misunderstand the book, especially if they're expecting a conventional Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel. Insofar as there is nothing conventional about this novel, it has been further suggested that an illuminating blog might cut through any potential confusion. I'm acting on that suggestion by developing this blog, which I hope brings into focus the novel's backstory and "purpose," if a novel can be said to have such a thing. 

Here are three links that cut to the chase. One link goes into some detail about the magnitude of the project and the infrastructure that are at the center of the novel. Another ruminates on the effect on humanity of total solar eclipses and its implications. In the third, the Beekeeper summarizes the startling import of these eclipses. As a further aid, just under these links are two praise quotations from leading authorities on what to expect and how best to navigate the book to get the most out of it.

About Solar Eclipses                                The Infrastructure                                           The Beekeeper Speaks

From Gary Lovisi, world-class Sherlock Holmes authority: "The Sussex Beekeeper is an incredible book. I can’t believe how much material and research has been put into it ... [and] woven together so well; truly stunning; a massive undertaking. The Holmes/Mycroft comments were fun. I think it is a special book, very well done. Holmes/Quatermain and all readers who like anything in that area will simply adore the book.”

From British fantasy authority Mark Valentine:  “[The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time] is a highly postmodern creation, conveying its narrative through many different sources, each inflected with different shades of irony or doubt. The author has structured the work [so that]…. one outer document leads to another, and these to further, inner documents, so that the reader experiences the book as if going through a series of doors in a labyrinth of secret passages. This approach is complex—the reader must keep their wits about them—and allusive. It asks for an alertness and constant curiosity. An impatient reader might be daunted by the layers of what appear to be preamble at the outset, but these are in fact essential to the way the book works…. [W]e must regard the book as like a curious crystal, which reveals some new dimension as each facet is caught in the light of our understanding.”                   

Available at amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com , and practically all online marketplace book dealers.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

The Infrastructure

I’ve always been enchanted by lost cities, giant secret projects and the like. The following text summarizes the sort of "giant secret project" that I long wanted to create. Of course, while the project serves as the vital setting in the book—it was also created so that I could visit it! 

Ironically, the large laboratory where Allan Quatermain and his "Hottentot" sidekick Hans are detained for weeks on the west coast of Africa, and which is the control center of the project, it is only the merest tip of something so astoundingly immense that it can only be inferred in the course of the story. This blog post, then, actually gives me the opportunity to describe the project through comparisons with the historical projects that inspired my story. Since the book is basically a memoir, there is no practical way to describe any of this other than to infer its enormous existence through footnotes and other asides. Also, readers of this blog will likely better appreciate the astonishing nature of the hubris involved in building the telescope and of the almost unfathomable degree of irony with which the novel concludes.

Giant projects, of course, have been around since the advent of humans, everything from Stonehenge through the Apollo Project to send humans to the moon.  In between was the construction of Europe's cathedrals, the Panama Canal, America’s Transcontinental Railroad, the Suez Canal, the Great Eastern, Hoover Dam, and countless other projects, both exotic and prosaic, old and new, on virtually every continent that pop up at the simplest query of any Internet search engine. There is something inherently romantic about the ability of humans to organize and pursue such enormous projects to completion. But none of those just mentioned was secret, and most took a considerable amount of time.

              ..........Click on these images to enlarge.

Two views of the plutonium plant in Hanford, 
Washington, with a workforce of 45,000.

Some housing for Hanford's workforce.

The altered priorities of war, however, change everything, including the necessity of many activities being prosecuted rapidly and in secret. That said, it may or may not be common knowledge that the Manhattan Project, the U.S.’s Second World War bid to crash-build an atomic weapon, probably holds the record for the most vast, most secret, most vital, fastest engineering project in all human history. 

On September 17, 1942, U.S. Army General Leslie Groves was ordered to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis did. At that moment in time, all that existed in the USA was a growing palpable excitement as physicists learned of the potential of the atom, lots of equations (most derived from Einstein's E=mc²), much concerned extrapolation about how far along their German colleagues were, and a few experiments done in university labs. Since our best intelligence at the time showed that Hitler was well ahead of us, Groves was given a blank check with the entire unquestioned power, wealth, and resources of the United States at his disposal and, for all practical purposes, at his informed whim. It turns out that physicists in those days were an undisciplined lot, so one of the first things Groves did was install Robert Oppenhiemer to keep the scientists focused—easier said than done, as a good many of them were Nobel Prize winners!

The uranium 235 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
 with a workforce of 24,000.

Housing for some of Oakridge's workforce.

 

Two years and ten months later, on July 16, 1945, the Trinity bomb detonated in New Mexico. In between, there had sprung into being—literally from nothing, from an arid wilderness, a woodland valley, and a desert plateau, respectively—the plutonium plant in Hanford, Washington, with a workforce of 45,000; the uranium 235 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with a workforce of 24,000; and the bomb development facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, with tens of thousands more. To me this is living proof that humans can do anything once they set their minds to it.

The road to Los Alamos.

At the end of the road.

Thus, when I began what would become  The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, I needed H. Rider Haggard's hero Allan Quatermain to stumble onto a super secret project something like the Manhattan Project in Africa. When I got through appending some of my other interests to this core concept, what resulted was the building on two continents in less than two years time of a giant way-before-its-time radio telescope for reasons far transcending mere astronomy. 

The telescope that Quatermain and his "Hottentot" sidekick Hans discover in 1873 is a vast world-girdling interferometer radio telescope that was built for Pope Pius IX by James Maxwell, considered the greatest scientist then alive, and Impey Barbicane, the genius engineer who built the mammoth cannon that sent a projectile to the moon a decade earlier as described in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.

These three conceived of, designed, and built the telescope to “listen in” on the still-dying nova that was presumed to be the Star of Bethlehem and that has long faded from sight in the constellation of Aquila. They coordinated the efforts of more than 100,000 scientists, technicians, and laborers on the west coasts of both Africa and South America, which efforts included the mining and smelting of unthinkable quantities of silver ore.

 (Foreground) One of the four gargantuan bowls that comprise the telescope.  Note the four full factories along the circumference and the two locomotives on the far left. (Background) The distant second bowl of exactly the same character and proportions. These two were built on the west coat of Africa on the border of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Two more identical bowls were simultaneously being built on the west coast of South America along the coast of Ecuador. Drawing by Elizabeth Davies

Of course, this whole gargantuan enterprise required prodigious amounts of power, and again these passionate masterminds conceived and contrived the damming of rivers in mountain valleys on both continents, as well as inventing and building two unprecedented 300-mile-long gravity-powered aqueducts and undreamt-of hydroelectric plants that, again, would not see the light of another day until October 1934 when the City of San Francisco's mammoth Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct System became operational. 

                                     Click on image to enlarge.

(Top left) Hetch Hetchy Valley before the Tuolumne River was dammed (landscape painting in the style of Alfred Bierstadt, artist unknown). (Bottom left) Hetch Hetchy Reservoir today. (Top right) O'Shaughnessy Dam, which blocked the river and created the reservoir. (Middle right) The water’s long journey from the reservoir to San Francisco is almost entirely downhill, providing the energy to run the generators (top inset) that create electricity that is transmitted to the city through these power lines that cross much of the state (bottom inset). (Bottom right) The journey across the state as shown here was preceded in 1873 by equivalent mega engineering projects on the west coasts of Africa and South America. Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

Before then it was necessary for San Francisco (as our telescope team had already equivalently accomplished twice over in 1873!) to dam the Tuolumne River in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, thereby diverting and transporting the river's fresh clean drinking water (which I happily drank for the first 40 years of my life from the local catch reservoir named Crystal Springs!), as well as transmitting the resultant electricity to power the city clear across the breadth of the state of California. The difference here is that the telescope builders constructed their electricity generating plants, along with the concomitant construction of an unending array of towers to transport the electricity hundreds of miles, for the sole purpose of collecting electricity to power its super-telescope. The water being of little use to them, they simply let it pour into the sea. 

Drawing by Elizabeth Davies

There were also a couple of high-speed submarines built for the project so that the two facilities on two continents could rapidly communicate, before the first Africa-to-South America telegraph cable was finally laid on the Atlantic Ocean just in time to turn on the telescope. But the submarines are a whole 'nother story.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

About Solar Eclipses

The August 21, 2017, solar eclipse (the real deal pictured below) with all the attendant excitement in North America reminds me of the theme of The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time. The whole point of the novel is an analysis by Sherlock Holmes of the meaning of total solar eclipses. What follows are a few items that support his hypothesis dealing with solar and lunar matters along with his reasoning that supports his conclusions.

Photo by John Johnson/copyright © 2017 by John Johnson.

Recall that in 1965 Gerald S. Hawkins published his book titled Stonehenge Decoded, and in 1972 renowned cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle published From Stonehenge to Modern Cosmology.

Hawkins used science, mathematics, and archeology to determine that the stones of Stonehenge are configured in a manner that could allow its designers to determine the occurrence of future solar eclipses. In other words, Hawkins strongly suspected that Stonehenge was built to be an observatory to keep track of the movements of the sun and moon for the principal purpose of knowing—knowing, not predicting—when solar eclipses would occur.

Hoyle used the same disciplines to build on Hawkins’ work by proposing scenarios, from a cosmologist’s view, illustrating why it might have been so important 5 thousand years ago to determine the occurrence of solar eclipses. Aside from the obvious fear factor, he pointed out the existence of nodes (invisible moving points in the sky), the substance and awareness of which the designers of Stonehenge would have positively needed to know and incorporate into their calculations for accuracy's sake when aligning their observatory’s titan stone blocks.

All this is important to the theme of The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time because in the story Pope Pius IX believes that he can learn God's will first hand if he “listens in” on a dying nova in the constellation of Aquila. In order to accomplish this, he tasks James Maxwell, the leading scientist of the era, and Impey Barbicane, the genius engineer who built the gun that shot a projectile to the moon, to do whatever is required, with the coffers of the Vatican at their disposal.

While the telescope did not work as expected, nonetheless from it emanated a message from the Dawn of Time in Hans' click language that was clear as a bell to Quatermain's sidekick, who in turn conveyed the message to Quatermain. The message was a simple one, instructing humans to appreciate the miracle of total solar eclipses and to understand that such eclipses were instrumental in the development of civilization on earth. That message can be summarized as:

(1)  Total solar eclipses are, of course, the consequence of the earth's moon and the sun being coincidentally exactly the same relative sizes in our skies, and the probability of such an exact duplication in sizes—given their totally separate and unrelated diameters and distances from the earth—is exceedingly, even awesomely, remote in astronomical terms. [Yet ordinarily, modern inhabitants of this earth never consider this coincidence, always and utterly taking for granted the sun and moon and their movements, which is a foible of modern life.]

(2)  And this circumstance of coincident identical relative sizes of the sun and moon is a long-standing fact of terrestrial reality due to an "attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'" beginning the task 4-5 billion years ago, deliberately setting things up so that those two orbs would, after a very long while, eventually be seen to march across our skies by our remote ancestors, with the moon incredibly but regularly and perfectly blotting out the sun….

(3)  ... in order to scare early Homo sapiens half to death to the extent that they strove to learn more about these terrifying occurrences through problem-solving….

(4)  ... which resulted in the conception of and the building of Stonehenge and similar prehistoric observatories and calculators over much of the world….

(Counter clockwise from top) Stonehenge as it appears today (wikipedia/searchoflife.com) plus two artists' conceptions of how it may have looked 4.5 thousand years ago. (stone-circles.org.uk/ancient-origins.net)  Click on the image to enlarge. Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

(5)  ... which in turn further resulted in Homo sapiens developing cognitive skills that have held us in good stead ever since.

Naturally, for any of this to “work” as I’ve outlined, an "attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'" must be presupposed.

All of which is meant to share my simple for-me incontestable awareness that while the fabric of the enormous universe with all its stars and galaxies and enormous spaces seems to be materially devoid of consciousness, nonetheless there is something, somehow, somewhere that is able to take the time out of its busy schedule to situate the sun and moon in such a way as to kick start human intellectual and cultural development, as well as, as I've explained elsewhere, prod me to go back to school. I am calling that “something, somehow, somewhere” an “attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'” for want of anything better for the time being.


.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

The Beekeeper Speaks

The Sussex Beekeeper's words:   “Having just read the interesting new paper by a certain A. Einstein and now Quatermain’s memoir with Hans’ mentioning eclipses brings to mind certain matters that had once piqued my interest concurrent with my interest in the Cornish and Chaldean languages, both preoccupations of which came to a head during the excursion W and I took onto the Cornish moors, but ultimately came to naught as the distractions at that time were piling one onto another. 
"The region where we were staying was one of those Celtic lands that are dotted with stone monuments and rings that had in centuries or millennia past sprung up all over that charming land. I was then just beginning to see a glimmer of purpose in the erections that [possibly] dealt with eclipses, a purpose that stimulated me to venture down avenues of which I’d heretofore paid little attention. In connection with the longitude and latitude of these constructions, I couldn’t help but notice that on or near December 21 and June 21 certain of the stones lined up in thought-provoking ways. This led me later to peruse all manner of almanacs and volumes in the British Library, and certain facts took shape that directly pertained to the stones. 

"For one thing, [various] eclipses of the sun occur roughly every 18 months in some part of our world. Naturally these experiences affect humans of all walks of life, often by exciting some of the more primitive emotions such as fear and awe. This reaction is partly a consequence of a remarkable coincidence. The diameter of the moon happens to be 1/400 of the diameter of the sun. But the moon’s proximity to the earth is 1/400 of the earth’s distance to the sun. The result of this, during a [total] solar eclipse, is that the disc of the moon perfectly covers the disc of the sun—causing any number of atmospheric effects: strange glowings in the resultant darkness, cold, wind, and so on. 

"What must stone-age man have thought of this extraordinary intrusion? Furthermore, I concluded then (an opinion that hasn’t changed) that Stonehenge and its brethren were built and conceived as instruments with the primary purpose of predicting the occurrence of eclipses. The builders of these ancient observatories most certainly made all their calculations under the assumption that both the sun and moon revolved around the earth as even I would have assumed had not W set me straight on the matter! This is only a natural conclusion because, for all major purposes, the sun and moon do appear to behave in just that fashion. 

"Now it happens that one of those obvious facts of life that most people entirely take for granted, never thinking of, is the equivalent sizes of the sun and moon! Nevertheless, this illusion of apparent equivalence of size owes nothing to physical or universal laws; there is no simple definable, materialistic explanation for the relative placements of the sun and moon—no discernible cause. It is merely a coincidence! Yet, it is just this coincidence that causes such an awesome eerie spectacle that stone-age man was inspired to engineer and build their vast calculators.

Photo by John Johnson. Copyright © John Johnson.

"Considering the incalculable import that the equivalent solar-lunar magnitudes and the resultant eclipses have had on our Western culture and civilization, it would be ludicrous to deny that this exceptional coincidence has meaning! One need only to look at the ratio of measurements to become aware of the remarkable relationship that presumably blind chance has provided:

. 
.


       Sun’s Diameter               :          Moon’s Diameter
Sun’s Distance from Earth        Moon’s Distance from Earth

      865,400 Miles                 :                  2,160 Miles 
   92,956,500 Miles                              239,000 Miles

           .0090                          :                     .0090

In other words, a pretty damn peculiar one to one ratio! Hans’ mysterious voice seemed to know what it was talking about? I wonder!”

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.