DOWN is a novel, available in Hypercard stack and ASCII text format.
It concerns the adventures of Lang, a young layabout inhabitant of Levinfield, a city that has fallen into a bit of a decline. Levinfield is millions of years old, and the slow pendulum swing of civilization, from high to low, advanced to backward, vigorous to decadent, is a well known fact. Lang and his friends live amongst the wreckage of greater ages, digging up ancient machines for their own use, in a lazy twilight lifestyle I envy greatly.
But Lang enjoys delving into the tons of moldering books that fill the slowly collapsing libraries, and they fire him with a desire to go exploring the forest which lies to the West of the city. While his friends try and persuade him not to leave, fearful of what he might find, he prepares his rusting, ancient motorcycle, gathers supplies, and sets out on the old roads, undriven for thousands of years.
You will read how he hunts and kills the white deer, which has for generations been the source of a rumor that the forest is haunted by the ghost of a lost truck driver, who wanders through the trees eternally searching for his map.
And about his disastrous meeting with Catherine, descendant of the once-rich clans who still live in their ancestral villas beyond the forest. She lives alone, decoding the babble of the birds who nest in the forest. They preserve an ancient language, now lost, which still carries a lot of power, if you know how to use it.
When Catherine decides to make Lang pay for killing her pet, the white deer, she uses this power to create a bottomless pit. An empty universe, a void, that will close and contain whatever is thrown in for eternity.
But Lang doesn't go down without a struggle...
To get your copy, choose one of the two versions to download:
Down/Text
Down/Color
Yes, DOWN is shareware.If you enjoy reading DOWN, please send whatever you think it's worth to:
If you can't afford the money, that's cool. Just make sure to propagate my book wherever you can. Send copies to your friends and enemies, and especially to anyone you know who works in the publishing industry! Make sure to include the Readme file with any copies you pass on. There are other versions in Hypercard, for Mac Plus and Powerbook screens, which I might put on line when I have enough shells to afford it.
The future? Stand-alone versions, done with Macromind Director, as soon as I figure out how to import bulk text into Director movies.
And watch out for my next book, WOODCODE, which should be out before the end of the year.
The image above is comprised of five Polaroid shots I took during the bushfires of January 1994. They cover about 180 degrees, from SouthWest to NorthEast. Taken in Blackwattle Bay Park, down the end of the Glebe peninsula, you can see the Glebe Island suspension bridge under construction, the Glebe Island turntable bridge, the old grain silos, the abandoned CSR factory of Pyrmont, the city peeking out above the rooftops, the fish markets, and the huge clouds of smoke that hovered over the city for a week. Sydney has veins of native bushland running all through the suburban sprawl, and in this summer some kids were torching them all through the North Shore region, an afluent part of Sydney known for it's beaches and waterways, full of mansions and quiet, tree-lined streets. Charred black leaves rained from the sky over the Cyberspace warehouse and the smell was like barbeques. Click on it for a closer look.