ÿþ<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>About R A Bragg, author of 'By the White Book, a Far Angelus Novel'</TITLE> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="EXPIRES" CONTENT="0"> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="It's mid-July, 1988. Picture Moscow, if you can, in late evening. Deep in the KGB District near Dzerzinsky Square, about ten minutes from the nearest Moscow Metro station . . ."> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="By the White Book, White Book, 1410764273, Far Angelus, science fiction, SciFi, SF, adventure, alien, greys, grays, abduction, R A Bragg, Newfoundland, Globular star cluster, Palomar 5, distant worlds, genetics, Jesus, goddess."> <!---------CALL scrollbar frameset --------------> <LINK href="scrollbar2.css" type=text/css rel=stylesheet> <!---------END scrollbar frameset call -----------> <!----BEGIN on right click warning----> <SCRIPT language=javascript type=text/javascript> window.onload = function() { if (document.addEventListener) cbeAddEventListener(document, 'mouseup', mouseHandler); else cbeAddEventListener(document, 'mousedown', mouseHandler); } function cbeAddEventListener(obj, type, listener) { var eh = "obj.on" + type.toLowerCase() + "=" + listener; if (obj.addEventListener) { obj.addEventListener(type, listener, true); } else if (obj.captureEvents) { obj.captureEvents(eval("Event." + type.toUpperCase())); eval(eh); } else { eval(eh); } } function mouseHandler(e) { var msg = 'All original illustrations, images, text, and other material on this web site are copyrighted © FarAngelus-dot-Com or RA Bragg and may not be copied or reproduced without written permission. 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Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!"</I><DIV ALIGN="right">-Edna Ferber</DIV> </P> <P CLASS="just"> <I><FONT size="5" color="#800000"><B>A</B><FONT size="3"><B>uthor R A Bragg</B> has admitted to selling hardware retail, ladies nylon stockings wholesale, and Amway products by proxy. He has 'fleetingly' drag-raced on city streets, and for five years drummed with a rockabilly dance band. He has opportunistically scribbled freelance (Saltscapes Magazine, and local news paper), been formally recognized provincially as a scriptwriter (1992 Government of Newfoundland Arts and letters Award for Dramatic Script), and nationally as a master educator (1990 <A HREF="http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/M/htmlM/mcluhanmars/mcluhanmars.htm" TARGET="_blank">Marshall McLuhan</A> Distinguished Teacher Award). Bragg travelled widely in western, central and "Eastern Bloc" (communist) Europe and the UK. Although he modestly describes himself as a dabbler in speculative fiction, Bragg's vivid characters lead us through an adventure thriller like no other. His three decades of teaching in English, Literature and his own course, Film Theatre, and his firm grasp of the varied but relevant science, history and humanity behind the cosmic setting, unique society and tragic conflict found in <B></I>by the White Book<I></B> has eventually, after several years of research and writing, presented us with a reading experience reminiscent of the epic classics of Aldiss, Heinlein, Silverberg, and Van Vogt. <P CLASS="just"> R A Bragg currently resides in the lovely Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. A post-graduate in Linguistics, he is presently at work on a non-fiction book on the dialects of -- appropriately enough -- the island of Newfoundland, England's first overseas colony and the initial setting of </I><B>by the White Book</B><I>. <BR><BR> <!I Visit the <A HREF="http://www3.nf.sympatico.ca/ra3raga/" TARGET="_blank"></I><B AUTHOR'S WEBSITE</B></A><I for reader reviews in English and French ! </I> </P> </FONT> <P> <!---------END right column TEXT author info---------> <P>&nbsp;</P> <A NAME="writing"> <H2 ALIGN=LEFT>. . . writing the BOOK</H2> <!---------BEGIN right column TEXT book-origin--------> <P> <FONT COLOR="#000000"> <P CLASS="just"> <FONT face="Comic Sans MS, Arial Narrow, sans-serif" size="6"><B>T<FONT size="4">he idea</B> for a novel occurs to many potential writers who never get past the scattered-notes stage. Similarly, by 1997 a small pile of jumbled, unrelated notes, the barest genesis of <I><B>by the White Book</B></I>, had collected in an ancient briefcase. <FONT size="3">The notes were put into rough order, supplemented with fledgling research efforts and the project had begun. The first three or four chapters were hammered out at night, after work, on an old laptop under a working title that varied - <I>'Far Angelus, Highland Planet'</I> was a contender for several months. </P> <P CLASS="just"> But the ultimate stimulis which eventually became <I><B>by the White Book</B></I> began years before, in Moscow . . . .</P></FONT> <FONT size="2">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <B>It's mid-July, 1988. Picture Moscow, if you can, in late evening. Deep in the KGB District near Dzerzinsky Square, about ten minutes from the nearest Moscow Metro station, is a five-story building, a bland and well-worn piece of minor Constructivism serving at the time as a rather delapidated warehouse. Up by way of a rattling, halting lift to the top floor and along a long, narrow, dimly lit hallway to a large, gloomy, high-ceilinged room. One wall facing tall dirty windows is covered with amateur avant-garde paintings distined for sale to tourists in exchange for "hard currency" on the narrow lawns of the Rossiya Hotel across town.</B> <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Across a low table holding a Russian samovar filled with steaming, black Chinese tea are two very dissimilar men. One is dark, short, bearded and barrel-chested in grey slacks and a light windbreaker. That's our author. He drops a small knapsack at his feet. His Russian is little more than basic. <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The other's slim build makes him appear tall, and his pale short hair seems at odds with his olive complexion and slightly almond eyes. A Kyrgyzstani musician in Moscow without a required prospiska permit. Kyrgyzstan is far to the east, bordering on China. He is a long way from home, but it does not seem to unduly concern him. His English is excellent. <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The topic? How to get a passport for the Kyrgyzstani who wants out of the USSR altogether. <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Within four or five years you'll walk out without 'borrowed' papers." <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Our Kyrgyzstani is reluctant to agree. "I have to live here, like a prisoner. How would you, a visitor, know that?" <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Exactly because I am a visitor. I have passed through East Germany to get here, and twice before that, in 1984 and 1987. Glasnost and the US dollar are the undoing of the system. It's faltering. It will fall altogether, and soon." <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Our author had already observed the Communist experiment-turned-Socialist-fiasco up close. In 1987, on the autobahn north out of Berlin to Varnemunde he found himself on a bus delayed for forty minutes by the Vopos, the East German police, detained when the bus driver had mistakenly pulled in to an unauthorised rest-stop. Later that summer he was delayed en route from Budapest into Austria at a tourist trap just off a ferry across Lake Balaton, six hours of sweltering in the summer heat just to fix a flat tyre. Before that, in 1984, times were obviously more tense for the casual traveller. Today it's no more than a mildly interesting place with souvenir stand, but our author could recall standing in a line-up in the no-man's-land of Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie for twenty minutes as Vopos, "people's police", with Kalashnikovs slung over shoulders, carefully matched passport pictures to faces while others poked wheeled mirrors under every vehicle or sniffed through buses with German Shepherd dogs. The unexpected can be enlightening in a communist country. <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Yes," the Kyrgyzstani agreed. "The USSR is becoming an economic colony of the </I>Amerikanski<I> Empire, like everywhere else on the planet. Or even off the planet, who knows. Even </I>inostranih<I>," he joked, "use the US dollar here."<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "</I>Inostranih<I>?" <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Aliens. </I>Kto snayit?<I> Who knows? They abduct our people, why not our economy as well?" <!--------INSERT left column IMAGE RAB-na-Moskva------------> </TD></TR> <P ALIGN="center">&nbsp;</P> <TR VALIGN="TOP" ALIGN="LEFT"> <TD ALIGN=LEFT VALIGN=TOP WIDTH="188"> <IMG SRC="resources/na_Moskv.jpg" ALT="author in Moscow '88" BORDER="0" VSPACE="3" style="filter:alpha(opacity=30);-moz-opacity:0.3" onMouseover="high(this)" onMouseout="low(this)"></A> </TD> <TD ALIGN=LEFT VALIGN=TOP WIDTH="324"> <!---------END insert left column IMAGE RAB-na-Moskva--------> <FONT face="Comic Sans MS, Arial Narrow, sans-serif" size="2" color="#000000"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Further discussion of geopolitics produces little agreement and the talk turned to other things. Momentos are exchanged. Soon it is three o'clock in the morning. The Moscow Metro, as noisy as today but cleaner then, did not run after one AM. The pale Kazhakstani and a Russian friend walk our author across Moscow, along side streets and through safe alleys to the giant Rossiya Hotel near Red Square. <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A couple weeks later our author is back in the West and across the Atlantic. Letters are exchanged with, then written on behalf of, the Kyrgyzstani. It does not take five years for him to realize his dream of leaving the USSR. Two years after, in August, 1990, our author visited Munich. Much later, a final letter from the Kyrgyzstani told of his being a musician in a nearby town at that time, not twenty minutes from the German city. Small world. <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But the words 'colony', 'alien', 'dollar' and 'abduct' would persist to eventually contribute to the basic premises of a novel. </FONT> <P></P> <DIV ALIGN="right"> <A HREF="#top"><IMG SRC="images/bttn_grn_up.gif" width="33" height="33" border="0" alt="TO TOP of PAGE"></A> </DIV> </TD></TR> </TABLE> <!------ END right column text book-origin------> <BR> <HR SIZE="10" WIDTH=324> <BR> <!--------BEGIN mailto call--------> <TABLE><TR> <TD WIDTH="156"> <IMG SRC="images/back_bttn.GIF" width="150" height="121" border="0" align="left"> </TD> <TD ALIGN="CENTER" WIDTH="360"> <FONT SIZE="1"> <A HREF="mailto:?body=Check out news on this great new original SciFi adventure novel at http://www.FarAngelus.com ." TITLE="Send a Friend to this site." TARGET=""><I>CLICK HERE to send a Friend <BR>76,000 light years away, <BR>to this site!</I></B>!<BR><IMG SRC="images/infohiway.gif" BORDER="0" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" WIDTH="120" HEIGHT="110" ALIGN="center" ALT="Send a Friend 76,000 light years away, to this site!"></A> </FONT> </TD> </TR></TABLE></CENTER> <!--------END mailto call----------> <BR CLEAR="ALL"> <DIV ALIGN="center"><FONT size="1" color="#666666">Copyright © 2003 to date FarAngelus-dot-Com and the author RA Bragg. <BR>All rights reserved.</DIV> <P>&nbsp;</P> </BODY> <!-------page last updated 18jun09-------> </HTML>