Five Characters Ten Directions
This video contains a short talk introducing the five main characters and the Ten Directions they take. The transcription is below:
Ten directions - there are five characters in the book, and they have five different perspectives on what's going on - they can either go towards suffering or away from it - in aggregate that's Ten Directions.
The first character is August Bridges. He's a CEO of one of the last global corporations. Imagine a world in the future, which isn't entirely unlike our own, where there's been a sort of reorganization about how the economy and everything works, and the corporations, the big corporations, have been given outer space so they can have continual economic growth in outer space without limits. But they find out there are quite a lot of limits. So they're a bit stuck.
At the very beginning August is looking to try to break that impasse by having the Aliens tell us how to do the Star Trek scenario. So he's put out a Space Telescope and he wants to hear from the Aliens about how to change that.
Now, across the universe, there's an Alien, d'Jang, and he's watching this planet getting sucked down by this technology they successfully built to go faster than light, but it's actually destroyed their whole planet.
[So here he has this sort of...] I don't know has anyone here read the first chapter because that's how the book starts. It's on my web site, I'll pass it around.
But basically what he has is the thought, 'what about everyone else?' - and [so] he sends out a warning, but he also tells how to build the technology.
Sitting out on the Space Telescope is a Tibetan Buddhist monk, because they're the only people that can stand the intense isolation. He receives the message, and he's the only one who's seen the full message because, as it goes back, I have another character who's a villain. That's who is Django's [my son's] very favorite character, who is a corporate clone because in the future the Corporations started to clone their employees. So he has his own twisted motivations (we'll do a reading on that) and he splits up [the message] and only passes on the good news.
So then the whole thing is - can Kalsang the monk come in and tell the world? He needs help. There is a West Australian woman who is a scientific researcher on Mars, and who is a close friend of his [the monk] so he has an ally in trying to come back.
[Then there is] another sort of unusual character who was totally not planned as a major character, and she's just sort of an ordinary person working in the security apparatus, and she was a secondary character, but she has such a force of personality, andhe just kind of blew everything in unexpected directions, [so] that she became the fifth major character, Francesca.
So [in summary] we've got August, Kalsang, Aurora - the scientist, Francesca and Calvin30, the clone.
So would you guys like to hear a little bit of a reading?
