C.L. Talmadge Guest Post

I am so excited to have C.L. Talmadge here to talk about her amazing series in a guest post here at Paranormal and Romantic Suspense Reviews.

C.L. is currrently touring to promote her Green Healing series which features four generations of strong-willed female characters who inherit a mysterious green gem ultimately revealed to mend broken bones and broken hearts, protect against missiles, and render its wearers undetectable.

For more information about each book, please visit http://www.greenstoneofhealing.com/

Thanks so much Goddessfish.com for connecting us on this blog tour!

Lost island nation comes alive in speculative epic

By C.L. Talmadge

Ever wonder whether a lost civilization (like Atlantis) really existed? There are literally hundreds of nonfiction books devoted to theories answering these kinds of questions.

Few of them, with exception of books about 20th century psychic Edgar Cayce, talk about what it might have been like to live in that civilization. Cayce had some fairly specific descriptions of life in this lost continent, and it was modern, with things like television and mechanized transportation. Small wonder Greeks in ancient times (Plato, for example) could not believe tales they heard about it in places like Egypt. They would not have fully understood it.

A newly destroyed, continent-sized island nation called Azgard is the setting for my speculative epic, the Green Stone of Healing® series. It is big, so the geography varies greatly, depending on the latitude. There are huge, snow-capped mountains; lush forests of redwood trees with a house-sized circumference; sweeping grass plains populated by herds of horses; rich farmlands, meadows, and even vast swamps in the far south. The island is also well endowed with mineral wealth and other natural resources, including abundant water.

At first glance, Azgard seems little short of paradise. Polarized, however, is the key to understanding the island and its society. Azgard is deeply divided by race, by rank, by gender, by wealth, by level of power, by opportunity for advancement, and by access to technology.

Two groups inhabit the island. The dominant race, the Toltecs, are long-lived, exceptionally tall, physically strong, black-haired and black-eyed people with skin that ranges from light copper to deep reddish brown. The subject people, the Turanians, are smaller in stature, with blond, red, and light brown hair, blue or green eyes, and skin so pale it seems like milk.

As the tale of first-generation heroine Helen Andros begins, the Toltecs had conquered the Turanians several millennia earlier. Turanians endure limited chances for economic advancement, and are employed largely as servants, low-paid menial workers in industry, or as farmers. A handful of Turanians have managed to accumulate wealth, but they must hide that fact to keep Toltec bureaucrats from plundering their assets. Turanians also have highly curtailed access to communications like links and other technology, and are not allowed to own any form of mechanized transport or even drive one without the permission of a Toltec employer.

Toltecs, on the other hand, control most of the wealth and the means of producing even more. A Toltec oligarchy that uses the name of “the Kindred” owns all land and patents on numerous inventions. The Toltec monarch is known as the Exalted Lord of the Kindred. Females are the property of either their fathers or their husbands and have few legal rights or protections. Married men may rape or cheat on their wives with complete impunity since married women cannot divorce without their husbands’ consent.

Visitors to Azgard find that while the Turianians are hospitable to strangers, the Toltecs are much more aloof and suspicious. They regard anyone who isn’t a Toltec as inferior. Their racial and ethnic supremacy beliefs guide the Toltecs’ foreign policy, which is based on military power and subjugation of other countries.

Toltec society is also theocratic, with all people subject to civil laws and the religious laws of the state-sanctioned Temple of Kronos. There is no freedom of speech, and Turanians or those Toltecs too poor to afford legal representation frequently suffer the heavy hand of Toltec law enforcement, which is punitive, often violent, and not overly concerned with real justice. The goal is to maintain the social order through fear and reprisal for any disobedience.

Helen’s very existence is evidence of a violation of this strict and cruel social order. She is a half-breed; her father is an unknown Toltec and her mother a long-dead Turanian. The Temple forbids sexual contact between the two races on pain of punishment that can be so severe it could cause death. The revelation of the identity of Helen’s father as on one Azgard’s most powerful Toltec lords touches off the kind of political explosion that would have ensued had the leaders of the U.S. Confederacy discovered that General Robert. E. Lee had an African-American mistress and loved her enough to wed her.

With its deep divisions and sharp economic/political disparities, Azgard is not a tenable society. It cannot stand because it is a house divided. Even worse, there is a secret gnawing away at the underpinnings of Toltec power that will be exposed as the series progresses due to war, plague, and civil unrest. That secret is related to the heart-based spirituality that the Toltecs who originally arrived on the island many thousands of years earlier were taught, then abused and promptly forgot in their lust for power and control.

The four generations of heroines use their green gem to offer a peaceful, loving, and inclusive alternative to theocrats whose quest for utter domination ends up in utter annihilation.

 
Thank you C.L. for being here today to talk about your series, I greatly appreciate it!
 
Book Four will be released on October 1.
 
Anyone who leaves a comment today will be entered in a drawing to win an autographed set of the first three books in the Green Stone of Healing series.
 
Please follow C.L.'s last two days on her blog tour and win these great set of books:  http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2009/08/virtual-series-tour-green-stone-of.html