Sphinx Daybreak
a science fiction novel
by Robert Wilfred Franson
  

Fame requiring great risks;
Longevity via philosophy and the Great Health;
Immortality carrying vast responsibility;
... and, for all of these:
Individuality — too much, or too little?

Here we have history as it wasn't seen:
a clash of cultures in the airs above the Earth,
and dark and bright spaces wider than worlds,
hidden beyond tapestries older than the Pyramids.

And, for devilishly tempting ambition,
we see how all of Faust I & II fits on the edge of twilight,
shown simultaneously on the linear dream-stage.

You haven't read another novel like this one.

Before the Wright Brothers opened the era of mechanical, powered flight in 1903, the daytime skies above the Earth were populous and busy. In the Middle Air were hidden the vast sunny cloudland of the Walking-Deck and smaller cloud-isles like Athenaeum and Swan, inhabited by humans since the fall of Troy and by aircats longer than that. In the Lower Air was the gossamer swirl of Springfolden, inhabited for long millennia by the more-or-less intelligent etherine vortices whom men called djinn.

Yet in the Nineteenth Century, volcanic turbulence disintegrated Springfolden and later burnt the Walking-Deck. In 1904, the long-lived Luftmenschen — both humans and aircats — were coming to terms with the wreckage of their comfortable way of life; as the djinn in their own way were as well.

Hendrik Rheinallt, a veteran in his youth of the New Model Army in the English Civil War, was a leader in redefining and redirecting the Luftmensch philosophy of life and action. His aircat friend Arahant and other colleagues and allies were one by one regaining optimism and energy — but so were the hostile djinn.

Strange new lands and spaces beckoned — new kinds of lands and spaces. Then the Sphinx (no, not that one) awakened her dreams from caged sleep, and began re-forming loyalties.

In summation:

A deep & fanciful secret history;
  a playfully philosophical adventure;
    a soaring flight of imagination —
with exotic humans, aircats, & djinn,
  on a stage of romance as vast as the sky,
    and beyond — right off the map.

Sphinx Daybreak is an Overflight novel: science fiction (or fantasy, if you prefer — but there is no magic, simply ethereal science).

225,000 words.

The print version is a 6"x9" quality paperback; 604 pages. ISBN: 978-1720240068

Cover painting: "A Coign of Vantage" by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1895.

Please see these reviews at Troynovant —

Dean M. Sandin on Sphinx Daybreak.

Raymond J. Ford on Sphinx Daybreak.

On "willing suspension of disbelief":

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. ...

In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV, 1817

  
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