The Lizards of Nagrafki-Uri

A discussion on the blog of Mr. John Wright mentioned a stunning lack of space lizards in modern SF. Although this contention was quickly rebutted by others, it reminded TOF that back in high school, he had started writing a grand space opera involving Lizards, Spiders, Humans, protoplasmic blobs, and sundry other folk in a great cosmic game of conquest and revenge.

A brisk search of The Olde Files resurrected a folder containing several hundred carbons and originals of this primitive effort. The prose is somewhat prolix:

Great throbs of power surged through the vessel and even the mighty structure of the colossal ship shuddered slightly as the titanic engines mounted in the rear spewed shorn atoms into the endless void. 

Okay, so it's a big ship, right? Well, it was the Sixties and TOF was young. One sign of adolescent thought is the deification of great size, of bigness-as-such.



It is also unlikely that space lizards would use hours, minutes, miles, and suchlike, and if TOF were to write this story for real, it must clearly be reworked. He was amused to find one world named Redfgy, and a glance at the standard keyboard would suggest its origin. Oh, them weird alien names!

TOF has not read this story ab multos annos and has no recollection of how it turns out, or if indeed it was ever finished. He did notice in flipping through it that there is a character evidently named "Dirk" which in normal cases would be a deal-killer. He is also thinking that the story might be served by an omniscient narrator; and that there are issues with time-space-and-scale that need resolution. In 1965 there was a lot of stuff that hadn't been invented and the narrative proves it.

There are a couple of lines that seem nice:

• He slept through the gap of a thousand light years as electronic brains carried him from a world already burning to another that shortly would.
• Above him were the stars, and in the stars were Spiders.

But... "electronic brains"? Forsooth. TOF had forgotten that computers were once called thus, and that the phrase AI or artificial intelligences were unknown. Year 1965 was indeed in vanishing past.

There is also a point where the narrative plays with a reader expectation and then flips it around. Perhaps Faithful Reader can spot it.

The prologue of the story is reproduced virtually without change on its own page, here: The Lizards of Nagrafki-Uri.

So here is the question du jour, O Faithful Reader. Should The Lizards of Nagrafki-Uri join the queue behind The Shipwrecks of Time, The Chieftain, and the collaboration-that-must-not-yet-be-named? How does this mesh with The Journeyman series of novelettes? Or the lamentable fact that Shipwrecks may commit trilogy.  TOF's back is not in good shape. Might this be The Straw?