By Natalie
McDougal, author of the immensely popular Malnutrition
Dawn series of Young Adult fiction.
There are plenty of
novels and non-fiction books deemed as “classics” or as “important” that aren’t
really all that entertaining. For example, I recently opened up a used copy of Moby Dick by Melvin Hermville; not only
was there no female characters, but there was not a single love triangle nor
supernatural fight to death. You would naturally expect a book with so many
strong male characters to have at least one homoerotic sex scene, be it
explicit or just a night in rubbing down some candlesticks. This series, of
which A Brief History of Time is the
first, represents a revolution in literature; I will be taking these books and
editing them to suit the needs of today’s modern audiences. I can’t really
imagine how anybody slogged through them in the first place. This book in
particular I found truly dreadful. I read the first three paragraphs and found
not a single vampire or lycanthrope; nobody dreamed of a life together in some
far flung future; no one even wistfully stared out at a dark sea at midnight, wondering
when their ghostly love interest was coming back with the picnic essentials. So
I’m fixing these author’s mistakes. Stephen Hawking’s book has been perhaps the
most challenging for me, and that is why I put it first in the series; this
reediting is a remarkable work of effort by yours truly. When I first opened
it, I was shocked by how unliterary it was. You would think he wasn’t writing
exciting literature at all!
What follows is an
excerpt from the very first chapter of my revised A Brief History of Time. You’ll notice when the novel does
eventually hit stores that Mr. Hawking’s name has been removed from it; we
believe this is for the best. If he wanted credit, he would have written it
this way from the start.
-Natalie McDougal,
author extraordinaire
Chapter
1
A Long Dark Night of
Dark Wistfulness
On a Dark Sea of
Lament
Rose McGowan stared out on the rippling blue tides at
dawn. It was a dark night, and the moon reflected a white orb in the
pitch-black water; there was no other color to be found in that water. Rose
stood in the bushes, tenderly caressing a leaf on a nearby tree, wishing it was
Wayland’s hand. As she sat there in the shrubs, she listened to the caw of the
morning birds in chorus with the frogs on their lily pads. It was a beautiful
sight, that sound.
Her face glinted and seemed to glow in the moonlight,
like that of a newlywed bride or a recently pregnant woman. She was also a
beautiful sight, Rose. Wayland would be arriving soon, she knew, and she had to
look her best. She struggled to absorb as much of the moonlight as she could.
A ladybug crawled up the leaf she was still
absentmindedly stroking. She caught a glimpse of it. It almost seemed to wave.
Nature was so friendly ever since she met Wayland. Perhaps it was a side effect
of his mysterious powers over nature. She had first glimpsed his powers the first
night they met, and that glimpse told her everything any more glimpses ever
could. The ladybug glimpsed back at her. Rose allowed it to crawl up her arm
and she watched it move about for a bit. Growing impatient with Wayland’s
mysterious ways, she shook the bug off and stared back out at the sea.
It was then that he appeared, and her heart leapt into
her throat. Thank Goodness, she
thought, I was beginning to get scared
there for a bit. He took her by the arm and held her close.
“I’m sorry I’m so late, my love,” he said, tenderly.
“How could I ever be mad at you?”
“What were you thinking about when I so rudely
interrupted?” asked Wayland, lovingly. He pulled her tighter and breathed upon
her ear.
“Oh, you know, the usual stuff.”
“Yes, but you know that I love to hear every thought
that brims inside that wondrous mind of yours,” Wayland said, majestically.
“I was thinking that, due to gravity,” said Rose,
“logically the universe must one day collapse in on itself.” She raised her
arms in the air and mimed the image of galaxies collapsing upon one another to
create black holes, singularities in space invisible due to the fact that no
light may escape them.
“Yes, you would think so,” said Wayland powerfully as
he broke apart from Rose. She looked upset at the severing of contact, so he
grasped her by the chin and stared into her eyes consolingly. He backed off and
pulled a chain from around his neck, placing it gingerly onto Rose. “That is
the Nature Medallion that has been in my family for generations. It is the
reason I wanted to meet you here tonight. Long ago, during the Ghoul Wars of
ancient times, my family found this pendant in the ruins of the old vampire
cities. It allows us to commune with nature. While it’s clues are cryptic, it’s
wisdom is vast.” The pendant glowed green upon Rose’s chest as she looked down
in disbelief.
“Why would you give this thing, so precious to you, to
me?”
“Because you are more precious to me
than that powerful gem ever could wish to be,” said Wayland, gingerly. “And to
answer your previous query, we have discovered through use of, oddly enough,
the Doppler Effect that all planet’s have a phenomena known as Red Shift. Everything moving away from
us casts a red light upon us, and everything in the universe casts a red light
upon us. Therefore, the Universe is expanding,” said Wayland, as he caressed
Rose gingerly.
“That is very interesting!” said Rose,
in her monotone voice that drove all men to love her. “Does the Nature
Medallion give us these answers?”
“No, but it drives us in the right
direction. It allowed me, for instance, to find you.”
Rose and Wayland kissed as Wayland
tried desperately to recede his adamantium claws back into his knuckles. The
conversation had tired them both, so they laid down in the meadow and began to
discuss Feynman Diagrams.
Hope you enjoyed the excerpt! Look for it on bookshelves in December
of 2013, along with Volume 2: The
Canterbury Tales, and volume 3: Animal
Farm.
-Natalie McDougal,
author extraordinaire
