Birgom's Diary

Book excerpt: To Birgom's people, the Known World is bounded by treacherous ice to the North and South, by the endless ocean to the West, and by impenetrable jungles and merciless deserts in the East. Birgom leaves this world behind. Sometimes joyful, sometimes desperately sad, sometimes written in excruciating detail or forgotten for years, *Birgom's Diary* charts his long and eventful life in a world that's recognizably ours, yet very different. Maybe a few hundred years in the future, maybe a few thousand, I don’t know. Post-apocalyptic, but so far post- that the apocalypse is the subject of speculation or mythology, not history – on the rare occasions that it enters anyone’s consciousness at all. This is not a sci-fi world of high technology or space travel, but nor is it a world of primitive savages. But you’ll have to read it... In the back of the book there are some maps that Birgom drew of his travels. It's in the same world as my previous novel, *Exile*, with some of the same characters – Birgom is an important secondary character in *Exile*, and his diary is mentioned. The "Story Elements" below are oversimplified: while there's a lot of nautical setting, there's a lot of non-nautical setting too; and the time period is wrong.