New author’s word The Defenseless - The Janus Clan - fifty-two years
Members of The Janus Clan travel all over the globe. They start out from Denver, Colorado, to Chicago, Washington DC, San Diego, Leadville, Miami, London, Las Vegas, Pluckley, Brighton, Trinidad (in Colorado), New Orleans, Caracas, The Amazon Jungle, New York City, Padstow, Dakar, Timbuktu, Luxor (Thebes), Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, ancient Palmyra, Mosul, Nineveh, Samarra, Baghdad, Tehran, Mashhad, Merv (Mary), Bukhara, Samarkand, Khujand, Otrar (Farab), Alma Ata, Kashgar, Beijing, Athens, Vancouver, Boston, Seattle, Minneapolis, Spokane, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, Nogales, Tucson, Portland, Billings, Danbury, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Copenhagen, Berlin, Charleston, Hamburg, Newcastle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Paris, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Gaza, Centralia, Richmond, Detroit, Beit Omar, al-Khalil
Northfield, Massachusetts doesn’t exist in our reality.
This is just a small selection, really, just those featured in the Janus Clan books. I have visited 150 countries, give or take a few.
Especially traveling on the Ancient Silk Road was just a remarkable experience. All those ancient places, human history long before the fucked-up Europeans entered the picture, was just priceless.
And I travel with them. They travel with me, visiting all levels and corners of the world and the world beyond. Everything combines into a powerful synthesis bigger than the sum of the parts. My travels enriched my stories in priceless ways. My stories prompted me to travel more, far more, than I otherwise would have done. The world, the both horrible and inhuman, glorious and remarkable, made my art. It is far more than pure knowledge and facts. My beyond exciting human experience created the story, and also added to it in immeasurable ways. I have visited all the places I write about, except Australia, for some reason. I took extra care with researching that because of that. I have also lived in many of the places for an extensive period of time, especially London. I see London as my home more than any other place outside the untouched wilderness.
The series is an alternate history of the last fifty-seven years on Earth. That isn’t very pronounced in the first four books, but with the fifth, as the story grows in scope, it becomes evident. The books are always focusing on the microcosmos of the characters, but they are expanding until they eventually embrace the total human experience. It is one long journey, more or less my own, a dramatized autobiography, if you will. I would say around ninety percent happened to me one way or another. The final ten percent is pushing way beyond that. I describe human society both as it is, and as it should be and become.
Rereading The Defenseless brought back my adolescence, both because it describes some of my childhood experiences and because it makes me remember even better how I felt at the time. As stated, Ted Cousin, Ted Warren is both an idealistic and demonic version of me. Some personality traits are similar, while others aren’t. The story is fiction, but it is grounded in reality. Most of it really happened, one way or another.
Chances are made in the new version. It isn't marked second edition for nothing, but having noted that, there are surprisingly few of them. They are mostly adjustments, a result of what I know after having written the entire story. I remember fearing that I wouldn’t be able to juggle all the balls in my hands, and break the continuity of the story, contradicting it at some point or another, but I don’t believe I have, at least not in a major way. I haven’t for instance killed off a character in one book, and made him or her reappear alive and well later on. I was aware of the fact that stuff like that could happen, and guarded against it. I won’t presume I have not made any mistake or continuity error during the course of a story containing well over two million words, but they are minimized at least. I have done everything myself. No one else has proofread this book or most of the others prior to the first publication. I am to blame…
I had to wait 37 years to publish the first edition. It is now 52 years since I started writing the first draft after dreaming the entire story three nights in a row on, during and after my twelfth birthday. It feels like yesterday to me. Publishing the book the first time felt great beyond words. This does, too. I was never completely satisfied with the first cover, even though it was relevant to the story. I shot the photo in central Denver, where the river is calm, and with no people. The others are upriver, and picturing several of the characters crucial to the story.
The river depicted in all versions is South Platte south of Denver.
One Sherwood Forest - Second edition printing version 2025-03-03
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Relevant to the story: UNICEF: Slavery better business than ever
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Some online bookstores where you can get the novel:
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FIRST AUTHOR’S WORD
It’s a special pleasure for me to publish this novel. It’s my first, and thus it has been rejected most times by establishment publishers…
This is the very first book of twelve (or thirteen) in The Janus Clan series: Twelve stories (or so) about the wild man in the modern world.
It usually takes me about ten years to complete a book, from the start to the final finishing touch. But with The Defenseless it has taken me thirty-seven years. It has been a long, long Journey, from the moment I first glimpsed the story in my fevered dreams when I was twelve.
My first version was about 50 000 words. I quickly grew dissatisfied with that one. My second was about 150 000 words. The main difference between those, written in the late seventies and early eighties, and this, final one, is that I know more, now, much more, about everything, and that I’ve learned to write dialogue. The dialogue in the two first versions sucked, quite frankly. I’ve aimed to keep the original mood, though, the fact that the story was originally written by a teenager, which is manifesting in a number of ways. It’s the same story, in spite of the minor and major changes in approach when it comes to telling it. I also remember it all, the context and my state of mind when I wrote it.
This book is very different from all others I’ve written, even different considering that I always strive to make each new book I write different from the previous, to always and passionately seek new ground. I see that in every sentence, every paragraph, perspective and inclination.
Ted isn’t me, even if he’s fairly close, at least in some aspects, and all major characters I write or wrote are usually both demonic and idealistic versions of myself. Like any writer and artist, I use what I experience and observe, both good and bad.
This novel is me, like every story I tell is me.
I longed for humanity’s savage past already as a child, of course, the freedom and the unblemished nature, and I’ve always struggled to recapture what was misplaced, also through my art.
Well, this is it, Wild Man. I greet you and hope we will meet out there, on the true Freedom Road.
It’s a long, hard and brutal path, also within the story, but know that it will be worth it. There will be a payoff making all other payoffs pale imitations…
Amos Keppler
1977
1982
2003
One Sherwood Forest 2010-06-16
One Sherwood Forest 2010-02-28
The Sherwood Forest isn’t a place, but a state of mind.