The Archivist
by
Book Details
About the Book
Barbara Brodman began writing this book nearly a half century ago and abandoned it to some far corner of her heart and mind until a confluence of life experiences and advancements in science made it viable as a work of science fiction. Incorporated herein are decades of research and teaching in disciplines as diverse as literature, art, and almost every area of the social sciences. However, it was not a lifetime of teaching and research that motivated this book as much as a desire to leave behind a fictionalized memoir of a family lineage the author feared would die with her passing. It also pays homage to the fine art of storytelling that has all but disappeared from modern culture, and it encourages a closer evaluation of concepts of love and family born of free thinking, not of fear. The novel spans some thousand years of human development, beginning at a time not too distant from our own. It begins when a group of scientists, faced with the possibility of impending extinction of the human species at human hands, decides to take action. After decades of discussion and research, they conclude that the only solution is to eradicate all males of the species and to design a blueprint for a female-comprised new world order that accords to nature the preeminent position it lost under male domination. In this new world order, politics and religion are abandoned as basic institutions of society, and consensus rules. Knowledge of a world previous to the new world order is possessed by only one woman, the Archivist. It is she who is the most respected of women, though she wields no power outside of the world of books. When she wanders too far outside the walls of the Great Library, to which she is bound from birth, things go awry, and the impossible occurs. Her quiet life of books and solitary research becomes a life of adventure and subterfuge, love and loss; until, once again, she must face choices made by the ancestors who created her world.
About the Author
Dr. Barbara Brodman recently retired as Professor Emeritus from a South Florida university, where she taught courses in history, economic development, global issues, and literature. She holds graduate degrees in Hispanic languages and literature, Latin American Studies, and International Business; she has been awarded an honorary doctoral degree, Fulbright awards in Brazil and Indonesia, and she has published a variety of scholarly works that deal with Latin American and international cultures and affairs. She is founder and President of Global Awareness Institute (GAI), an environmental non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and protecting highly threatened areas of the Peruvian Amazon, and for many years she sat on the board of the Inter-American Center for Human Rights and served a variety of humanitarian organizations as a trained international election observer and human rights observer. Her journey through South America, retracing Che Guevara’s 1952 motorcycle journey, was widely covered by the media, while thousands followed her adventures online or read her book about the adventure. More recently, she has co-edited a series of books on the vampire and other legends of the supernatural and a collection of essays on images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in literature and visual arts. A book recounting her exciting 2014 journey around the world in seventy days precedes this, her first novel. Scholar, humanitarian, and adventurer, Dr. Brodman’s knowledge of global and Latin American affairs, and her hands-on approach to acquiring it, continue to enthrall and inspire the many students and non-students to whom she lectures still, both at home and abroad.