The Songs of Loss is my creation, started in 2015: 3 novels totaling 1200 pages from memory, with a fourth on the way, which concludes the first part of the saga (yes, it’s a saga) and a tabletop role-playing game. All have been published with some success, the role-playing game having become a reference in French-speaking creation, and my novels have been submitted for several literary prizes (no, I’ve never won, don’t kid yourself!).

So why do my novels belong here, and why am I telling you about them? Because, in fact, the basis of not only the plot, but also the setting and the characters, was inspired by my first adventures and discoveries of Gor in Second Life. Although I’ve completely reinvented the universe, the concepts are different, and the plot has nothing to do with Gor’s novels – it’s, as one of my friends put it, a kind of Gorean fantasy. And this same friend added: your novels are as if Gor had been written by a woman. A feminist and humanist woman at that. The first volume of Les Chants de Loss describes, alongside its political and urban intrigue, the training and education of pleasure slaves in a crude and cruel way, bordering on the horror of which I am capable. It’s a way of denouncing this horror by making the reader experience it head-on (I’ve rarely been told it’s romantic!!), while at the same time setting up one of the saga’s plot issues: how do you escape this? Can we?

What differs greatly from Gor is already the much more militant feminist and humanist viewpoint underpinning the story, and the universe of Loss, which is a Da Vinci-punk (Clockpunk) planet-fantasy: a sort of Renaissance era (16th to 17th centuries) where the first scientific revolutions were accompanied by major industrial revolutions, because the inventions of geniuses could be created.

Pitch for the first volume

“Jawaad the master merchant is known as the white wolf, for his solitary, misanthropic nature, for his secrets, adventurous life and strange friends. And for his wealth, the benefits of which he seems to disdain. Which is surely his most shocking habit for luxury-loving Athémaïs.

Lisa the earthling is just an orphaned teenager, a junkie who destroyed her own existence, her artistic gifts for drawing, her older sister’s life. She should have died in a dark corner somewhere in Paris. But Loss has snatched her up, and an even crueler destiny begins for her. A destiny in which she must find the strength to survive.

Jawaad is looking for a red-haired, green-eyed earthling. No one has ever known why. But he’s going to find her.

And in the midst of the intrigues and plots of Armanth, the city of the Master Merchants, their destinies will intersect, linking them intimately. Together, they will draw friends, allies and enemies into a quest that will elude them, and decide the fate and future of an entire world.”

You can read the novel’s chapters here : https://www.psychee.org/gorpedia/category/novels/the-songs-of-loss-novels/book-one-armanth/

PRESENTATION OF LOSS

The world with two suns

Loss is a distant and foreign planet. It is hostile and savage. Its wildlife is exuberant and dangerous. It is a world that has never been made for humans. Nobody knows how they reached this world millenia ago. Nobody even knows how long humans have dwelled there. But all the Lossans know that they come from the stars. Only the myth on their arrival and its origins changes.

A world of drama and of wonders.

The Lossyans say that the first gods offered them Loss as a present. Others that it was a punishment or the consequence of a divine war. In all cases, they managed to survive in this hostile world. Originating from the ancient peoples of Asia, Africa and Europe, they settled in the shores of the Seas of Separation, a vast inland sea with scattered archipelagoes. They founded new cultures and big city-states there.

Later, they discovered the Loss-metal: a metal with wonderful properties that is present in many Lossyan technologies. Its strangest feature is its usefulness as a catalyst for the song of Loss, which can be manipulated by only a few people, often women, most of them red haired. It is an extremely rare and misunderstood power which permits to control gravity, magnetism, elementary forces and even life. A frightening gift which evokes the magic and exploits of the ancient gods and heroes.

It is mostly a destructive force which almost destroyed all the Lossyan civilizations. That was on the Day of the Destruction of Antiva by the dreadful and demonic Orchys of Parcia. That was the day of a wordlwide cataclysm. That was the day when the suns disappeared to remain hidden for years. That was the Long Winter, a thousand years ago.

When it ended, after five years, almost all the Singers of Losss were dead, exterminated because of the fear and hatred their power inspired. The city-states were only abandoned ruins and the Lossyans were only survivors of starvation, cold and epidemics.

The first prophets of the Church of the Divine Council arrived then and claimed that the gods had failed, allowing singers of Loss to enslave the Lossyans until destruction while they had been created to serve. The Church restored some kind of social order until it became a real hegemony which radiated from their first temples in Anqimenes. After crusades and conquests, the Church imposed its dogmas, its faith and its authority all over the Seas of Separation, and whoever resisted it was mercilessly crushed.

However, that conquest never was a total success. Century after century, new city-states and new empires were built. Peoples defended their beliefs against the crusades. Some fought mercilessly for their independence. If some peoples chose the faith of the Council, most underwent it. Finally, some are still resisting with rage, and sometimes victory, while other, more progressive, ways of thinking are growing among the city-states.

A world of conflicts and struggles

The world of Loss is constantly plagued with war. Each city-state fights to seize the assets of the other one and ensure its own subsistence. Peace is rare. Death is violent and frequent, due to either disease, fighting of starvation. It is a world of raids, of marching armadas and armies, a world where even nature is in conflict against men. And men themselves are aware that all their renewed genius is necessary for them to prevail.

It is a world of struggles: between the tyranny of the Church of the Divine Council, an authoritarian religion which has hundreds of fanaticized legions at its disposal, whose armed wing is Anqimenes, the capital city of the Hegemony; and the irresistible momentum of progress, knowledge and innovation embodied by the Merchants’ Guild, an immense consortium of fellowships, of land owners and of city-states of the Athemais, which chose Armanth as a capital city and the place from where it spreads its subversive and heretical ideas.

Loss is a harsh and unfair world, on which the legacy of the dogmas of the Church weigh permanently, even when they crack in front of the theories and books of the modern intellectuals, philosophers and savants. These dogmas have made slavery a sacred practice, originally aiming at ensuring a complete control over the female Singers of Loss. The High-Art, its other name, is destined to them while all the male Singers of Loss are killed on sight. After Loss-Metal, the most valuable ressource is women, often enslaved. And nobody can imagine a world without slaves.

The same dogmas, supported by patriachal traditions leave very little room for women in the society and the family for people who apply them to the letter. They also refute the ancient cults, the innovative ideas, some scientific and historical research. Whoever tries to challenge these dogmas is doomed. The Church will chase them and all their relatives.

A world of honour, courage and wisdom

Lossyans praise three virtues: honour, courage and wisdom. They are the three qualities that define the world and mankind. They are what makes them Lossyans. Failure of any individual to either know them, understand them or demonstrate them will make a barbarian and a rightless beast out of them.

These virtues are more respected than Loss-Metal, wealth or material goods everywhere. They transcend and contradict even the dogmas of the Divine Council. The Lossyans regard respecting, honouring and recognizing these values and those who bear them as having a greater value than respecting the dogmas, for these three qualities – honour, courage and wisdom – impose weighing people at their fair value, with no further consideration. Neither the origins, nor the race, nor the rank, nor even the word of the Church (to its dismay) are taken into account.

If the Lossayns are chauvinist phallocrats, if the value of a woman is often underestimated, except when she’s a slave, that is to say a merchandise, if the Dogmas of the Council imposes cruel laws, virtues often offer a means of escape; an opportunity of outbalancing one’s rank and of breaking the societal straightjacket. Thus, female ship captains or military officers, warriors, savants or intellectuals, heads of families and contractors are women who have waved the flag of honour, courage and wisdom in front of men to be regarded as their equal or even recognized. They are Swordswomen, considered with distrust, sometimes with disdain, but also with much respect.

A world of forgotten secrets and conspiracies

To finish, Loss is a world of false pretence, of forgotten pasts, of rewritten histories and reinvented myths.

The deep forests and deserts of Loss are hiding ruins of the Ancient Ones, the predecessor peoples of the Lossans. They are places of legend where audacious explorers can find wonderful or dreadful artefacts.

It is also a world of secret societies, of conspiracies between merchant families and noble lineages. Complicated and hidded inside fightings rage between the dark intentions of the sects of the Church and the dark mysteries of the secret partnerships of the Merchants’ Guild. Truth is never evident, appearances are often deceptive and certainties are often challenged. Even the antagonisms between the powers hide baleful and frightfully complex truths. Nothing is what it seems to be on Loss, starting with the forgotten and church-rewritten past the Lossans are only starting to rediscover.

Levitating ships travel the seas and plains, sailing over herds of giant animals and the predators which follow them, always mapping a greater portion of the world. Savants and geniuses explore the arcana of science and matter, discovering the movement of the stars, the mysteries of engineering and medicine, the secrets of Loss-Metal; and the most reckless and heretic of them explore the knowledge and the mysteries of the Ancient Ones. Each discovery is a new enigma and a new stake in a struggle between obscurantism and progress… a struggle which announces a new large scale war which wouldn’t refer itself to as one.