SILENT ORDER: Who Is Adelaide Taren?
The other day I mentioned Adelaide Taren from my SILENT ORDER science fiction series as an example of a character with intellectual curiosity, and a reader (perhaps out of intellectual curiosity) asked who Adelaide Taren was.
To amuse myself, I wound up writing an in-universe news profile of Adelaide Taren. Readers of the SILENT ORDER series will be amused to compare the official profile with what actually happened. 🙂
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With the publication of her latest book, The Elder Wars: A History Of Pre-Calaskaran Alien Empires, Dr. Adelaide Taren has returned to the public eye.
Taren, 37, is a full professor of archaeology at the Royal University of Calaskar and the author of eighteen books. Her first book, Ancient Stones: The Alien Ruins Of The Alexandria System, was noted for its colloquial writing style and its construction of a narrative about the long-extinct alien inhabitants of the Alexandria system. Despite only middling review from the academic press, the book was an instant bestseller, bringing the esoteric topic of pre-Calaskaran alien races to the public eye for the first time.
From that success, Taren became a full professor at the Royal University, and has since become a mainstay on documentary videos. Taren has produced over a dozen videos of her own archaeological expeditions, and she is a regular on Ministry of Information videos about the history and culture of Calaskar and has appeared in such informational presentations over fifty times.
Her reputation in academic circles is mixed. Some of her critics have claimed her work relies on too much popular speculation, presenting fanciful imaginings of extinct alien races rather than sober archaeological fact. The department head of the Department of History of the Royal University famously derided her books as “popular trash” and suggested that Dr. Taren’s popularity was a result of her physical appearance and an illicit affair with the her publisher, a statement which the University later forced him to retract after the editor of the Royal University Press threatened a libel lawsuit.
Taren has never responded in public to any criticism, saying only that if her critics dislike her books, there is nothing stopping them from publishing their own.
She is tight-lipped about her personal life, though she has kept her husband’s name after he was killed in an industrial accident fifteen years ago.
The Elder Wars: A History Of Pre-Calaskaran Alien Empires, along with Taren’s other books, are available from the Royal University Press.
-JM