Review of an Unusual, Even Unique Book: Hyperlink from Hell

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Hyperlink from Hell; a Couch Potato's Guide to the Afterlife

by Lindy Moone

I discovered that Lindy Moone was in the process of reading my Ki'shto'ba series, so I investigated what she had written and discovered this remarkable book.  Ir isn't formulaic -- it marches to its own drummer -- and that's what I like. I'm planning to read it a second time because the plot is not all that coherent, as I note below.  However, I've been in touch with the author and she is planning a sequel (maybe two books) in which she promises to make everything much clearer!

Here is my review:

A bored god plays games with those who created him

Hyperlink from Hell is a difficult book.  On a superficial level, it’s a bawdy, raucously funny, offbeat fantasy, but it’s a lot more than that.  The beginning grabbed me because the author is such a skillful writer, establishing the situation, setting, and characters with smooth realism.  Then with the onset of Jimmie Canning’s book-within-a-book, I was plunged into the kind of story I don’t usually read – overloaded with sex, nudity, and bathroom humor.  However, I just kept plowing through and that element tapered off as the story continued and expanded into speculative fiction, including an investigation of the afterlife and the nature of god.  It’s saturated with puns (and I happen to love puns), and it’s also loaded with references to popular TV and movie entertainment from the past thirty or forty years.  I never watched a lot of those shows, so I’m sure I missed some zingers, but I got enough of them to appreciate the effect.

When I finished the book, I reread the beginning and the concluding sections and I have to say, while some of my questions were answered, I felt just like Dr. Stapledon – I still didn’t fully understand what really happened.  It’s a book that should be read at least twice because the plot is not the most coherent or self-explanatory.  There are two sets of the same characters, who exist in alternate realities, and the relationship among these two sets can get really confusing.

Three of the characters die early on and the quirkiest of gods, who loves pop culture and game shows as much as Jimmie does, steps in to play games with his creations’ afterlife, testing and teaching them in a sort of mad, mad, mad, mad reality show purgatory.  It includes shapeshifting (flying monkeys, to say nothing of walking pineapples), a stinky but lovable invisible dog, Frankenstein’s monster, giant T. Rexes, vampires ... the list goes on and on.  God appears first as the Wizard of Oz – the Man behind the Curtain – but he also takes the form of the Cheshire Cat, the snake in the Garden of Eden, a tiny devil wielding a pickle fork ... and finally as the Master of Ceremonies in the ultimate game show, which soon morphs into a major battle between good and evil (complete with weapons provided by a purple case reminiscent of the walking box in some of Terry Pratchett’s books.)

But a pivotal element is when god discusses who he really is, and this calls for a quotation:

“Check out those books of yours, again.  All of them.  My favorite line is ‘Man created God in his own image.’ ... I think I was willed into existence.”

“Who could do such a thing?  How?  Why?”

“YOU PEOPLE, WHO ELSE? How, I can’t say.  I’m sure you had your reasons – lots of reasons – but when it all comes down to it, you just want someone to blame and a Twinkie.  I’m sick to death of you, but I’m stuck.”

So this cynical, bored god plays with those who created him in order to alleviate his boredom, but this doesn’t negate the processes of good and evil.  “Thou shalt not kill” still applies and so do the Seven “Dudleys,” the Seven Deadly Sins.  And the wonder of it is, the antihero Jimmie grows as a character, until by the end he becomes a real hero, defeating evil with a visual pun in a delightful plot twist.  Jimmie also refuses to kill and has learned how to forgive and how to care about his fellow human beings.  A hero also has to give up something in order to do the right thing (part of my own definition of the hero) and that surely happens in Jimmie’s case.  All of this comes out of his own mental processes, which aligns this book with humanism – that your ability to be good comes out of yourself and not from an external command from a god who may not even have an independent existence.

I could write a lot more about this book, but I’ll just end by again praising the author’s writing skills, which are capable of keeping the reader mesmerized even when the plot is at its most confusing.  I should also say that the ebook is carefully formatted, with no aberrations to distract the attention and no typos that I caught.  That’s yet another plus.  The only reasons I’m giving it four instead of five stars are the excessive use of bawdy humor and the confusing elements of the plot.

And at least at the moment, the book is only 99 cents.  You’ll get a lot of pleasure and an intellectual workout for this 99 cents, and I strongly recommend that you pick up a copy right now.

A Bright, Shiny New Review of Children of the Music!

Thanks to Christopher Graham (The Story Reading Ape) I have my first review (5 star) of Children of the Music!  Read the review below. (And go to the Map page in the list of Pages above and print or download any of the material, which appears only in the paperback edition.)

Having read all this author's previous books, I found this realistic fantasy story (a departure from her highly enjoyable science fiction series about Intelligent Termites), to be every bit as compelling and engrossing.
As with her previous stories, the author's worldbuilding skills made it easy for me to get immersed and alongside the characters in no time, even through the 300 year span covered in the book.
An insight into what can (and often does) happen when two differing peoples meet.
In this case, they have physical, belief and mindset differences.
Injustice is rife.
Fear is mutual.
Result?

Back cover, with map for Part Two

Buy at

Amazon (all countries)

Smashwords

Barnes & Noble

I Missed a 5-Star Review of The Termite Queen, v.2!

Buy at Amazon

     Well, a revelation! I discovered that I just sold a copy of "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder" on amazon.ca, so I thought, maybe I ought to check out the Canadian site for new reviews. And what I discovered was a wonderful 5-star review of v.2 of The Termite Queen that I didn't know existed! It's by Tim Myles, the entomologist whose writings taught me most of what I know about termites. He lives in Canada, but his review of v.1 is on the American site, and I never checked the Canadian! Can you believe it's been there since July of 2012?  I must go through every Amazon website and check things out!  

     I honestly think Tim Myles understood this book better than anyone else who has read it.  I particularly appreciated his remark: "A story that brainy girls may especially enjoy" because I've always thought the novel should appeal to women, but very few women have read it.  I also love the fact that he found it to be a page-turner. Some people have found it long and tedious. And it's refreshing to at last find someone intrigued by the troubled mind of Griffen Gwidian.

Here is the review: 

A tragic love story set a 1000 years in the future

The Termite Queen is a novel unlike any other. Bio-science fiction at its best! A story that brainy girls may especially enjoy. It involves a tragic romance set 1,000 years in the future between a young female associate professor linguist and a senior expedition leader, who is a xeno-entomologist, one who studies alien insects. Aboard the outbound flight our love struck couple tie the knot amid a ship of mixed alien commarades. Having reached the target planet, a new intelligent life form, analogous to earth's termites, is discovered and its language is cracked by the brilliant young linguist. We are talking social science and biology here, a refreshing switch from physics and technology-based scifi. We are taken into the social world of strange creatures and embroiled in their political intrigues. But on the brink of the homeward departure the nefarious plotting of the alien termites brings tragedy to the love struck couple. Dark questions are raised about consciousness and morality. Even more disturbing questions have been raised about our protagonist entomologist. Every psychological thread is following in detective fashion to reconstruct the troubled mind of a lost lover. Mind blowing and heart wrenching. A gripping and thought provoking story that will keep you rapidly flipping the pages to the end.

Children of the Music - Published!

"LUCKY 11 LAUNCH PARTY FOR 

CHILDREN OF THE MUSIC"

THURSDAY, AUG.11, 2016, ON FACEBOOK

BECAUSE IT'S THE 11TH BOOK I'VE PUBLISHED!

Here are the buy links:

Amazon (all countries) 

Paperback on Amazon (US) (they haven't linked them yet)

Smashwords

     I'm optimistic about the appeal of this book because I think it's the most accessible tale I've written so far.  Some of my books are a bit specialized and -- let's face it -- a bit difficult.  You should have a strong interest in languages and communication to really appreciate The Termite Queen, and you have to have the tenacity to plow through to the end of v.2 to get the most out of it.  Not everybody has done that and so they have missed out on a lot.  The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head series is best read after finishing The Termite Queen, but those who have read the whole thing love it! "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder" is a shocker; lots of people think it's excellent (see the reviews on Amazon), but it turns off some people, and it's entirely different from my other books, which are much tamer.  Fathers and Demons is a piece of weighty speculative fiction containing a long discursion into the Jewish religion as well as an absorbing psychological study of a troubled Rabbi and a disturbed spacefarer.

     So what makes Children of the Music different?  The length is moderate (Smashwords lists it at 122,000 words, but some of that is Character Tables and an Afternote by the author (me!)  It's laid in a world of medieval cultural level, and the genre can only be called fantasy, although magic is restricted to prophetic utterances and the strange effect the Golden-Eyed Siritoch have on the Epanishai, the invaders of their land.  Back in the 1970s when I wrote this book, I called the genre the "realistic treatment of an imaginary world," which is what I considered LotR to be.  I had no knowledge of the term "constructed world" at that time; today I would probably say "realistic treatment of a conworld."  

     Realistic treatment means that the characters are recognizably real -- you can relate to them as human beings no matter whether they are good guys or villains, Siritoch or Epanishai.  The characters are admirable but also flawed.  And there is a lot of irony -- both people honor the God of Life but in such radically different ways that, as I say on the back cover, "When two such peoples are driven together, which one has the most to lose?"

     But there is another reason you should enjoy this book: Its tone is lyrical -- smooth, poetic, flowing ...   You should simply begin reading and let the sound of the words and the movement of circumstances flow through your consciousness and captivate you.  It affected me that way when I first read it after hardly thinking about it for 30 years (the odd thing is, I barely remember writing this book -- spooky!)  And the characters evoke so much empathy -- my favorites are (in Part One) Himrith the Headman's wife,  the pivotal characters of Leys and his great-grandson Nebet, and of course Daborno, the Chieftain of the invaders. In Part Two, you have to love Ondrach the shepherd who rebels against the circumstances of Siritoch existence; his wife Lisarith, who grows in stature as the book progresses; Saremna the willful child of the Epanishai; Cumiso the Chieftain of Galana; his brother Sembal ... 

     I'm going to end this with an extract to illustrate what I meant about the lyrical flow of the text.   I hope you enjoy this sample and choose to immerse yourselves in the entire book.

From Chapter 15 (The Makers of Music) Ondrach and his family have gone to the village of Preymis to earn some money entertaining the Mayor and his cohorts on his wedding anniversary:

But then there came a lull, while the laughter died back, the guests wiped eyes streaming with merriment, the horns were drained and refilled.  In the midst of the relative quiet, Doranath struck his harp, and the tone was altered – as gay as a moment before – as quick and teasing – but different: sunlight on dew-silvered spider-silk – hummingbird flight – a whisper of dawn-wind among harebells.  Real silence drew down upon the hall as the Siritoch began to play Siritoch music. 

At first it was only the harps, but soon pipe and flute joined in, and the lute, and the tinkling finger bells.  And then the tone changed again – sunlit gaiety darkened into mystery as Doranath and Farnol began to sing. 

The words were ancient, older than Siritoch memories, coming from the clouds that were whirling up the years – from the Clouded Time that was past yet ever drawing perilously nearer.  The Siritoch were forgetting their tongue.  They often spoke Epanishai even among themselves.  When they did not, they spoke a dialect in which the concrete realities were their own but the movements and relationships were borrowed from a less patient race.  The cherry tree might be “thirnam,” but the word that made it bloom had passed away. 

The songs, passed from parent to child at the crib, kept the ancient tongue pure, but even these held only traditional meaning.  No Siritoch could have translated phrase by phrase from the song into Epanishai, or even into the dialect.  This song was the river; another was the stars.  The words and the melody were fused; they meant themselves, no more and no less: they were the Music. 

And the Epanishai felt this, but they did not understand.  In fear they called the Siritoch witch-people and their music incantations.  At the same time they treasured the spell.  They felt in it the dark groping of the roots of their own dawn-tree and the lifting of its branches toward the sun, and they yearned to be swept toward a depth of joy, endurance, and serenity that most of them could never plumb. 

So Doranath and Farnol sang words whose lost meanings were perfectly understood, while the Epanishai stood silent, their drinking horns forgotten in their hands, stirred by the glimpse of trembling stars, the dark waters of the luminous sea, the soaring of the eagle around dread, forbidden crags.  And when the song passed into silence, they could not quite remember what they had felt, but they wiped tears from their eyes. 

The youngest adults of the troupe had donned dancing cloaks and the Epanishai pressed back to give them room.  There was a pause.  The youth and the girl stood facing each other, an arm’s length of emptiness separating their extended hands.  Then the music commenced – flute and lute and the wordless descant of a woman’s voice, and the throbbing of a tabor to mark the rhythm. 

In a moment boy and girl began to move – circling slowly, always facing, never touching – swaying to and fro, bending and stretching – two willow wands caught in the winds of the music.  The movement grew swifter, the tempo more demanding.  The eyes of the dancers bound them together, their glances never parting even when their bodies turned.  Still those bodies within the floating cloaks did not meet, and the watchers began to desire their contact – to wait with breathless pain to see arms and torsos entwine as intensely as the eye beams. 

But some in the crowd gazed more at the minstrels than at the dancers – at the solemn little boy who beat the low-toned drum – at the woman whose fingers moved over the twelve-stringed lute as tenderly as if it were her child – at the man whose fluting brooded, one with the woman’s chanting, like the shadow of an oak tree on a starlit night.  The woman’s eyes were the color of swirling gray river mist touched by the sun; the man’s were moss green and leaf color, the forest floor dappled with sunlight.  The watchers did not look long into those eyes, which like the pulsing of the instruments spoke of things more ancient, more golden, and more living than the Epanishai could bear to contemplate. 

The tempo had grown – not frantic, such a word might never conjure up the mood – but stretched to a tension that could only break.  And then it did break – the boy and girl had come together, she bent backward in his arms while he bowed above her body.  For a moment all was suspended.  The Music was silent.  If the dancers should never move, the world would hang timeless for eternity.  

But the dancers did move, springing apart and darting from the hall through yielding revelers.  And the Epanishai sighed, vaguely disappointed, half relieved.  What they had experienced was too strong for them.  They were glad to be done with it – they wanted it again – it made them angry to be at once so shaken and so unsatisfied. 

And so someone called for Epanishai songs – ”Enough of this dirge-playing!” – and someone called for a dance tune – “To stamp the foot to! That’s the way to hoof it!” – and soon the rousing rhythms had cast out the stars and sealed up the depths of the ocean and bound the eagle’s wings.  The Epanishai danced – reels and jigs and circles that drove faster and faster until one nearly fell dead from laughter and breathlessness. 

The ale flowed and the mead was brought out.  The crowd grew unruly and inattentive; they could hardly hear the music and made little attempt to keep its rhythm.  Some, drunken, called the Siritoch “pasty-face” and “wool-sucker” and more obscene epithets, while others, scarcely more sober, tried to repress them.  “You want a curse on you? You want a two-headed calf like last year?”  “You want to see your daughter violated?”  “Faugh, those tales are rot!  These lily-loined runts haven’t the stomach to bed a stout Epanishai woman!”

“It’s time to take the money,” said Horbet quietly, “and leave before our welcome goes before us.” 

I could quote a whole array of passages to illustrate 

why I think you'll relish this book, but I have to stop. 

 Please do pick up a copy!

 Ebooks are only $2.99!  

And come to my event if you're on Facebook!

There will be prizes of free books!

Writing about Immortality

ONLY ONE MORE WEEK 

IN SMASHWORDS'

JULY SUMMER/WINTER SALE!

ALL MY BOOKS ARE

50% OFF THROUGH JULY 31, 2016!

     I haven't updated my progress on publishing Children of the Music since May!  I'm happy to report that I'm close to considering it ready and will try to publish it before the end of August.  The book was meant to be a prequel to a much longer fantasy, which I never completed and do not plan to complete. This means that the prophecies uttered in Children leave the reader with a lot of unanswered questions.  I have been writing an Author's Note to set at the end of the book, explaining what was meant to happen in the larger work.  I'm going to quote parts of the Author's Note here (without giving away anything important about Children!) and add a few comments that I cut from the Note.

The “big story” was entitled To Sing with the Wind (a title I never especially liked) and it grew out of my fascination with the immortality of Tolkien’s elves.  I began to wonder – what would it actually be like to be immortal, especially in a world also inhabited by mortals? To explore this, I created an immortal race of my own called the Demrai, who fell victim to hubris, dominating and mistreating the “inferior” mortal peoples of the world who were supposed to be under Demran care. Their god (Dar) punished them by mewing them up in the mountains, unable to find a way out.  However, they were promised a Liberator who would come when they were worthy and guide them back into a life in the larger world. Simultaneously, all mortals were imbued with a sense of horror toward the spine of mountains that bisects their land, ensuring that there would be no accidental contact between mortals and Demrai.   

Now a few words about the difficulties of creating a race of believable immortal beings.  For example, if Immortals propagated at even a slower-than-human rate, they would ultimately overrun the earth.  There had to be a way to kill off some of them.  Furthermore, what would happen to Immortals who were maimed in some way?  Would they simply regrow a severed hand or an eye?  My invention of the Demrai predated Highlander, but the writers of that motion picture and series had to deal with some of these same problems.  Highlander-style Immortals are sterile, so that fixes the propagation problem.  And as we all know, they can die if their heads are cut off. 

My Immortals didn’t get off so easily.  The only way for them to die was to will their own deaths.  Life can become very tedious if it has no end (remember the song in Highlander “Who wants to live forever?”)  Depression would surely have been rampant among the Demrai, especially since their lives have lost all purpose during their separation from mortals.  When their Liberator finally appears, their numbers are in a dangerous decline.  

Several dilemmas are solved by the suicide concept.  What happens if an Immortal is buried in a landslide?  Would this person still be alive if he or she was disinterred thousands of years later?  Such a situation would surely be unendurable, and a person in this situation would undoubtedly choose to end his or her own life.  

And what about physical damage?  In Highlander: the Series it is made clear that severed limbs of an Immortal don’t regrow and that if the voice box is damaged, a glorious singing voice can be destroyed.  In my version one of the main characters is a blind Demran priest.  But I never tackled the question: What would happen to a Demra is his or her head was cut off?  Or if he were chopped into a hundred pieces?

I remained fixated on immortal beings for years.  I couldn't seem to come up with any other theme, even though I had already mentally stored away the concept of a race of giant intelligent termites.  After I abandoned To Sing with the Wind in the late 1970s, I invented a new world with another version of immortal beings.  The series, laid in a much more fantastic world with more fantastic beings, was to be called The Wizards of Starbell Mountain.  I did manage to complete the first volume, but later efforts also fell victim to the improvisation virus that had doomed Wind.  Anyone who is interested can get a taste of this world in my novelette “The Blessing of Krozem,” which is perpetually FREE on Smashwords.  It was written as a Prologue to the Starbell Mountain series.  Someday I might look into publishing that first volume.  But don't hold your breath.

Smashwords Summer/Winter Book Sale!

ALL MY BOOKS ARE HALF-PRICE 

THROUGHOUT JULY, 2016

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IT'S SO SIMPLE A TERMITE COULD DO IT!

"Bend to the reed's tune - sing a new song": Update

     It's time for an update on the book I'm currently working on: Children of the Music.  The title of this post is the epigraph for the book -- a traditional statement from the Siritoch culture.  The book itself is divided into two halves, the first being "The Reed's Tune" and the second "The New Song."  You can discover how those phrases apply to the story when you read it.

     I have also decided to reveal the cover art.  This doesn't mean the book will be published soon, because I'm not quite satisfied with it yet, but this gives me an illustration to post in various places.  The cover incorporates every symbolic element of the book: the differing eyes of the two peoples, the Music of the Siritoch (of particular importance is the serpentine trumpet that I featured in another post), the sacred tree of the Epanishai, and the circle of standing stones where a shrine exists that is holy to both peoples, although they don't realize it.

     The back cover will have a map of the Land between the Mountains and the Sea, and the text of the paperback will have two internal black-and-white maps, one for each half.  The second part of the story takes place 285 years after the first, so the land has changed considerably in that time -- a larger population, more cities, roads, etc.

Names and Conlangs in Children of the Music

     The reader will not find the names in this book as difficult as my termite names, although of course they are not English.  There are quite a few characters and the relationships among them may be a little difficult to keep straight at first, so I've compiled tables clarifying who is related to whom.

     When I wrote the book some thirty years ago, I wasn't into the conlanging mode yet.  I've always been interested in language, but I mostly just made up names on impulse. (In fact all of my conlangs started out that way.)  Consequently, I wasn't as careful about some aspects of the names as I would have been if I had written the book in the last ten years.  

       A word on the phonetic system:
     These days when I construct names or a language, I never use the English letter "C" because its pronunciation is too ambiguous.  Is it to be pronounced like an "s" or like a "k"?  In English it's usually like a "k" when it's followed by "a," "o," or "u," and like an "s" if the following letter is "e" or "i"  (examples: cake, cere, cinnamon, conlang, culinary).  

     In the two languages in Children of the Music, I consistently used "c" instead of "k."  I think my intention was to have it be always "hard" as in Latin, but who is going to know that?  So we have names like Cumiso and Cormaldur and Corith.  In fact, I discovered that actually I had only one name where there was an ambiguity in the pronunciation and that was a minor mention of a river named Cindala.  I'm changing that to Tindala.

     So I decided to keep the letter "c" instead of changing it to "k."  I've grown accustomed to the "c," and "Kumiso" and "Kormaldur," etc., just don't feel right to me.
      "G" presents a similar difficulty.  However, I find I used only initial "ga" in Galana and Galno and Gauramur, so those don't present a pronunciation problem.  And I never used the letter "j" so its pronunciation is a non-issue.

     I have thought about writing some rudimentary conlangs for the two languages, but I don't really want to spend a lot of time doing that at this point, even though it would be fun.  And I've decided it wouldn't add anything to the stories except maybe for some of my conlanger friends.  I do have a few words in Siritoch and Epanishai.  In Siritoch "Wal" means "Grandfather"  (of any degree, actually).  I wanted something for Nebet to call his great-grandfather.  Just "Grandfather" seemed too formal for a seven-year-old and "Grandpa" or "Granddad" seemed too colloquial and too native to our planet Earth.  I really think it would have been appropriate to make Siritoch words for "Mother" and "Father," too, and I've considered adding those to make it less formal.  However, I haven't decided yet whether to do that.

     The odd thing is, among the Epanishai, I felt that having  Saremna call her father "Papa" seemed perfectly appropriate.  "Father" would be way too formal from a five-year-old, and I never even thought of making an Epanishai word for "Father."  So I haven't been exactly consistent, but it seems to work.

     For the Siritoch, I did come up with diminutive suffixes, such as "Walanatha," which would in effect equal "Grandpa."  This can be used with personal names as well, such as Nebetanatha or just Nebetanath and even the long but sonorous Batharamolanatha (her name is Batharamol).  This is sometimes shortened to simply 'Ramolanatha.  Otherwise, I have very little Siritoch vocabulary, only "Thirnam," a name which means "Cherry." Frankly, I've always liked the word "Epanishai" (pronounced Eh-PAHN-ish-AI), but I never cared for sound of Siritoch (the "ch" should be that soft gutteral sound as in German "Koch.").  However, after all these years I'm stuck with the word -- my mind would not accept using any other term for those people!
     If you look at the names of the Siritoch, there are repetitions that surely mean something in their language.  A lot of names end in -ith or -ath or -eth, and others end in -ol.  I've sometimes thought of -ith as a feminine ending, but I haven't been consistent in this.  I think the names all have a meaning which could be worked out if a conlang was composed (e.g., -ol could be a plural form), but again I don't think that would add anything to the enjoyment of the story.

     I did do a little more technical work with the Epanishai language.  The holy trees are called the "sharovai" (singular: sharova), so it's clear that at least one form of plural in Epanishai is changing the -a ending to -ai.  I figure "Epanishai" is plural, too, but I never use a singular -- it never occurred to me back then.  The sacred grove is the "Codia," and a Priestess of the Grove is a "Codian" (plural: Codiant, so that's another way to make a plural in Epanishai).  And I do mention the names of some of the Epanishai months: Torhorda (the month before the new year begins; Danhorda (the midwinter month), and Nalhorda (the month just before midsummer).  I clearly remember setting up the calendar to have eight-day weeks, because I've always found our seven-day week annoying.  If you have to do something every other day, for example, you can't make it come out even.  If I have more information on time keeping, it's buried irretrievably in my voluminous collection of early manuscripts.
     The Epanishai names themselves are distinguishable from Siritoch.  The male names often end in -o.  For variety, several male names end in -ur, -is, or -al, or even -ab.  I didn't seem to vary the female names; they all end in either -ia or -a.  Of course, I could still change some of those, but I don't think I'm going to do that. 

     And that's about the extent of the linguistic work I did for this book.  Probably enough, although not thoroughly satisfying.

A Follow-Up on My Political Correctness Post

     I did decide to change the word "men" whenever I had used it to mean "people."  There was a lot more of that in there than I had realized.  I did keep the term "bearded men" because the Siritoch have no beards and it's the male Epanishai that they fear, not the women, so it makes sense they would make statements like "the bearded men are coming to kill us."  They wouldn't say "the bearded people."
    And I also eliminated "alien" when it's a noun referring to the Epanishai.  I kept it in certain adjectival usages such as "that's alien to our way of life."