Find out all kinds of useful things about The New World Order’s friendly conquerors …
- The One Tongue as she is spoke: or, mepkhe dono am’khesmo. Inventing an alien language.
- Holekhor time keeping: how their clock works
- Locations: settings for scenes from The New World Order.
Who are the Holekhor?
Well, I’d really been hoping not to have to give this one away. But a dispiriting number of reviews of The New World Order have talked about “aliens” or even (bafflingly) “aliens from outer space” — absolutely no idea where they got that one from.
So here it is.
SPOILERS COMING UP!!!
Are you absolutely sure you want to continue?
Okay, the Holekhor are Neanderthals.
Oh, all right … Neanderthals were another species of human being, Homo neanderthalensis, inhabiting mostly what we would now call Europe, though they spread as far as the Middle East. They seem to have vanished about 29,000 years ago. We first became aware of them in the modern era when Neanderthal skeletons were discovered in 1856.
Readers of The New World Order are privileged to know that in fact the Neanderthals discovered a portal to a parallel Earth, whence most of them emigrated. The portal then closed, leaving them the dominent species on their world and us on ours. They developed a technological civilisation and, in what we would reckon as the seventeenth century, they returned.
Some Neanderthal speculation
Having them around in the real world was the closest thing we’ll ever get to sharing a world with an intelligent alien species. A shame we weren’t in any position to appreciate the fact. Other than the fact that they were short and muscular (which we can get from the skeletons), we know little of what they actually looked like. So we can have fun trying …
A purely speculative article the author once read suggested that they might be the originators of the genes for red hair and for blue eyes. They mostly lived in the European area, and these are European characteristics. Thus the Holekhor are all red haired and blue eyed. There was also a suggestion, based on examinations of their larynxes, that they could only handle the vowels “o” and “e”, hence some of the limitations of the One Tongue.
And some useful links …
- Here is the Wikipedia article about them.
- There’s a useful link here showing work that used modern forensic techniques to reconstruct a Neanderthal face from its skull. The final result is quite attractive, and guided Henry Steadman, the cover artist for The New World Order.
- Some interesting speculation here … (“Neanderthal voices were loud, womanly and probably highly melodic”. It says.)
- And, for an alternative take on our robust friends, you can’t do much better than Robert J. Sawyer‘s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy.