Follow Friday - Two Roman Emperors Were Killed in the Battle of Abritus in 251 A.D.

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and a single Follow Friday Featured Blogger each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the Featured Blogger of the week - Girl of 1,000 Wonders.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: First physical description of a character in a book that you find appealing.

This is kind of a description of Lorq Von Ray, the central character in Nova by Samuel R. Delany. As with most things written by Delany, there is a lot going on in this paragraph. The plot of the story revolves around the conflict between the Pleiades Federation, which are supported by the Von Ray corporate interests, and Earth, which is supported by Red-shift. Lorq Von Ray is the heir to, and later head of, Von Ray, while he is opposed by his contemporary Prince Red. The key to the conflict is an incredibly rare element called Illyrion, vital to powering starships and terraforming planets, and control over the flow of Illyrion is a virtual guarantor of victory. In addition to their political conflict, the antagonism between Lorq and Prince Red is personal: Prince Red was born without an arm, and wears an incredibly strong mechanical prosthetic in its place. During a dispute in their youth, Red slashed Lorq across the face with his artificial arm, leaving Lorq with a huge scar that Lorq refuses to have corrective surgery to remove. In this passage, Delany describes Lorq and outlines the conflict itself:

His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived at 12 Extol Park in Ark, the capitol city of the Pleiades Federation. He walked beside the moving road. Through the wind shields, the winter garden of the city bloomed. People looked at him. That was because of the scar. He was thinking about Illyrion. People looked, then looked away when they saw him look back. Here, in the center of the Pleiades, he was him self a center, a focus. He had once tried to calculate the amount of money that devolved from his immediate family. He was the focus of billions, walking along by the clear walls of the covered streets of Ark, listening to the glistening lichens ululate in the winter gardens. One out of five people on the street - so one of his father's accountants had informed him - was being paid a salary either directly or indirectly by Von Ray. And Red-shift was making ready to declare war on the whole structure that was Von Ray, that focused on himself as the Von Ray heir. At Sao Orini, a lizard-like animal with a mane of white feathers roamed and hissed in the jungles. The miners caught them, starved them, then turned them on one another in the pit to wager on the outcome. How man millions of years back, those three-foot lizards' ancestors had been huge hundred-meter beasts, and the intelligent race which had inhabited New Brazillia had worshiped them, carving life-sized stone heads about the foundations of their temples. But the race - that race was gone. And the offspring of that race's gods, dwarfed by evolution, were mocked in the pits by drunken miners, as they clawed and screeched and bit. And he was Lorq Von Ray. And somehow Illyrion had to have its price lowered by half. You could flood the market with the stuff. But where could you go to get what was probably the rarest substance in the universe? You couldn't fly into the center of a sun and scoop it out of the center of the furnace where all the substances of the galaxy were smelted from raw nuclear matter by units of four. He caught his reflection in one of the mirrored columns - and stopped just before the turn-off to Nea Limani. The fissure dislocated his features, full-lipped, yellow-eyed. But where the scar entered the kinky red, he noticed something. The new hair growing was the same color and texture as his father's, soft and yellow as flame.

And from last week, here are the books described in my seven word plot descriptions:

1. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke.
2. Dune by Frank Herbert.
3. Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear.
4. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.
5. His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik.
6. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.
7. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin.
8. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
9. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
10. Ring by Stephen Baxter.

Previous Follow Friday: "250 Things You Should Know About Writing" Is a Book by Chuck Wendig

Subsequent Follow Friday: There Are 252 Ways to Place Four Pieces on a Connect Four Board

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