ALIEN INTERVIEW - THE NEW EARTH - Earth Changes and The ...

The protagonist, Alonso Quixano, is a country gentleman who has read so many stories of
chivalry that he descends into fantasy and becomes convinced he is a knight errant.
Together with his earthy squire Sancho Panza, the self-styled "Don Quixote de la Mancha"
sets out in search of adventure. The "lady" for whom Quixote seeks to toil is Dulcinea del
Toboso, an imaginary object crafted from a neighboring farm girl (her real name is Aldonza
Lorenzo) by the illusion-struck "knight" to be the object of his courtly love. "Dulcinea" is
totally unaware of Quixote's feelings for her, nor does she actually appear in the novel.
Published in two volumes a decade apart, Don Quixote is the most influential work of
literature to emerge from the Spanish Golden Age and perhaps the entire Spanish literary
canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, it regularly appears at or near the
top of lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published and is the best-selling non-religious,
non-political work of fiction of all time."
-- Reference: Wikipedia.org
45 "...One Thousand and One Nights..."
"One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة - kitāb 'alf laylah wa-laylah;
Persian: ﻩزار و ﯼﮎ شب - ezār-o yak šab) is a collection of stories collected over thousands
of years by various authors, translators and scholars in various countries. These collections
of tales trace their roots back to ancient Arabia and Yemen, ancient India, ancient Persia
(especially the Sassanid Hazār Afsān Persian: ﻩزار افسان, lit. Thousand Tales), ancient
Egypt, ancient Mesopotamian Mythology, ancient Syria, and medieval Arabic folk stories
from the Caliphate era. Though an original manuscript has never been found several
versions date the collection's genesis to somewhere between AD 800-900.
The main frame story concerns a Persian king and his new bride. The king, Shahryar, upon
discovering his former wife's infidelity has her executed and then declares all women to be
unfaithful. He begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next
morning. Eventually the vizier cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier's
daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of
their marriage, Scheherazade tells the king a tale, but does not end it. The king is thus
forced to keep her alive in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she
finishes the tale, she begins (and only begins) another. So it goes for 1,001 nights.
The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems,
burlesques, various forms of erotica, and Muslim religious legends. Numerous stories depict
djinn, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and
geography; the historical caliph Harun al-Rashid is a common protagonist, as are his alleged
court poet Abu Nuwas and his vizier, Ja'far al-Barmaki. Sometimes a character in
Scheherazade's tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may
have another one told within it, resulting in a richly-layered narrative texture.
The different versions have different individually detailed endings (in some Scheherazade
asks for a pardon, in some the king sees their children and decides not to execute his wife,
in some other things happen that make the king distracted) but they all end with the king
giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life.
The narrator's standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern
literature. While in many cases a story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing his life or
another kind of deep trouble, in some parts of the full text Scheherazade stops her narration
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