March of 2020 saw the publication of my SF/Noir novel Vulcan’s Forge by FlameTree Press. Sadly, being published the week the world goes into shutdown for a once a century pandemic did nothing for the book’s sales. Still, I believe in the book and for those who are interested here’s some things about this novel.
Deep Backstory
By the end of the 21st century advances in computer sciences produced true artificial intelligence, along with automated manufacturing, advanced 3D printing, and practical fusion power. Instead of ushering in a period of expansion these technologies became the means by which humanity survived a planetary cataclysm. A rouge brown dwarf drifting thru interstellar space was discovered with a trajectory that carried through the inner solar system, disrupting all the rocky planets and close enough to eject Earth from the solar system.
Humanity launched solar sail arks carrying sperm and egg cells, fully capable artificial intelligences, and automated manufacturing equipment to save humanity by planting it on scores and scores of target worlds throughout the local stellar neighborhood. Due to the advanced technology and manufacturing techniques the cost of an ark was low enough that private groups, religious organizations, and loose confederations could launch one to preserve their culture and people.
Vulcan’s Forge takes place on a colony, Nocturnia, whose founders were fixated on racially diverse urban Americana of the 1950s. Like all who become focused on nostalgia their view of the past was not entirely historically accurate but rather a more romanticized and idealized view of that period in American history.
The Story
Jason Kessler helps create the social and cultural norms of Nocturnia by carefully curated film and television preserved in the digital storage of the ark that founded the colony. However, Jason himself find the conformity and repressed sexual mores of his colony stifling, not wishing to marry young and produce a brood of children to re-populate the species. He would rather
Flame Tree Publishing
enjoy to banned films labeled ‘anti-social’ and live a life of pleasure, but the colony’s surveillance and enforcement of their morality makes this impossible.
When Pamela Guest sweeps into Jason’s life everything changes. Contemptuous of Nocturnia’s morality and seeming immune from its enforcement Pamela introduces Jason to the possibility of everything he had ever dreamed about doing and wanting. Jason also learns that there is a secret criminal underworld to the colony and soon he and Pamela are fighting to survive as darker conspiracies than mere criminality threatens Nocturnia.
As a traditionally published novel Vulcan’s Forge can be ordered from wherever books are sold. I am including links to San Diego premier specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy along with links to Amazon.
I am also including the YouTube video of myself reading the novel’s prolog.
