Category Archives: SF

BOOK SIGNING CANCELED

BOOK SIGNING CANCELED

Due to the continuing Corona Crisis, not even a pandemic will stop my alliterations, the signing event for my first novel is now canceled.

With gatherings of 10 or more people highly discouraged the store, Mysterious Galaxy, has closed to foot and in-person traffic until at least April 1st. There are discussions of possibly rescheduling the event for later in the year but I am sure slots will be limited and I am not the only author impacted so a reschedule would be nice but I am not counting on it.

If you were planning to attend the event, or if independent bookstores are important to you, I suggest that you buy the book from Mysterious Galaxy anyway. They are taking orders and fulfilling them by mail. Bezos and Amazon will weather this storm with literally billions in cash but local businesses will not be so lucky.

Mysterious Galaxy is a critical factor in the existence of my novel Vulcan’s Forge. For ten years I have met there with my writing group and that has certainly leveled me up as a writer and their staff are always helpful, friendly, supportive, and knowledgeable. From Mysterious Galaxy and stores like them you get those personal recommendation that can lead you to a new favorite author, not something simply pushed by an algorithm.

Vulcan’s Forge is my first novel and I certainly hope it is not my last. Having your debut event canceled is tough but COVID-19 is tougher and we can weather this if we do the right things. So, I will be sad to not have that signing but I hope that instead people stay safe, healthy, and order the book online even if they can’t have my illegible scribbling defacing it.

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Mind Exchange is Fantasy Not SF

The final indignity for the original series of Star Trek was the episode Turnabout Intruder where a bitter woman, Janice Lester, used trickery and an alien device to swap bodies with Captain James T. Kirk generating some of the series most over the top performances from William Shatner.

The body swap, a fantastical process where one person’s mind is placed into the body of another is tired trope and one that should always be understood as fantasy not science-fiction.

The core erroneous concept for this idea is that there is a separation between body and mind, that our ‘selves’ exist independent of our bodies and thus could be transplanted into a new form like a sapling being moved to a larger pot.

Our minds are emergent properties of our bodies. The subtle and complex interactions of physical experience, hormonal balances, and genetics give rise to the varied and unique personalities of the human race. There is not independent mind to move from one body to another. It is the body that generates the mind and with a different body, or a significantly altered one, the mind is different. Numerous brain injury and disease cases bear witness to this fact of life.

All of that said, I think I have found at least one, far out but barely plausible method of telling a body swap story. Now to see if I can make it work.

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The Joys of Revisiting a Manuscript

For reasons too extensive to go into here I am revisiting a novel length manuscript I last opened in November of 2014. This novel, at the suggestion of an agency, went through a major change in 2015 and that revised version has been the version sent to various people. Now I am taking the opportunity to go back to my original vision and use it for a different submission.

Originally, I went in for the prosaic task of turning all the underlined text into the house’s preferred format italics which required carefully reading every page of the novel to make sure I didn’t miss an instance. This led to the discovery that this earlier, longer version of the story is also before I changed the name of one of the major military ships that appear in the story, Okay, so now I am not only fixing underlines with italics but I’m watching for the old name so I can replace it with the new one.

Of course, my writing a changed over the last five and a half years, hopefully for the better, and I am finding the odd sentence where I need to massage it a little to get it to where I am today in terms of style and voice.

Then I discover an error that somehow slipped past all my earlier edits, my beta readers, and everyone else who has taken a gander at the manuscript. Reggie leave Geneva under the light of a full moon; the same night Seth in Spain is getting ready for what he hopes will be a romantic evening under a new moon. Glad I caught that one!

Still, my most common reaction to re-reading and working on this manuscript has been joy. This is the sort of book I love to read and while there are minor edits taking place, I am very happy with the prose and love revisiting my original vision.

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This Feels Wrong

This will be a quick post.

So, I am revising my military SF about an American serving in the European Union’s Star Forces set in a future in which America took a wrong turn in the early 21st century and became a second-rate power. Honest, I was cooking this idea back in the early 90s.

This is the manuscript that originally clocked in at 115 thousand words and on advice from an agency was trimmed to around 98 thousand.

As I review the original longer work, a version I had preferred, I find that I am really enjoying this book. It has been a few years since I have read it carefully, line by line, word by word, as once I send a project off to editors for consideration, I protect my sanity by moving on to the next project. So, this return to the origi9nal manuscript is a, pardon the pun, novel experience.

It feels wrong just how much I am enjoying this read. But this speaks to the truism I hold to in writing, write the book you want to read. There is your vision, there is voice, there is what makes it yours.

 

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Treacherous Seas

In less than a month my debut novel Vulcan’s Forge will be released upon an unsuspecting world. My editor at Flame Tree has expressed the hopes in the future that we shall be working together on many novels. I have found everyone at Flame Tree to be wonderful, supportive, and utterly professional and welcoming so the idea of working with them on more books is very enticing.

Some years ago, I completed a military SF novel that landed me with a literary agency. While the association with the agency didn’t work out and we went our separate ways, that novel has sparked at least some interest with a couple of publishing houses.

The trouble is timing.

Two other editors are looking at the book, one because we met a conference and they read a few sample pages and the other because I had submitted the manuscript through the imprint’s slush pile. (Slush pile is the name for the great stack of manuscript that are sent to a publisher un-agented.) Both publishers have had the book for over a year now. In that interim I sold, edited, and next both will have published Vulcan’s Forge with Flame tree.

I have decided that I am going to go ahead and send my military SF book over to Flame Tree. I will let the other editors know what the score is but I can’t even be sure that my emails are being read. These are turbulent seas to navigate and the sort where having an agent would be extremely helpful but I have no agent and must sail these waters myself.

I am taking some time to revise the manuscript before sending it over the Flame Tree. When I submitted to that agency I was signed with it was 115,000 words long, not overly long for an SF novel, but the reader and co—owner of the agency had required that I cut it down before he recommended it to his agents and so I brought it down to 98,000 words. I did this by trimming the opening battle but I was never truly happy with that. The massive battle that opens the book is meant to have the scale, weight, and importance of something along the lines of WWII’s battle of Midway and the lighter version I felt didn’t quite get that across. So, I am going back to the 115,000 words manuscript, making minor adjustments and that will by the new version.

Wish me luck.

 

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Brief Comments on the Passing of Mike Resnick

Mike Resnick noted science fiction author and mentor to many up and coming writers has died. He did not disclose publicly that severity of his condition and there are a great many in the field that will miss him.

I never had the fortune to have personal interaction with Mike other than a few passing online comments and an ‘almost there’ rejection letter. (He said he was onboard for the story until the last two pages.)

Many of my writing friends have had close communication and guidance from Mike and all had nothing but good things to say about the man, as a writer, as a teacher, and as a human being. That’s a damned fine eulogy right there.

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Sunday Night Movie: 1973s Westworld

The Criterion Channel this month added a number of films as part of their spotlight on 70s science fiction. There is a pretty good representation of the pre-Star Wars genre in the selection. Worries about the population bomb with Z.P.G., environmentalism with No Blade of Grass, Corporate control before cyberpunk made it trendy with Rollerball and societal collapse with both The Ultimate Warrior and Mad Max. Sunday night I watched Michael Crichton’s Westworld, which of course served as the basis for HBO’s current series.

The set-up is straight forward, the company Delos runs three theme parks, Roman World, Medieval World, and Westworld where guests for the sum of a thousand dollars per day, just north of 5 grand in today’s money, can live out their fantasies amid a park filled with robots that are nearly indistinguishable from human. Being a Michael Crichton SF story, the technology goes wrong and the robots in the last act of the film go violent and begin killing all the guests leaving our hero Richard Benjamin being hunted by a gunslinger robot player by Yul Brynner.

With a brief running time of just 88 minuets you would think there there’s no room for exposition and yet this movie drags with scene after scene of nothing but exposition. There’s an attempt to explain how the park is safe because the guns detect human body temperature and will not fire at a living person but utterly disregards the concept of ricochets. I was surprised just how dull this movie was. I had not watched it since perhaps the 80s and truly this is an exercise in watching someone else play a game. It isn’t until very late in the movie that the threat rears its head and then there is very little but chase and escape.

There are a lot of SF films from the 70s that hold up today, but boy this is not one of them.

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First Movie of 2020: The Ultimate Warrior

I had planned to start my year off with the 1980 Musical Fantasy Xanadu, a flawed film but an emotional favorite, but before I slipped the Blu-ray into the player I surfed the Criterion Channel and discovered a mid 70s SF film I had not only not seen but had never heard of, The Ultimate Warrior.

The Ultimate Warrior from 1975 and set it the far distant future of 2012 is about competing bands of survivalists in a world that had been devastated by viral plagues. The Plague apparently killed off an enormous number of people as New York City is desolate and deserted, and destroyed the several species of plants, ending Ultimate Warrior Postercultivated farming. It is suggested in the movie that some form of economic collapse occurred shortly before the plagues swept across the earth as we are told that 1981 was the last year automobiles were produced and the plagues came later. The film is light on explaining the backstory giving the audience just enough to feel that it is a world with history that has been thought out and not simply bludgeoned with that information.

Baron, played by the unequaled Max Von Sydow, leads the ‘good’ commune/compound of survivors. Their numbers have been dwindling and the scavenged food is beginning to run out. A rival compound led by Carrot, William Smith, survives through force and theft and threatens the survival of Baron’s community. Into this mix comes the mysterious Carson, Yul Brynner. Carlson is a hired warrior and Baron manages to in his services. In Baron’s commune is Cal, it is never explained if Cal is a farmer or a botanist, but either way he had cross bred another of plants to produce food bearing crops that are immune to the plagues. Knowing that the decaying city is no place to reestablish cultivated farming, Baron has hopes of using Carson’s tremendous gifts as a warrior to get Cal, Baron’s Daughter Melinda, and the precious seeds, out of New York to someplace suitable, but Carrot’s murderous goons growing stronger, time is running out.

Directed and written by Robert Clouse, The Ultimate Warrior, capture the mood of mid-70s cinematic science fiction, dark, cynical, and if there are ‘happy endings’ the price if terribly high. This atmosphere dominated 70s cinema and culture until the release of 1977s Star Wars, when light escapist fare displaced the dark dreary movies with adventure of Campbellian heroes.

Produced on a modest budget the film still manages to portray a dying world and a dead culture. Baron is striving to do what is best but is not immune from mistakes with terrible consequences. Carrot and his gang are not characterized at all, but are presented as simply violent, greedy, a force of the world out to destroy and then be destroyed. There is never any reveal for Carson’s extraordinary skills. He is not presented as a product of science or breeding, and it is never even hinted as having a particularly interesting backstory, or any backstory at all. He simply arrives and upsets the delicate balance with his presences.

The Ultimate Warrior was an enjoyable movie and for those who did not live through the decade of malaise it could be instructive to see the tone that so many did experience in nearly every aspect of the culture.

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My Personal Year in Review

Well we’re about to start another arbitrary cycle around our local star and that means it’s time to look back at what we’ve and answer for it. Wait, that didn’t come out right, it’s time for personal reflection and growth. Yeah, that sounds better.

Anyway, I have to say that this year has been a pretty good year for me.

Naturally, the biggest writing news is that Flame Tree Press purchased my novel Vulcan’s Forge with the publication set for March 28th, 2020. This was a joy and a surprise. Vulcan’s Forge, which languished on my former agent’s desk for a year unread, was a book I wrote entirely for myself. It was an experiment to see if I could sustain a cynical tone for an entire novel, and a labor for my love of film and the genre film noir in particular.  Blending it with science fiction and making constant references to movies throughout the book Vulcan’s Forge is in one manner my most personal work.

In other aspects of my writing life I managed a few interesting short stories and one of my previously published works A Canvas Dark and Deep has been selected for reprint in the anthology Twilight Words coming in spring 2020.

My goal for 2020 is to have my next novel, Do We Not Bleed?, written by my birthday in mid-May. A detailed outline is already produced, and I have high hopes for this piece.

2019 was also the year I fully committed to listening to Podcasts. I have a number of fun, informative, and challenging podcasts on regular rotation. One that has been most surprising in just how fully engaged I have become with it is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters.

Clearly with my love of movies screenwriting has always been a fascination with me. John August and Craig Mazin each week discus the business, craft, and art of screenwriting with many of the topics applicable to other forms of writing as well. They are also gamers, puzzle solvers, and entreatingly amusing people.

My day job continues to be good. I am so happy to be part of a vibrant strong union. Too many times before in my life I have been chewed up by petty bosses and it feels great having an organization at my back instead of being stabbed there.

IN gaming my sweetie-wife and I added Lords of Waterdeep to the regular rotation of our board and card game nights and it’s become very popular. In role play gaming I took a massive step into the past and began running a campaign of FGU’s Space Opera a game system I ran quite successfully for many years during the 1980s, PDFs of the rules are available at a quite reasonable price and it’s been fun, challenging, and amusing to engaged with the typo filled rulebook.

Here’s to looking to 2020 with hope, optimism, and confidence.

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Movie Review: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

This will be a spoiler free review.

The Rise of Skywalker is the most disappointing Star Wars film since The Phantom Menace. After the movie finished, I stayed to watch the top line credits. Two people working as a team were credited as the writer with four people working as two teams were listed for story. Frankly I am surprised the writing credits were so brief. The film has such a cobbled together feel with so many disparate elements smashed together lacking any unifying whole that it feels of constant rewrites throughout production.

The movie lacks any sense of serious character arc and none that were established the previous two films in the trilogy. Characters speak and act only to further the thinnest of plot contrivances with all sense of stakes and dangers coming from exaggerated escalations that borrow from earlier films in the franchise.

When The Force Awakens repeated the first film’s beats, I thought that had been a fairly smart move. Returning to the beginning seemed to be a way to clean the slate after the disappointing prequels a way to return and let the audience know that this was going to be Star Wars again and not the laminations of Anakin Skywalker Jedi Stalker. The Last Jedi for all its controversy took bold swings and made firm commitments to interesting themes and characters. At the time there were interviews where people associated with the production stated that Rian Johnson had been given a free hand and that there was no grand outline for the trilogy. I doubted them. I doubted that Disney had spent 4 billion dollars and would let the series simply wing it. After seeing The Rise of Skywalker, I doubt no more.

Not only does this film not build upon anything established in The Last Jedi it uses elements from The Force Awakens as mere hand waving tools to attempt to explain away its own plot holes and deficiencies. The film is a series of action sequences strung together with the barest of plot quests. It feels like a video game where after completing an absurd mission the player is treated to a ‘cut scene’ to explain the threadbare story and the more action and fighting ensues as the next mission is launched. Even this comment does a disservice to many video games which have spent considerably more thought and time on their characters and story than The Rise of Skywalker.

J.J. Abrams having destroyed Star Trek has now repeated himself with the Star Wars universe. Let’s hope that maybe Quentin Tarantino has a Star Warsscript in his back pocket it. It will take something that bold to save the series.

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