I went to see this movie last weekend, and was looking forward to it after seeing the previews before some other movies. You know how that goes; sometimes they live up to expectations, other times they don’t. Now I grew up on the original The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland. It was a big TV event every year, and every year it was a family event to watch it. It was amazing that a movie made in the early days of color was so good. Of course the new movie is a prequel, I guess you would say, to a movie that was made seventy four years ago. Of course the effects and the backgrounds were better, but just because a movie has better special effects does not make it as good. However, Oz did not disappoint this movie goer. From the opening in black and white Kansas, to the land of Oz in full glorious color, to the climax of the film, is was wonderful.
Not to spoil the movie, but Oz is about an illusionist, womanizer and con man working a traveling circus who, running from a jealous boyfriend, jumps on a hot air balloon. He is sucked into a tornado and ends up in Oz, where he is seen as the fulfillment to a prophecy. Of course the con man takes advantage of the situation, and his self serving behavior actually makes things worse. But his very behavior as a con man and illusionist allows him to combat the wicked witches at the end. To this movie goer the coolest thing about the film was how it could seamlessly lead into the original. A lot of origins were explained, and everything was kept true enough to the Wizard of Oz that you could watch them back to back and come away with the feeling that they were made that way. Highly recommended, and I give it five stars.
Golden Age
I recently did a guest post at Linda R Harley’s Site, Rosebuz. My post, entitled How much is too much science?, is a post on my theme of getting the science right in science fiction. I am appreciative of Linda for allowing me to guest post on her blog, that of a book blogger who reviews books and gets the word out about independent writers. She performs a great service for independent authors and the reading community, and I look forward to the review she has promised of The Deep Dark Well. I have contacted several other book bloggers who have agreed to do author interviews or reviews in the future, depending on their schedules. I hope that happens, as it is a great boost in publicity. I have also had some who promised to do something and then didn’t. I sent a great deal of information to two bloggers, as well as a copy of one book for review, only to hear nothing after. For one I actually bought a webcam for a video interview. I tried to contact that blogger (though they actually called themselves a promoter) and kept getting a reply that they were still interested. I finally gave up. If they want to contact me that’s great. If not, I move on.
I still am not really sure how much publicity or reviews play into the success of a book online. One book, The Shadows of the Multiverse, has five 5 Star Reviews and went through its five day promotion on Amazon. I had planned for it to be the next book to take off after The Deep Dark Well, only it hasn’t happened. So far less that a hundred sales, though I still have hopes that it will someday take off, and even if it only sells forty books a month for the next couple of years it will have been worth the effort. Another science fiction novel, Exodus: Empires at War: Book One, just seemed to take off on its own. 1,300 sales in seven weeks, without the benefit of reviews or likes, though it has some of each now. I can only figure that a lot of the people who downloaded The Deep Dark Well when it was free, or bought it afterwards, wanted another of my books to read, and skipped over The Shadows of the Multiverse. Currently I have my Steampunk Fantasy, Daemon, on promotion, and based on past performance, I have no idea how it will do afterwards.
Is the effort of publicizing a book, whether through promotion, reviews or book blogging, really worth it? All I can say is it can’t hurt. Over the weekend I tried another method. I put a list of all of my current book on a page at the front of each ebook, with hyperlinks to their sales page on Amazon. I have also placed a The Favor of a Review section at the end of each book, along with a hyperlink to that book’s sales page where the reader can easily post a review. Will that help? I have no idea, but again it can’t hurt.
As I said in my last post, I wrote Daemon in 2010, looking for something different to maybe attract an agent. I had read some steampunk that had fantasy elements in it and decided on that approach rather than the steam robots and battles of airships approach. I set the story in a world where magic had taken over for technology, and technology had stagnated for centuries in the steam era. Steamships, automobile, trains and even airships were still around as necessary components of society, but magic had taken the place of much of technology. Lighting, security systems, even labor by undead zombies, were the norm. And as in most societies, the rich had access to everything and the poor struggled to survive. Only living on the streets in this world brought other dangers, both from the negative energy Shadows and the establishment looking for life energy to power the magical grid for the use of the haves.
The name Daemon is significant in three ways within the novel. Daemon Corporation is the most powerful company on the planet, and supplies the magical energy to the grid through the execution of criminals, the slaughter of food animals (and some more unsavory killings), and some above the law acquisitions that become apparent in the novel. Lucius Daemon is the Big Boss of the Corporation, a member of the Council of Mages that runs the government, and one of the most powerful magic users on the planet. A pillar of society, he is also an evil man who will let nothing get in his way. And the creature that is after the members of Daemon Corp is a Daemon, a force of nature that comes to us from Greek Mythology. It is not really evil, not Demonic, but can be quite destructive in its actions. It is the unstoppable force that is killing people who have a connection to the corporation responsible for feeding magical energy into the grid.
The only foil to the magic using majority is The Church of God Ascendant, the one surviving religion from the days when there were hundreds of denominations on the planet. They see magic as the evil which has caused the world’s problems, and will not use it in their day to day activities, unlike the rest of society. They see their God as the only salvation. They know the end is coming to the world of magic, and that the end will not be pleasant. But they are ignored by most of society. Remember to pick up your free copy on Amazon from 12/8-12/12. Now for the excerpt:
“So,” said Jude, attempting to keep his voice from cracking, and failing. “Where are we going?”
“Someplace really dry,” said Stark with a laugh. “Someplace where you can have some peace and quiet. And rest in peace.”
Jude didn’t like the sound of either of those. He tensed his muscles and released, seeing if he could get any slack in his bonds. He worked his fingers in the ropes and couldn’t tell if that had done any good. It didn’t seem to have. Just as he was about to try a spell another man came into the compartment and took a seat on the opposite bench, looking intently at Jude. Jude gave the man a questioning look and got a smile in return.
“Don’t try anything magical,” said the newcomer. “I am a trained Mage, and I am here to watch you. And to stop you.”
Jude grunted a reply, knowing that when the time came he would risk pitting himself against the man anyway. But the time had not come, and the airship continued out over the bay, its own string of powerful lights shining to illuminate the night.
The airship forged on for hours, or so it seemed to Jude, who did not have access to a timepiece. At one point something very large flew by, a thing bigger than any natural flying creature. The airship had bucked and turned, and the thing had screeched out in the dark before moving on.
“One of your future playmates,” said Stark, looking out the window with a worried expression. “But he’s going to have to wait for a moment.”
“So you’re going to dump me in the dead lands?” asked Jude, glaring at the Magara agent, feeling a chill run up his spine. “That’s still killing me.”
“Not really,” said Stark with a nasty smile. “You’ll be in decent shape when you hit the sand. We’re not going to push you out from too high, after all. Then some Shadow will take credit for ending your life, and you’re welcome to haunt it as long as you want.”
Jude looked back at the man, his mouth falling open. That would circumvent the intention of his spell. They would not kill him, not in the strictest sense. They would take the actions that led to his death, but they would be free from any burdens his spell could lay on them.
“In fact, I think it’s time we started you on your way,” said Stark, standing up and walking to the door to the cockpit. He opened that door and leaned in, saying something to the crew. The bottom seemed to drop out as the airship moved downward.
A crewman slid open the outer door, looking out into the night. He looked back and nodded. The heavyset white tough stood up and pulled Jude to his feet, then pulled him toward the door. Jude tried to dig in his feet, but was pushed around like a child.
Now, thought Jude, saying the trigger words to a spell. The ball of force radiated out from his hands, shredding the ropes that had them confined. Jude stifled a cry as the ropes burned into his flesh as they were ripped away. The tough looked at him, a glare of anger on his face, and grabbed Jude’s right hand before the Detective could bring it up.
This was a time that Jude wished he had a repertoire of spells, like a real battlemage. He had only learned a few in his time in the military, and maybe another couple while he was learning and practicing forensics. He didn’t have much to throw. He only knew a couple, but he knew those well. He reached into himself and drew power from the airship’s system, raised his left hand, and sent the tough into the wall. The man dragged him along, maintaining a tight grip on Jude’s wrist. Jude brought his left hand into the man’s face in an open hand strike, adding a force blast at the end.
The tough’s head smacked into the wall. Blood spurted from his nose and dripped from his ears as his eyes went blank. His grip loosened on Jude’s wrist and the Detective jerked it away, turning from the stricken man and assessing the situation in the cabin.
He didn’t like the snap assessment he had made. Stark was reaching into his jacket, grabbing at something to draw out. The other Mage was mumbling some words and raising his hands in Jude’s direction. The black tough was moving toward him with outstretched hands, while a crewman was picking up a metal bar, obviously to use as a weapon.
Jude snapped a ball of force at the other Mage first, sending the man back into a wall. The Mage grunted and lost his spell, giving Jude a moment of respite from his attentions. Jude snapped his left hand and sent another ball of force into Stark, lifting the man from his feet and sending him into the cabin ceiling. Stark landed back on the floor with a huff of expelled air, and then scrambled to grab a seat frame to keep from falling from the ship. Jude reached inside for one more shot as the tough grabbed at his shirt. The ball hit the tough in the stomach and lifted him into the air, to fly with a scream from the airship and fall away.
Jude glimpsed a flash of black in the light, just before huge claws snatched the tough out of the air and into the darkness. The man’s screams faded quickly.
Jude didn’t have any more power left. He made a motion toward the crewman that made the man flinch away, then looked back over at the Mage. The man was coming to his knees and saying words of power. Jude ran toward Stark, hoping he could get to the agent and use him for cover. Just when he was about there the cabin shuddered with a thunderous roar and Jude’s muscles twitched and spasmed as electricity flooded his body. He cried in pain and stumbled, his muscles losing all their strength. Before anyone could stop him he fell through the door and into the night.
When I was growing up there were a large number of science fiction movies appearing at the theater. Most involved cigar shaped space
ships with flames curving out of the ends (a product of filming the things in an Earth gravity field and atmosphere). There were bug eyed aliens, and men in flight suits and jet pilot helmets fighting them with .45 caliber pistols in hand. Or the men fell in with the hot women from Venus, or some other hokey plot. The actors were the B-list marvels who we saw in the same kind of movie last year and the year before. Some were decent actors. Most weren’t. They were still exciting to a young mind, who imagined blasting off with the spacemen and patrolling the lanes of the Solar System. And then there was the first of the truly modern science fiction movies, Forbidden Planet.
Forbidden Planet was a different sort of beast. Made a year before I walked this planet (or should I say the year before I lay in a crib screaming for food and crapping my diapers) Forbidden Planet had a cool looking flying saucer (that was stolen by Twilight Zone and many others later on), a great robot (also stolen for Twilight Zone and many others), an alien civilization that made you think, disintegrator beams, and really out of this world electronic music. Of course, since it was done at the beginning of the atomic age everything was atomic, with Neutron Beam disintegrators, in a time when the risks of nuclear power were not as clear. It had big name stars like Ann Francis and Walter Pidgeon, and Leslie Neilsen when he still considered becoming a serious actor. The setting was a planet around another star system. The special effects were wonderful for the time, even better than what Star Trek boasted ten years later, though to give Trek credit, they were a TV Show and as such low budget. I kept trying to catch Forbidden Planet on TV when I was small, but my parents kept taking me to other events when it was showing, so I never really saw the whole movie until I was twelve. When I did I was amazed. And science fiction movies as a whole got better.
Oh, not immediately. There were still low budget flicks with bug eyed monsters or civilizations of gorgeous women and no men, and rocket ships that would take forever just to get to Mars, but could get to the imaginary inhabitable worlds swarming our Solar System in days. But the seeds were planted by Disney, and we started getting some better movies in the 60s, even more in the 70s, and now we have a bunch of really high quality space movies coming out each year. Forbidden Planet opened up the possibility of movies about travel to other stars, a mainstay of written science fiction at the time, but not explored on the big screen. It opened up robots that weren’t just clunking pieces of stove pipe. And it opened up alien civilizations that weren’t just cruising the Galaxy looking for easy marks to conquer, and that didn’t look like us with silver skin. I think Forbidden Planet was a risk at the time. But it was a risk that paid off. I have watched the movie several times lately. Friends have remarked that it seems dated. To me it still looks wonderful. No, it’s not Star Wars or Trek, but keeping in context the time it was a very well done movie, a true classic that set the stage for Star Trek and Wars. And now I discover a Facebook Page called Forbidden Planet, that is not just a celebration of the movie, but of all science fiction. So hooray for Forbidden Planet, and may the Krell always dwell in our hearts and our imaginations.
I switched my first published book, The Deep Dark Well, to KDP Select about a month ago, making Amazon the exclusive marketer of this novel. From 09/07/2012 to 09/11/2012 it will be offered for free on Kindle. I really like this book, and consider it one of my best. Written in 2004, just after I had gone through a divorce that really hurt, I submitted it to the three publishers that accept unsolicited work in my genres and received two very detailed rejections that praised the book, the plot, the characters, the setting. The problem was neither publisher thought it would make a ton of money, probably because it was classic science fiction. I still believe that people want to read this kind of scifi, thought publishers and agents don’t agree. I set the book aside for many years, then brought it out for agent submissions when I started down that path. Then a final polishing before self publishing. And reading the book that I had not read in years gave me the impression that this was a damned good novel. I put it out on Amazon without really understanding formatting, but fixed that problem. I have gotten three reviews so far, one three star and two five stars, though the three star was as heavy on their praise as any. But after selling about seventy copies of the book I have yet to get past three reviews. So if you want to read a damned good classic science fiction novel in the tradition of Niven and Anderson, get the book for free and come back to the Amazon page to leave a review. Here is the blurb I use for the book on Amazon:
An Adventure Forty Thousand Years in the making
Pandora Latham was just a country girl from Alabama turned Kuiper Belt Miner. The last thing Pandi expected was to run into a ship from the future on the outskirts of Sol system. Even less expected was that the ship would fall apart while she was inside it, the Universe correcting the paradox. The wormhole in the center of the ship beckoned, and Pandi jumped through, forty thousand years into the future. She arrived on a massive station built around a black hole. Once the center of a Galactic Civilization, the station was used to generate wormhole gates linking the Cosmos. The empty station is a memorial to the civilization that once was.
One survivor, an immortal being called Watcher, remains, guarding the secrets of the station from those who covet its advanced technology. Watcher, lonely from his self-enforced exile, befriends Pandi. Soon the woman from Alabama discovers that there is more to Watcher than is apparent on the surface. What was Watcher’s part in the fall of civilization? The answer to this question will determine whether Pandora Latham survives in this world, or becomes just one more death added to the trillions who went before her.
Grand adventure in the tradition of Larry Niven and Poul Anderson, set in a far future in which many struggle for supremacy, and one woman from the past will decide the winner.
And the book trailer: The Deep Dark Well.
And the three reviews in their entirety:
Azog (3 stars):
Not too bad. I am in agreement with the product blurb, in that I was often reminded of the great grandmasters of sci-fi like Asimov and Niven. Set in far distant future, when galactic empires have risen and fallen, leaving barely a memory of their existence. Massive engineering on incomprehensible scales. There are also nods to some of the great writers within the story.
The story was well-paced. It wasn’t a frenetic page turner like some action novels, but I don’t think there was any moment where I felt bored with the story. Mysteries are introduced in such a way which made me wanting to keep reading. The major actors were introduced in a manner which felt natural, and the overall backstory developed over the course of the novel. I would certainly like to read more of this story.
So why three stars if I enjoyed it so much? There were some minor editing errors, typical typos and such. But the typesetting (or text formatting, since it’s an e-book) needs to be addressed. The text changed fonts in various places, at random times. This threw me for a mental loop, since font changes such as this are often used as a story-telling device, e.g. perhaps to indicate a computer speaking. But there did not seem to be a reason, as the text would change size and font from one paragraph to another. Paragraphs were also either indented too far, or not at all. It may sound like a minor nag which I’m harping on, but typesetting is as fundamental to the book as editing and the story itself.
Janet D Ballard: A Fun Read. (5 stars)
This is classic space opera, with the science updated to modern specs. Admittedly I have a bias because I cut my teeth on E E Doc Smith, James Blish and others of this genre. I finished it in one read. I hope the author does more like this, as this type of book has become uncommon in the last few decades. Another review mentions some problems with the publication that are more of the nature of editing and “typesetting”, and while those are obvious, they did not detract from my overall satisfaction with the book.
Runningbear: Dancing Madly Backwards, then forwards again. (5 stars)
I enjoyed this one all the way through, and the beginning didn’t give a hint at where it was going to end. I especially like the way Dandridge introduces limitations on the end-time hardware. Star Trek’s easy technology is just that, easy. This book presents tremendous technologies, but each have their limitations and even hazards, something all to true in life. High speed sub-light travel with the downside of braking to deal with, not something dealt with in traditional sci-fi much. The author left open the possibility to follow the characters for further adventures. I hope he follows up on this. Great read with more solid detail than is typical.
And finally an excerpt of that solid detail:
The huge cylinder rotated into place. The wormhole com link made the distance between it and its control center meaningless. The wormhole sensor link made the distance between it and its target meaningless. The unit powered up, energy flowing along the millions of kilometers of power cables within the cylinder. Gathering at the conversion chambers. Power spiked to maximum, as the beam of gravitons, the messenger particles of gravity, streamed through the expanding wormhole sensor link. Target, the Nation of Humanity battle cruiser Dolphin.
* * *
The engineering crew of the Dolphin were about their normal business. Basically their business was to be there when automated systems malfunctioned. Or when damage occurred during battle that needed to be repaired quickly. Currently all fusion generators were on line, powered up to three quarters full. All that was needed for alert status. It was always good policy to keep a reserve. The matter/antimatter generators were off line at this time. That much energy was only needed when the space destroying drive was on line.
Crewmen and women were dressed in their battle gear, hard composite armor panels over environment suits, proof against most of the types of hard radiation one might find in a space battle. Helmets were for the most part detached, hooked to belts or set on stands near duty stations. Everything was running smoothly and efficiently. Inertialess drives were tuned perfectly, energy storage packs at full charge. Cooling systems were damping the heat of fusion reactors to the radiators on the skin of the ship.
Everything was running smoothly and efficiently, until disaster struck without warning. The first inkling the engineers had that something was wrong was when objects sitting on shelves or workstations began to slide and fall to the floor. Within moments these same objects were flying through the air, followed by helmets and other heavier objects. Then the crew had to grab onto whatever was at hand, or be pulled across the floor toward a gravity source much greater than that generated by the ship’s artificial field.
The central fusion center was hit the worst, and the first. The large room was sucked free of atmosphere, a roaring wind pulled into the high center of the chamber. Crew grabbed for helmets, then quickly for holds to keep from being pulled along with the air. The environmental systems struggled to dump enough air into the room to keep it stable. Not enough, not nearly fast enough.
Here objects were swept into the point, to disappear in a flash of light. To disappear from sight, but not from the Universe. A helmet swept in, obliterated in an instant. A crewman was pulled in, his screams over the intercom squelched at the instant of his contact with the point, though it took a moment for the gory mess of a disrupted body to be pulled in as well.
Survivors belted themselves to whatever was available, using the safety straps provided on their environmental suits. These were the witnesses to the next phase of the destruction. Braces pulled loose in silence from the nearest fusion reactor, crumpling like tin foil as they struck the point source, to disappear. The closest crew followed, belts tearing, or bodies and suits coming apart under the inexorable pull of gravity. Only those furthest from the source were to survive, for now, though the pain of tidal forces brought screams of agony over the ship’s intercoms.
Matter was squeezed together by the terrific concentration of gravity. Even compressed beyond the resistance of the electron shells. Charges flowed from protons, turning all into a mass of neutrons swathed in a thin shell of electron liquid. Gravity increased as more gravitons entered the mix, informing time and space of the existence of mass that didn’t really exist.
The point source began to move, forward, pulling in more and more matter, as it crushed its way through the bulkhead to the next compartment.
* * *
“Commodore,” yelled the engineering liaison from his station. “We are under attack.”
“From what?” asked Elishas. She was still trying to puzzle the data on the anomalies sent from the flagship. And there had been no warning of any kind of attack.
“We don’t know,” answered the officer. “But it’s tearing the engine rooms apart.”
“On screen,” she ordered. Immediately an image formed, of a distortion of glowing air, swinging swiftly through the antimatter reactor room. Objects flew in blurs into the object, ripped from their places. A cooling pipe tore loose as they watched, to disappear in a flash.
“If it ruptures one of the antimatter storage tanks,” said the hushed voice of the navigator.
Yes, thought Elishas. If it ruptured an antimatter storage tank the Dolphin would be reduced to a great number of small particles moving from the center of the explosion with great speed. Then the point was through the next bulkhead and moving forward. The bridge crew breathed a sigh of relief. A short-lived sigh.
“It’s coming forward,” cried the science officer, echoing the thoughts of others.
The ball of neutronium was indeed coming forward, growing more massive with each traverse of a chamber, pulling crew and equipment into its embrace. The ship shuddered from the assault as bulkheads began to buckle. The view screens followed its progress. To the relief of the commodore it stopped, in the exact center of the ship. Already a thousand tons of matter had been compressed. A small proportion of the ship, to be sure, but still a threat.
Billions of kilometers away the graviton beam was switched off. Instantly the source of gravity that had pulled the thousand tons of matter into a microscopic neutronium sphere disappeared. Matter could not exist in such a concentration without sufficient force pulling it together. There were still sufficient charges within the ball to generate the natural repulsive forces of like charged matter.
Within a nanosecond of the removal of force the ball exploded outward, particles reaching an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. This explosion in itself would have destroyed the vessel beyond recognition. The rupturing of the antimatter storage tanks, followed closely by the destruction of the negative matter pods, assured that little in the way of matter was left to clog the lanes of space.
* * *
Dolphin flared as a brilliant light on the view holo, followed an instant later by the form of the Tiger Shark. Bridge crew covered their eyes instinctively, though the display would never reproduce light powerful enough to damage eyesight.
“What happened?” demanded the admiral, his mouth dropping open at the spectacle of the complete destruction of two of his vessels. No warhead he knew of could have destroyed them so quickly, or approached so invisibly.
“Should we move the squadron back?” asked the captain nervously.
“Yes,” said Gerasi, his voice hushed. “At flank speed.”
“Helmsman,” yelled the captain, “full speed astern. Transmit orders to the rest of the squadron to do the same.”
“Stop us when we are another billion kilometers out,” ordered the admiral.
“You don’t intend to run from this display of power?” asked the captain incredulously.
“We don’t even know what it was,” answered Gerasi, strength creeping back into his voice.
“The gravitation anomaly spiked just before the destruction of the two vessels,” said the wide-eyed science officer. “Ejecta consisted of neutrons, gamma particles and microscopic particles of matter. It will take some time to completely analyze the remains from this distance.”
“We sure as hell are not going to get any closer to that thing until we figure out what happened,” said Gerasi. And what then. He couldn’t go back to the home system empty handed, especially with the loss of two capital ships. But what good to sacrifice all the vessels. All the crews.
“Transmission coming through,” said the com officer.
“Put it on,” ordered the admiral.
The creature appeared on the holo. No longer looking frightened. Its voice no longer trembling with fear.
“How did you like my little pyrotechnic display?” it asked, a smile cracking its narrow face.
“You were responsible for this?” yelled Admiral Miklas Gerasi, waving a fist at the holo. Of course the creature would not be able to respond for over an hour round trip transmission. He couldn’t wait till he had the creature in his grasp, able to communicate by means of voice and pain, instantaneously.
“Of course I was responsible for this,” said the creature. “Oh, don’t look so shocked, my dear admiral.”
“You, have instantaneous communications?”
“Of course,” it replied. “Only primitives such as yourselves do not.
“I had hoped that all of your little ships would have stepped into my parlor. Then I would not have to worry about watching your vessels, filled with semi intelligent monkeys capering about their controls. Now you have been warned. Stay away from the Donut. If you approach closer than two billion kilometers you will never again see the stars of your home. Bring this warning back to the men who sent you. This is my space, and mine alone, and I do not intend to share it with any half evolved protohumans.”
“And what name shall I give my Patriarch, when he asks who gave this ultimatum to an admiral of his fleet?”
“Tell him Vengeance gave the ultimatum. Tell him Vengeance awaits whatever he might send to test my resolve.”
The holo went blank before Gerasi could reply. The admiral stared into the display of stars that took its place for a moment.
“Halt the squadron,” he ordered.
“You don’t mean you believe him about the two billion kilometer limit?” asked the captain with a shaking voice. “The crew will not like being so close.”
“He would have destroyed us already if he meant to,” said the admiral. “Besides, who commands here? The crew, or me?
“I want an analysis on the remains of the two vessels he destroyed,” said Gerasi, as he left his seat and headed for his day cabin. “Keep me informed.”
I hope that many people will pick up what I consider to be a damned good read this weekend for free at Amazon, The Deep Dark Well. And please come back and leave a review.
When I self-published my first eBook, The Deep Dark Well, I was a little fearful of getting reviews. You know, the kind that tell you that you are nothing as a writer, and how dare you darken their page with your lack of ability. I thought I had a good book. The long rejection letters I had received from two big name publishers gave me reason to believe that it was better than most of the submissions they received. The same from friends or members of critique groups who had read some of the book. There is still that fear, and I went to Amazon to look at my first review with a sense of dread. And surprise, he liked it. He only gave me a three, since I had a lot of formatting problems on Kindle, which I have since learned to correct before putting something out, but the book itself was praised. Then I got two five star reviews. And since then, nothing. The book has sold, some, as have the other nine I have put out online. But the reviews are not coming in. And from what I have read, an author lives or dies on his or her reviews. I have also recently read that many writers get every friend and family member they can use their influence on to write a review, and have also heard that people are starting to discount those reviews, unless they are accompanied by a Top Reviewer tag. I have avoided asking friends to write reviews, feeling that it would be better to have actual readers review the work. But when only about one in thirty buying the book write a review I wonder if that is a workable strategy.
Recently I have put two of my books into the KDP Select program, more as an experiment to see if it works than anything else. For those who don’t know, KDP Select makes the author pull that particular work from any other outlet that might sell it, including their own website, and sell exclusively on Amazon for a 90 day period. The author can then renew, or take the book out of the select program. One of the benefits of the program is the ability to promote it for free on Amazon for five days during that 90 day period. So, on September 7 through 11 The Deep Dark Well will be offered for free on Amazon. I hope a lot of people go there and download this labor of love for free. And I hope more than one in thirty of them write a review, or at least click the write button on the book page. I have no control over that part of it, I can only hope that enough will comment to send it over the top. Go over to Amazon at The Deep Dark Well Page and get yours during that five day period. It’s science fiction as written by the old masters, with science.
Everyone of course knows about Superman, the Man of Steel (though he is actually much stronger than steel or he would have long since been splattered over the landscape). The original Superman (not the comic hero) was actually a villain with aspirations of World Domination. He wasn’t near as powerful as the later comic version. And of course the DC version was a Boy Scout with the ability to fly, lift trains overhead, and bounce bullets from his chest. At some point he entered the absurd, gaining the ability to throw planets into each other and at one point blowing out a sun (like to see how many gas giant planets he had to suck in to pull that one off). It was always shown in the comics that Superman became such a straight arrow due to his rearing by Jonathan and Martha Kent in the very small town of, you guessed it, Smallville. With a kind voice and a firm hand they were able to rear the super-tyke to achieve manhood as a saint, willing to fling his invulnerable body into any situation that needed a helping hand. How realistic is this scenario? (Like being able to blow out a sun is realistic.)
Now I was trained as a child psychologist, and did all the coursework for the PhD, as well as twice the clinical work needed for pre-internship training. I left before getting the degree for reasons that had nothing to do with lack of competence in the field, and continued to work with children seven years after that, before getting into another area of social service. One of the things I remember from graduate school was you can not reason with small children. Talking to a two to five year old (and in most cases even with older children) is a waste of breath. Dr. Spock was wrong. That statement was drilled into me at the same time I was taught the use of Time Out and other disciplinary procedures that did work on the little creatures that someday would become reasoning beings. The fact is that children, while they do posses some reasoning abilities (as anyone who has seen a child figure out how to reach the cookie jar on top of the high cabinet can attest to), about as much as some apes and monkeys, they possess very little in the way of impulse control. They want what they want and they want it now. Only physical force, or the threat of it, can stop them. A firm no can work, if it is backed with a past experience of what it means to ignore the command, like some sessions in time out or a good spanking. Otherwise the word no will get a strange look and then be ignored as the child plunges on ahead with what its little mind is telling it to do.
So how does this concern little Superman, or Super Toddler? The question would be, how do you spank an invulnerable toddler? How do you force a tantruming child into time out? How do you keep a child who can punch out an Abrams tank from splattering you all over the living room if you attempt to discipline him? I guess you might be able to use Kryptonite, if some is handy. Otherwise there is no way to correct the behavior of this child, who, according to my experience, will grow up to be at least a brat, if not a complete Sociopath/Psychopath, and not the Boy Scout portrayed in the comics. This is a Superman who would be better called Disaster-in-the-Making-Man. I see two outcomes for this character. Either he will rule the world. Or mankind will find a way to destroy him. Given that in the comics we seemed to have attracted more than our fair universal share of Kryptonite, I would bank on the latter outcome. But wouldn’t he have made a great villain for someone like the Flash to fight?
Decades ago I read one of the Kane novels by Karl Edward Wagner. I was impressed by the amoral immortal that was only out for himself, but at the time was only reading things that came easily to hand. I found no more Kane novels lying around and more or less forgot about the character. But not really. This year I looked up Kane and found that Wagner had written three novels and a number of shorts about the man who was cursed with eternal life. I found the complete shorts at the local library and bought the three novels in paperback form over the net. Masterful works full of mood, and an unforgettable character that might be called evil, but was also capable of doing good, even if it was accidental.
I became interested in the character because I was working on a series that featured immortal humans empire building on a world of magic, and wanted to read the perspective of a very successful writer who developed his own immortal character. Now my immortals were more along the line of Milo Morai in the Horseclans novels of Robert Adams. Engaged in life, mentoring the shorter lived peoples around them, sometimes cruel, but always for a good reason. The other immortal I am familiar with that might have lent something to the development of my own was Lazarus Long, Robert Heinlein’s immortal man who cloned himself as female twins and went back in time to have sex with his mother. Long was somewhat amoral, in a society that accepted such. But he was not really a bad guy.
Kane is a bad man in most respects. Part of it has to do with the curse that was laid upon him by a mad God for killing his brother and leading a revolt against the deity. Part of it had to do with living through the passage of so much time, where, as Wagner relates, centuries pass like years for most of us, and Kane grows bored with everyday activities, seeking the chaos that is the only thing that makes it all worth living. And, as Wagner states in another story, short lived beings like humans, whose lives flicker like candles before one who will live forever, seem useless. Kane does not mourn the loss of most people, they are just objects that will inhabit his world for the briefest of times. While he does mourn the loss of an ancient city, or even a tower or a wall, things that could provide constancy for at least some centuries of his existence. This was a different perspective on immortality, a fresh if dark perspective. Kane can still be loyal to friends who stand by him, or lovers who take away some of the loneliness, and even shows kindness toward his stallion, Angel, in Dark Crusade. But mostly he doesn’t really care for the short lived sparks of life that surround him. His attitude seems to be that more will be made, and he will again be surrounded by them as he continues his march through eternity. Makes me wonder what the attitude would be of an immortal race or species toward a shorter lived species. Would they think them worthless because they did not enjoy the same life span, even if the immortal race was not any smarter or stronger? Superiority based on life span alone. It could happen, since we have seen examples of superiority through skin color or circumstances of birth, why not from something that would seem more of a birth advantage.
My immortal characters will be more like Morai and Long than Kane, though he could become the pattern for the more evil characters I will have in my work. But I would not steal Kane whole cloth from Wagner. Kane is one of a kind, and deserves to remain so. I wonder if Wagner’s dark style comes from his having worked in Psychiatry. I was trained to be a Psychologist, and still work in social services, and I know my thoughts tend to run toward the darker aspects of human nature. Whatever the source, Wagner’s dark side brought forth some marvelous works. It was a shame he did not live long enough to give us more of Kane’s story. Just as it was a shame that Robert Adams died before he answered some of the questions in the Horseclans saga. Unfortunately the writers of immortal characters do not enjoy the same advantages as their creations, and death comes knocking sooner than any of us suspect.
Use to be in the day a writer could send their work directly to the publisher. An editor might read it, and if he liked it the work would be presented to the other editors at the house for approval. Then an offer would be made, and the author would call an agent asking for representation. In many cases the first agent contacted would agree to represent an author with publishing contract waiting. In the days of Asimov, Heinlein and others there were hundreds of publishers, all willing to accept manuscripts from authors, all hoping to find the next gem buried in the garbage. Manuscripts may have gone into a slush pile, and had to wait their turn to be read, unless a big name was attached to them. But the only job of the agent was to negotiate the contract, payments and rights, for the author.
Things changed for the worse sometime after this golden age. More people started to write, and more submissions were made. Publishers went out of business and suddenly there were fewer of them. And the slush piles grew to the size of mountains. With the exception of a handful of publishers all of them decided that the way out of this problem was to only accept manuscripts that were submitted by agents. That way they would only have to look at fairly decent submissions, and could avoid looking at the truly eye hurting junk that could end up on the pile.
So the paradigm shifted with this decision, and instead of publishers being inundated by an overwhelming wave of submissions, the tsunami shifted to agents. Oh, there are still some publishers out there that accept unsolicited manuscripts as they are called. I used to send to the three in my genre that still accept these manuscripts, and would wait a year for the reply. Some of those replies were very good, the kind of reply that lets you know they read a good portion of the manuscripts and were found a worthy product of a semi-skilled writer. But they didn’t result in sales, and in the mysterious ways of the business they said absolutely nothing that would improve the chance of a later sale. But the way to go, or so I was told, was to contact agents.
Now I respect agents and the job they do. It is not an easy job, and they catch hell from both above and below. I respect them, but I don’t always like them. In some ways they seem ill suited to their roles as the new gate keepers of the publishing world. Some are so young that I can’t believe they actually have much deep knowledge of the genres they represent. Some claim a mystic connection to the tastes and desires of the readers. And all the time I find myself reading truly awful works that agents sell to publishing houses. But my main beef with agents is the way they misrepresent themselves in their replies to writers. Terms like “careful evaluation” and “a good look” are used in replies that are returned within hours of an email submission. I understand they don’t have time to actually look at everything sent their way, but they try to represent that they did. And some replies, like “thanks for the look” or “Not for me” really seem to show how much time, or the lack thereof, they really put into their evaluations. Now not all agents reply like this, and I really appreciate the ones who say they find the idea interesting, or that I am obviously a good writer. At least they are taking a look at the material, though I am sure it is a short one. They still don’t give any kind of response that is actually helpful in navigating the maze of their creation. Nothing about what is wrong with the submission. Nothing about what they are really looking for. They must figure that there are enough people out there trying to get published that by chance the right submission will come in.
I acknowledge that agents are now the gate keepers of the modern publishing industry. I don’t think they are qualified for this role that was really thrust upon them, but they have it. And that in and of itself makes me really glad that we are in the middle of a self publishing revolution.
Many years ago, when I was in the Army stationed in Germany, I remember seeing an album cover by a local band called Nektar. The title of the album was Remember the Future. I always thought it was a cool cover and a really cool title. But what did that title mean, remember the future? I believe we all make up our futures depending on what we see around us. We predict, we plan, and most times we are wrong. Each generation makes its own future. Edgar Rice Burroughs, in Beyond The Farthest Star, envisioned a world where great air fleets battled the skies at supersonic speeds, with props. That was what they saw as the ultimate in aerial technology, so they pushed the envelop with what they knew. Back in the Golden Age it was thought that we would have moon bases in the 1960s, space stations in orbit, maybe even flights to Mars and beyond. It was also thought that the world would have three or four massive computers and everyone would send their data in to be crunched. Sure, we have mainframes, more than they imagined. But no one saw the billions of smaller computers, desktop, notebooks, even intelligent phones, and the international net that links them together.
The future of my childhood was shaped by the space program. From the west coast of Florida I watched the launches of Saturn Vs across the peninsula, their sun bright flames pushing them into orbit and beyond. Man walked on the Moon. There were plans to push the envelop, Moon Bases, Space Habitats, trips to the outer Solar System. 2001 came out in the 60s, a science fiction novel written by a real scientist. It predicted Howard Johnson’s restaurants in orbit, regular flights into orbit (though Pan Am didn’t survive much past the novel), a major complex on the surface of the Moon, even a voyage of exploration to Saturn (the original destination, which was changed to Jupiter in the movie and subsequent books). So WTF happened? I think it was the Cold War that sucked all the funding out of the planned space programs of the two superpowers. Fortunately the other prediction of the time, Nuclear Armageddon, also didn’t come to pass.
This generation’s vision of the future includes genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and virtual worlds. Again we predict the future we think will come, as well as the future we hope to hell never rears its ugly head. The old mainstays of scifi are still there. Space travel, FTL, Interstellar Empires. Most are set so far in the future that the writer does not have to worry about his world being destroyed by time. Some still make the mistake of wishful thinking and make the technology come too fast. My old mentor Charles Sheffield wrote novels in the early twenty first century that predicted an explored and settled Solar System in 2080, a date most thought was much too optimistic. As far as more Earthly technologies, everyone’s guess is as good as any others’. We can make predictions based on what we know about the here and now, and the logical progression of trends and technologies. What we can’t always predict is the new and the unusual, things which come without warning out of laboratories and Universities. The things which generate new trends, industries and cultures. But we still take a shot at developing the future, the settings for new stories, new characters, new history.
Follow Future Trends on PhutureNews, a blog of some hot scifi writers and new comers. Link on the side of the page.
Find my books, The Deep Dark Well, The Hunger, Diamonds In The Sand and soon The Scorpion on Amazon, Smashwords and my website, Imagination Unlimited.
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