Unless you lived in a cave or just came down from another planet, you have either seen Jurassic Park, read the book, or heard a reference to it in some post of popular culture. And not just from the official movies or books. Since it came out there have been dozens of movies made along the same theme, bringing dinosaurs back to life. Now in the movie they found dinosaur DNA in mosquitoes trapped in amber, and plugged the gaps with frog DNA. From what I have read this would not have worked. Either the dinosaur DNA would not have been well enough preserved, or the frog DNA would have altered the organism beyond recognition. So does that mean we will never see these big creatures again? As one of my favorite sports personalities says, not so fast. While it’s true that we may never see the exact same beast again, minus some kind of time travel that allows us to go back and collect eggs, or at least DNA, from the living beast, we may be able to construct some kind of facsimile. Whether we should or not is another question, but that has never seemed to stop us from doing anything.
Now most people have heard of the Human Genome Project, which is mapping the genetic structure of humans and finding out what does what in the Chromosomes. What many people don’t realize is that we are doing the same thing with other organism, plants, animals, fungi and microbes. Eventually we will have a complete map of the genome of just about every organism on Earth, and soon to follow will be an understanding of what each gene does. From there it is a simple step to design organism with the traits we want, sheep with better wool, fruit trees with multiple crops each year, guard dogs with more intelligence, you name it. There are many who are protesting this technology, saying it leads to dangers from the engineered foods, or falling back on religious objections that only God should design living things. The fact of the matter is there is no way to stop it, short of forming a world government and police force, which raises objections with other people. You may be able to stop crops from being grown in your country. You will not be able to do anything about a private lab in Singapore.
Once every gene is coded then designer organisms can be planned and basically built. Computer studies can show us what to expect from certain genetic combinations, probably not one hundred percent, but still in the ball park. Then comes the difficult part, the trial and error of growing the beasts. So we want a fifty ton sauropod that generally looks like an Apatosaur. Or a Tyranosaur. And we build it. And suddenly we have zoos with animals that have never existed on Earth, but have a close enough resemblance to the originals that we can hang signs on the enclosures and let people come to ooh and ah over them. Of course there may other uses for smaller animals that have been genetically engineered. I don’t see where a giant sauropod or a large carnosaur would be all that useful in the modern or future world. But velociraptors or other smaller forms might be useful for security or warfare. Or modifications of modern animals, such as the war jaguars in Michael Moorcocks Dorian Hawkmoon series. Or genetically modified house pets for space colonies. People may protest, but if it can happen it will happen. I for one look toward it with mixed feelings. But the decision is not in my hands. Nor, really, is it in yours.
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All posts for the month September, 2012
Vampires have always been a fascination of mine. Hell, I think they have been a fascination for almost anyone who reads or writes in the realm of the fantastic. Vampires are the ultimate undead (and I know some of you Mummy fans are going to disagree). They retain their human intelligence for the most part, combined with the animal cunning of a predator. They are strong and fast (how fast depends on the mythology of the literature they inhabit). In some works, like Bram Stoker’s, they are able to assume the forms of animals such as wolves, bats and rats, and can turn into mist and slide through the smallest of spaces. And in some works, again Stoker is the example, they can control weather. In the old vampire lore staking might kill them, but trying to stake them at night was an exercise in futility, as the stake would just go through their incorporeal form. In more modern works a stake will take them out no matter what. The vampires of old lore were really more powerful, in most cases, than those of modern works. They really couldn’t be harmed at night, just chased off by religious symbols. It was only during the day, when they were in their coffins, that they could be destroyed. And they tried very hard to make their resting places hidden from even the most determined of hunters. Of course not all Vampires were powerful. In some Eastern European regions they were seen as very weak, weaker than humans, and sort of like zombies with more intelligence. And like zombies they were more dangerous in packs.
In modern times many vampires are treated as almost normal humans with extraordinary powers. They dance, they drink, they go to clubs, and only drink blood when they need to. Some are even goods guys, the detective in Forever Knight comes to mind. I like these stories, but am more attracted to the vampires that are really evil.
My own Vampire novel, The Hunger, is being offered for promotion on KDP Select on October 5th through 9th. I wanted this novel to be different from the modern stories I see so much of, so I decided to go to the roots. Bram Stoker. Now Stoker did not originate the vampire, but he borrowed from the various legends to create the monster we are most familiar with. Vampires who are strong and fast, but not the blurs that some moderns are. Able to shape change, control the weather, not able to enter a dwelling without an invitation, having to be in their coffins by sunrise, but also able to move around during part of the day. And most of all evil. Not good guys, who lament their being vampires, though they may be tormented by nightmares (not really in Stoker, but from some other early vampire movies, i.e. Mark Of The Vampire). And spreading their disease with each kill, not having to do some organized ritual to turn a victim into monster. Anyone they kill rises in three days as a vampire unless something is done to prevent it.
Lucinda Taylor, the protagonist, is a vampire. But she regains her free will when her master is killed and goes after her own targets. She still has to kill to survive, but she makes sure her kills don’t rise again. Other vampires in the story do the same thing essentially. The old vampire tales always bothered me in that the vampire always made too many of his kind, and nothing spoils the party like too many guests. People catch on, and as I say in the story, nothing scares the vampires more than a city’s Baptist Ministers reinforced by the National Guard on their trail. Vampires against troops and religious figures during the day is a no win situation for the undead. But make no mistake. Lucinda is still evil, and does evil to evil in the name of vengeance. And the book is raw, with street language, drugs, gangs, and sexual situations. Vampires use sexual attraction to lure in victims after all. This is not a book for those who prefer gentle language and gentle people. But then again, the subject matter is not a gentle one, when we are talking natural killers, both human and inhuman. I hope that people will take a look at this book when it hits its free promotion. I think it is as well written as The Deep Dark Well, my scifi novel. And now an excerpt.
“What the hell are you?” he screamed as the weapon clicked on the empty chamber. He reached frantically into his jacket, trying to fumble another magazine, then tried to ram it home. But as his hands shook the new magazine refused to go where the old one still resided.
Lucinda took off in a sprint toward the man, moving faster than humanly possible, faster than the swiftest sprinter. She lowered her shoulder and took Carlos in the ribs, feeling the bones crack as she lifted him into the air. The man struck his right shoulder and arm against the wall, grunting out his breath. Lucinda was past him and into the living room as he slid down the wall to the floor, the machine pistol falling from nerveless fingers as consciousness fled.
Lucinda pivoted on her right foot, turning toward the family room, as more bullets whizzed past her, the sound of cracking plaster and breaking porcelain sounding to her sensitive ears. One large man, with the mass of a football player, came straight at her from the glass doors, lowering his shoulders and reaching his arms out into a classic tackle. Lucinda leapt into the air and brushed the ceiling as she flew over his form, which was falling to the floor after not meeting the resistance it had been preparing itself for. The vampire did a turn in the air, as she thanked herself for the gymnastics lessons her mom had insisted that she take, and landed lightly on her feet.
She could sense that the door before her was locked, and she didn’t have the key. So going into a crouch and out again she sprung toward the double doors and crashed through the glass, leaving jagged hanging splinters behind her. Women screamed as she propelled her naked form across the flagstones. One man dropped his drink and made a grab for her, but a strong backhand lifted him from his feet and into the pool
In an earlier post we looked at the possible alien sense of sight and possibilities other than sight to produce a picture of the world. Things such as sonar and radar were also discussed. Now on our world some animals have much better hearing than vision, and it seems to serve them well. Dogs and cats have a much higher range of hearing, and dogs can hear rodents running through the ground across a field. In fact dogs can hear four tones for every one we hear, which means that perfectly tuned guitar might sound horribly out of tune to them. Now hearing is best in animals which live in environments where sight might be limited. Sight hounds like Afghans and Greyhounds do not have quite the hearing of their cousins, though it is still very good. But their eyes are much better, since they hunt across open plains. Our hearing is adequate for our purposes, though our eyes are superior in most respects to any other animal. We don’t allocate as much brain area to hearing as we do to sight. Our visual cortex takes up an entire lobe, about a quarter of our brain mass. Hearing a small section of one. But we hear well enough to communicate, and that seems to be enough for a well sighted like us. Speaking about communication, research shows that deaf people are on the whole more depressed than blind people. Seems that the sound of another human communicating to us is important to our psychological well being. But I still always thought I could do better deaf than blind. Then again, as a writer I can work without having to hear anything, while being without vision would be a pure bitch. So what would the hearing be like for another intelligent species? And could it be the dominant sense?
In Star Trek Spock had superior hearing because the atmosphere of Vulcan was thinner than Earth’s. It would make sense for organisms that developed in a thinner atmosphere to have superior hearing to a similar Earth animal for the simple reason that less dense atmospheres conduct sound at a slower and less robust rate. Also, the more stealthy predators there are the better the hearing should be. Now in space hearing is a sense that could be done without. Not that it isn’t useful, but sound doesn’t transmit in a vacuum, and visual displays could handle all communication. So there could be space faring races that are completely deaf, though not having the utility of hearing on a planet’s surface is still a detriment. Having something sneak up on you that isn’t really stealthy, because you can’t hear, would be an embarrassing way to die. Of course another sense like 360 radar sense or vision might compensate, but if the creature has to sleep hearing is a good sense for picking up the approach of an intruder and waking one up.
So what about for communication? Visual signals or scents might do the job, but good old talking, yelling whatever covers a good distance and goes around corners. Hearing seems like to useful a sense to leave out of the package for most creatures. So will there be intelligent creatures that are deaf, or at least don’t possess hearing organs, depending on picking up vibrations in other ways? Probably, but I would still put my money on most of them having hearing organs of some type, and picking up sounds for communications and survival purposes. They might have hearing organs like we do, and two seem to do a good job at giving us a directional sense of hearing, but hearing vibrations through the skin might do the job. Hearing in the lower ranges might do as well as hearing across all ranges, but there is a reason that animals with sensitive hearing have such a good range, much higher than our own. And of course we would expect intelligent creatures to not have as good a sense of hearing as lower animals on their world, or would we. There are all kinds of possibilities, and I don’t think we can rule any out just based on our own world examples.
I have recently been reading the short stories of Kane by Karl Edward Wagner. Now for those unfamiliar with him, Kane is loosely based on the Cain of the Bible. He killed his brother and was cursed with immortality, unless he is killed by violence. Good luck with the second part, as Kane is three hundred pounds of muscle and bone, with an expert’s grasp of the blade and a sorcerer to boot. Not an easy man to bring down, Kane is one of the greatest anti-heroes of fiction. He can be evil, and he can also become the hero that rescues the world from calamity. In one of the stories he is sought by a knight and his men who travel the world destroying evil, and Kane is their next target. But is the knight actually good. His men can be as dirty and evil as they come, exalting in the pain and suffering they cause to others in their obedience to orders. And the knight is first introduced as putting possibly innocents to death to wipe out the corruption of the evil Ogres they served, even though they had little choice but to serve or be served as the next meal. So the good knight is not so good after all. He still defeats evil, and in the long run leaves some lasting good in the world. Still, when killed by Kane, the ultimate evil who is just looking for peace, I cheered at his end.
Sometimes in the real world the good is not always so good. Not everyone in the tales of the past is a Paladin, a pure holy warrior whose only purpose is to destroy evil and save the innocent. People can hide their evil inclinations behind a facade of good. Think of those Spanish Conquistadors who rode in the name of the church, only to kill en mass for gold. Or the witch finders of Europe who accused only those who had wealth to give up, so that both they and the church profited. Or the priests of this era who molest little children while hiding their demons behind the cassock and cross. And then there have been evil men and women, those who break the law, but are still good family members, and upholders of the weak and helpless. Jesse James, who killed and robbed and still looked after family. Brutal men who fought at the drop of a hat and were still gentle to their sons and daughters. Sometimes in fantasy characters are portrayed as black and white, fully good or totally evil. When real people have a little of both in them, and their character allows one or the other to rise to the fore, most of the time. Wagner, on the verge of a career as a psychiatrist before becoming a writer, knew this, and was masterful in making characters cut out of both sides of the divide. I applaud his efforts, and hope that someday I will create characters as memorable.
I have always been fascinated by habitats in space. Now I’m not taking about those small structures with a couple of pressurized rooms and maybe space for a dozen people. No, I’m talking about those multi-kilometer long and multi-kilometer wide cylinders or rings or series of domes that might house ten to a hundred thousand to a million people in an artificial world with plants and trees and maybe even some animals. Like miniature planets in their own right. I have seen designs on the internet, and videos on Youtube, but the things just aren’t used enough in science fiction literature and film. Rama was a self propelled habitat with no people, on a journey to another star, passing through our system. Babylon Five was a space habitat, though we were mostly treated to corridors and rooms. There were always the few tantalizing visions of the artificial habitat as seen by the center mounted train car, with fields and foliage and houses in the open. We may never make it to the stars. We may never terraform other planets in our system, though I believe we will, someday. But I am sure that we will build massive habitats in space, maybe by the millions at some point, establishing a Dyson ring around our sun. They could each house their own culture and government, a place for people to try out new things while still within range of rescue should those things go very wrong. We can experiment with different gravity fields, even if artificial gravity is never developed, just by changing the rotation speed of the ring. I believe that a whole new world will open up for us, and maybe Earth will be relegated to the position of place to be nostalgic about and preserve as a museum, but just too hazardous to actually live on. There are plenty of materials in space to construct huge numbers of such structures, from metals, to carbonaceous materials for soils, to volatiles for air and water. They are just there for the exploiting in the Asteroid Belt and the Cometary Halo around the system.
But what about these places as settings for stories. That is the part that really fascinates me as a writer, the millions of different settings that can be constructed in a hard factual universe where the stars are out of reach and the planets to inhospitable for more than mining bases. Now these structures can contain surface areas in their rotation rings or cylinders from dozens to thousands of square kilometers, larger than most counties in the United States. Imagine them forested, or filled with jungle. And imagine hunting preserves stocked with animals that were illegal to create. Or cults of peoples who don’t want the scrutiny of outsiders. Or plagues or viruses, or maybe even nanites. And imagine entering this structure through the hanger area, and seeing a thousand square kilometers of jungle, not just to front and side, but also overhead. Of winding rivers in the sky. Of people who may have reverted back to savagery, or mutated to some new form. This would be plausible setting for many of the old pulp style adventures. I have some ideas for settings like these, and may explore them in the near future when my current projects are done. A setting for a sequel to The Deep Dark Well, or in one of the sequels to the future series based on that novel. Or perhaps a volume of short stories, all showcasing a different environment on one of the habitats. The possibilities are endless. It surprises me that more has not been done in this area. Maybe the time is coming.
As I posted in a recent blog, last weekend I did a KDP Select promotion for one of my books, The Deep Dark Well. The promotion went well, with over twenty other sites joining in and over a score of other authors tweeting. My Twitter followers grew from 499 to 538 in five days, a steady increase. I was also on several book blogs that I did not contact, proving that word was getting out. It was quite a bit of work to get everything set up, but with automatic tweets through Hootsuite I was able to attend both a soccer match and a football game last weekend. I hoped for good results, but the aftermath (and aftermaths can actually be good) were beyond my expectations.
The Deep Dark Well had been hovering between 130,000 and 190,000 on Amazons Kindle sell list. I was selling some, I estimate about 70 since I put the book online. Not what I expected for a book the quality of The Deep Dark Well, which missed major publication by a hair. The problem was getting exposure, and I had been working hard to get as much as possible. With little luck. It was amazing how many people showed some interest in the book but wouldn’t buy it. On Friday, 9/07/2012 the book was offered for free. On Monday I looked at the book on the Amazon page and was amazed to see that it was ranked 105 in the Kindle free list. And was the number 1 High Tech Scifi book on that list. Wow! Now of course that was for a freebie, but there are anywhere from 3-5,000 books listed for free on Kindle at any one time. So 105 is huge. On Tuesday, 09/11/2012, the day before my birthday, the book was offered free for the last day of the promotion. The next day I checked the book page and saw that the Kindle Sales rankings were in the 360,000s. What a let down. I figured that since it was in the 100,000s before the promotion it would at least be there after. But then again, it hadn’t been for sale for five days, which could knock it down.
On Thursday, 09/13/2012, around noon, I checked the book page and my eyes almost popped out. I thought it must have been an error. But The Deep Dark Well was listed on Kindle sales at eleven thousand and something, and for High Tech Scifi in the nineties. So it jumped three hundred and fifty thousand spaces in one day. I still wasn’t sure it wasn’t a mistake, but checking the page that night showed the book to be ranked at 10,647 in sales, and this morning it was 6,838, and in the 53rd ranked book in both Kindle and all of Amazon High Tech Scifi. Talk about beyond my wildest dreams. I hoped that it would eventually get into the top 1,000, but not that quickly.
Still not ready to retire from my daytime job, still hoping to someday before I hit 60. But I would recommend the KDP Select program to everyone thinking about publishing an ebook, or with an ebook already out there. The five free days of promotion are a Godsend. I will be putting another ebook on free promotion in October, and if it does anywhere near as well I may be putting the rest of my books on the program, at least over time.
Today is the end of the KDP Select Promotion for The Deep Dark Well, and I must say that it went better than I expected. On Monday the book was ranked 105 on the list of freebies on Kindle, and Number 1 among High Tech Scifi. It was listed there on the page for all to see. I also received several offers for reviews when they were book finished reading the book. If half of them pan out it will really help, plus I expect some from those who didn’t offer to do so. I want to thank all the wonderful people who retweeted my tweets during the promotion, in particular those at the Independent Author’s Network (IAN). IAN is a great organization with a lot of talented authors, so check them out. I also wanted to thank all the book bloggers and free book promoters out there who gave me some much needed publicity. I appreciate each and every one of you, and will try to mention you by name in a future blog. I happen to think that The Deep Dark Well is a damned good science fiction novel. But in today’s market if no one knows that the book exists it doesn’t matter if it’s a lost Ray Bradbury. And one person can only do so much to promote their own stuff.
I did make some mistakes in this promotion. In one case I posted to a facebook page where I shouldn’t have direct posted, working from some erroneous or old information that said I could. In another I submitted to a freebie promotion site much too late, and they didn’t start promoting until the fourth day of the five day promotion. I know there were others. I am planning to promote another book on KDP Select in October, and will take some of the lessons learned by these mistakes into it. Unfortunately not all of my books fit into the same category. Because I chased that elusive dream of a publishing contract I made sure every book was completely different from the last. I still have some more novels to put through the rewrite stage and publish on the net, so the pattern will be continued for a little longer. Then I will concentrate on the fantasy and scifi series I am putting out this year, as well as some sequels to The Deep Dark Well.
Next up will be a promotion for my Urban Fantasy Tale The Hunger. It involves vampires, but not the sparkly vampires that seem to be so popular these days, nor the clubbing vampires that kill, then drink and dance the night away. I followed the pattern of the Bram Stoker vampires who rise each night to kill, then sleep. The hero of the story, Lucinda Taylor, was a woman who had been forced into prostitution and drug addiction after her husband beat her and threw her out of the house. She attacks her pimp when he won’t give her what she needs, and gets her throat slit for the trouble. A passing vampire, attracted by the smell of blood, finishes her off, and she rises three days later as a vampire. At first she is controlled by the lord who took her life, but when he dies she is a free agent. And she embarks on a crusade to kill the same kind of men who tormented her in life, pimps, drugs dealers, the abusers of woman, and those who run the crime families that perpetuate the misery of women like she was. She makes sure that those she kills do not rise, taking their heads or burning them. Many are after her, the church, the FBI, an ancient vampire who is afraid she is bringing too much attention to those who prefer to hide in the shadows, and a giant of a man who was her one mistake, rising from the dead and bent on vengeance against her.
Unfortunately The Hunger has not received much attention, partially, I think, because of the great number of vampire tales out there. But it is different, a gritty tale of crime and murder, with street language and street behavior. It is definitely an adult tale, not for the kiddies or the faint of heart. And I believe it is as good a novel in its own way as the Deep Dark Well. I would not have released it as the second book of that first release tandem if I didn’t believe that. Hopefully its promotion on KDP Select will garner the attention I think it deserves, from those who want their vampires evil and bloody.
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