I occasionally review movies in this blog (obviously fewer during the pandemic). I’ve often said that the best ones are based on books (the best of them all is undoubtedly The Lord of the Rings trilogy). But there are inherent limitations found in that transfer of media from the written word to audiovisual film. The mere fact that a movie is usually between two and three hours long means it can’t possibly contain all the nuances found in a novel. Hollywood cuts, edits, and rewrites often damage the novelistic adventure when transferred to the silver screen as well.

But a recent very successful movie shows how Hollywood can even fail miserably at original storytelling—in fact, is more likely to do so because screenwriters aren’t novelists. In this case, not a flop at the box office—lots of moviegoers jumped on the bandwagon!—but in creating anything worthwhile for novel readers who expect a lot more. I’m writing about Barbie, of course. It has convinced me that I never want Hollywood to make a movie based on any of my stories!

This isn’t idle speculation about what I’d do if some producer or anyone else from Hollywood approached me. It’s a raging denial of Hollywood’s storytelling capabilities! You can savor a novel; it’s the product of a creative and inventive artist who is following the age-old tradition of storytelling. Hollywood can’t make anything that can compare with that personal relationship between reader and author because Hollywood is too mass-market; yet most moviegoers don’t read books so their expectations are low, playing into Hollywood’s hands—so when a movie is a flop, it’s really a disaster.

This isn’t idle speculation about any reaction I might have in the sense that some readers have told me that a particular title from my oeuvre would make a good movie. We’ve even discussed who would play whom at times, in particular for Detectives Castilblanco and Brookstone. (The mysteries and thrillers might receive better treatment from Hollywood, but my sci-fi would be far beyond the movie industry!) This is all a frivolous waste of time, of course. Hollywood could never do justice to even the shortest “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” novel! And the complex intertwining of historical periods found in Son of Thunder (second book in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series), arguably my best and most profound novel, would undoubtedly defeat the best Hollywood screenwriters!

In other words, I don’t want Hollywood to even try! And they won’t either, because they must appeal to a largely illiterate and audio-visually dependent yet passive audience that make few demands on quality but are great believers in hype (as in the case of Barbie).

I’ll make a prediction in this post: Hollywood and audiovisual media will destroy storytelling. Even now, the reading population is biased toward older generations. Younger people have the attention spans, so they passively watch streaming video, mesmerized by an audiovisual experience that’s superficial and far from being profound. It’s only a matter of time until the novel becomes an ancient artifact studied in some halls of social scientists. Thankfully I won’t live to see that occur, but it will happen. The process has begun.

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Son of Thunder. Three storylines come together in this mystery/thriller novel with historical fiction elements about the lives of St. John the Divine and the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli and how Esther Brookstone is affected by them. Perhaps this is the novel Dan Brown should have written instead of The DaVinci Code because the history here is fact-based inasmuch as it can be (of course, his isn’t). In any case, you will find Esther’s adventures described here taking her back through centuries of history as you the reader join her on an armchair journey. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold…and also in print!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

So you’ve written what you believe is the great American novel, penned the biography of your family relative and war hero, or created a theory of everything, and you want to self-publish it. There’s a lot of bad advice out there from marketing gurus to scam artists, all willing to share their secrets if you’re only willing to pay them.

Who can you trust? You might say to yourself, “Well, this fellow is associated with X, normally a reputable source, so their advice must be good.” Wrong! If X is some fellow whose gig on the side is selling his marketing books to would-be authors, don’t use him. If X is any POD publisher (POD = “publish on demand,” the oldest form of self-publishing beyond vanity presses) that advertises on cable channels, don’t use them! If X is any ancient and struggling POD that’s traveling along the road to oblivion (you can determine that by the number of books published recently…if they’ll tell you!), avoid them. If X is any of the tech giants (Amazon, Apple, or Google), run like hell away! And if X is the venerable NY Times, rest assured that they don’t give a rat’s ass about self-published authors!

Most of the advice on how to self-publish a book out there now is bad advice. Here’s a recent example: In the NY Times’s article “A Story to Tell? Self-Publish Your E-Book,” J. D. Biersdorfer uses a half-page of the 8/3/2023 business section to spew forth bad advice about self-publishing. He obviously knows very little about it. He recommends Apple and Google (bad advice), DIY covers (really bad advice), and generally guarantees that your self-published book will be a flop. While that might occur no matter how it is (“gurus” like Biersdorfer never tell authors that there are absolutely no guarantees for making your book into a bestseller, traditionally or self-published), following his bad advice will only hasten the demise of your book. (Generally speaking, the NY Times will have nothing worthwhile about self-publishing to offer authors interested in it.)

Many reporters worldwide know well that if they want to report on what war is like, they must talk to those who are participating in it. The same goes for self-publishing. J. D. Biersdorfer’s qualifications don’t meet that test. He writes computer manuals, maybe even good ones, but he’s not self-published a single book, at least none displayed on Amazon. And most of his manuals are about Apple products (which is why he mostly supports self-publishing with Apple, I suppose). Obviously reporter Biersdorfer has no good advice to offer any aspiring self-publishing author; indeed, one has to wonder about the Times’s editor’s moral underpinnings in allowing such an article, a completely biased travesty, to appear in the Times!

While Mr. Biersdorfer more than mentions Apple and Google, he doesn’t tell you that they’re not aggregators. What’s that mean? It means that neither service distributes the ebooks they publish! Your ebook only appears at the Apple or Google online store! (Amazon operates in exactly the same way.) While you can become your own aggregator, why bother? If you use an aggregating service (Draft2Digital/Smashwords is the easiest to use), your ebook, will be distributed automatically to many online sites selling ebooks around the world. You must pay a bit in royalties for this service, but it’s nothing like traditional publishers take for publishing your ebooks. Either Mr. Biersdorfer doesn’t know about aggregators, or he’s coddling Apple and Google. In either case, forget about Mr. Biersdorfer’s bad advice (here a lack of any useful advice!).

Here’s the best advice I can give authors who are considering self-publishing: If there’s a charge for the advice (in the case of the Times, you’re paying an exorbitant cost for that paper), be wary and take all advice offered with a grain of salt. There are ways to self-publish that are efficient, easy-to-use, and produce a quality product. Do your homework, though. Too many people out there are waiting to steal your money! Once you have a manuscript properly prepared, formatting, publishing, and distributing your ebook is a lot easier than what Biersdorfer says. In fact, once you’ve written and edited a manuscript, most of your work is done. Why do more?

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Good advice (or a lot better than the NY Times’s Biersdorfer, at least). My advice for authors thinking about self-publishing is free! Go to the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page and download my short course Writing Fiction. (The parts containing self-publishing advice are generally applicable to book publishing in general, not just fiction books.) My qualifications? I’ve traditionally and self-published (from old PODs to ebooks) since 2006, producing a number of titles that I’m proud to call mine, including those traditionally published ones. Unlike the Times reporter mentioned above, I’ve done it all, so my advice and opinions are based on hard-earned experience. Because I receive absolutely zero benefit for this course beyond offering authors a helpful hand, this little course provides a better launch pad than the NY Times or any how-to article or book on the subject that charges you for the advice! Peruse my advice and please let me know what you think of the course.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I haven’t been publishing my stories that long compared to some authors (my first published novel, Full Medical, also #1 in the “Clones and Mutants” series, was published in 2006), but there were many more things that concerned me at that time than the so-called “culture wars” (Saudis’ support of 9/11 the terrorists, the Iraq War, a POTUS from the Good Ole Piranhas who now looks good in comparison to the one who lost hugely in 2020, etc.). Nevertheless, from first book to my last one (so far), a celebration of diversity and its importance in our great country and the world can generally found in my prose, so much so that it’s something of a meta-theme. Certain people would now say that prose supports “woke,” a recent addition to American slang that confuses everyone across the political spectrum.

If so, I wear that label “wokeness” with pride. My parents from Kansas went to California during the Great Depression and were always celebrating the diversity found there in that greatest of great American states. (Actually, they celebrated it in their native Kansas as well—their best friend was a Mexican national who went to the same business school in Topeka.) From food to friends, my childhood was defined by my parents’ celebration of the state’s diversity, so it should be no surprise that I also celebrated it as an adult. In my California hometown, my parents’ best friends were an Armenian couple from whom I learned all about the Ottoman Empire’s attempt at ethnic cleansing; the main road in my college town just off-campus was Embarcadero del Norte; my best friend at grad school on the East Coast was a good-natured black fellow from the Dominican Republic, who married a nice Jewish girl—I read one of my poems at their wedding; and through him I met my first wife, a fantastic Colombian lady who passed on far too soon; etc., etc.

I’ve celebrated diversity all my life for so long and considered it such an important part of our American culture that I was surprised that certain scurrilous politicians now use this new term to focus their hatred, racism, and nationalist, isolationist tendencies on their enemies: “woke” recognizes the importance of diversity; “anti-woke” implies that such hatred, racism, and nationalist, isolationist tendencies should be used against any group whose members aren’t far-right white Christian women and men. In other words, anti-woke signifies a desire to have forced apartheid in our society; woke means freedom and respect for all and a celebration of all human diversity.

When Ron DeSantis or any other far-right wannabe dictator (“there were good people on both sides” one said to excuse his bigotry) says that the state or country he’s running in is where “woke comes to die,” he’s channeling Hitler and his use of Jews, homosexuals, and others—anyone considered to be an enemy—as scapegoats to be attacked, imprisoned, and executed…and will do exactly that if ever given the chance! The lesser extremes all too often lead to terrible events too. I can’t watch this going on and not think of the Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian, Rohingya, Uighur and other genocides that have appeared throughout the world. I can’t watch these occurring and not worry that too many politicians are following those same horrific plans made by the monsters of history to use any people perceived as different as scapegoats. It’s terribly sad that we continue to let this occur over and over again. That says a lot about humanity in general and a specific challenge for any democracy. Are we up to the latter? Or will “anti-woke” become the new norm in our sad world?

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Intolerance. This seventh novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series shows that anti-woke can take many forms and isn’t restricted only to the US. Three separate cases challenge Esther and friends here: One involves a whole town’s intolerant treatment of an atheist family; another shows how jealousy turns an old British soldier into a rabid hater of the Irish; and a third describes a right-wing domestic terrorist group’s hatred of refugees and migrants who have come from foreign lands to the UK to escape economic catostrophes and persecution in their homeland. Some of these themes will continue in the following novels in the series, but this one is a free PDF download available on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page. The novel is a great introduction to the entire series. Enjoy.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Nine Black Robes. Joan Biskupic (2023). “No one should be confident that this majority is done with its work.”—Dissenting opinion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Thus begins and ends this excellent expose of the fascist takeover of the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) written by CNN commentator and SCOTUS expert Biskupic.

Yes, fascist SCOTUS! Unlike the author, I’ll call a spade a spade, and the SCOTUS’s new majority are rabid fascists who conspire with the Good Ole Piranhas, which include fanatical evangelicals and Catholics, Putin lovers, racists, and bigots, along with many other far-right elements in government. And they are out to destroy democracy in America by whittling away at individual rights, enabling mad-dog gun enthusiasts, etc. by arguing that’s what the Founding Fathers wanted!

Too strong? If you believe that, read this excellent book, and then let’s talk. (Probably too much to ask of MAGA maniacs that they actually read something worthwhile of course. Their fuehrer doesn’t like to read.) It’s a toss-up which group in America represents the most existential problem for American democracy, the climate-change deniers (let them die in the three-digit heat waves and other extreme climate events that will continue to plague the country and the world!) or the idiots out to destroy America by other means. (Of course, these groups have a lot of members in common!)

Here the author knows the law, SCOTUS history, and the ins and outs of the legal issues. She presents the story of how Trump, McConnell, McCann, and other fascists over decades created today’s fascist majority in the court…and she does it well. Although the story is comparable to how Mein Kampf led to Hitler’s takeover, it’s been a much slower one in America compared to Germany, aided and abetted by every conservative president since Reagan. (Of course, “conservative” morphed into “fascist” during that process in American government and elsewhere!)

Today we have the following in that SCOTUS fascist majority: Thomas, who’d be welcome in the Ku Klux Klan; Alito, who’s more fascist than Scalia ever was (and that’s saying a lot); Chief Justice Roberts, who has turned hypocrisy into a fine art; and the two new lackeys of the far right, Comey Bryant and Kavanaugh—all of them rabid Catholic fundamentalists except for Thomas. (Beyond fascism, he just goes along with his colleagues fundamentalism, but you can bet he’d never receive the support of the BLM or #MeToo movement.) These fascist judges will be around a long time, and they’re out to ruin American democracy by legislating from the bench.

The author doesn’t dwell on the obvious solutions required to weaken these fascists’ powers: age and term limits plus increasing the number of judges. The Dems had better control both houses of Congress and the presidency in 2024 so these solutions can be implemented. Of course, the way things are going (SCOTUS doesn’t protect the integrity of elections!), maybe the Dems will never win another election in America if they can prevent it!

So, in brief, this book is a good portrayal of the current SCOTUS, doesn’t use the appropriate word “fascist” to describe the six judges who form the junta basically in charge of the country now, and doesn’t consider the obvious solutions. Perhaps it needs a second volume to do that? Or the author simply accepts that American democracy is dying and doomed, and we can do nothing about it? In this sense, this book is a depressing yet very informative read.

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The Klimt Connection. I don’t write legal thrillers. The nearest I’ve come is this eighth novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series where Esther backs an old Austrian Jewish man who is conned into selling his Klimt painting, complete with trial. There are a lot of other things going on, including the introduction of readers to Inspector Steve Morgan who has a secondment with MI5 to bring down a far-right terrorist group. (He soon has his own series!) This is a complex mystery/thriller that has Esther in a case that harks back to her days in Scotland Yard’s “Art and Antiques” Division. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon). Enjoy.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

It’s not easy to discover facts about the ancient Celts. Their origins seem to lie in Central Europe. They were pagans…if one can say they paid any attention at all to religion beyond their myths and legends. They didn’t record their history, so the historical records are distorted by others’ descriptions. It’s known that they won important battles against the Greeks and Romans because we have the latter’s (badly biased) records of those events. Bodica later on made the Romans’ miserable in ancient England.

The Roman legions, much more organized than the largely leaderless Celts, drove the latter back to the far borders of their empire. Thus we find Celts in Spanish Galicia, French Brittany, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Those separate Celtic groups’ dialects evolved into the Gaelic languages we know today.

The biased historical records continued with the Irish monks, Christianity versus paganism now creating the biases. Those monks are justifiably credited with preserving western civilization, protecting Greek and Roman culture and history from the invasions of Viking and other barbarous hordes, but they largely ignored Celtic civilization and history except in their colorful artwork found in gilded tomes like the famous Book of Kells (on display now in Dublin’s Trinity College library).

Recorded Celtic history is even a bit lacking after St. Patrick, i.e. seventh century on, and certainly before with the Viking, Norman, and Saxon influences. The often-quoted adage that the conquerors write the historical accounts to make themselves look good is never more true than with Celtic history. The history of St. Patrick is an obvious example. He was actually a Briton, and not enough is known about his life (there are a lot of legends). Maybe he was indeed once the slave of an Irish chieftain, but it’s certainly not true that he drove the snakes out of Ireland! (There are Irish politicians, after all!)

I hadn’t included much about Celtic history and civilization in my novels until I wrote some recent books. (The starship Brendan in the Dr. Obregon stories doesn’t count.) There’s a bit of that history in Celtic Chronicles (last novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series) and the novels in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series (Cult of Evil, for example) but the lack of reliable historical records is this wannabe historian’s excuse along with a lack of historical training to make all such mentions minimal. In brief, the O’Moore in me failed to spring forth to make my blarney more convincing.

I must say, though, that anyone attempting to write British-style mysteries better realize that Celtic civilization is very much a part of the British Isles background, whether the Brits like it or not. They (most notably Cromwell) might have wanted to erase its appearance in the historical records, but they’ll continue to find that an impossible task, if only for the fact that so many famous authors claimed by the British are Irish! And imagine how intolerable the Brits would have become if writers like Shaw and Wilde hadn’t lampooned English aristocrats and Yeats hadn’t shown them how to write poetry!

Yes, Celtic civilization is part of the British cultural psyche no matter how much they claim otherwise!

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Dr. Carlos, Chief Medical Officer. Lucky you! Carlos Obregon’s adventures as Chief Medical Officer aboard the exploratory starship Brendan (that Irishman is the patron saint of Irish sailors), spread throughout several short fiction collections, are collected together in this free downloadable PDF. You can find it in the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page. (While you’re there, take a look at my other freebies, which include two complete novels!) While the only thing Celtic here is the starship’s name, Obregon’s outlook on life could be considered very Irish. (St. Brendan discovered the New World long before Columbus, even before Leif Erickson. His trip across the Atlantic in a longboat made of animal skins was proven possible years ago, and there are runes in Virginia dating from before the first English colony there that are Celtic!)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

No, this isn’t one of my political blog posts (see pubprogressive.com if that’s what you like). It’s about villains in fiction—my fiction and others’.

The new Indiana Jones movie has the Alan Quatermain-like Indy battling Nazi villains once again. He’s made a career fighting them. Every sane person hates Nazis. (Exceptions are found among the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, Boebert, Cruz, Gaetz, Greene, and other fascists, of course.) Even Putin used them as scapegoats, comparing Ukrainians to Nazis—quite unbelievable considering that everyone outside Russia knew Zelenskyy is Jewish! (You’d think the Russians would know that too. Or maybe they do, and it’s only a return to their anti-Semitic ways? Stalin-like pogroms anyone?)

Yes, those old Nazis are ideal villains, but a fiction writer has to create period stories to employ them in that way. (Even one of the best sci-fi tales, James Hogan’s The Proteus Operation, which is time travel done right, is a period story.) Hitler and all his evil cronies make great villains. Very few characters, real or otherwise, can be so evil. Their reincarnations depicted in tales about more recent times also provide villains. Neo-Nazis in Rembrandt’s Angel want to establish a Fourth Reich, for example. (Only cartel leaders’ evil can begin to compare—see the same novel.)

As an author, I prefer to use the Nazis as models, and real life now seems to do the same. Putin and Xi are fascists comparable to Hitler, for example (yes, Xi, you are a dictator!), and so I often use them as villains, men so evil that even my arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin hates their guts. (Kalinin appears in many of my mystery/thriller novels.)

Putin is more like a mafia don, though, while Xi is more practical in sagely wielding his dictatorial power in China than Hitler ever was in Germany. Putin, of course, is more like Hitler than Xi; he’s stupid, not clever, whereas Xi is a smart technocrat. (Perhaps his Western education made all the difference?) Yet Hitler is the fascist who blazed the trail for them all. No ethnic cleansing before or after (e.g. Ottoman Turkey with the Armenians and Myanmar’s junta with the Rohingya) can compare to the Hitler’s Holocaust against the Jews.

I feature Putin and Xi, both real-world fascist leaders, as villains in many of my later novels, most recently in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series. (Putin’s oligarchs first appeared in Gaia and the Goliaths, though, book seven in the “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” series—that was long before they became such news items.) I will continue to use real-life villains whenever it suits my fancy.

Traditional publishers don’t like authors to use real-life people as characters, but these novels of mine are mostly self-published (all of Morgan’s, for example). Hence I can damn well use them as villains because there’s no way they could ever sue me! (Um, okay, if Trump is reelected, I might be in trouble.) I think that makes these novels (and others) come alive for readers. They relate to our real world today. And their villains are real-life dirtbags, not dead Nazis!

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“Inspector Steve Morgan.” Last week I featured an evergreen series. This shorter one (fairly new, compared to my others) containing three novels covers three aspects of evil. The first and third feature Putin and Xi as villains, respectively, who cause the clever inspector a lot of grief from their vultures’ perches far away. The direct threat comes from their lackeys, of course. (These villains always like to maintain deniability.) The second book in the series might remind readers of the cults organized by Koresh, Manson, and Jones (a Manson acolyte is about to be pardoned—why, I don’t know); an evil cult leader ruins his acolytes’ lives. Together the novels in this trilogy have enough evil villains to make the reader of mystery and suspense novels forget about Indy and the Nazis for a while.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Amazon has been anti-author/anti-publisher for quite a while (I boycott it as much as possible), belying its beginning as an online bookstore, and it has dragged Goodreads down ever since it was purchased by Amazon. Goodreads has become so bad that even the New York Times is going after it (article in the June 27 edition). That’s not surprising when you read the article. The Times caters to the Big Five publishing consortiums, and the latter’s authors are also getting whacked by trolls on Goodreads as well as Amazon.

In the years before Amazon, Goodreads was a neutral congregating place for authors and readers alike where genre and character preferences were more prevalent than politics and trolling. Many of its groups had lively and interesting discussions about books. I know; I was in some of them. Then the trolls took over. Many groups became anti-author and little personal kingdoms for their authoritarian monitors. I bailed out of a lot of groups when I dared express something the monitors and their toadies didn’t like. Goodreads has continued to be dominated by trolls, as the New York Times’ article proves. And Amazon has done nothiong to stop them.

I suppose the bifurcation of Goodreads and other book discussion groups into warring camps is only a reflection of what’s going on culturally and politically in the US in general, a separation into warring tribes out to destroy the other tribes. Social media has become a dangerous jungle, so Goodreads is not exceptional.

But it never was a good place for self-published authors, and even less so after Amazon took it over. Most of my books are self-published, but my traditionally published ones weren’t received well at all either. And members of Goodreads can opine about any book without even reading it! At least the old Amazon site tries to avoid that; it just follows the old model: Anyone can review a book if they purchased it. Many do, get their one-star troll-reviews published, and then return the book. On Goodreads, though, it’s a free-for-all!

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Dan Brown made the phrase “divine feminine” famous in his Da Vinci Code. (My Son of Thunder does the same a bit more realistically.) But anti-machismo story lines have traditionally been rare in fiction. (I’ll give Dan the credit for trying to change that.)

From Bond to Solo, Reacher, and Rhyme, male detectives and PIs have dominated mysteries and thrillers. Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, and other Hollywood hunks strove to project their macho allure to worshipping women by playing their signature roles. I suppose it makes sense: Men throughout history have erroneously thought they determine the fate of everything in the world, and that includes entertainment.

Early on in my sci-fi stories, I created a future where women had as many principal roles as men, if not more. So it was natural when I began writing mysteries and thrillers (the first was The Midas Bomb where Chen and Castilblanco are the principal characters) that women starred as much as or more than men. And that continued throughout my oeuvre!

I’ve admired smart, strong women for a long time, even before my first novel Full Medical, which features several of them. They see things differently compared to men, especially compared to those male characters who are stereotypically macho men filled with excess testosterone. Lincoln Rhyme tones that down a bit (or maybe Deaver thinks his character appeals to the mothering instincts of women?), but not much, especially when Denzel portrays Rhyme in the corresponding movies.

“Enough of that!” I said to myself long ago. “Fiction must reflect reality, and the reality is that the world would probably be a much better place if men paid more attention to women or women were in charge.” (Not ones like Keri Lake, of course, who are just imperfect clones of bad-acting testosterone-filled thugs.)

In both my series and stand-alone novels (seven of the former, without counting A. B. Carolan’s), either the principal characters are female or they share the stage with males. Some will say that’s silly on my part because men rule, but I can counter that perception with many arguments. If you force me to stick to the commercial viability of my books, let me only say that women read a lot more than men! It’s hard for me to believe that they’re only interested in reading about macho hunks. (I’m ignoring romance and erotic novels. Their audience is primarily female.) I believe women want to see female principals in sci-fi, thriller, and mystery novels. They can’t all be interested in those macho-male heroes!

But that’s all mostly beside the point. I, as an author and a reader. want to see more female protagonists. In my life, I’ve admired a lot more women than men at work and in my social interactions (especially when I used to participate in book events—men are rarely seen there unless a woman has forced a man to accompany them). The human feminine might not be divine, but women are also often a lot more interesting and more competent than men…at all levels! Let’s celebrate them in our fiction!

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Four strong, smart women. Dao-Ming Chen, Jenny Wong, Mary Jo Melendez, and Penny Castro have principal roles in the “Chen and Castilblanco,” “Chaos Chronicles,” “Mary Jo Melendez,” and “The Last Humans” series. You can meet them all by starting with the first books in each series, respectively: The Midas Bomb, Survivors of the Chaos (although that has a second edition in the ebook bundle of the entire “Chaos Chronicles” trilogy), Muddlin’ Through, and The Last Humans. Readers will find enough action, suspense, mystery, and thrills in these ebooks to last their entire summer and into the fall. And yes, there’s romance as well! (Some of these novels are on sale during June at the Smashwords store.) Enjoy!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Sci-fi authors often extrapolate current events, inventions, and issues into the future, so they run the risk of getting it wrong. Usually, the farther they extrapolate, the safer the extrapolation, because who knows what things will look like thousands of years hence? Near-future extrapolations can easily be proven wrong later on in the life of a novel. I’m more than a sci-fi author, of course, but I’ve written enough speculative fiction that I’ve guessed a lot about what will occur in humanity’s future, near or far.

Some of my guesses are more obviously wrong than others and soon proven wrong. Hydrogen-powered cars in the early “Chen & Castilblanco” novels are an example. A more egregious error perhaps, because I saw the intense hatred for our first black president among the far right (who became today’s MAGA maniacs—their future fuehrer championing that “birther theory” for years), I thought there’d be at least one attempt to assassinate Obama (the first novel, The Midas Bomb). (If Obama’s roasting of Trump in that national press event had already occurred—the latter’s expression is enough to betray his thoughts because narcissistic sociopaths can’t take humorous criticism—I probably would have guessed that the assassin would be a Trump supporter, not a Russian terrorist as in the novel.) These errors (and others) were near-future extrapolations that are surprisingly more difficult because they’re usually more detailed and specific than the far-future ones. They also turned my whole “Future History” timeline into an alternate history of humanity after the fact!

That timeline is also interesting because it predicts a slower turn to fascism in the world than what’s occurring, an eroding fascism in the US and elsewhere that basically follows the Chinese model—i.e. an Earth controlled by autocratic multinational corporations, their CEOs forming a world order akin to an oligarchy that doesn’t require a Putin or Xi. I believe that will still occur a lot faster now (I’m more pessimistic about this with every day that passes), but it looks like this Chaos I’ve postulated might arrive a bit later than I thought. People will have to get tired of personality cults first, Narcissus le Grand’s among them.

Moving along that timeline, the excesses of AI we now worry about (Chat-whatever is still very primitive, computer code that’s more brute-force than elegant) are seen in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan (bridge novel between the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series and “Clones and Mutants”), and they naturally led me (I was already bored by HAL) into Full Medical (first book in the latter series) and the consequences of cloning. While AI might have more importance than I’ve projected, cloning has been simmering on the stove’s backburner and will probably soon rear its ugly head again. On the other side of the stove, you’ll find bubbling in the pot more atrocities and excesses created by radical religious fanatics like those that already exist because of these fanatics’ participation in the MAGA hordes; you won’t have to wait long for the consequences portrayed in Soldiers of God. Or maybe I just didn’t get the order right?

Of course, for me and many other sci-fi writers, these predictions about humanity’s future are just warnings that put flesh on the bones of a plot that is often an exciting adventure, mystery, or thriller. Readers are imaginative and smart enough to suspend belief and just enjoy the rides on these futuristic rollercoasters. I do that in my own reading, but in my writing I still feel bad sometimes when I got it wrong.

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The “Future History” mega-series of novels. This alternate-history timeline begins with The Midas Bomb and moves through six series of novels (“Chen & Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone,” “Steve Morgan,” “Clones & Mutants,” “Chaos Chronicles,” and A. B. Carolan’s YA sci-fi mysteries), three standalone novels (The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, Soldiers of God, and Rogue Planet), and ends with the Dr. Carlos stories (see Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape and elsewhere). The books can generally be found wherever quality ebooks are sold, and there are free PDF downloads containing stories that have settings on this timeline. (See the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) A free PDF download covers most of the timeline. (I try to keep it up to date.) Enjoy!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I’ve explained a few times here in articles in this blog how I’ve chosen prices for my books, both ebooks and print versions (also see the little course “Writing Fiction,” the free PDF download). Some prices of print versions are out of my control for books published by my two small-press publishers, Penmore Press (Rembrandt’s Angel and Son of Thunder) and Black Opal Books (The Last Humans). Now pricing is out of my control for my other print versions—not that there are many (most of my books are only in ebook format), but there are some important changes for YA readers. Amazon has decided to unilaterally force price changes in all self-published print books that were published using their KDP POD service (print on demand—it used to be called Create Space), completely ignoring any considerations self-published authors might have against taking such an action.

This self-serving and egregious action by Amazon is basically a breach of contract, the one entered into between Amazon’s KDP and self-published authors. In other words, we authors who use that service chose Amazon over some other POD service (such services existed long before Amazon’s Create Space got in on the act, even before ebooks) because of the contract details existing at that time. Amazon shouldn’t be able to legally change that contract without the self-published author agreeing to the changes.

To give that breach of contract charge a bit more oomph, we self-published authors should make it into a class action lawsuit: All self-published authors with print books published (and sold!) by Amazon should sue the retailer for breach of contract. Of course, that probably won’t occur. People let Amazon get away with murder…at least commercially. They’ve ruined retail competition in the US and worldwide, basically creating a retail monopoly in so many consumer areas. The big evil Bezos bot and all his little evil bots at the top get rich on the backs of suppliers and consumers. It’s time they’re taken down a notch!

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