Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci. Whether you’re like me trying to wash out memories of Brown’s The Da Vinci Code or you’re an art lover interested in the man, Isaacson’s book is a fascinating read. I’ll write a review of it sometime soon. Isaacson’s previous biographies should be enough for you to expect great things, but he far surpassed what I expected. You have here a great story about Da Vinci—the man, his art, and his science, a fellow far ahead of his time. We can forget about The Da Vinci Code now.

What catches your eye? Do you mostly take the advice of friends and family when you select a book to read? Many readers prefer to be a bit more independent. If that describes you, what catches your eye? An attractive book cover, a good summary, a peek inside, or reviews and endorsements? (You can peruse all of that online, of course, but maybe it’s more fun in the aisles of your local bookstore?)

Many readers react to at least some of the above. The writer or publisher must provide ALL of the above for ALL readers. (OK, maybe the “peek inside” is automatic.) We often don’t think that publishing a book is complex, but it is. These items represent one facet of a complex process.

Two confusing labels. Ask ten readers what they mean by “literary fiction” or “classic fiction,” and you’re liable to receive ten different answers—or maybe twenty?

I don’t like the tag “literary fiction.” It’s too often used in opposition to “genre fiction,” as if to imply the latter doesn’t have as much literary value.  Of course, that negative for genre fiction is balanced by the negative that literary fiction is often considered a miscellaneous genre where we put any title we can’t classify well.

“Classic fiction” is ambiguous too. It’s too often equated to “old fiction” or, more specifically, “pre-21^st century fiction.” I suppose if an old book is still being read (a while ago I purchased an ebook version of A Tale of Two Cities, the only Dickens novel I like), it qualifies as a classic. Yet in art or music, a newly discovered Da Vinci drawing or Bach fugue is automatically declared to be a classic.

What’s your opinion?

Speaking of classics…. I wanted to provide my readers with a link to a Rembrandt painting: https://ijr.com/2014/10/183699-famous-artwork-lost-world-war-ii/ “An Angel with Titus’ Features” is the painting featured in my mystery/thriller Rembrandt’s Angel (Penmore Press). It now only exists as a B&W photograph. The Nazis stole the painting during WWII for Hitler’s museum; it never has been recovered. Neither have the paintings from the Gardner Museum in Boston that are featured in The Collector (Carrick Publishing).

If you see any of these paintings, please let the F.B.I. or Scotland Yard know. The art world will thank you. I’m no art critic, but I’ll thank you too. Recently a Degas was discovered when inspecting a suitcase on a train. Art thieves and illegal art dealers are still in business, following the lead of those old Nazis.

Is IBPA a reader’s or author’s friend? The Independent Book Publishers Association has just come out with nine points to define a “hybrid publisher.” I’m suspicious for two reasons: (1) The points actually define an indie publisher AKA small press. We don’t need more confusion in an industry where Big Five sycophants are out to confuse the public into thinking anyone without a traditional contract from a Big Five publisher is a ne’er-do-well who’s not worth reading. (2) The list of points is approved by the Authors Guild, an organization that works hand-in-hand against independent publishers in favor of the Big Five conglomerates that are out to eliminate all new authors who want to make their voices heard.

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[Note: This article is part of the new series of blog posts, “Character Bios”—you’ll find them all in the blog category of the same name.]

Part of a secret genetics program on a futuristic version of the International Space Station, Mr. Paws became friends with Shashibala Garcia and the other three kids in her gang, the Fearsome Four, who lead similar lives to Army brats living on the old military bases of the past. In other words, they get into trouble, and trouble finds them.

Mr. Paws is more like the reclusive scientist who created him, though, in the sense that he’s an adult cat with human-like emotions and feelings. He’s also a genius, a mathematician interested in number theory but willing to tutor the kids in their calculus assignments.

He values the adventures he had with the Fearsome Four on the ISS. They set out to solve the mystery of his origins, but that pursuit led them into a lot more trouble than they’d bargained for. In the process, he was torn between his maker and the kids, the most charming humans he’d ever met.

Mr. Paws has his own genotype—superfelis domesticus. He’s unique, though. He’s Dr. Watson to Shashi’s Sherlock Holmes, and he chronicled all those adventures on the space station. He has no desire to write more chronicles, though. AIs in the far reaches of Earth’s solar system aren’t as sophisticated as the one on the ISS, and he needs a good editor! Besides, the poor fellow became discouraged: the censors on Earth watered down his book so much that he didn’t feel like publishing. A friend helped him send the manuscript back in time to two authors whose books he’d read, but Mr. Paws is sure that Earth in their time period will just call it a sci-fi mystery. Maybe Watson and Holmes had a similar experience?

Mr. Paws is currently stationed near Saturn where he works with an astrophysicist he met on the ISS. He hasn’t had a chance to socialize much with other cats, but he’d like to meet a nice lady-cat someday and have some kittens, hoping the lot of them would be like the Fearsome Four…or Five…or Six.

***

The Secret Lab (2nd ed). Four students on the International Space Station discover the origins of a mutant cat and uncover a conspiracy in a sci-fi mystery that’s sure to entertain young adults and adults who are young at heart. In a new second edition completely rewritten and reedited by Steven M. Moore’s collaborator A. B. Carolan. Now available in a print version (Create Space) as well as all ebook formats (Amazon and Smashwords).

From a review of the first edition: “I will disclose this: I picked up The Secret Lab because of Mr. Paws, the intelligent cat. Yes, I could not resist the temptation to read the adventure of a sentient, mathematics inclined cat, told by Steven M. Moore. It exceeded my expectations. Mr. Paws is the result of a genetics experiment aboard a facility orbiting Earth in 2147. The cat and his newly found friends, a group of four smart teenagers, find themselves in an intrigue with corporate agendas, young curiosity, dangerous and ethically problematic research, relationships and their difficulties when coming of age. The complexity is enthralling, but the author also makes it easy to follow, using a light, natural style to tell us their story.”–Alfaniel Aldavan, in a Smashwords’ 5-star review

In libris libertas!

Technically speaking, saying I don’t advertise at this website IS an advertisement—in another words, it’s a feature readers might like. But why don’t I advertise here? I could make some extra green. Many websites do so, even many authors’ websites—from popup ads to services and affiliations with the 800-pound elephant in the retail room, Amazon.

When I go to a website and get bombarded by popup ads, though, it irks me. I get enough of that from Amazon, Facebook, Goodreads, Google, and LinkedIn, not to mention other websites, so much so that I’m often tempted to end my participation on all those social media and retail sites.

I mute TV ads—too bad there isn’t a “video mute” as well, but then I guess I wouldn’t know when the show starts again. I let telemarketers’ robocalls just ring—if I don’t recognize the number, I don’t answer. Period. (That robokiller app for the smart phone sounds like a great invention.) An annoying ad makes me less inclined to buy a product or use a service, exactly the opposite of what the advertiser wants, I’m sure.

With those negative experiences, why would I bother you, dear reader, with even more ads? I wouldn’t feel good about it. It would also seem unethical. There’s little moral integrity left in America, but that doesn’t mean I have to add to the decay. Most internet commerce is more than decay, of course. It’s like a toxic landfill where you need a hazmat suit.

Sure, I list some trusted websites on my “Join the Conversation” webpage that either offer services I’ve used or sell products that I approve. Some of these might have their own ads for other products and services—I can’t control that. Besides, that’s not the same thing, because nothing happens until you click on my website’s link to that other website.

In fact, it’s the same thing as clicking on the link to one of my books that takes you to the Amazon page (you didn’t know the cover icon links to the book’s Amazon page?—try it!). You can buy the book there, of course, but I do it more so you can see more info about the book that’s not available on the “Books & Short Stories” webpage—the latter is really only a summary. FYI: I’m not encouraging you to buy on Amazon—I don’t think this huge retailer is a friend of readers and writers. I’d just as soon have you buy the book elsewhere—on Smashwords or their affiliates, for example, or at the publisher’s website or a bookstore or other online retailer like B&N, where applicable.

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(Joanna Penn, Public Speaking, self-published, 2014)

More focused on helping someone wanting to make a career out of public speaking, Ms. Penn’s book still offers some good tips for introverted types who must do some public speaking and dread it. Of course, you don’t have to be nerdy or introverted to dread public speaking—we’ve all heard the expression “tough audience”!  Facing the know-it-alls and hecklers can be daunting…or even just facing a lot of people you don’t know.

She starts by defining some characteristics that make her an introvert. I found this part amusing; I share all those characteristics! In academia and R&D work, I was forced into public speaking, though, so I’ve had some practice. A large lecture class or conference presentation certainly qualifies as a large audience (sometimes with a Nobel Prize winner in it), but I was still nervous during a recent podcast and lecture about reading, writing, and book publishing (here are the links: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/dead-to-writes/id1323768397?mt=2 and https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dLNmI9KdD88 ). Invisible audiences engender trepidation as much as visible ones, it seems—at least for me. I’m much better with discussions in a small group. (Maybe because I’ve run them?)

Other than bloviating politicians who seem to love to go on and on, public speaking is daunting for most people, in fact, but especially introverts, so I’m not exceptional. And authors tend to be reclusive (that’s me!)—how can you seriously write in a crowd?—so even greeting readers can make a writer uncomfortable. I’ve done enough public speaking that I should be comfortable with all its aspects, but I’m not. But I can’t say that this book makes me feel more comfortable.

But back to the book’s emphasis on a career in public speaking: I doubt that the world needs another Joanna Penn. She’s unique in the book world. She makes supplementary income, according to her book, on her speaking tours, but the average author shouldn’t start thinking that s/he can do the same by following the advice in this book. Ms. Penn started in the publishing business after I did and chose some roads I didn’t follow to make a living with her novels, marketing advice, and public speaking. More power to her—she filled an ecological niche that was waiting to be filled. I wouldn’t have made those choices, and I didn’t have to do so.

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[Note: This article is part of the new series of blog posts, Character Bios—you’ll find them all in the blog category of the same name.]

Dao-Ming Chen. Born on Long Island in the state of New York to Chinese immigrant parents, Dao-Ming was an accomplished diver in high school and college. After studying economics and training in the Army ROTC, she became part of an experimental and secret special ops group for women in the Green Berets (U.S. Army). Many of her activities in that group and its very existence are still classified Top Secret. She joined the NYPD where she first met Castilblanco as a uniformed cop; the case involved the murder of a Central Park carriage driver (“The Case of the Carriageless Horse,” in World Enough and Crime).  She spent time in the narcotics division (some cases are described in Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java), and has partnered with Rolando Castilblanco since 2014 (their first case together as detectives is described in The Midas Bomb).

She is a tall, strong woman who doesn’t smile much—Castilblanco calls her his “Asian Mona Lisa”—but she’s in excellent physical shape and is good at martial arts.  She speaks both Cantonese and Mandarin as well as English.  She is married to A.T.F. agent Eric Kulmala, and they now have one child.

She’s Catholic and a conservative, and she and Castilblanco are like yin and yang, but a great crime-solving duo.

Rolando Castilblanco. Born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican immigrant parents, Rolando became interested in history in high school. He studied criminology at John Jay College and entered the U.S.N. after graduation, where he became a SEAL and participated in many special op missions. He also started as a uniformed cop in the N.Y.P.D. and soon became a homicide detective; the murder of the carriage driver described above was his first homicide case. He’s progressive, but still works well with his partner, Detective Chen. Major cases appear in the seven novels of the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.” Some minor cases are short stories in Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java and various PDFs Steve has free for the asking.

He’s a tall, corpulent man who often mixes barbs, similes, and metaphors in his speech.  He speaks Spanish and some Urdu and Pashtun as well as English.  Because of his love for ethnic foods, he tends to have weight problems and suffers from acid reflux.  He is married to the TV news reporter Pam Stuart. They adopted his cousin’s too kids.

He recently converted from Catholicism to Buddhism.

***

Gaia and the Goliaths. #7 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” is on sale at Smashwords until March 31, a 50% price reduction. The NYPD homicide detectives are given the case of a murdered environmental activists. Like many of their cases, it blows up to have international ramifications. Available in all ebook formats, including .mobi (Kindle). Use the coupon code on checkout.

In libris libertas!

Both Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa are titans of Latin American literature (Nobel Prize winners) and good examples of why the label “literary fiction” should be abolished. The first author, affectionately known as “Gabo,” is celebrated for being the inventor of magical realism. Vargas Llosa’s more complex novels have earned him the moniker “the Latin American Balzac.” Neither writes literary fiction, but they’re master storytellers.

First, an explanation of names. Because America is such a diverse country, many readers might already know that two last names are customary in Spanish (often hyphenated, but not required or necessarily correct). Garcia and Vargas are the two authors’ fathers’ names; Marquez and Llosa are the two mothers’ names. When I lived in Colombia, all my Colombian documentation had me with both names too (as a Colombian resident, I had a citizen’s ID card—not a bad idea for the U.S.—just like everyone else). If Latin American wives follow the tradition, their names will be something like Anna Maria Lopez de Benavides, the last “de Benavides” signifying she “belongs to” Sr. Benavides, i.e. she’s his wife, and the Lopez signifying her father was a Lopez. Yeah, these societies are traditionally macho, but things are changing for the better, so stay tuned.

Both authors’ books are often characterized as “literary fiction,” that nebulous and unfortunate label that tells the reader absolutely nothing. Worse, this is often considered a genre. Genres are often nothing more than keywords anymore, of course. For some reason, critics, bookstore owners, and many readers like to pretend “literary fiction” is a genre. It’s not. No way. These words aren’t even keywords because they contain zero information about what’s in the book. They represent a catch-all category equivalent to “Miscellaneous,” which is unfair to every author whose book is so labeled, but especially unfair to these two titans of 20^th century literature.

I’ve read most of Gabo’s books and many of Vargas Llosa’s in the original Spanish (remember, the latter’s are more complex). There was an interesting article in the 2/25/2018 edition of the NY Times Magazine, “The Last Titan” by Marcela Valdes, about Vargas Llosa. I believe her when she states that Gabo benefitted from having better translators, but I’m not competent enough to look at English translations (I never have) and make a determination, so I can only timidly second Ms. Valdes’s opinion. If you want labels, though, maybe reading these books in Spanish explains why I call most of Gabo’s oeuvre “historical fantasy” (he writes about historical events like La Violencia in Colombia using magical realism) and Vargas Llosa’s “political fiction” (stories with real political events as their settings). That’s an oversimplification in Vargas Llosa’s case, and Gabo’s Otoño del Patriarca could be classified as political fiction too, but categories always oversimplify.

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A thank you… to the Montclair Women’s Club for inviting me to talk about writing, publishing, and my novel Rembrandt’s Angel. A good time was had by all. Montclair’s Channel 34 videotaped the talk; here’s the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dLNmI9KdD88 Thanks to TV34 too.

Carrick Publishing. Donna Carrick, who runs this Canadian company, interviewed me in her podcast series. Her series of podcasts is called Dead to Writes; you can find them on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/dead-to-writes/id1323768397?mt=2 (choose S1, E3).  She begins by reading one of my short stories, “The Case of the Carriageless Horse,” the tale of Detective Castilblanco’s first homicide case (the story is found in the anthology World Enough and Crime).

Carrick will be publishing the second edition of The Secret Lab and the new book The Secret of the Urns in the first and third quarters of 2018, respectively; these are both young adult novels. The reclusive Donegal writer A. B. Carolan will be my collaborator on these two young adult sci-fi mysteries.  He completely rewrote and reedited the first book and wrote the second, which is based on one of my short stories, “Marcello and Me,” found in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, a collection of speculative fiction.

Black Opal Books… will be publishing my new post-apocalyptic thriller, The Last Humans. Readers should check them out.  They’re an indie publisher (AKA small press) with an extensive catalog of exciting books and authors. I’m honored to join them and their group of talented authors and look forward to working with their staff. In future newsletters, I’ll keep you posted about the estimated date of publication of this new book.

Here’s the blurb for the book: Foes of the U.S. have attacked the west coast of the U.S. with a bioengineered contagion that spreads around the world.  The apocalypse kills billions—numbers so large that most survivors’ minds snap shut. One of only a few survivors, Penny Castro, ex-USN diver and L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy, reacts differently. On a forensic dive, she is interrupted. When she surfaces, she finds all her colleagues dead, so she has to battle starvation, thirst, and gangs of feral humans until she ends up in a USAF refugee camp. Penny’s adventures will entertain and shock you into asking, “Could this really happen?”

You can find a pre-release excerpt here: https://stevenmmoore.com/pre-release-excerpt-from-oasis-redux/ (Note that Oasis Redux was just the working title while I wrote the novel.)

And check out my guest post “Novels of Doom” on David W. Spell’s website http://TheScaryReviews.com. This explains some of my reasons for writing this new book. (David’s website offers a lot of good information about scary fiction, and The Last Humans is very scary…and current too, I might add.)

Walmart… has added another feature to their continuing campaign to compete with Amazon: They’ve signed a deal with Kobo to sell ebooks. I sent an email query to Smashwords because Kobo is an affiliate retailer of theirs, but the response was a bit nebulous: the person answering didn’t know how it would affect Smashwords authors.

For those not familiar with Smashwords, this ebook retailer offers all ebook formats (including .mobi for Kindle) and also distributes to its affiliated retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, and so forth) and lenders (Overdrive, and so forth). For both readers and writers, it’s an alternative to Amazon, the giant retailer, who distributes to no one and only lends through Prime. Authors should NEVER be exclusive to Amazon!

It’s good to have alternatives. Readers should frequent their local bookstores for print versions. If they don’t have an author’s book, and you know it has a print version, ask them to order it. They might do 5 or 10 in the same order, and that will help both readers and writers.

Projects in the works. I’d like to list coming attractions AKA book projects in the works. There’s no guarantee I’ll finish or publish any particular one, of course, but they are:

Mary Jo Melendez #3. There were some loose ends in #2, so I decided to make the series a trilogy. It will soon be sent to beta-readers. Tentative title: Goin’ the Extra Mile.

Sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel. Penmore Press should be interested; if not, I’ll try some other small press…or Carrick Publishing. It will be a bit different from Rembrandt’s Angel: a lost Botticelli plays a role, but so does some religious artifacts. Tentative title: Son of Thunder.

Chen and Castilblanco #8. Again, this will be a bit different from the other books in my detective series because it will feature Castilblanco’s adopted children. Tentative title: The Phantom Harvester.

The A.B. Carolan books were already mentioned.

I’ll post pre-release excerpts for all these books as they near publication. You already have one for The Last Humans. I think these new novels will be good additions to my oeuvre, allowing me to entertain even more readers, assuming I don’t abandon them. Stay tuned.

Gaia and the Goliaths. On sale now at Smashwords until March 31–50% discount. #7 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” has the detectives on a homicide case where the victim is an environmental activist. As often happens, the case becomes much more important and takes on international proportions. Available in all ebook formats, including .mobi for Kindle.  Use the coupon code shown on the Smashwords’ book page on checkout. Enjoy the read!

Free for the asking. I can’t publish everything I write, even the good stuff (the bad stuff never sees the light of day, of course). On my website you will find a list of PDFs free for the asking. For readers, most of them are short fiction. For authors, there is also a course on writing fiction. Peruse that list and send me an email requesting those that interest you. I’ll reply with the PDFs as attachments. Some of the projects noted above might become free PDFs, for example.

In libris libertas!

Many novels have a large cast of characters. The main characters, protagonist(s) and villain(s), always capture the readers’ attentions, but supporting ones are also important. The main characters interact with them and that makes them all seem a bit more human, assuming they all act like real people to begin with. Every character is an actor on a stage where the stage is your fiction story.

Pirandello wrote the somewhat schizophrenic drama Six Characters in Search of an Author. The problem he describes is often not the real one, though. Sometimes supporting characters are so good that they seem to clamor for top billing in other novels. That happened to me with Ashley Scot, for example, the DHS agent who’s friends with Detectives Chen and Castilblanco. Even the detectives wanted her to have her own book. I gave Ashley top billing in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. Ashley did a great job. Detective Castilblanco is reduced to a cameo role.

Another example from my own oeuvre is found in Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden. Esther, the Scotland Yard Inspector from the Art and Antiques Division, was only a supporting character in The Collector; Bastiann, an Interpol agent, played supporting roles in Aristocrats and Assassins and Gaia and the Goliaths. In The Collector and Gaia and the Goliaths, they were already a bit romantically involved. That romance really bloomed when I gave them their own novel, Rembrandt’s Angel; that romance is only part of the story in that book.

In my next major novel, The Last Humans, which will be published by Black Opal Books, no secondary character is clamoring for her or his own novel. Benjamin Thomas, the ex-physicist affectionately called Ben Hur, is an important secondary character, though, and he insisted I include one of his poems at the beginning of the book. Time will tell if that’s suffice to keep him satisfied.

People often say “It takes a village.” That applies to the best novels. Some secondary characters are important to the main plot, others not, and still others participate in subplots. As the village is populated, a short story becomes a novella and the novella becomes a novel. That’s an evolutionary process that represents a lot of the fun in writing fiction.

The danger of secondary characters is that they can become caricatures—2D representations of humanity. Or worse, they can become parodies of the main characters. It’s not easy to make all these characters seem real, but that’s more challenging for the secondary ones. The author will spend less time developing them a fortiori, so s/he has to be careful.

One place where many authors fail is naming secondary characters. Their names have to be as carefully chosen as the main characters’ names unless they’re just what a movie director might call “extras.” The same goes for their personalities. Time is needed to develop them too.

The longer the novel, the more characters there are, and vice versa. In Rembrandt’s Angel, my longest novel to date, I included a list of all the characters. In my new book, The Last Humans, I probably won’t. There are two reasons: it’s about the post-apocalyptic journey of Penny Castro, and she tells her story in the first person. The reader will remember her adopted family well enough by the end—Ben Hur is one of them—and that’s what mostly counts.

As a reader, I’ve found books where I wish I had a list of characters; with other books, I wonder why the author bothered to include one.  Maybe for readers who read more than one novel at a time (guilty as charged, but I still don’t often need the character list).  As a writer, I always have a working character list, together with a brief description of each one, and that helps me as the novel writing progresses. I make the decision before sending the manuscript out to anyone else whether to include an edited version.

***

Note: Why are all the links above to ebooks on Smashwords? Because that online retailer provides better service to readers than Amazon. It offers all ebook formats, including .mobi (Kindle), distributes to other retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, etc), offers ebooks to lenders (Overdrive, etc), and allows me to sell ebooks at a reduced price to public libraries. Amazon does none of that. For those who insist on Amazon, here’s the link to my Amazon author page. I try to reach out to all readers, no matter what their preferences are.

In libris libertas….

(Craig A. Falconer, Not Alone, self-published?, 12/19/15)

Mr. Falconer’s book doesn’t need another review—at last count, 1850+ readers have jumped on the fanwagon and written their one- and two-line endorsements (called reviews by Amazon)—but I often review books that I buy for R&R reading when they have a lot of positives.  Unfortunately this one has many negatives too.  So here goes.

First, the positives. There is no Star Wars-like space opera here. Most of the first half of the book is spent uncovering a government conspiracy and battling the perpetrator’s and media’s attempts to hide it. Dan Murphy, a believer in UFOs, just happens to be present when a thief steals a Top Secret folder containing evidence for ETs from a government agency, and it also just happens that Emma Ford, an expert in PR and marketing, shows up to help him battle the media. When no one worries about who the thief is, I became suspicious—that’s a flaw some readers might glide over, but I didn’t. Still, I managed to get through this ponderous half of the story because the concept was interesting, albeit a long variation on all those conspiracy theories about Area 51.

Second, there are nice twists that happen in the second half of the book, if you can make it that far. Consider them examples of the adage, “It’s not paranoia if it’s true.” These twists can be a lot of fun, I’ll admit, but I just wish it hadn’t taken the author so long to get to them—completely unnecessary. Because Mr. Falconer can’t seem to pare things down, he should have hired a content editor.

In his “apology” at the end, he states that he wanted to make just one novel and not split it up. At 742 equivalent pages, this ebook is shorter than my Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, but it’s certainly equivalent to at least two novels.  And it didn’t need to be! Where does Falconer go wrong? Call it his being a wannabe speech writer, overly enchanted with his own prose, or what you like—he’s just too verbose.

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As readers of my novels know, my stories treat important themes. Here’s one: healthcare will become a worldwide problem.  It already is in the U.S., of course, because the whole system is based on making money for greedy Big Pharma, greedy insurance companies, and greedy healthcare networks and their associated professionals.  But other places will have problems too.  Even single-payer systems will have problems as they start having to limit costs in order to cover everyone.

Here’s a recent headline: “British Health System Felt the Strain of Cuts: Doctors Vent over Being Overwhelmed” (NY Times, 1/4/18). What? The standard for single-payer systems is in trouble? Of course, this is a question of governmental priorities—the conservative PM Theresa May is in trouble. and she can’t control her party’s desire to slash anything that benefits the middle class and poor.  Sound familiar? Speaker Paul Ryan has proposed slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to pay for the deficit increases attributable to the tax cuts for corporations and the rich.  And Trump’s proposed budget does exactly that!

OK, I made a New Year’s resolution not to write any more political op-ed and dedicate myself to storytelling this year, but that’s the point of this article: warnings in many sci-fi stories can easily become reality. While that’s true in general for any story (I watched the movie Enemy of the State again recently and thought, “it’s much worse now!”), sci-fi writers often extrapolate current problems into the future. They sometimes get it almost right, like Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451—we aren’t burning books yet, of course, but we’re doing much the same thing because the number of readers is diminishing, and our illiterate-in-chief in the White House seems only to be capable of reading business charts with bulleted items, if that, and surely wants to burn one book in particular if extracts from it are any indication.

But back to healthcare. I’ve been concerned about it ever since Nixon and the president of Kaiser Permanente sat down and invented the HMO concept, figuring there was a lot of money to be made on the backs of the infirm and poor.  The system we now have in America should fulfill their wildest dreams…and U.S. citizens’ wildest nightmares.

I probably co-opted the phrase “full medical” for the title of my first published novel from Frederik Pohl—that’s a theme in his novel Gateway (part of the HeeChee Chronicles).  Of course, no one in the U.S. besides the filthy rich and government people have complete medical coverage, so Pohl’s main character would feel right at home in our current setting—he wouldn’t need the HeeChee. My version of that book has a 1976 copyright, so Pohl beat me by some thirty years—my novel Full Medical was published in 2006 (it now even has a second ebook edition).  But I make more specific predictions than Pohl did in reference to the theme of health care (so much so that one idiot reviewer thought it was a medical book).

Here’s one: I imagine a strong black market in body parts, leading in its extreme to clones being used to generate them for the one-percenters, including corporate and government VIPs.  This book is the first in the “Clones and Mutant Series.” In the world of 2053, most people without full medical coverage just die; the rich elites can live forever with body parts taken from their clones.  The first is happening now, of course, so we don’t have to wait for 2053; the second is a distinct possibility.  After Dolly, human cloning WAS possible, and they’ve done it with other animals, so it’s not surprising that many nations have outlawed it.  And with that personalized source of body parts, free from the danger of rejection, we have the ultimate full medical policy for the rich and famous.

Of course, Pohl was writing his HeeChee stories in the seventies when “sci-fi thriller,” that is, a combination of sci-fi and thriller, hadn’t yet been invented.  To his credit, there’s plenty of action in his trilogy, but my three novels combine the two genres. But when it comes to health care, his “solution” is less probable than mine.  The theme recurs all through the “Clones and Mutants Series,” starts in earnest in the bridge novel The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan (nursing homes for the elderly, with a nasty government wrinkle for certain elders), continues after the clone series in the bridge novel Soldiers of God, and ends with the dystopian nightmares of the Chaos in the first book of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” Survivors of the Chaos (the trilogy is bundled in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, a real value for readers).

I’m not going to claim that everything dealing with health care in my books will come to pass, but I’m definitely afraid it will. More importantly, given current events in the world, exemplified by the first few paragraphs of this post, we know that health care will be an important theme for sci-fi to consider for a long time. And that’s critical: no sci-fi storytelling should be without important themes where the futuristic setting can provide us with the opportunity to stand back a little and analyze objectively what it all means.

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In libris libertas…