Book pricing is always debated among self-published authors and the marketing gurus who pretend to advise them; traditionally published authors have no control over it—their publishers determine pricing, often to their detriment. But we can include both groups of authors (and hopefully exclude the gurus) by asking, “What should be the price of a quality ebook?”

Note that I’m focusing on ebooks. I no longer understand print-book pricing because that’s all over the board and no longer makes any sense. Also note the inclusion of the word “quality.” Whether self- or traditionally published, there’s a lot of garbage books out there that are often overpriced to make them appear to be quality literature—most celeb books are trash, for example.

For both, self- and traditionally published, let me start on an equal footing: I’m assuming that we’re deciding on the correct pricing for a fully edited novel, both copy- and content-edited, and one that has an attractive cover. I’m also ignoring additional publishing costs: Forget about trying to recuperate those editing and cover-art costs or anticipated marketing costs. And let me focus on a novel that has between sixty and seventy kwords (many traditionally published novels are padded to the extreme because the traditional publisher wants to make it “worth their while” to put out a print version—that’s a quote from one of my traditional publishers, by the way).

Such a novel in ebook format should be priced in the $3 to $5 range, independent of genre. I have many years of experience that goes into determining that range as a reader and a writer. As a reader, if I see a novel in ebook format priced outside that range, I rarely purchase it. When less than $3, I might take a chance; when more than $5, forget about it!

Traditional publishers’ ebook prices are usually far more than $5, which is absurd! An ebook is just an efile. Self-published books are usually better reading bargains, costing about the same as an on-demand movie, and it provides many more hours of quality entertainment.

My ebooks are generally in the range I’ve indicated. (Fortunately, my traditional publishers also keep their ebooks within that range as well.) Recent ones I’ve published and distributed using Draft2Digital reflect the inflationary pressures of our times (what doesn’t these days?) and are priced at $3.99.

Ebooks are usually purchased online, of course, but no one can claim they’re not browsable before purchasing. Just like in a bookstore, readers can read the blurbs and peek inside to see if they think the ebook is worth buying (or that the author can at least write). I do that all the time (while I mostly ignore the reviews, especially on Amazon).

There are borrowing opportunities for ebooks as well, just like in a public library. Draft2Digital distributes to many library and lending services, and many public libraries now offer ebooks. (They tend to cater to Big Five ebooks, though, which is unfortunate, because those are usually overpriced, so libraries’ number of offers have to be limited because of fixed budgets—the cost of the ebook determines what it costs to lend the ebook.) That’s all an argument for self-published authors to keep their ebook prices in the range I’ve indicated. Smart consumers know value when they see it.

There was a time when ebook sales plateaued and print sales didn’t. Covid changed all that because people favored online purchases. Buy an ebook online and you’re reading it almost immediately; buy a print book and you’re waiting for it to be delivered (or the reader becomes the delivery man). Avid readers often read ebooks only because of that difference.

Authors, please price your ebook novel accordingly and take advantage of digital publishing. You will be a happier author by doing so.

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Fear the Asian Evil. Former Scotland Yard Inspector Steve Morgan’s next case at Bristol PD involves the attempted murder of a journalist who happens to be the sister-in-law of one of his sergeants. Its prelude, though, involves a fishing trip made during a vacation when Steve and his girlfriend’ father find a dead Chinese spy afloat in the North Sea. That leads to frictions with MI5 that distract from solving what should be the routine case of the woman’s attempted murder. The hunt for spies and ordinary policework clash until they come together. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not on Amazon).

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

Many of my books are part of a series, but a lot of the series end as a trilogy. The latter will probably be the fate of “The Last Humans” series (I’m working on the third novel, Moscow Menace), but it could also be the fate of the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series (three books already published).

In any case, it gives me great pleasure to announce the publication of the third “Inspector Steve Morgan” novel, Fear the Asian Evil. Here’s the summary:

Former Scotland Yard Inspector Steve Morgan’s next case at Bristol PD involves the attempted murder of a journalist who happens to be the sister-in-law of one of his sergeants. Its prelude, though, involves a fishing trip made during a vacation when Steve and his girlfriend’ father find a dead Chinese spy afloat in the North Sea. That leads to frictions with MI5 that distract from solving what should be the routine case of the woman’s attempted murder. The hunt for spies and ordinary policework clash until they come together.

When I introduced Morgan in The Klimt Connection, Book Eight in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, I sensed that the complex British copper was a character who promised to provide many suspenseful adventures as he solves complex crimes. Although all British-style mysteries owe something to great trailblazers like Agatha Christie, today’s world is a lot more complex than theirs was, and crime-fighting has taken on a new meaning. If only for its massive bureaucracy (the UK reorganized that for policing in general in the first decade of this century, creating the NCA, for example), a bureaucracy Morgan often battles (particularly MI5’s), crime investigations have to be carefully managed now. I believe Morgan has shown he’s up to the task while he strives to put order in his personal life (in particular, with a new romantic partner). I hope my readers will agree.

All three novels, Legacy of Evil, Cult of Evil, and Fear the Asian Evil, are distributed by Draft2Digital and available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not on Amazon, which I now boycott for my book publishing). Because everyone is already talking about holiday gifts, allow me to suggest that the entire set would be a great gift to yourself or to anyone among your family or friends who are avid readers of the mystery, thriller, suspense, and crime genres. Here a reader can read about complex twenty-first century crime that goes from murder at the local level to nationwide syndicates and international spy rings. Christie and other mystery and thriller pioneering authors could never have imagined how crime stories have evolved! Modern readers reap the benefits.

As I announced in a tweet (I don’t know how much longer I’ll be on Twitter because Elon Musk seems intent on ruining it!), I’m finishing a short story for my “Friday Fiction” series on my blog (see this Friday’s post). I use short fiction to take a few breathers, a cooling down if you will, after running the marathon of completing a novel (in this case, the first three “Inspector Steve Morgan” novels that may or may not end as a trilogy). Of course, short fiction is like running a few sprints or mid-distance races in comparison to a novelistic marathon. (The real NYC Marathon will take place soon. I was never able to run a real one, but I can still admire all those runners stamina!)

Once I’m done with that short story and posted it, what comes next? I’ve been debating three possible new novels. I had intentions of morphing More than Human: The Mensa Contagion into three novels, adding to the first and second parts of that sci-fi novel. There’s also still the question about what becomes of the combined Human-Mensan expedition to a nearby star (nearby in cosmic terms, of course).

I couldn’t call on A. B. Carolan to help on that, though, an avid fan of sci-fi himself. He’s still working on the second and third books of “The Denisovan Trilogy” to add to Origins. Unlike the Mensan book, there’s two novels there that need to be written to finish that story about galactic empires and their political battles. The first book took place on Earth. I can understand A. B.’s indecision about the next two with all the politics already going on here on Earth! He expressed that when he appeared in Intolerance, Book Seven of the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. (It’s available as a free PDF download—see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page here at this site.)

To avoid badgering A. B. and to take a breather from sleuthing, British-style (the Brookstone and Morgan series), I’m going to try to control my ire against Black Opal Books (publisher of The Last Humans) and Amazon (for confusing the first book with its sequel, The Last Humans: A New Dawn) by finishing the trilogy with a novel tentatively titled Moscow Menace. Here, as hinted at the end of the second novel, Penny Castro, the principal protagonist in the first two novels, and her husband Alex will have starring roles once again.

The plot for Moscow Menace is about Russia, of course. Don’t worry. Vladimir Putin is long dead, having succumbed to the same virus bioengineered by the PNRK and unleashed on the US’s west coast only to see it become worldwide and kill billions, even most of its originators. (All that predated Covid-19, although it’s still in question whether the latter virus was bioengineered by the Chinese. At any rate, it certainly made The Last Humans more believable and a warning that no one heeded, among them the Chinese.) Penny and a few others are among the survivors, all a fluke of genetics. (The mRNA vaccines help explain why genetics is important here. And we’ll be studying the consequences of that, i.e. the vaccine side effects, for a long time.)

The post-apocalyptic world of Penny Castro is still one where human beings must struggle to survive, but like in the second novel, this third novel adds the debris from world politics to the trials and tribulations of the survivors. I’ll keep readers posted on my progress. In the meantime, if you haven’t read the first two novels, you have some catching up to do!

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Four sci-fi novels. Mentioned above are More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, The Last Humans, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, and A. B. Carolan’s Origins. All are available wherever quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon, except for the last). They’ll make fine holiday gifts for all the sci-fi addicts among your family and friends. (See the “Books & Short Stories” web page for descriptions.)

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

[Announcement from Steve: If you’re looking for me on Facebook, for my author’s page in particular, you will no longer find me there: I have ended my long-term participation in that social media site! Zuckerberg and his minions have changed it so much and gone to the dark side that it’s now a complete waste of my time. (I could no longer post to my own author’s page, for example! And I have to put up with too many fascists whom Zuckerberg and friends are all too willing to help, including the Russians in 2016.) My readers can follow me here in this blog—hey, it’s social media too!—and on Twitter, although I might end my affiliation with Twitter too if Musk ruins it like Zuckerberg has done with Facebook. Meta be damned! Amazon (Bezos), Facebook (Zuckerberg), and Twitter (Musk) are no longer an author’s friends. Moreover, their outreach to readers has always been highly questionable. I can no longer recommend any of them to authors. Stick with your blog or, if you must, use Goodreads. (Amazon has ruined that too, of course.) Now…back to my post.]

As I explain in the end notes of my new novel Fear the Asian Evil, I’ve long believed that Xi’s China is a more dangerous adversary for the US than Putin’s Russia, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. I gave Vladimir Putin his due as a villain in Legacy of Evil, so it was time to make Xi Jinping the villain in this third book of the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series. Putin has had made many mistakes and miscalculations; Xi’s major one so far was the mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic that threatens the Chinese economy. I suppose that’s just because Xi unleashed Covid upon the world.

In the novel, I deal with Xi indirectly by focusing on the MSS (China’s evil Ministry of State Security), specifically on its agents and spies whose goal is to disrupt western democracies and steal their ideas and inventions. (Any autocratic system kills individual creativity. The FPA in America should carefully consider that truism—that’s the Fascist Party of America, once known as the Republican Party.) How are these Chinese operatives financed? I examine one possible way in my novel, one that could be hard to thwart for any security agencies in the UK, US, or any other democratic country. There could be other ways not portrayed in my novel, of course, but what I do portray shows that China presents a clear and present danger for freedom, human rights, creatives’ hard work, and world peace.

It’s interesting that President Biden and others are echoing my concerns about China. The Ukrainians are slapping Russia around—let’s cheer them on!—but we’ve not forgotten and can’t afford to forget about that Red Dragon. It’s time that the US and all western democracies confront all the bad actors in the world, including Iran, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia…and China!

My new novel is another mystery/thriller featuring the Bristol PD DI Steve Morgan. It might be called a political thriller with enough romance and suspense added to make a spicy stew. Its themes should be topics of discussion around everyone’s dinner table just like the themes in all the Morgan books. If you want fluff, read a cozy mystery, not these novels. I don’t ever expect all readers to agree with me (my characters express a variety of opinions, many not my own), but if I can start intelligent discussions among you, this book and the other Morgan novels are successes!

Watch for Fear the Asian Evil—coming soon!

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Fear the Asian Evil, Book Three in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series, will be available this November at all of Draft2Digital’s affiliated retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and library and lending services (Overdrive, Scribd, etc.), but not on Amazon. Here’s a summary:

Former Scotland Yard Inspector Steve Morgan’s next case at Bristol PD involves the attempted murder of a journalist who happens to be the sister-in-law of one of his sergeants. Its prelude, though, involves a fishing trip made during a vacation when Steve and his girlfriend’ father find a dead Chinese spy afloat in the North Sea. That leads to frictions with MI5 that distract from solving what should be the routine case of the woman’s attempted murder. The hunt for spies and ordinary policework clash until they come together where mutual cooperation finally wins the day.

While you can read this novel independently from all my others, if you missed The Klimt Connection (where Morgan makes his debut), Celtic Chronicles (which leaves some things unresolved for the first Morgan book), or Legacy of Evil and Cult of Evil (#1 and #2 in Morgan’s series), you might want to check them out too. (Hint for Santa’s helpers: A gift of the entire “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy will please any avid reader of mystery/thriller novels among your family and friends.)

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

Stephen King and Dean Koontz have made a good living writing horror stories. (The second’s tales are better than the first’s.) Other authors less so. (Maybe not so good a living but still some quality stories in that genre?) All their stories are probably better categorized to be a subgenre of fantasy and not sci-fi.

Mystery and thriller stories do a better job of capturing the actual horror of real life, though. What could be more horrible than a school shooting? Or Putin’s war in Ukraine? Or 9/11? Moreover, fiction dealing with horrible events can provide useful warnings for us precisely because those events could occur in real life!

Even in my sci-fi stories, I prefer mystery and thrills, not unbelievable horror. You won’t find an ET like the one in the movie Alien, but you will find some scheming and murderous ones. I prefer mystery and thrills in my reading, and I prefer to create them in my writing to creating some fantastic story featuring impossible events.

My new novel Cult of Evil has enough horror that it should still creep out a lot of readers, though, especially because such horror could actually occur in real life. The story takes place in the Bristol conurbation of England (Britain’s west coast), but it could easily occur in any port city anywhere. The novel also differs a bit from my other mystery/thriller novels, the first novel in the series included, because it’s more a police procedural featuring Inspector Steve Morgan, also the principal character in Legacy of Evil and making his debut as a secondary character in The Klimt Connection. In contrast to crime stories set in America (Detective Bosch in LAPD and my own Detective Castilblanco in NYPD, for example), the police procedures are English ones, but there’s a lot of surprising commonality between LAPD and NYPD versus Bristol PD. Morgan himself has things in common with the two mentioned American detectives (a military background, for example), but there are also quite a few differences.

Cults, of course, are very real, from L. Ron Hubbard’s crazy scientologists, Quakers, and Seventh Day Adventists, to David Koresh’s and Charles Manson’s fanatical groups and those QAnon believers that plague American democracy. From these examples, one sees cults can be good or bad. Of course, Morgan has to deal with an evil one.

I hope you find the horror in Cult of Evil subservient to the mystery and thrills. I also hope you find it more interesting than what’s contained in a King or Koontz novel. Let me know if you do.

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Now available! Cult of Evil, Book Two in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series, was published October 17 and will be available at all of Draft2Digital’s affiliated retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and library and lending services (Overdrive, Scribd, etc.), but not on Amazon. Here’s a summary:

Steve Morgan, a former Scotland Yard Inspector and now one at Bristol PD, has another murder case to solve. A young woman appears to have been tortured as part of some cult’s evil rite and then hung lifeless from a Victorian folly. Is the cult leader the scam artist who took over the woman’s properties and other valuable assets? And to make matters even worse for Morgan, a deadly assassin is hunting him.

While you can read this novel independently from my others, if you missed The Klimt Connection (where Morgan makes his debut), Celtic Chronicles (which leaves some things unresolved for the first Morgan book), or Legacy of Evil (#1 in the series), you might want to check them out too.

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

I didn’t watch the Emmys—those types of incestuous, popularity contests don’t interest me in the least—but I remember someone saying this during the recap on the news. Some uneducated presenter was commenting about how good it was to have good TV to watch. I don’t want to waste my time here picking a battle with him and other zombies mesmerized by audiovisual pyrotechnics—you might hear such sentiments at the Oscars too—but I insist on praising the entertainment and educational value of reading a good book over any TV show or movie and asking even that presenter to consider that alternative.

First, TV shows and movies are formulaic and boring in general. Viewers can’t seem to realize what they’re missing…or they don’t care that the boob tube and the silver screen turns them into zombies. That’s their choice and their loss. Any avid reader can attest that books win over TV shows and movies hands down for the reasons mentioned. And those negatives apply to streaming video as well, which is the worst thing to happen to movies since they were invented (long after books, I might add).

Second, a good novel can entertain and educate a lot longer and more profoundly than any movie or TV show. Let’s consider a typical half- or full-hour show or even a two-hour movie. That half bour reduces to twenty minutes and that full hour reduces to forty. In that amount of time, a director can’t begin to tell a meaningful story, and a viewer doesn’t have the time to digest it even if the director could manage this miracle. A reader can read at his own pace, savoring the nuances of the story; putting it aside to ponder its lessons for a bit; or underline pithy prose sections as they go (even on a Kindle!).

Third, characters in TV shows and movies are often stereotypes and lack the complexity that real human beings have. What’s more, readers can interpret the characters in books, becoming them as they read, whereas with TV shows and movies, viewers are force-fed the actors portrayals of the characters (mostly dictated by a director, of course, because actors aren’t really that smart).

Fourth, there’s no Pulitzer, Nobel, or Booker prizes for a TV show or movie, and, as I said above, the judges of quality for the latter aren’t nearly as qualified and too involved in that media’s narcissism! Plays might be an exception, but dramas, like the novel, are first and foremost literature, not visual arts, and exist in a weird twilight zone between literature and visual arts at the best. In any case, no one should ever compare those prizes, even for drama, with those for commercial media, Emmys and Oscars.

Is this article only the rant of an erudite fiction writer? No, it’s more a suggestion to that idiot at the Emmys to try some quality entertainment, not fluff. In other words, he should read a good book!

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The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! And today is the last day! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills.

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

No, this post isn’t about a racy pumpkin who’s become a spy! But you might be able to guess that the quotation marks indicate something unusual. If you do, you’re correct. This post is about English slang…or should I say American slang because I write British-style mysteries?

I’ve touched on dialects and slang in various posts here over the years and in my little course “Writing Fiction” (see the list of free PDF download on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). Are slang words dialect? Not really, but they can be part of dialect. English dialect is what’s used by a Cockney or a Texan, and Brits might think American English is a dialect of British English (and vice versa), but slang words can be taken from dialects and used in the principal language, or created and used singly, and not vice versa. I’m no linguist (okay, maybe every author is an amateur one, and I’m an author), but both slang words and dialects must drive professional editors nuts. First, how can they know if an author is using either one correctly? Second, how can readers wade through a novel filled with slang words and dialects they don’t completely understand?

The two items in the title are labeled as new slang and are now found in Merriam-Webster this September. “MacGyver” is a verb: To MacGyver something is to use common materials at hand to make something useful. Its origin is found in the first TV show of that name, which was much better than the second ever was with a better actor playing the main role, although people might only remember Richard Dean Anderson in Stargate. I’m not quite sure about the origins of “pumpkin spice”—I’d hate to think that it comes from that ubiquitous coffeeshop slop sold along with other horrible concoctions at Starbucks.

The Brits have their own slang, of course, and, like American slang, it’s often regional. I include some of it in the list I started in the short fiction collection Sleuthing, British-Style and have carried over to the later novels of the “Esther Brookstone” series and those in the “Steve Morgan” stories. These lists are more for Americans who are unfamiliar with British slang words and dialect (like me!).

But that’s all beside the point, isn’t it? Editors will still have those two worries indicated above, and authors should too. One only has to listen to Brits or Yanks to know the living language employed by them always has local variations and nuances. Using the latter adds some pumpkin spice to the dialogue in an author’s prose. Abusing them, though, might reduce the number of readers who can enjoy reading that prose.

As in most things associated with the art of creative writing, the Goldilocks Principle tells us what to do as authors: MacGyver your dialogue with snippets of slang and dialect but just enough to add pumpkin spice to the mix—not too little, not too much, but just enough.

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The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! And it ends Sept. 30. This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills.

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

When I was young, I loved to draw and write. (Obviously, I still love to do the latter!) But when I started to think about how I might make a living in my teens—what any responsible lass or lad should do—I chose to focus on what’s now called STEM, figuring that would give me a lot more opportunities for gainful employment than writing fiction. Not that I didn’t love science and math—I did, and it came easy for me, so it was easy enough for me to acquire the necessary skills—but I loved writing even more. As a consequence, my publishing career only started in 2006, while I still had a day-job (not uncommon for wannabe authors).

From the time of that teenage decision, and before that first novel, I always wondered what opportunities could be coming along for writing professionals (even with my number of novels, I still consider myself an amateur, not a pro). After a few novels, I wandered into LinkedIn, one of the reasons being to answer that question. My initial assessment of that website was what might be common among authors: What was it good for in my case? Initially, I played around in the discussion groups, but Microsoft ruined those when they took over that website (just like Amazon has ruined Goodreads). With so many LinkedIn connections, my question continued, and I often asked people who wanted to connect with me if they could answer it. (By the way, for those nice people who want to connect, I rarely turn anyone down, but I generally do batch-processing on the requests, so please be patient. And you might expect that question!)

Recently, though, I decided that LinkedIn might be a good place to answer the first question in a context far removed from the teenager who asked it long ago: What jobs are now available for writers? In particular, is it now easier to make a living as a writer? LinkedIn seemed to be the most readily available place to find answers to those questions.

I was surprised—maybe astounded is the better word! Almost everyday I receive between ten and twenty job postings, all involving writing. These aren’t job offers, of course, and I won’t be applying to any of them. (LinkedIn hasn’t discovered I’m scamming them, payback for destroying the discussion groups.) But most of them didn’t exist when I was thinking about a future career. I should add that LinkedIn focuses more on my writing skills, which I have, and not on my STEM skills, which frankly are a bit out of date now. (The latter leads to some technical writing jobs, of course.)

Some jobs are onsite, which I’d never take now; others are work-at-home positions; and still others are mixed onsite and remote. Most of them, if I’m honest, seem interesting—or they would have interested that teenager long ago. And I don’t think I even added more traditional writing jobs like journalism or editing to my “desired positions,” the former seeming a lot more interesting now except for the fact that newspapers are dying.

That’s all good news for any young person who wants a writing career. Young people can write their great American novel in off-hours away from their their day-jobs if they want that too, but they can definitely make a living writing now. Maybe the latter could even involve writing fiction, the latter ubiquitous in many politicians’ speeches! Want to be a speechwriter?

At any rate, I consider my experiment a success. Most of the jobs in the LinkedIn postings didn’t exist when I was a teen, thus reaffirming that my choice of STEM was the correct one at the time. It also showed me that writers are in demand more now than ever before. That has to be a good thing, right!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on my “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment is classified as spam.)

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills.

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

I’m like many people: I’d like more time to read. I have an excuse many readers don’t have, though: I’m often writing fiction, articles for my blog (like this one!), and answering email correspondence relevant to my writing life. And while my Kindle tells me I read a lot, about a book a week for fiction, but I want more reading time.

I often review books I read, unless I can’t say anything good about them. (If it seems that will be the end result for a book, I won’t review it.) Other endorsements can be found buried in these posts at times. But if you glance at all that or at the “Steve’s Bookshelf” webpage that features a list of only some books I’ve read and can recommend, though, you’ll see many are non-fiction. They take longer to read. But that’s time well spent too!

In fiction, I tend to read in the genres and subgenres I write in: mysteries, thrillers, suspense stories, crime novels, science fiction, and some historical fiction. While it’s hard to describe my own books with just one of those genres (my 99-cent sale this month features the Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, a bundle of three novels that range from dystopian to first-contact stories and beyond, all with mystery and thriller elements—see below), I can go beyond them in my fiction reading.

In non-fiction, books that are bios, history, and politics chew up more of my reading time than fiction, as mentioned above, and I don’t write non-fiction. If I want more reading time, why don’t I just minimize my non-fiction reading?

The answer is complex, but the crux of the matter is simple: Reading non-fiction is important for my fiction writing! To paraphrase Tom Clancy (the exact quote is among those running across the top of this website): Good fiction must seem real. This applies to sci-fi as much as the other genres that describe my fiction. I can’t do a good job of writing about my fictional worlds, including ET ones, if I don’t at least partially understand the real world I live in.

Of course, this is even more of a truism for fiction set on planet Earth in the past, present, or near future; many of my novels fit under than umbrella too. A good knowledge of historical events is required to write about the past (historical fiction, a book like my Son of Thunder, for example); a good knowledge of present ones and reasonable extrapolations to predict future ones, especially in the sense of providing warnings that readers might want to heed (those about China and Russia in the later “Esther Brookstone” and more recent “Steve Morgan” books, for example), can turn a plot into a powerful statement.

Moreover, reality is often stranger than fiction, so when an erstwhile critic tells an author something occurring in a novel could never really happen, that author can counter with, “Actually, something similar has already occurred.”

In The Last Humans, someone who’d read the novel wondered if a worldwide pandemic was even possible, not the only thing that’s prescient about that novel unfortunately. Of course, Covid-19 was just that, a worldwide pandemic, and it’s still an unanswered question if the real virus was tweaked in a Chinese biowarfare lab in Wuhan and then let loose (if so, the Chinese have taken it on the chin). (The nation responsible in the novel was North Korea, but that doesn’t change the message.) The current drought and fire-scarred landscapes in SoCal are real manifestations of what was predicted in that novel too. In the case of writing this novel, I extrapolated from what I knew (even the desalination plants in the novel already existed, just not off the SoCal coast). Could I have written any of this without reading non-fiction? (Okay, the desalination plants came from reading Science News, but that’s also non-fiction!)

The Last Humans was pre-Covid but also one of my more recent works (2019 publication date, but written at least a year earlier—traditional publishing is slow!). Let’s go back a few years to 2006 and my first sci-fi thriller Full Medical (now the first book in the “Clones and Mutants” series): That novel is a sci-fi thriller, but its motivation came from non-fiction, in particular, from the very real cloned ewe Dolly! Yes, the novel told the tale of an evil application of cloning (results limited to the very rich—medical advances often are even now), but cloning was going on at the time I wrote the novel, and it still is. (I had to learn a bit about genetics and aging at the time I wrote the book.)

I firmly believe that all authors should read non-fiction as well as fiction. Both might spark creativity, but the first also often provides a foundation for that creativity. Fiction writers should never forget that!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on my “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment is classified as spam.)

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills.

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

[Note from Steve: Frank Drake, the father of the SETI program and much of radio astronomy, passed away last week at 92. He was director of the Arecibo Observatory from 1971 to 1981. Consider this post my feeble attempt to honor this great man.]

I felt sad when I read about the demise of the Arecibo radio telescope, and even sadder when I learned about Frank Drake’s passing. When I attended a conference at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Mayaguez years ago (1970s)—it’s on the opposite side of the island from San Juan—we stopped on the way there to take a tour of that facility. It filled an entire valley and filled me with pride that human beings, scientists like me (at the time), could create such an awesome structure dedicated to exploring the Universe. At that time, Arecibo was a principal center for radio astronomy. Not only was it an important place for probing the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, it was also the home of SETI, a program whose goal was to search for signs of intelligent life in the Universe, presumably originating in radio signals emitted by other civilizations in the cosmos.

Frank Drake and others began that search. Fermi, the last physicist who worked in both the theoretical and experimental sides of physics, once asked the taunting question, “Where are they?” He was referring to ETs, of course. SETI was designed to answer that question. With both Arecibo and SETI gone, one has to wonder who’s trying to answer it now, especially considering all the exoplanets that have been discovered since Arecibo was built.

Of course, searches for ET life with radio signals depend on ET civilizations existing “out there” that broadcast in that narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Drake’s famous equation enters into that argument: Depending on the values assigned to the terms in the equation, the likelihood of such a civilization existing can be estimated. I haven’t seen any scientists revisiting this equation and adjusting the terms according to how many exoplanets have been found. Perhaps they should?

Of course, there are other ways for such civilizations to signal us. In A. B. Carolan’s Origins, the ETs are here on Earth, and they are us. In More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, I considered the possibility of interstellar probes launched by such a civilization looking for a new home. In other words, the ETs came to us, an unusual “first contact.” In Sing a Zamba Galactica, #2 in the ebook bundle, The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection (see below), I assumed that we’d discover the ETs by traveling “out there.” (In that novel, the “first contact” was with friendly ETs. I also included the ubiquitous alien invasion later in the book!)

Sci-fi writers often avoid Fermi’s question completely. In Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi universe, found in the Foundation series, there are no ETs! There’s a lot of good sci-fi without ETs (rarely of the variety known as “space opera,” e.g. Star Wars, that invariably contains ETs), so one can’t really criticize Asimov.

I guess we won’t have an answer to Fermi’s question for a long time, if ever. Frank Drake tried to answer it with the tools he had available. As exciting as recent developments have been (exoplanets and black holes, Space-X and new NASA programs, and instrumentation advances like the Hubble and Webb telescopes), we’re probably centuries away from sending expeditions to even the nearest planetary systems. (Such expeditions were limited to nearby Sol-type stars in the first two novels of the “Chaos Chronicles,” where “nearby” still means tens of light-years!)

Of course, it’s always possible that ETs will visit us as they do in More than Human or Origins. In the first novel, we’re descended from them in a sense. In the second, they came without knowing Earth already had tenants. Then the answer to Fermi’s question is simple: They’re here!

In any case, his question could be unanswerable except via sci-fi. And whether they ever come to Earth or we go out there, only the ruins of civilizations might be found because they’ve destroyed themselves. Right now, it seems we might be headed that way ourselves!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on my “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment is classified as spam.)

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills.

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