As much as I find the NY Times “Book Review” worthless to me as both reader and author, the Times published an interesting editorial about Amazon on Sunday, December 5. (It wasn’t in the “Book Review,” of course. Heaven forbid they say anything against Amazon there!) While more verbose than necessary—the Times’s reporters and contributors tend to bloviate in general—that opinion piece laid out the case against Amazon and pointed out how Bezos’s retail behemoth is destroying American publishing, if not the world’s; and how, as it destroys bookstores, it no longer deserves to be called one.

One charge against Amazon in that article describes how I’ve been victimized all too often by the retail giant: Bots have taken over that “online bookstore.” There are no humans in charge, so you can’t find a real person to help you, no matter how hard you try. My most painful experience where an attack of Amazon bots occurred was when they confused the two books in “The Last Humans” series. I could get neither human nor bot to fix that. (Fair warning if you want to purchase both books on Amazon—you’ll need a lot of patience and need to follow the instructions in red on my “Books & Short Stories” web page to do it. You’ll make your life easier by buying them from B&N.) Probably not surprising, but that was the straw that broke this camel’s back: I’ll never put any more new ebooks up for sale on Amazon again!

(more…)

Let me start with the blurb for the new Esther Brookstone novel, Defanging the Red Dragon :

Esther Brookstone, ex-MI6 spy and ex-Scotland Yard Inspector in the Art and Antiques Division, and her husband, Bastiann van Coevorden, ex-Interpol agent, along with NYPD homicide detective Rolando Castilblanco and his wife, TV reporter Pam Stuart, become embroiled in geopolitical intrigue as the West tries to thwart a plan China has for stealing its nuclear submarine secrets. Taking place mostly in the US and UK, this suspenseful story has multiple twists and turns and is also the tale of two cities, New York and London, and the bustling life found in both, from the rich and powerful to the most scurrilous criminal elements.

I should add that this all takes place around the holidays sometime im the future—no jolly old elf in a sleigh with his ho-ho-hos in this novel, though, just solid mystery, thrills, and suspense that tie together two of my major series, the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series and the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective:” series, in a nice, big bow just for you.

I hope this is a holiday gift you will enjoy. You’ll find the novel in the list among my other free PDFs. I had a little problem making it available. Microsoft had decided to eliminate one of my options that allowed readers to download these PDFs: The OneDrive sharing option is no longer available. (Big Tech strikes again!) Thankfully, I don’t need OneDrive, so good riddance. I have found a work-around (thank you, WordPress!). You only have to click on the title to bring it up in a PDF viewer (at least on my PC laptop; who knows what happens with Apples and smart phones?)—use the download button if you want to have a permanent copy (for your e-reader, for example). (This works for all the older PDFs as well—just remember to hit the back arrow in the PDF viewer to return to the website.) If this doesn’t work for you, you still have the option to email me using my contact page and list the free PDFs you want me to send to you.

Readers of the books in both series know they’re related. Brookstone and her husband van Coevorden have cameos in the first series, and Chen and Castilblanco have some in the second. Many readers are also TV viewers and surely have noticed that crossover series have become more prevalent. I don’t know where scriptwriters got that idea. Maybe from wanting to turn an hour’s drama (really forty minutes or so if you subtract out time for the ads) into something like a full-length movie? It occurred to me that no one had done that for two series.

In a sense, I suppose my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” and A. B. Carolan’s first three sci-fi mysteries for young adults have the same relationship as the two named above, but what they have in common, my sci-fi universe, is a setting, not characters. TV crossovers feature characters, in addition to settings. I wanted to experiment with both.

Why not publish this novel normally, with Draft2Digital, for example? The answer is simple: I wanted to make it free, so why bother publishing normally? I already had set up a mechanism for readers to access free fiction, after all (until Microsoft forced me to find that work-around!). And many authors make the first books in a series free. I’ve stood that on its head and made the last one in both series (for now) free! The motivation is the same: Motivate readers who might be interested in the other books!

It wasn’t easy to put all four detectives in one novel. I think I pulled it off, though. If you agree or disagree, let me know. By the way, the subtitle is A Brookstone-Castilblanco Holiday Adventure in order to recognize the principal detectives and indicate that the series were joined…for at least this one time! Each series might go its separate way again later.

Happy holidays!

***

Comments are always welcome!

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

Huxley had one; in his Brave New World, everyone is happy, happy, happy, taking their soma and not giving a rat’s ass about the futility of their lives. Orwell had one too; in his 1984, no one was happy, even if the entrenched plutocracy ordered them to be, the plutocrats figuring that if they said it often enough they would believe it to be true. C. M. Kornbluth had his too; in Not this August, he painted a desolate land laid to waste by Chinese and Russian invasions. (These are often called dystopian visions, but dystopia is only what follows an apocalypse, even if the latter is only societal.)

By the time I graduated from high school, I read these tales and other apocalyptic visions…the “red menace:” was a part of my childhood. We’d have drills when we’d hide under our student desks so the USSR’s bombs wouldn’t hurt us. While I believed that the USSR could attack us—JFK took us to the brink—I was punished for telling our teacher he was stupid if he thought a small desk could provide adequate protection.

You see, even back then I knew that apocalypses are bigger than any single person; when we say an event is apocalyptic, it affects thousands or millions. Despite that realization, I also realized that the really interesting stories that should be told about apocalyptic events are the ones about how individuals react before, during, and after the event.

In the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” there are two apocalypses. The first is manmade, a collapse of the social order I named the Chaos. Recovery from that ends when ETs use a bioengineered virus to terraform Earth and remake it to their liking. That involved attempting to eradicate all the planet’s native lifeforms, including humans. Fortunately, the recovery from the Chaos continues on three extrasolar planets colonized by humans. Apocalyptic pandemics also play a role in “The Last Humans” series (see below), although the virus is manmade in that case. In More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, a more benign ET virus creates Homo sapiens version 2.0, so the apocalypse is short-lived and in the end beneficial.

Viral apocalypses aren’t as dramatic as crashing asteroids (the dinosaur’s apocalypse), or a nuclear holocaust, and, in the worst-case scenario, leave no story to tell, unless some ET archaeologists stop by later to wonder, “How did this once robust civilization die?” One needs survivors, and that’s where the individuals come in. There are several types of apocalypses like that describe in A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse; they are visited by the heroes in that tale.

The quintessential tongue-in-cheek apocalyptic survivor story, though, can be found in C. M. Kornbluth’s novella “The Marching Morons,” where, unlike my More than Human novel, the apocalypse is reverse evolution—most human beings become incredibly stupid with the exception of a few unlucky souls who have to run everything. (This is akin in a way to Brave New World, I suppose, and was uncannily prescient about the Q-Anon movement.)

Above all, apocalyptic visions in the sci-fi literature are excellent warnings. The better the stories are, the better the warnings. Hollywood has poor apocalyptic visions. We’ve lost a lot in going from Huxley and Orwell to that snow train and cowboys destroying killer asteroids. Special effects in a two-hour movie can’t begin to portray realistic apocalypses or probe into characters’ reactions to them. That can only be found in a book.

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Comments are always welcome.

“The Last Humans” Series. This post-apocalyptic series has been hammered due to the vagaries of modern publishing. The first book, The Last Humans, was published by Black Opal Books, a small press (I think it’s near bankruptcy). In it, Penny Castro survives an apocalypse when a US enemy attacks with a bioengineered virus that works too well, going round the world when the target was only the Pacific Coast of the US. Imagine Covid on steroids! In The Last Humans: A New Dawn, Penny is still in survival mode, but she’s forced to participate in a revenge mission against the country that unleashed the virus. I published that novel with Draft2Digital. In any case, both ebooks are available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (And I might eventually make this a trilogy, especially if Black Opal cancels my contract with them.)

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

[Note from Steve: Due to supply chain issues—my time will be in short supply as I dedicate more of it to my writing—I will reduce the number of articles posted to this blog to two in the future. Wednesdays will feature an article about reading, writing, or publishing, and Fridays will be dedicated to free short fiction, continuing the “Friday Fiction” series. Thank you for your understanding.]

In books about writing fiction (often much wordier but saying less than my own little course available as a free download), I’ve never seen this topic mentioned (my course doesn’t either, but I might include the topic in a future edition). “Who!” you say. “That’s not creating new fiction if you reuse characters.”

Wrong. Fiction writers recycle characters all the time. That’s what series do. While creating believable and interesting characters is important, more fresh material is always found in the plots and doesn’t have to exist in the characterization, except for the development of characters in time.

And why stop with series? Consider my arch-villain, Vladimir Kalinin. Books in three different series, “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone Art Detective,” and “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” along with two bridge books between them, needed an evil villain (although he has some redeeming qualities in No Amber Waves of Grain, the third book in the trilogy). Ergo, he’s present, creating problems for multiple protagonists.

Because these books move along an extended timeline, you could argue that they represent one huge series, but a series generally recycles the good guys, not villains—that’s how we define series! (The same observation might make you wonder how old Vladimir lives for so long. That question begins to be answered in Full Medical, my very first novel and first book in the trilogy.)

But outside a series, should the good guys be recycled? Why not? Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden, protagonists in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, play important roles in the detective series. (I often call them cameos, but they’re really more than that. Cameos are what I give myself!) Turn-about’s fair play, so sometimes Chen and Castilblanco appear in the “Esther Brookstone” series, most notably Chen in Palettes, Patriots, and Prats.

All of this has to make sense, of course. I’ve worked hard to make that happen and like the results. You might have fun trying it as well.

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Comments are always welcome.

Origins: The Denisovan Trilogy, Book One. Perhaps you’re familiar with A. B. Carolan’s sci-fi mysteries for young adults (and those adults who are young at heart!). If you’re a science fan as well as a sci-fi fan, you’ll have heard about Homo denisaovan too. What’s that got to do with A. B.’s new trilogy? Read the first book in the trilogy, filled with thrills and suspense, and see. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold, just not on Amazon.

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

Dramas aren’t the only literary works that have scenes. They naturally occur in short fiction and novels (maybe even biographies?). Authors can, in fact, forget about outlining if they move from scene to scene, not that this is necessarily recommended because other story elements are important too.

If a newbie author trying to figure out where to break the prose into chapters and sections when point-of-view (POV) doesn’t do that naturally, scenes can help make that determination. In fact, readers might get upset by abrupt scene changes within a section or chapter as much as they do with abrupt POV changes (often called “head-hopping”), so both can help authors decide where natural breaks occur. Moreover, scene changes and POV changes often go hand-in-hand: Different scene, different POV, because the scene features a different character.

Even when settings remain the same in flashbacks or back story, there’s a scene change because a scene involves time as well as space. A setting might remind a character of what happened in that flashback or back story, yet there is a change even though the setting is the same: A jump into the past in the character’s mind. This also presents two opportunities: First, to show how the character’s mindset has changed over time; and second, to provide a pause in the action.

Does this seem complicated? It’s really not. It all comes naturally the more fiction you write. Like riding a bicycle or driving a car, once learned, it becomes second nature. But that shouldn’t stop old hands from reflecting on what was just written. Even old hands can improve their prose!

There are some things to watch out for, of course. Just like in drama, what occurs in a scene needs to be meaningful. For example, a gratuitous sex scene might be an effective hook at the beginning of a story, no matter the genre, but it must mean something farther into a story.

Another example that’s a bit difficult to pull off is the scene where a character dies. An editor of Son of Thunder, for example, reacted strongly when I killed off a character whom she liked. Perhaps I should have built up to that scene in a better way? The same thing happened in Aristocrats and Assassins when a reviewer reacted strongly after I killed off a character. In the first case, I might have built up the character too much; in the second, I thought my character description was a bit more ambivalent, so there’d be no problem. Of course, both negative reactions are anecdotal and don’t represent a valid statistical sample.

Of course, both scenes could be justified by their shock value. Twists in fiction scenes, especially mysteries, thrillers, and sci-fi, can please readers like surprises from a pinata. That has value too.

Settings are often confused with scenes. The latter is a more general concept because scenes have their own plot, characters and their POVs, dialogue, and settings—they’re miniature, self-contained stories for the most part.

Authors can put drama into their stories with scenes, so the better they are, the better the drama.

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Comments are always welcome.

Even short fiction employs scenes! My collections Sleuthing, British-Style, Volumes One and Two contains quite a few. Volume One is available on Amazon, and Volume Two can be downloaded for free—see the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this website. (More can be found in the “Friday Fiction” archive and will eventually end up in PDF downloads found in the list.) I’m binge-reading others’ British-style mysteries, and they’re influencing my short fiction and their scenes as well as the last novels in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. They’re a great way to learn about the milieu and culture of our friends across the pond!

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

They are rarely provided by governments now as huge conglomerates spread their tendrils around the world to strangle all competition. I’ve just considered Facebook, that online behemoth that has damaged everything from our youth to our democracies, yet is allowed to compete with other online services by swallowing them up in its evil maws. That’s one place that pisses this reader and author off. Another is found in the publishing industry.

The Big Six publishers were reduced to the Big Five when Random House gobbled up Penguin. Now Penguin Random House wants to swallow Simon and Schuster. Where are the antitrust and anti-monopoly protections?

There are two problems here for a reader like me. First, the huge publishing conglomerates emphasize hardbound, print books over ebooks because that’s where they can scam the reading public most efficiently. I hate print and avoid it wherever possible. You have to wait forever to get an ebook version for the rare good book published by one of these conglomerates, for one thing; and that rare, good book is rarely kept on my bookshelf because they’re doorstoppers that take up to much space and make the shelves sag.  I only read hard-bound books when relatives or friends give them to me, or they’re the only published version available when I write a review (those are often free, but the price tags are usually around $30—I can buy up to ten ebooks for that price, although not from the Big Five).

The latter indicates the extent of how the book-publishing conglomerates flaunt the antitrust and anti-monopoly laws. Let’s consider the last four of my reviews of hardbound books: Klobuchar’s Antitrust, Leonnig’s Zero Fail, McMahon’s A Good Kill, and Woodward and Costa’s Peril. All were free (or I wouldn’t have read them), and all are involved with one of those nefarious Big Five conglomerates, Penguin Random House, in one way or the other. This beast publishes about 15,000 books per year. Let’s ignore for the moment that most of those books, including three of the four I mention, would mostly be lost to average readers who don’t keep up on the new books. (I do, whether I read them or not.)

Klobuchar’s, published by Borzoi, which in turn is part of Alfred A. Knopf, now owned by Penguin Random House, illustrates the problem. This monster publisher is huge! Ironically, and for obvious reasons, Klobuchar mentions how big publishing conglomerates are eating up smaller publishers, an example of what she rails against in her book, making me wonder if she’s truly serious about protecting consumers against trusts and monopolies. Apparently her fat contract received because she’s a celebrity politician muted her critique; or worse, her publisher, kept her from saying too much. A bribe leading to muzzling? I wouldn’t put it past Penguin Random House.

Leonnig’s Zero Fail is the only book published by Random House in my list and not one of Penguin Random House’s imprints (unless you now call Random House an imprint of Penguin Random House?). McMahon’s A Good Kill, the only fiction in the list (it’s a thriller), is published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, one of the old publishers that, you guessed it, is now part of Penguin Random House. Finally, Woodward and Costa’s Peril is published by Simon and Schuster, another old publisher that will be consumed by Penguin Random House, unless the latter’s voracious appetite is stopped.

I don’t know if all this isn’t some giant conspiracy by the big publishing conglomerates to maintain control over the book industry. They fear self-publishing and small presses alike. They eat up the latter if they’re successful, a la Facebook. They can’t do anything much about self-publishing. Self-published authors are the ones I read most because that’s where the good books are usually found! Twenty-five to one would be my estimate. And those are the books I keep (as ebooks on my Kindle or laptop).

Of course, the Big Five aren’t the only ones playing these monopolistic games. Amazon wants to play in that space too, beating them to the punch by gobbling up Thomas Mercer, for example, which is as snooty and against self-published books as any Big Five conglomerate. Things can only get worse, and readers will continue to suffer all this monopolistic activity.

The Biden administration has sued to stop Penguin Random House from swallowing Simon and Schuster. I hope they succeed, but I fear it’s too late, that we’re beyond the tipping point, as is the case for many multinational corporate enterprises. I will continue to fight these monopolistic trends as much as I can. I might have parted with my own two small presses, but I hope they can remain independent. I doubt they will be able to do so, though.

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Comments are always welcome.

Death on the Danube. While you shouldn’t consider this the last novel in a trilogy (as the publisher of the first two books in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series wanted—there are two more novels in the series, making it into a “pentalogy”), it represents an inflection point in Esther’s long life. In the first two novels, Esther and Bastiann are older lovers, both a bit hesitant about a twilight marriage; but they’re married in this story and on their honeymoon, a riverboat cruise down that famous river. They can’t escape their past as accomplished sleuths, though, because Interpol agent Bastiann must lead a murder investigation onboard the riverboat. For a visual preview, see the trailer. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold, and there’s also a print version.

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

Mark “Sugar-Mountain” Zuckerberg, thinking he’s some kind of god in control of the internet, continues to annoy me, to say the least. From the moment I created my Facebook author page (the URL is https://www.facebook.com/authorStevenMMoore for those interested), I knew he and most of his minions at Facebook were greedy SOBs. Every post on my author page is followed by advice to reach out to more Facebook users by creating an ad! And anyone accessing that page is hit by ads as well (not mine). They (and Google as well) make all their money that way. Sorry, Mark, I won’t let you exploit me! I know you will bury my posts about my books, if only with other ads, and make my readers furious, because I won’t play your games. I don’t give a damn now. (Well, I do about my readers, but Zuckerberg can go to hell.)

I created that page because many pundits and a few author friends recommended it. Same for using the social media aspects of Facebook. All social media is similar to more insidious versions of PR and marketing whose gurus want to take authors’ money. Most of the those gurus  pay homage to the Amazon god by exclusively playing Bezos’s game (Penny Sansevieri’s AME is a prime example.) While social media has the positive of allowing me to keep in contact with some internet friends, it’s useless for book marketing. (So is Amazon. The only thing their bots did for me was to confuse two books in “The Last Humans” series, If B&N can keep them straight, why can’t Amazon? (That’s why the links in the ad below go to B&N. You won’t see many links to Amazon here anymore.)

I’ve thought many times about completely cancelling Facebook (even for my social media). Old-fashioned email seems effective enough to maintain contact with relatives and friends, fellow authors included (spam from everyone else is treated accordingly). Election meddling aside (Facebook will take anyone’s money, including Putin’s), the whole Facebook edifice is just built on sand, volcanic black sand steaming with corporate greed. No, not sand, but quicksand. One sinks into it and disappears, burning as if you just passed across the river Styx. It’s much torturous than drowning.

And what’s this about that name change to “Meta”? Sugar-Mountain says it’s short for “Metaverse.” Now I know old Mark has no real interest in physics—he probably flunked all of high school science—so I don’t buy his reasons for the name. (I’m just happy I used the string theory term “Multiverse” instead of “Metaverse” in the title for my sci-fi rom-com, A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse). What he really means is VR, short for “virtual reality.” As much as I think Harari is a charlatan (a history prof popping off about past and future science who has no business doing so, and makes tons of mistakes doing it), he has warned us enough about VR and AI. Facebook’s current algorithms are AI—they study users and then target them with ads (which I ignore, of course)—and Meta indicates a future where Sugar-Mountain plans to turn everyone on planet Earth into a VR avatar, a conspiracy to create a worse world than the one in Neuromancer.

That famous and brave whistle-blower (I won’t mention her name, not wanting her to be attacked by crazies) has exposed a lot of Facebook’s shenanigans that I’d only suspected by observation and without solid proof that would hold up in court. The transgressions, in my opinion, are sufficient to close down Facebook and ban it for good, whatever it’s called. They’ll never learn and are too arrogant to change, especially Sugar-Mountain and his close confidents. (I’d never “lean on” one, for example; she’s luring us into that hot quicksand.)

I’ll play along with the internet’s Goebbels for a while longer until I’m so sick of Mark and his cronies that I can’t stand to use Facebook anymore. You might want to consider using my email steve@stevenmmoore.com now, though, because you never know when Facebook puts me over the edge. Or they ban me. In any case, my days there are numbered.

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Comments are welcome.

The Last Humans: A New Dawn. For a short time, the first novel in this series was the bestselling Black Opal Books’ novel on Barnes & Noble. This second novel continues Penny Castro’s adventures in a post-apocalyptic world. What remains of the US government forces Penny and her husband Alex to participate in a revenge campaign against the country that caused the apocalyptic pandemic…by kidnapping their young children! Just as thrilling as the first novel but independently readable, this Draft2Digital ebook is available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not at Amazon, Black Opal Books, or Smashwords).

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

I’ve dissed NaNoWriMo aka “National Novel Writing Month” before. Let’s forget about the poor choice of November for this annual writing frenzy. (Thanksgiving in the US is a major travel holiday that can take out a big chunk of writing time!) That’s not an important criticism. (For all I know, authors take advantage of holidays to write, especially if they otherwise have demanding day-jobs.) No, my main criticism is that no one should write a novel in a month! Or even think they can.

So…you’re not one-third of the way through the month. Have you finished one-third of your great American novel? Maybe you have sixty thousand words in an MS Word file and even an outline for everything, but in the twenty day left, it’s almost impossible for you to turn even that into a novel. NaNoWriMo is a sprint, while writing a novel is a marathon. You’re winded now? You have seventeen or eighteen miles to go!

Having written a few novels, I have a large statistical sample that I can extrapolate to say, “The odds are against you.” I’ve never written a novel in a month. I’m lucky to finish a short fiction piece in a month! I don’t want to discourage writers or dampen their enthusiasm—after all, I’m an avid reader who’s always looking for a good story—but steady writing a bit each day over months or years is much better praxis than fits and starts for a writing project. Authors are the captains of their writing voyages, and “steady as she goes” is always better advice for a captain to follow than “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” The latter is likely to end in a shipwreck, and the author can go down with the ship.

I have speedily written a few novels. The Midas Bomb‘s  words just spewed, page after page; The Secret Lab‘s prose went quickly too. Maybe that was because The Midas Bomb was my first mystery/thriller and I had two new characters, a crime-fighting duo, to spur my interest; and The Secret Lab was my very first YA novel with a lovable mutant cat as a main character. But that speed had consequences: The Midas Bomb required a second edition to make it better and align it with other books in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series; and The Secret Lab also had a second edition, a bit of makeover by A. B. Carolan to prepare for more YA sci-fi mysteries to follow.

Mind you, the first two editions of those novels were good, modesty aside, but the speed in writing and publishing the first editions left me dissatisfied. And, even with that speedy writing, I didn’t finish them in a month!

Because my writing technique involves content editing as I go, that speedy writing was due to the stories nearly writing themselves, so there wasn’t much need for content editing. In fact, self-analysis tells me that my writing speed is determined by how much content editing is required. Or, to put in another way, how well-formed the entire story is in my mind (I don’t do outlines because they constrain me).

That’s my writing technique, of course. If yours is getting a fast first draft done with editing only in subsequent drafts, I suppose it’s possible to get the first draft done in a month like the organizers of NaNoWriMo encourage you to do. But, if you do no self-editing after that month, you’re being unfair to your beta-readers and other editors who’ll read the manuscript. In fact, no acquisition editor worth that title will want to receive an unpolished manuscript. Whether self- or traditionally published, your tale will need polishing before anyone else sees it, and that’s impossible to do in a month!

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Comments are welcome!

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. Here’s another example of what I mean by the above post: This bargain bundle of three epic sci-fi novels, none of them written in a month, should provide many hours of entertainment for any reader interested in sci-fi. Survivors of the Chaos starts in dystopia with multinational corporations dominating both the Earth and the solar system, maintaining order with their corporate militias. First contact occurs in Sing a Zamba Galactica as friendly ETs are discovered on the third planet colonized by human beings; a further contact with more ETs is not so lucky, and some collective intelligences out there in intergalactic near-Earth space just might blow your mind. Finally, if the first two novels represent my First and Second Foundations, Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! features my Mule, an autocratic psychopath who is out to control near-Earth space with psi armies. This bundle is a bargain you can find wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

Isaac Asimov made androids and robots famous long before the Star Wars movies did. He took some ideas from Capek’s seminal play and created sci-fi tales that revolutionized the genre, even inventing the three laws that they had to follow so people could get past their Frankenstein complex. (Mary Shelley’s monster was neither an android nor a robot, of course; today it might be called a golem or zombie.) As a tween reading Asimov’s stories (in the early days of the computer age), I often wondered how those three laws could be programmed. I still do.

But I digress. Androids and robots are only some of the elements of sci-fi. Asimov didn’t have ETs in his stories, just humans and mechanical men. (I can’t ever remember an android or robot with female characteristics in his stories, so that last is politically correct.) My sci-fi stories have both but probably more ETs (even some with matriarchal societies).

And sometimes all the fancy technical stuff, once explained, is assumed. Castilblanco talks about NYPD-issued PDAs but really means smart phones, considering the timeline of the stories in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series. The implant in a person’s head that allows a direct link to the internet first appears in Survivors of the Chaos, the first novel of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection,” but it’s taken for granted in later books. And FTL travel, once discovered in Sing a Zamba Galactica, the second novel of that trilogy, is rarely mentioned again. All that tech is still there, of course, but I don’t want to bore or distract readers by mentioning them over and over.

Androids and robots appear more sporadically than ETs or futuristic tech in my stories. In my “Future History” timeline (Chen and Castilblanco start that, and it continues through many stories, all the way to the Dr. Carlos tales), some cultures have them, others don’t. There are cyborgs too (although I call them MECHs, but the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” don’t fall on that extended timeline), as well as clones and mutants (the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” is on that timeline). The ultimate distillation of all those programmable beings is the disembodied AIs that play multiple roles, some that HAL could never imagine even in his wildest dreams.

Sometimes I mix up things in new ways. In A. B. Carolan’s Mind Games (that takes place on that timeline too), I, rather he, asked, “Could an android or robot be given ESP or psi powers?” Asimov didn’t consider that, as far as I know. I don’t think any sci-fi author had ever asked that question before. I won’t give away the answer here—you’ll have to read the novel.

So…what’s my point? I think old Isaac could have had a lot more fun with androids and robots than he did, by adding ETs and other sci-fi elements to his stories. I’m not being critical. He was a pioneer, after all. But modern sci-fi authors can be like fancy bartenders, mixing and matching these elements as if they were inventing new cocktails. I’d like to think that Isaac wouldn’t constrain himself now; he’d be doing just that. Maybe he’d even be writing a few British-style mysteries too! He loved the mystery genre, even though he had very few sci-fi mysteries. (All of A. B. Carolan’s books can be considered sci-fi mysteries.)

Combining the mystery, thriller, and sci-fi genres with all their different elements is a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed doing that.

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Comments are always welcome.

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This bargain bundle of three epic sci-fi novels should provide many hours of entertainment for any reader interested in sci-fi. Survivors of the Chaos starts in dystopia with multinational corporations dominating both the Earth and the solar system, maintaining order with their corporate militias. First contact occurs in Sing a Zamba Galactica as friendly ETs are discovered on the third planet colonized by human beings; a further contact with more ETs is not so lucky, and some collective intelligences out there in intergalactic near-Earth space just might blow your mind. Finally, if the first two novels represent my First and Second Foundations, Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! features my Mule, an autocratic psychopath who is out to control near-Earth space with psi armies. This bundle is a bargain you can find wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

Note from Steve: Sometimes it happens that I’ll write an article that’s appropriate for both my blogs, this one and my political blog. That will usually mean the message contained therein goes beyond writing. I hope this short one resonates.

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Okay, you’ve probably heard many renditions of this song, but Reuben and the Dark’s provides us with a different meaning of this classic. (Forget about the snippet heard on that Celebrity Cruise ad and listen to the entire version.) That Canadian group expresses almost a pantheistic love for Gaia, a primitive vision of the planet’s ecosystem that provides sustenance for all flora and fauna, including us. It’s wistful at the beginning, reminding us of how we’re damaging our only home’ but, after a glorious crescendo, becomes a celebration of how truly wonderful it is.

I’m sure that’s not what Celebrity sees in the song, but it might represent what Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) saw in his ten-minute view of Gaia from space, as many true astronauts have seen before from the International Space Station.

Thanks to the immoral Senator Manchin, champion of the fossil-fuel industries, evil will continue to be unleashed against Gaia. Hopefully he and others like him will have a special place in hell for all eternity. They deserve it. As long as such people walk this good Earth, the planet will never be safe!

It still is a wonderful world. We must vanquish the forces of evil and take care of it. That’s a moral obligation each and everyone of us has irrespective of religion or creed. Global warming, extreme weather events, and species extinction aren’t hoaxes. They’re warnings we haven’t heeded, and we and future generations will pay dearly if we continue to ignore the health of our planet.

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Comments are always welcome.

Gaia and the Goliaths. This last novel (so far!) in the “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” series is my only novel with an environmental theme. Russian and US fossil-fuel conglomerates are the villains, environmental activists are the victims, and Chen and Castilblanco’s homicide case that begins in NYC expands to involve a conspiracy of national and international proportions. This story also highlights much of the environmental debate currently going on and has the crime-fighting duo doing their best scrambling yet! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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