In “Another Year in the Books,” the NY Times’s critics confirmed once again that they don’t know much about books people read (article on Friday, 12/6/2019). First, let me state that I haven’t read any books they listed—they just don’t appeal to me. Second, they’re all Big Five books—the Times’s editors and critics ignore small press and self-published books. Third, the latter books feature less trite and formulaic works and more new voices—it’s rare that anyone in the latter group gets past the Big Five’s gatekeepers AKA agents these days.

Other people’s lists of 2019’s top books are even more questionable. GMA came out with one, and I suppose Oprah will pontificate about her choices too. These are often more about PR for the people making the lists, so they’re doubly worthless. The people making them don’t have any qualifications at all.

Of course, most book critics are like literary agents: they don’t recognize their biases (I probably should call them prejudices) as they arrogantly pontificate about what readers should be reading and pretend to be the only ones who know the marketplace for books. Avid readers like me generally ignore them and for good reason.

It’s not that Big Five books are overpriced—they are, of course. Like I said, good, exciting storytellers are less likely to be found among Big Five authors now. We want stories that grab us and make us think. And none of us like to be told what to read.

Have you ever heard of Dwight Garner, Parul Segal, and Jennifer Szalai? How about Holland Cotter and other Times critics? No? That’s because they’re not writers. Yet they have the audacity to tell us what to read. That’s stooping even lower than literary agents in a sense, who are only prejudicial toward authors’ manuscripts and not books already published (they don’t care about them then—they mostly just look for their commissions).

I can paraphrase that adage about teaching: Those who can write a novel do so; those who can’t become book critics. That’s true for most artistic disciplines, more so than about teachers who get a bum rap–some people (like me) just love to work with young people. It also means critics might be frustrated people like many agents, so another agenda might be taking out their frustrations on real authors as well. Whether intentional or not, that seems to be the effect. Nothing personal about that agenda, I suppose, but it doesn’t help the people who actually write books.

In science, one’s critics are one’s fellow scientists. That makes it easier for a scientist to accept a paper’s rejection—at least it did for me. My fellow scientists were peers; I had some respect for them. Book critics and literary agents are not writers’ peers because they’re not writers; I have little respect for most of them. It’s hard to accept rejections from people who have never written a novel. Readers can reject me, but they should also reject the critics and their questionable choices.

I suppose book critics are readers, but let’s consider some statistics. Each book critic in that Times article chose maybe ten books. Let’s say that each critic read one hundred books during 2019 (that’s probably being generous, but it’s maybe the right order of magnitude—ten is obviously too few, and one thousand is out of the question). But many thousands of books were published in 2019!

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Reviewers rarely write them. Amazon promotes series (if only saying what the next book in the series is when you finish a book), but they want reviews for the individual books, which they just treat like other “products.” Smashwords lists series but never promotes them as such—in fact, they basically ignore evergreen books (older books that are as current as the day the author published them), so only the latest books in a series are promoted. And bookstores and libraries also ignore series for the most part.

Like Amazon, most retailers, online or otherwise, now treat books like products and ignore series and other literary aspects associated with books, so none of this should come as a surprise. But hardly anyone writes series reviews either, so I thought I’d write a few here, especially because I’ve binged on some recently (they’re excellent for doing just that).

The order in the following is ugly, bad, and good, so play Morricone’s score backwards (the leit motif still sounds good).

The ugly: The Kate Redman series. I started bingeing on this, but ran into a bit of a roadblock. Celina Grace or her publisher became sloppy. When I tried to download yet another book in the series (it met my $6 threshold, but many don’t), I found a corrupted file residing on my Kindle. Returning to Amazon, I saw it announced there that the book has a “quality control” problem. I thought I’d lost my money, and everyone knows Amazon’s return policy sucks. But the next day the file seemed okay. Did Amazon magically change it? Scary if true. Still, fair warning.

That said, let’s talk about Grace’s Kate Redman character. Compared to the principals of the other series listed here, she’s the most conflicted, a thirty-year-old with a lot of baggage who can’t deny the attraction she has for her boss or get past it. Frankly, there’s too much focus on Kate’s hang-ups. I like complex characters, but those hang-ups become tiresome the farther I go into the series. I’ll keep reading, though, at least the ebooks under my $6 limit (for the book that was initially corrupted, even $5.99 is too much for 262 equivalent pages). Stay tuned.

The bad: A, B, C, etc. is for whatever. Okay, I’ve never binged on this series—Big Five prices are exorbitant—but let me consider this long crime trek through the alphabet by Sue Grafton and say why it’s bad (in that, it has a lot in common with other over-extended American crime series). I haven’t read many of these books, thank goodness, so it’s only fair to say why they turn me off.

Grafton’s is a “good” series to illustrate what an author should not do: Don’t keep a series going even when new books in the series are formulaic and uninteresting and simple variations on what has come before. Authors should know when to stop. (I suppose readers should know when to stop reading such series too. I did.)

I mostly blame the Big Five for all these flawed series. Those publishing conglomerates continue to publish them because they’re moneymakers—an uncritical fandom continues to buy the books, unwilling to try something new, just like the author of this series. I hate to criticize dead artists, but she only stopped because she passed away in 2017. I pass belated condolences on to her family, friends, and fans. She was an interesting person and into my preferred hard-boiled style of mystery and crime writing, but I just grew tired of the series.

More on similar series later.

Top o’ the good: The Kirby/Langdon series. In contrast, author Daniella Bernett has a winner here—books with original twists on traditional crime stories I found extremely entertaining. No old-style PIs or forensics experts here as main characters. Instead, they are Kirby, an investigative reporter, and Longdon, a jewel thief. A British inspector (his name really belongs in the series’ name) firmly places these books firmly into the category of Brit-style mysteries even though the author is American. The villain(s) vary from novel to novel as the author fills in background material and develops the main characters, including Kirby and Longdon’s on-again, off-again romance (Kirby often mentally beats herself up for having fallen for that rascal rogue Longdon). The mostly European settings vary from novel to novel too, and the plots are intriguing and entertaining. (Note: Daniella was my most recent interviewee to grace this blog and is December’s featured author on the Black Opal Books home page.)

Second place among the good: The rural mysteries series. Author Diana J. Febry takes the reader into the English countryside where her principal characters often find a murder to solve in spite of the peaceful setting. (You have to wonder how, like Cabot Cove, so many murders occur there, but I learned to not question that too much because the plots are fine.) Fiona can’t decide whether to make a play for her boss Peter, but, at the end of the series (so far), he’s divorced, so we might see a bit more romance in future books. Again, each book in this series is well plotted, and each novel tells us more about the main characters. Another winning series readers might not know about…and it might just satisfy readers’ appetites for cozies, although there’s nothing cozy about the crimes considered.

A tie for second among the good: The Yorkshire murder mysteries. Author J. R. Ellis has also created some highly entertaining stories also in a rural setting for the most part, namely the Yorkshire area, where old mills once clothed the English public and mineral spas pampered English aristocrats (as if they needed more pampering, poor devils). I find DCI Oldroyd more interesting than Rankin’s Rebus and James’s Dalgliesh. More interesting than most crime fighters, in fact.

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Fantasy films have been moneymakers for Hollywood recently—the Marvel, Harry Potter, and Star Wars series come to mind. The Marvel movies, based on that venerable comic book enterprise, don’t pretend to be serious—both DC Comics and Marvel Comics were once kids’ introductions to fantasy. I like the origin stories the most because I missed them in my comics reading as a kid. The Harry Potter series of books represent Rowling’s verbose description of a magical world, a bit juvenile at the beginning but darker as it went along, and so verbose that they made two movies of the last book. She has tried to keep it going—is that Broadway show as verbosely boring as those later novels? The series had examples of Deus ex Machina all the way through it. Magic is the epitome of fantasy, of course, and Rowling wouldn’t argue with that classification. But the Star Wars movies really turned me off. None of Lucas’s or Disney’s hype calls them fantasies. What’s more, they’re bad ones.

First, there’s the rampant plagiarism of sci-fi classics and action traditions. I consider ninja classics’, Edgar Rice Burrough’s, and Isaac Asimov’s influences plagiarism, but I suppose the statute of limitations applies and prevents the last two writers’ estates from taking legal action. You’d think Japan would make a national outcry about the ninja-like material too, but that’s not the first time Hollywood has distorted that tradition, turning reality into fantasy.

Second, there are glaring absurdities. Consider that freaky, sizzlin’ light saber. It’s not really a saber, of course—it’s not curved. While ninja warriors might covet such weapons, they are absurd weapons in that galaxy so far, far away. By the way, some wag said that Star Wars isn’t really fantasy because it’s in this universe, but Harry Potter occurred on Earth and no one denies it’s fantasy, so I’ll ignore that argument. But back to the light saber: Remember this scene from an Indiana Jones movie? An evil ninja-like combatant threatens Indy, swishing his sword back and forth in a menacing display of speed and skill. Indy pulls out his gun and plugs his attacker. Now translate that to Star Wars. I’d just pull out my blaster (or ray gun, or whatever they call it) and blast the guy with the light saber who’s threatening me, just like Indy did. Swords were appropriate for the Jedi warriors on Burroughs’s Martian stories that Lucas plagiarized, but they’re absurd in Star Wars (yes, Lucas plagiarized even the name Jedi as well as the concept).

Third, while we still have princes and princesses in the modern era (a particular nasty prince in Saudi Arabia and the British queen’s son are modern and anachronistic examples of princes), Lucas’s use of them is also absurd. They turn Star Wars into one big formulaic fairy tale. Of course, the entire Star Wars social structure is absurd, including the Senate and Empire, both stolen from Asimov and morphed into ugly fantasy. Whatever those speeds obtainable by the Millennium Falcon are, empires are hard to maintain among the stars. Loose trade unions a la the EU are only possible because the starships in use are the fastest means of communication—and that’s not fast enough to grip that galaxy far, far away in the iron hand of Lucas’s evil empire.

Fourth, the fantasy world of Star Wars doesn’t have consistent rules. Rowling also fails at that in her fantasy series, but it’s not so obvious as Star Wars. Lucas and other Star Wars directors fail miserably at this in their movies—or maybe their screenwriters are the real culprits. (Most Hollywood screenwriters have no idea how to write a good fantasy, so their screenplays are bad ones.) A fantasy universe has to have a consistent set of rules. Each Star Wars director makes them up as he goes, especially Lucas.

I’m not against fantasy. I just want it to be done right. I’ll read it and watch it on the silver screen if it is done right. Star Wars doesn’t do it right. And don’t come at me saying, “It’s not fantasy. It’s sci-fi.” It’s not sci-fi, it’s bad fantasy. Viewers are delusional if they think it’s sci-fi. And they should also realize it’s bad fantasy.

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Comments are always welcome.

Want some really good fantasy? Check out Veiled Memory by S. P. Brown (a sequel is on the way) and Kilts and Catnips by Zoe Tasia. The first fantasy describes a dark conspiracy involving Celtic runes that are mysteriously ancient; the second takes a few Celtic legends and plops them down into a modern setting. I reviewed both in this blog. They’re writing comrades at Black Opal Books, but I’ve discovered that searching through small press catalogs is a great way to find new and exciting authors…at least new for me. And you can avoid the overwhelming lists at Amazon that way. Black Opal Books are available wherever books are sold, and directly from the publisher. Support indie publishers like Black Opal.

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

The beginning: a crime is committed. The end: a crime is solved. Fill in the details.

This, of course, is an extreme case of simplification, where the Devil really is in the details. I knew that before I wrote my first mystery, Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.” (Technically, The Secret Lab—see below—was the first one published, but that’s a YA sci-fi mystery.) You might have thought that The Midas Bomb, #1 in the detective series, was a mystery? Not in a pure sense; it’s a mystery/thriller, as many of those detective novels are. #2, Angels Need Not Apply, is almost a pure thriller. (I don’t see genres as hard boundaries, just key words to describe stories.) So when I had the idea for #3, I approached it with some trepidation.

I can’t remember if one of Christie’s novels or Asimov’s Caves of Steel was the first adult mystery I read. I say adult because I dived into that Hardy Boys series as soon as I learned to read, which occurred before the first grade, thanks to my mother. In any case, the samples in the mystery and crime genre that I’d read were numerous by the time #3 became a project, but I felt I still needed to learn more about writing in that genre before doing so. Responsible writers always have those doubts when tackling a new genre (I went through the same process with that YA novel).

I’m guessing they have a course on mystery writing in an MFA program—do they? No matter. At the time, there was plenty of available material about writing mystery and crime stories, some of it common to all genre fiction, other material delving into specific aspects—all “out there” and free. Here I’m not going to go into the various requirements for writing a mystery or crime novel. Those interested can find books and articles on the subject just like I did. But I have to confess, I learned more from osmosis. With a critical eye, I latched onto things I liked and rejected those I didn’t just from reading mystery and crime stories.

I’m going to go out on a limb here: Asimov, who had the benefit of following Christie, was better at mystery and crime writing than she was. I know…blasphemy! But that’s my opinion. Dame Agatha was an early pioneer although there were predecessors (Father Brown and Sherlock, for example) and well worth reading, but old Isaac knew all the devilish details required of a modern mystery or crime story. Besides the two robot mysteries Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, he wrote many traditional mysteries. His Black Widowers stories are modeled after a club he belonged to, essentially a book club that studied mystery writing.

I took those two sci-fi mysteries featuring Earth detective Elijah Bailey and android Daneel Olivaw and compared them to Rankin’s Rebus oeuvre and James’s Dalgliesh, for example, and saw a lot of commonality. I doubt that Ian or P.D. ever read Isaac, but that doesn’t matter. Louise Penny and other writers also showed me how it’s done—things to emulate and things to avoid. All those mostly American  writers of hard-boiled crime stories also taught me via osmosis.

I have no shame. I selected what I liked as a reader and emulated it as a writer, giving my own spin, of course. My characters are often a bit more diverse, my villains are often complex gals or guys, and my plots often contain uncomfortable and current themes as well as complexity—no cozy mysteries from me.

I’ve had a lot of fun following that winding path from the crime to its solution…and I will continue to do so. I love to read in this genre, and I will continue to write in it.

And, as a nod to Dr. Asimov, my alter-ego A. B. Carolan writes YA sci-fi mysteries. Perhaps they’re more related to those Hardy Boys stories; I’d like to think they’re what those YA novels should have been. (I’d have probably liked them a lot more!) But A. B. writes them with a twinkle in his eye, and you can see that same twinkle in every picture of Dr. Asimov.

Am I trying to upstage other writers? Nope. I just want to tell original stories mostly my own way, but, as Newton said, I stand on the shoulders of giants. I don’t think any of them will mind that.

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Comments are always welcome.

Evergreen Bridges. What’s that mean? Many readers don’t realize that three of my series plus two bridge novels make one huge series. The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan provides a bridge between the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” and the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” while Soldiers of God provides one between the last series and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” (now available as an inexpensive ebook bundle). Of course all these books are evergreen, as current today as when I wrote them…and you can read them in any order. They offer many hours of reading entertainment, from mystery and thrills to far-out sci-fi,  and they are available wherever ebooks are sold.

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

Binge reading is fun, and it’s even more fun when you do it with a series. Recently I binged on Bernett’s Kirby/Longdon mystery series, Febry’s rural mystery series, and am currently on Grace’s Kate Redman series—there are enough books in the latter that I probably can’t finish them before 2020, but they’ll be waiting for me then. (Note added during publication: Some books in the Kate Redman series are a bit expensive for my reading budget. I recently discovered J. R. Ellis’s Yorkshire mysteries, which are a real bargain…and fantastic mysteries. I’ll get back to Celina Grace, I’m sure.)

A good series allows a reader to jump in anywhere, of course. I binged on the first two in order; for the third, I’m (was) jumping around a bit. (And I’m now reading J. R.’s books in order.) All these books can be read independently, though, and they don’t contain that eighth deadly sin, cliffhangers.

I know some readers insist on reading a series in order (reviewers often get hung up on that too). Obviously authors write them that way, although my mystery/thriller The Midas Bomb changed considerably in going from first edition to second to match the rest of the series. As more novels are published in a series, the principal characters develop—a series fails if that is not the case. But the stories are what’s important, so it’s also fun to read a later book and then backtrack to read a previous one. With a prequel, an author formalizes that kind of reading.

I cheated on Son of Thunder. Yes, the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective Series” is a spin-off from my “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” but Son of Thunder is both a prequel and sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel. Okay, maybe it wasn’t cheating, just a trick played on readers who want to binge on a series by reading it in order. And, by the way, I’m already working on the third Esther Brookstone novel. Maybe I’ll pull some more rabbits out of the hat with that one too.

You see, a lot of my scientific work dealt with nonlinear phenomena. Engineers love to linearize everything, but Nature isn’t linear. It’s much more complex. Bat chirps are nonlinear signals that scientists (engineers reluctantly?) have learned to mimic for radars. Nonlinear equations create fractals; rogue waves in the ocean are nonlinear phenomena. And so forth. Why should a book series…or even the plot of one novel…be linear? Life itself isn’t linear, and fiction should seem as real as life.

Maybe some readers find it confusing if they don’t read a series in order. They’ll probably dislike what I did in Son of Thunder. In the prequel parts, they’ll learn more about Esther’s past as an MI6 spy in East Germany. They’ll also visit the first century and the Renaissance and see their influences on Esther’s quest to find St. John’s tomb. I don’t do simple. Life is too complex, and I want my novels to reflect that complexity.

But back to the series I binged on. They’re complex. They’re full of back story, for example, as I learn about a character’s past or past events. Flashbacks and back story are nonlinear phenomena. They give complexity to even just one novel, and they’re necessary to maintain the flow of a series. I look for that in my reading, and I practice that in my writing.

So go ahead, binge, even if you’re looking for complexity. A good series won’t put you into a formulaic rut. Look for those good series and binge away!

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Comments are always welcome.

Evergreen Series. The “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” is an ideal candidate for series binging. Dao-Ming Chen and Rolando Castilblanco are two NYPD homicide detectives whose cases in the Big Apple often have national and international repercussions. Chen and Castilblanco have different backgrounds and different motivations, but they form a dynamic crime-fighting duo that bad guys fear. Start with The Midas Bomb that begins with two murders and introduces the arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin, an evil hedge fund operator who wants to exploit both terrorism and illegal immigrants in his evil and greedy agenda. Like all evergreen books, the books in this series and others of mine are as current as the day I wrote them, if not more so. Wall Street abuses and immigrant exploitation are but two examples. The entire series is available on both Amazon and Smashwords and wherever ebooks are sold.

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

Inspiration for this post doesn’t come from the Fast and Furious franchise or the new Matt Damon movie, Ford vs. Ferrari. It’s about the relationship between settings and conveyances.

A love affair with cars is much more muted in Europe than in the US. Sure, Europeans love fast cars—just try to drive on the Autobahn sometime, or on those UK and Irish back roads—but trains play a more important role. As a young traveler in frugal tourist-mode before and after conferences, I’d buy a Eurorail pass. Sleeping on the train to avoid hotel costs and waking up in a new European city or even country let me see a lot of Europe, at least the part outside the Iron Curtain (you’ve already read about some of my experiences in ex-Iron Curtain countries, which are much more recent). Train travel around Europe is easy, and it’s the way a lot of Europeans travel. As an author, you can neglect this cultural tradition at your own peril if your story is set in Europe. Even those opening scenes in Goldfinger made that mistake as the film’s directors pandered to American audiences—the villain’s Rolls Royce was still a car, after all, and James Bond’s famous Aston Martin was a fast car. (When I saw From Russia with Love, I thought, “How appropriate! Bond’s on a train.” Or was that The Spy who Loved Me?)

Traveling is part of culture in the US and abroad. A lot of us in the States like to get from point A to point B fast. “Fast” is always a bit of a stretch when we add on commuting time to airports, traffic in airports, and airline delays, whether due to weather (can’t control that) or faulty maintenance of the aircraft, cancellations, or TSA security (something should be done about those). I found train travel in Europe a welcome respite from European plane travel, but not so much in the US (once a strike by Allitalia when I wanted to fly from northern Italy to Madrid didn’t add to my appreciation for European plane travel—I had to go the long way around, back to Rome and then on to Madrid). For one thing, the US is just too big. For another, the options for train travel are minimal.

Car travel is different—more personal, less costly in general, and more dangerous, statistically, the danger directly proportional to speed as well as traffic density, no matter how many safety features the car has. Touring is also an easy way to see more countryside—train tracks are fixed and planes fly only between certain cities and fly so high that you can see very little.

The mix in Europe is a bit more logical and better than in the US. Eisenhower didn’t help with his gift to US auto manufacturers, the creation of the interstate highway system, but the dominance of car travel in America would probably have occurred anyway. Americans love cars and often see them as a status symbol. Europe is more compact and geared to offer travelers all options, including ferries to carry their cars and trains and ships cruising between various ports.

The US used to be more into trains and ships. The easiest way to Gold Rush Country in California (I’m looking at one of my father’s paintings of an old building from the area where gold was discovered) was by ship around the tip of South America (not so easy even by today’s standards, and you can do it via the Panama Canal). Once that golden spike was hammered into place in the cross-country railroad, trains connected the East Coast to the West, and vice versa (again, not so easy or fast, but the car didn’t exist at the time).

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Before I get into the subject of this article, let me wish everyone a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving. We tend to lose the meaning of this holiday that leads into the commercial end-of-year rush, starting with Black Friday…or earlier! It should be a time for personal contemplation about having family and friends and to give thanks for what we have in our lives. It’s not political or commercial but spiritual, a time to recognize our common humanity, something we share independently of political proclivities, religious preferences, or sexual orientation. We are all on spaceship Earth together, and we have a lot to be thankful for. Now, to the article….

While the sci-fi master Isaac Asimov certainly motivated me to write sci-fi—I read his first robot novel Caves of Steel at age twelve—I’m not Dr. Asimov. The ex-biochemist was also a master at writing popular science books that explained current science. I’ve failed miserably at that! A few blog posts, but not one book.

Like him, I’m a fan of Science News. Scientists are now super specialized in general, so we have to turn to more popular works like anyone else to see what other scientists are doing. I think both Isaac and I had that in common—we kept up with general scientific and technology progress in spite of our specializations. But the sci-fi master was already a generalist with many popular science books to prove it.

Of course, those books were also a respite from his sci-fi writing. His Foundation series is evidence for that. He wrote the Foundation trilogy, robot novels, and End of Eternity, and then he took a vacation of several decades to write all those popular science books. After that period, he returned to sci-fi and completed the Foundation series, bringing all those earlier novels together and continuing to write more, creating a masterful oeuvre the likes of which will never be seen again.

“Decades” is the key word. Like King and other famous genre fiction writers, Isaac Asimov got an early start. That’s difficult to do nowadays. I won’t complete two publishing decades until 2026…if I make it that far.

I’ve been tempted to write a few popular science books, but so much in that area is available now. In short, there’s no lack of authors and books explaining science. There’s also an apathy among readers who might otherwise read such books. Most people no longer care how things work; they just use the science and technology without thinking about it. There’s some interest in space science and astrophysics beyond sensationalism and controversy (is Pluto a planet?), but there’s also a societal disease where people think science is just belief and it’s responsible for society’s woes. And then there are the naysayers, deniers of global warming and climate change, or believers that the world was made 6000 years ago when humans were contemporaries of the dinosaurs (those fossils came from Noah’s flood, don’t you know?).

I would have a hard time channeling Dr. Asimov in such a toxic anti-science environment. True science is secular, but we’re becoming a belief-based society, even though the beliefs contradict facts. In one of the first Foundation books, there’s a scene where the principal confronts an archaeologist, telling him to prove his assertions by going out and digging up the evidence. The “scientist” refuses, saying that theories (his beliefs) are enough. Our scientists today haven’t gone to those extremes, but many in society have, denying scientific evidence while creating their own “theories” (intelligent design is the perfect example of an oxymoron, because the people who champion this belief ignore facts).

No, I’m not about to hit my head my head against the brick wall of public opinion. Let’s face it: it’s a lot more fun to write fiction that includes or extrapolates current scientific knowledge, allowing astute readers to see the possibilities in a fictional context. I just hope that my stories are enough to make Dr. Asimov happy. One can popularize science in many ways—mine are just a bit different than some of the old master’s.

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Comments are always welcome.

Evergreen Series: “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” Survivors of the Chaos starts with a dystopian Earth controlled by multinationals and their mercenaries, and ends with an expedition to the 82 Eridani star system. Sing a Zamba Galactica begins with first contact where Humans meet the strange ETs they name Rangers, and ends with a mercy mission where Humans convince one strange collective intelligence to cure another. In Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, a Human industrialist is bent on controlling near-Earth planets in the Galaxy, and Humans and their ET friends must try to stop him. Centuries of development in near-Earth space are covered in these novels, all three evergreen books; sci-fi is always current! And all three novels are contained in the ebook bundle, The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, a bargain you can find wherever fine ebooks are sold.

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

Many times sci-fi writers get it right. Arthur C. Clarke’s comsats are now ubiquitous, Theodore Sturgeon’s spread-spectrum communications is tech in hand every time you pick up your cellphone, and Isaac Asimov’s robots have morphed into assembly-line miracles and precision surgical tools.

Bioengineering is the name of the game in the 21^st century. Cloning and specially designed plants and animals generate lots of debate, but they will occur, for better or worse. In my “Clones and Mutants Series,” the clones are human and the mutant is a super soldier. Together with smart armor and weapons, the latter might change wartime battlefields, as if we needed to improve killing efficiency.

My “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” focus on another warfare possibility–MECHs, or “Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans.” Advances in robotics lead to advances in prosthetics, and one can imagine all kinds of possibilities there too.

In my recent novel The Last Humans, a region already scarred by fires and quakes is part of the post-apocalyptic SoCal landscape. Post-apocalyptic is a subgenre of sci-fi, and the genre is known for extrapolating current science and technology to the future.

But sci-fi writers don’t necessarily want to get it right! Extrapolations can go in many directions, and when they take us to places most of us don’t want to go in our creative imaginations, they reduce to warnings we writers broadcast to readers and society in general, warnings that boil down to, “If we continue along this path, bad things will happen.”

Huxley started all this in Brave New World, depicting a population made docile with drugs—not exactly marijuana legalization or the opioid crisis, but close enough, especially if all the anti-depression drugs on the market are considered—is the whole world going crazy? I don’t think so, but Big Pharma is selling anti-depressants even to little kids to make a buck.

Orwell wrote about doublespeak, Bradbury about book burning. The first still plagues us today, evidence in the spin doctors debating the differences between quid pro quo and bribery. Book burning isn’t necessary because readership is down, with most otherwise intelligent people, especially millennials, limiting their reading to tweets, not books.

Are writers really prescient? Or are they just keen observers of human nature who warn us about the worst that can happen if we don’t change our ways? I certainly can’t gloat about my fire-scarred landscape in The Last Humans becoming the new normal in my beloved native state of California. I’m sure no sci-fi author really wants to say, “I told you so.”

In one of my first novels, Survivors of the Chaos (now the first book in the ebook bundle The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection), multinationals have taken over the world, using their mercenaries to control everyone—and here I just wrote an article in this blog about tech giants being too big! In that same novel, I mention dikes on the East River keeping the seawater out of Manhattan. That story originated in a 2003 manuscript because I saw the perils of multinationals and climate change, but I never imagined that we might be beyond the tipping point for the latter sixteen years later. Recent events in the magnificent city of Venice show some places are far beyond the tipping point (the Italian government’s dragging its heels about a dike construction didn’t help). Needless to say, my warnings—or anyone else’s—have not been heeded, we’re being controlled by multinationals and pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, and a little Swedish girl is correctly blasting politicians worldwide for stealing her contemporaries’ future! Or present, as the case may be.

A sci-fi author can only do so much. Maybe people are so happy, happy, happy that the Star Trek communicator became their smart phone, the first drug of choice for billions, that they ignore the warnings. Dunno. I never had a smart phone. Never will. I prefer to write sci-fi, even if no one heeds my warnings. Mind you, I’m not prescient. I’m just an observer of humanity’s foibles. It’s not hard to extrapolate those to the end of humanity in this galaxy. Let’s hope that such an extrapolation is incorrect.

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Comments are always welcome.

Evergreen Series: “Clones and Mutants.” The clones are victims of a secret government conspiracy in Full Medical. The mutant appears in Evil Agenda as a sinister businessman endeavors to create the super soldier. And the clones and mutant team up to stop an industrialist out for revenge against the West in No Amber Waves of Grain. All books are evergreen—novels as current today as when I wrote them…maybe even more so. Available on Amazon and everywhere ebooks are sold.

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

Today it’s difficult to determine whether authors have visited any of the settings used in their novels. While I obviously haven’t been to Luna, Mars, or any planet in the 82 Eridani star system (all settings in my sci-fi stories), I’ve traveled a bit on our home planet and observed a lot in situ. But authors can also personalize other settings they’ve never been to by using Google Maps and Google Earth for generalities and then embellishing with their imaginations. There’s nothing wrong with that, and readers can visit faraway places that way.

That said, I traveled recently with my wife to see a few places in Europe we hadn’t seen before. We’d been planning and saving up for this trip for a while. (Readers of this blog probably didn’t even notice, thanks to WordPress’s ability to set up posts ahead of time!)

I knew Europe fairly well, but my knowledge was somewhat one-sided—I’d never visited the ex-Iron Curtain countries after they shed the oppressive yoke of the USSR. Considering that this year we’re celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, the “velvet revolution,” and other freedom movements taking place in 1989, my desire to visit these countries was doubly motivated.

Okay, there was an exception: In 1982, I took a train through the GDR on my way to a conference in West Berlin (I always saw that D in GDR as a grim joke, by the way, and that trip confirmed the black humor of the situation). Some of that experience is reflected in a flashback contained in my new novel from Penmore Press, Son of Thunder.

On our recent tour, we heard stories from locals about how the Russians worked hard to keep people behind the Iron Curtain—true-life stories about a corrupt and oppressive system’s efforts to control people’s lives. Their plight was real. It seems incongruous that now some people in those countries want to cozy up to Putin and his thugs, but newer generations all too often forget the struggles of past generations.

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Do you often feel like you’re David vs. Goliath when confronting the tech giants? You should! You don’t even have a slingshot to use in any individual confrontation. And you’re not alone. The courts are way out of their league too. In fact, the tech giants are multinationals with more power than most governments. Only the EU, a combination of many governments, seems to be able to stand up to them. The US is largely successful, largely because money interests dominate both political parties and allow them to cajole blocks of voters.

There’s something insidious and inhuman about how big tech now dominates our world. Facebook’s CEO seems to think he’s above the law, Apple’s CEO is only a few steps behind, and let’s not talk much about Amazon’s whose hands are everywhere. Google controls the information you see. And there are many other tech giants on the list—I’ve only named the so-called American companies. Other huge companies, most of them Chinese, are out to control your lives, using info obtained from spyware you willingly buy (TikTok is but one example).

I’m no Luddite. I worked on the high tech frontier most of my career. Tech produces good things—medical imaging advances, more efficient farming techniques and disease-resistant crops, and so forth. But I understand where it’s going, and I don’t like it generally speaking because It will grow and grow and destroy everything that makes us human. It’s already doing so. If there’s a zombie apocalypse, it will be of our own choosing. We are already destroying rational and logical thought. Kornbluth’s classic sci-fi novella “The Marching Morons” is more likely to occur from tech destroying our minds than any genetic selectivity towards stupidity. Artificial Intelligence will be all that’s left, the world taken over not by machines as in the Terminator series, but by our giving the machines all the power.

But enough of generalities—let’s have some specifics. How does all this affect readers and writers?

Online social media like Facebook and Twitter are already havens for liars, haters, and bigots…and Facebook’s CEO condones this as “free speech.” You say, “Just ignore it.” I say, “I can’t.” Friends of “friends” spew out the vitriol; followers of “followers” do the same—so I get blasted too!

Amazon is always the very large rogue elephant in the room. It and its toady service Goodreads allows trolls to make zero-content reviews that skew the rankings at the best, and spew vitriol against books at the best, all excused by parroting Zuckerberg’s free-speech dogma. They serve neither readers nor writers, but Amazon/Goodreads just calls them “negative reviews,” not hate diatribes.

Authors, search for yourselves on Google. If you don’t see pirating sites come up in that search offering your books for free, lucky you! Google doesn’t give a rat’s ass that this happens. For all I know, the pirating sites pay Google to have it happen!

And they all give preference to Big Five authors and their books over self- and small press published books. And they all give authors false hope by selling ads, thus sapping and wasting author resources. They make a lot of money selling those ads that do very little to promote a book.

There’s very little that’s democratic about online retailers now in this supposed democratization of the publishing process—the retailers are autocrats who think they can control our lives and run the world better than any government. It’s astounding how much power over out lives that they’ve accumulated in 25-30 years, and they’re grabbing more with every year that passes. In particular, they tell you what to read and watch…and we follow along like lambs to the slaughter.

Because they’re all about making money, some say they’re apolitical. They’re not. They’re fascist capitalists, ones not following the Chinese model becoming more like that Chinese model all the time. They wield immense power because of their size.

So it’s time to split them up. They’re bloated carnivorous giants like 21^st century T-rexes. It’s time to hit them with an asteroid or two and return the world to sanity, one where we’re not in danger of being swallowed up in the maws of the tech giants.

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Comments are always welcome!

Son of Thunder. Art detective Esther Brookstone, now retired from Scotland Yard, becomes obsessed with finding St. John the Divine’s tomb using directions left by the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. Esther’s search, the disciple’s missionary travels, and Botticelli’s trip to the Middle East make for three travel stories that all come together in one surprising climax. Esther’s paramour, Interpol agent Bastiann van Coevorden, has problems with arms dealers, but he multitasks by trying to keep Esther focused and out of danger. The reader can also learn how their romance progresses, as well as travel back in time to discover a bit about Esther’s past with MI6 during the Cold War. Available in print and ebook versions at Amazon and the publisher, Penmore Press, as well as in ebook versions at Smashwords and its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.). Or visit your favorite local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it).

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