A.B. Carolan’s having problems finishing “The Denisovan Trilogy” (some of his woes are discussed in Intolerance, a novel that’s a free PDF download found at this website). You’ll only find the first novel Origins for sale. It’s complete as far as it goes, but he’d be the first one to say there are a lot of planets and lightyears to go in order to finish the trilogy. His problem isn’t writer’s block per se; it’s what many authors experience: Losing track of the trees in a very big forest.

Let me explain, starting with an admission: Evidence of this problem is found in one of my very first novels, the sci-fi saga Survivors of the Chaos. (Originally published by the now defunct POD Infinity Publishing, a second edition is available as the first novel in the ebook bundle of another trilogy, “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection.”) It’s not a major flaw; it’s the nature of the beast, the key word being “saga.”

You see, Survivors, or even that trilogy as a whole, is a grand saga covering thousands of years of human civilization, and that’s the forest. The trees are represented by the individual human (and later ET) heroes (and villains!) who move that saga forward. As I wrote, I had to focus on those individual trees, the keyword being “focus.” A historian can perhaps focus on an entire nation or civilization, but sci-fi readers need specific individuals they can relate to; and those who make a difference, i.e., make change occur, are the ones authors must write about. It’s true that World War II was Churchill, FDR, Hitler, Stalin, and the Japanese generals, but the true stories told in history books and historical fiction novels come down to individuals. In other words, that list of the famous and infamous in that war for many can be less interesting than the story of just one soldier slogging it out as the Allies move toward Berlin.

Survivors has another feature that some might see as a flaw: It and its sequels, Sing a Zamba Galactica and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, used to be one huge novel. Consequently, you will find Jenny Wong’s story unfinished in that first novel and continued into the second (and third and beyond!); it’s definitely a cliff-hangar in Survivors. This isn’t the major flaw that it could be, because a reader who only peruses that first novel probably doesn’t realize she’s even still alive, so they’d be surprised when she returns in Zamba.

With all these problems, it was a wonder that Survivors got any positive reviews! Instead, I got my most cherished review (because it motivated me to ignore what an ignorant said as she complained about too much narrative, indicating no understanding of sci-fi writing where world-building is always required) from a Pulitzer-nominated author no less! In a nutshell, he liked that saga aspect. (Maybe he was a reader who just thought Jenny had died?)

I think Carolan’s problems with finishing “The Denisovan Trilogy” are similar to those I had with “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” He shouldn’t complain too much [wink, wink], though, because one strong character, Kayla Jones, will be the strong tree standing tall in all three novels no matter how big the forest becomes. She’s “the One” for the trilogy as well as for the Denisovans’ descendants, the shaman who will change human history. (You can write Carolan and tell him to get going using the contact page at this website. I think Google has cancelled his Gmail account. We just text now! But I can pass on any message you have for him.)

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Origins. Even this single novel shows A.B. Carolan can write action-packed sci-fi. (Of course, some readers saw that in Mind Games, another Carolan novel.) Origins is another sci-fi mystery written for young adults but many adults who are young-at-heart have enjoyed it. If you’ve read anything about the Denisovans (a real but more mysterious hominid line like the Neanderthals), you’ll enjoy this story about their descendants on Earth and those among the stars.

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

Do you get tired of every software company offering you what they call AI software? I do! They want to jump on the bandwagon, but almost everything they call AI is gimmicky and nothing like what real AI is supposed to be.

The best current software offered (and let’s not call it AI!) can only surf the web, admittedly faster than I can, pilfering information here, there, and everywhere, and maybe organize what it finds in somewhat logical order. In other words, current whatever-it’s-called is nothing more than yet another advanced search engine. One might be able to ask it to write a story in the style of Steven M. Moore, for example, and it will spit out something; but Steven M. Moore is such a common name, so who knows what it’ll come up with? Certainly not anything like I write simply because I don’t have one unique style. Just compare the novels in “The Last Humans” trilogy with those in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” one.

AI’s hardware and software versions often appear in sci-fi stories (including mine), and it invariably goes far beyond all the current and primitive offerings. HAL is perhaps the most famous example because of the movie 2001, of course, but the computer in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress easily beats Clarke’s HAL (and neither is actually called an AI).

I don’t believe I was the first sci-fi author to make AIs essential for FTL travel, but I was the first to say they’re needed to manage the appearance of FTL obtained by hopping around the different universes in the multiverse, which requires complex geometric and physical calculations in strange and varied spacetimes. In other words, my AI hardware/software constructs needed superhuman speed for super-complex calculations and the management of billions of terabytes of data to do the tasks no normal human or current AI construct could ever do. (Some abnormal humans manage in my stories, though. They’re often “collective intelligences.”)

In 2001, HAL goes a bit crazy (a bow to human beings’ Frankenstein complex?); in 2010, it redeems itself. Both cases remind some of us of an important question: If AIs are our constructs, will they have a soul? I’d like to ask the Pope if a sufficiently advanced AI could acquire a soul. Where did that AI’s soul in Heinlein’s novel go after he shut down? (I’m not so sure about HAL, but Heinlein’s AI seemed to have one.) Is there a corner of heaven where the souls of truly advanced but dead AIs will be found?

I suppose someone (probably not the Pope) could say that proving a sufficiently advanced AI has a soul could be the ultimate Turing test (assuming human beings have them, of course). We might not want to bring Turing into the discussion, though, considering what the British government did to poor Alan for being gay: How do you chemically euthanize an AI?

I remember way back (Radio Shack Color Computer Days!) when there existed programs that would accept my questions (from an approved list, mind you) and give me some answers that seemed to make sense. Today’s software creations aren’t much more than that primitive software except for being able to take more questions and/or providing more answers.

The real goal in AI development is sentience, i.e., self-awareness. When that occurs, as it did with the Terminator’s net, Heinlein’s lunar computer, and HAL, that’s when we’ll really have to begin to worry, especially if that sentient software has no soul, in a good sense, meaning moral spine. Otherwise, such a computational construct might become an invincible dictator or decide that human beings are superfluous (that’s not an “exclusive or,” of course, as a certain current sociopathic presidential candidate has shown). Current dangers from what we erroneously label as AI software seem harmless and trivial in comparison, real but manageable: Just shut them down! But the future might be very dark for human beings with AI advances.

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“The Doctor Carlos Stories.” These are spread around my oeuvre. Some appear in the ebook collection Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape; others (maybe some of the same?) are collected in a free PDF download. In any case, they all feature Dr. Carlos Obregon, medical officer of the explorer starship Brendan controlled by (you guessed it!) an AI. Sometimes the AI plays a major role, as it can in other sci-fi stories I’ve written. It’s always there, though, guiding a starship through the universes of the multiverse to give the appearance of FTL. (How human beings got that technology is explained in Sing a Zamba Galactica, the second novel in “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection”—an ebook bundle is available that contains the whole trilogy.)

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

This article is another attempt to say something intelligent about book titles. Authors often can be boringly banal and copycats with their titles: “Gone…” something or the other, “Fifty Shades…” of something, or too long a trip through the alphabet—“A is for…,” “B is for…”—all boring, boring, boring, if only by showing their lack of creativity (often on the part of a publisher and not the author, I’ll admit). The standard rule that’s used is “short and to the point” when it should be “make it more interesting than what’s on a cereal box, stupid.”

I’m guilty of creating bad titles too, but I think I’ve had a few good ones. While covers and titles are just window dressing for what’s in a novel, no matter what publishers, reviewers, authors, or readers think, I suppose bad ones can hurt sales figures. (Mine are so low, it doesn’t matter.) A muscular bloke naked from the waist up with one arm around some sexy gal’s waist on a cover, along with “Love in…” or “Romance at…” in the title, could motivate serious readers perusing B&N’s shelves or online pages for their next read to flee to other authors, publishers, and booksellers. (I’ve done exactly that for years. I now think most booksellers have no idea about how to categorize a book.)

Generally speaking, I’ve been lucky with my covers, learning early in my writing career (officially starting somewhere after 9/11) that I needed professional help from a cover artist for them. I choose the titles, though, and often go through various ones from the first working title to the one finally used on the published book. My best is still The Midas Bomb that sums up the plot in only three words; the worst might be Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, which only refers to the last scene of the novel. (I still like it, though, because it continues the theme started with Sing a Zamba Galactica.)

Some titles that I reject during the course of writing the novel are quite acceptable. Consider my novel Rogue Planet. At the time of its publication, or maybe a bit earlier, politicians were blathering about “rogue states,” meaning countries like Iran, Iraq, and Syria that didn’t follow the West’s rules of accepted civilized behavior (they still don’t, of course). That idea acceptably described the novel’s plot, was concise, and extrapolated how theocracies like Iran might even occur among the stars. (That novel might be considered the continuation and extension of “The Chaos Chronicles” trilogy; if that trilogy is my “Foundation Trilogy,” then its novels, Rogue Planet, and Mind Games are part of my “Extended Foundation Series.” Sorry, A.B.) The final published title doesn’t bring to mind anything like Game of Thrones, though, which the novel might do for some readers—they would be right, but it’s hard sci-fi, not fantasy.

One title I thought of before Rogue Planet was Tale of Two Planets. Some readers might appreciate the reference to Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, his only novel I really liked and admired. Two planets outside the ITUIP (“Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”) are involved, and the two related tribes that colonized them. What follows from that? You’ll have to read the book.

The point is that A Tale of Two Planets wasn’t a bad title; something with Thrones might have been okay; but I settled on Rogue Planet. Combined with Sara Carrick’s excellent cover (both ebook and paperback versions are available), the novel can be read as a stand-alone (despite the connection to the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy”), and Rogue Planet is one of my shortest titles that does its job, (I do follow the “short is better” mantra: There are two one-word titles, counting Intolerance and A. B. Carolan’s Origins but not one with The; and ten two-word titles, counting The Collector.)

All of this is subsumed under one rule: Damn the publishers, etc.; choose the title that works for you!

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Rogue Planet. A prince leads his people to overthrow an evil theocracy and its high priest. Game of Thrones-like battle scenes, romance, and secret alliances await the reader, but it’s all hard sci-fi adventure, not fantasy, set in the same far-out universe of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” in ITUIP’s near-Earth space (ITUIP = “Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”). Available in both ebook and paperback format anywhere quality sci-fi books are sold.

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

Celtic Chronicles, the ninth novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, represents my most recent nod to these disciplines, while Son of Thunder (St. John’s tomb in modern-day Turkey), the second book in the series, is the earliest. But Declan O’Hara’s scholarly tome about the life of St. Brendan, mentioned in several novels in that series and a few times in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy, were indirect nods as well. The first novel in the “Denisovan Trilogy,” Origins (hello there, A. B. Carolan, get your arse in gear!) came from imagining what had become of the Denisovans, our hominid brethren.

A reader of any of those novels (hopefully all of them!) might wonder where that interest came from. My training wasn’t in either of these academic disciplines, after all. And, while I enjoyed that “Indiana Jones” series of movies (especially the one with Sean Connery), these films weren’t the inspiration. Neither was The DaVinci Code, although Dan Brown’s novel showed me what to avoid in Son of Thunder.

My motivation goes all the way back to my young-adult years when I became interested in these disciplines and even thought of working in them. I checked out a lot of books about them from our public library, including Margaret Meade’s classic work. My conclusion was that human beings are just too damn complex as subjects of scientific study, so I chose to pursue training in an easier science (at least math and physics seemed easier for me). Perhaps that’s just as well. Social scientists aren’t all that rigorous, and Governor Reagan became determined to destroy the anthropology department at UCSB when I was there.

Nevertheless, the interest remains. I read most of the articles in Science News and often follow that biweekly magazine’s suggestions for further reading, but I usually read the articles about human origins and human quirks first! I don’t know if any of these esoteric subjects will be featured in any of my stories (a desalination platform off the California coast played an important role in The Last Humans, for example) but don’t be surprised if they are. Sci-fi, for example, isn’t all about astronomy or physics, and I have a special relationship with both.

Of course, Esther and Bastiann van Coevorden are volunteers who work on an archaeological dig in Celtic Chronicles. I agree with Bastiann in large part: Digging up artifacts and skeletons seems more like back-breaking labor that this old man shouldn’t be doing. We’ll leave that to the truly dedicated and their students!

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“Esther Brookstone Art Detective” Series. In this nine-novel series (two novels are free PDF downloads available at this website), the reader follows Esther and Bastiann through many dangerous adventures, all related to art in some way. These two sleuths represent my homage to Agatha Christie: Esther is a more sexy, active, and agile sleuth than Miss Marple (she’s a bit younger too); and Bastiann, first her paramour and then her husband, looks like the actor who portrayed Poirot so many times in BBC features. Agatha might not approve of their more dangerous and romantic adventures—she wrote in a different time—but I mean no disrespect (I also read her mysteries as a young adult) because our detective duos are active in different periods in the UK. The tongue-in-cheek humor and bawdy romance might even appeal more than the mystery and thrills.

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

…yet it might not seem like it. I’m also something of a romantic. But only the dearest and nearest people in my life have seen much of those aspects of me. I mostly avoid blatant humor and schmaltzy romance in my reading choices in my informal relationships and that avoidance carries over into my stories.

It’s a matter of degree, of course. For writing, while I suppose it could sell more stories (as if that were a goal), a focus on humor or romance doesn’t appeal to me. The only time I set out to boldly write (and purposely split an infinitive to rub it in to strict editors who haven’t read the new rules!) a pure romantic comedy (isn’t modern courtship always romantic comedy but rarely pure?) was mostly a failure: The first part of The Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, based on a short story about a mad and atypical female physicist (“mad” in the English sense and “atypical” because girls aren’t supposed to be good at math—of course, I know they can be, because I’ve taught math and science to both females and males!); she hires a brilliant black techie (I wanted to piss off both misogynists and racists); and the story expands to what becomes a “classic road trip” where the two time-travel without creating paradoxes.

I’ll admit that there’s more humor and romance in that novel than most of my other stories (and maybe less quality sci-fi?), but, whether sci-fi, mysteries, or thrillers, or some combination, there’s enough humor and romance in all my tales to make the characters seem human (or believable ETs, as the case might be—sentience requires both humor and romance). One of my favorite authors from my childhood, Isaac Asimov (also an ex-scientist), was a lot more serious than I am, in fact; and another favorite author, Robert Heinlein (you guessed it: also a scientist), in Stranger in a Strange Land, flaunts conventional Christian mythology with irreverent humor and romance that should be a model for sci-fi romantic-comedy writers everywhere (that novel became the hippies handbook!).

After finishing The Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, though, I realized that writing sci-fi romantic comedy isn’t that easy. Even Heinlein, a master of sci-fi writing, tended to the bawdy and sacrilegious and departed from the humor all around us in our daily lives. (Asimov’s seriousness is also a bit tempered by a few references to android-human sexual relationships in the robot trilogy. From his impish smile, he probably thought that was a great joke!)

In my mysteries and thrillers, Detective Castilblanco’s quips and Esther Brookstone’s penchant for collecting husbands often add humor—he’s a Latino, after all; and she’s an atypical Englishwoman, quite unlike Christie’s prim and proper Miss Marple. Perhaps my Esther deserves to be called that American term, cougar. I play Esther against type like I do Dao-Ming Chen, Castilblanco’s longtime partner, especially in Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder. I love to do that! It makes characters more interesting. And atypical characters often can add humor even though humor isn’t the goal.

Of course, humor comes in many forms. What makes a reader chuckle isn’t easy to predict, so maybe a good humorist should sprinkle different types of humor throughout a novel? What do you look for in humor?

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A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. Ever heard of the “Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics”? It’s not really a theory but a convenient interpretation of that strange theory describing atomic phenomena; it’s often associated with the Nobel prize-winning Richard Feynman, but it was actually invented by Hugh Everett III in a Princeton thesis subsequent to Feynman’s. For the scientific fans among my readers, the key words are “many worlds,” i.e., parallel universes, if you will; and it should theoretically allow you to time-travel without paradoxes. (Nothing says the parallel universes have to run at the same rate, right?) For those who just want a sci-fi rom-com that’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, though, sit back in your easy-chair and ride along with the heroes of this novel as I poke fun at much of human society’s conventions and culture. Available wherever quality ebooks are found. (You don’t have to be a physicist or engineer to enjoy it, by the way.)

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

While I’ve discussed these two topics elsewhere (for example, in my free PDF download “Writing Fiction”—see the list on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), I’ll mention them again because I consider them and their balance so important when writing fiction. Some fiction writers emphasize one over the other, maybe depending on the type of novel.

There’s no argument about sci-fi: It often requires a lot of world-building, which is narrative, of course. (I’ll never forget the incompetent agent who, early on in my writing career, couldn’t comprehend this. We Irish hold grudges for a long time! Her comment, “There’s too much narrative” soured me on agents in general and established for me a twist on an adage, “Those who can write should do it; those who can’t, should become agents or editors.”) Other genres might require more emphasis on dialogue (especially if you count “internal dialogue”—what goes on in a character’s mind—as a mental conversation with themselves).

Like all the elements used in writing fiction, an author must handle dialogue and narrative with care and skill. The Goldilocks principle is often indicated: Not too much of one or the other but just right. As you read other authors’ works, you’ll see the amount of each employed cannot only depend on genre but also on the location in the story. World-building is usually done early on, but in the novel I submitted to that incompetent agent, Survivors of the Chaos—she asked to read it, by the way—it had to be used all the way through because the venues so often changed. (This novel is the first of a trilogy, and all three books are now contained in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, an ebook bundle.)

In my British-style crime stories (novels in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series are the most recent), I first briefly emphasize narrative (describing the British settings, including police stations, because they’re unfamiliar to many US readers), and then I move early on to dialogue (direct and internal), which often plays a more important role (especially in interrogations). But the parts dedicated to narrative are less in my US crime stories (like the novels in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series—the free PDF Defanging the Red Dragon is a crossover novel in two series featuring the US detective Castilblanco and the UK detective Brookstone, which requires the acrobatics I performed there to tell that that tale).

And then we have another important aspect of dialogue to consider: How much slang and/or local idiom should an author use? For the same reason as above, I include local expressions to provide local color but provide the US reader a glossary at the front of most of my British-style mysteries. (If I’ve missed listing some that are unfamiliar to you—I’ve read a lot of Brit-style crime stories and am now used to the UK’s lexicon that’s as varied as the US’s at times—please let me know, and I’ll add it to the glossary if there’s a second edition.) Words like “nick,” “wanker,” “pillock,” and “eejit” aren’t part of American English (and maybe not Canadian or Australian either), but they add local color that can become an essential part of a character’s description.

The to-and-fro of direct dialogue has to be handled with care. When he is speaking to her, or vice versa, it’s usually not difficult for the reader to keep things straight, but two males or two females talking can create confusion, so names have to be used more within the dialogue or dialogue tags (what’s outside the quotes). They shouldn’t interrupt the flow if done correctly, only inform.

That flow is critical. The basic rule for writing fiction is to avoid forcing readers into situations where they stop and say, “Huh?” or “What’s going on here?” Think of it this way: A speed-reader (moi, par exemple!) should be able to breeze right through those questions if they occur. Tom Clancy suggests a course of action: Just tell the damn story! Anything that inferferes with that should be questioned by the story’s author. A writer doesn’t need either an agent or editor to tell them that. It should be obvious.

One thing is certain, though: Whatever you do in your fiction writing, don’t let Microsoft’s Copilot write your dialogue, especially in Aptos or Calibri. AI isn’t permitted in manuscripts submitted to traditional publishers, and self-publishers shouldn’t use it either. Times New Roman is still the font of choice you should use for your writing. (Microsoft’s sneaky changes to Aptos from Calibri and addition of Copilot—hell, we just got rid of Cortana!—shows how low that company has sunk!)

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A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. This sci-fi rom-com provides an example of many of the suggestion described above: It’s a lively mix of narrative (i.e. sci-fi world-building, many worlds, in fact—that’s an in-joke)) and dialogue (in romantic spats or with comic prats). This stand-alone novel is a futuristic “road trip” that avoids the paradoxes of time travel but not those associated with human behavioral quirks. Enjoy!

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

Having one current and three former presidents all in one place, NYC, at the same time, perhaps made good PR for the two candidates among them—Mr. Biden, Clinton, and Obama raked in $26 million at the Radio City Music Hall for Mr. Biden’s campaign, more than Mr. Trump made in an entire month (he’s busy trying to stay out of jail, of course); but everyone knew the Donald was trying to wreck the three Dems’ show by attending the wake for an NYPD officer effectively slain by the NYC Council’s malfeasance (an overzealous bail reform the root cause), having nothing to do with Mr. Biden, of course, so what did Mr. Trump gain? (He’s been diagnosed as a psychotic sociopath by a slew of qualified mental health professionals, so its natural that he only worries about himself after all and not Officer Diller!) But I’m surprised at the Secret Service’s allowing this strange event of modern politics to occur! (After all, the Secret Service didn’t allow the Donald to march to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a long-planned coup and a much more violent event.)

Because of the strict security surrounding past and current presidents, the US has rarely suffered from a presidential assassination like other countries have. (To be sure, many of those are more than welcomed by lovers of democracy everywhere when an autocracy’s citizens finally come to their senses, if only briefly, and depose their dictator.) The last assassination in the US was JFK, of course, but Reagan came close. Who knows how world history would have evolved if JFK or Abe Lincoln had survived, or Reagan had been killed?

Due to the rarity of such events in the US, I’ve not often considered assassination plots in my fiction. True, the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series began with a failed plot to assassinate Mr. Obama (never mentioned by name, by the way), one of the four presidents listed above, in The Midas Bomb. And, after one attempt on presidential candidate Sheila Remington’s life (The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan), that fictional US president was assassinated later on my fictional and futuristic timeline, an event that led into the first novel of the “Clones and Mutants” series (Full Medical, my very first mystery/thriller novel published in 2006).

Royalty gets better treatment on that fictional timeline: Major members of Europe’s royal families escape death and play roles of heroes in Aristocrats and Assassins (fourth novel in the “Chen and Castilblanco” series); only minor royal functionaries suffer. A king on a planet outside ITUIP (the “Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”) is assassinated, but his son leads a rebellion against the Iranian-syle theocracy that took over afterwards; the son gets his revenge (Rogue Planet). And, because I tried to keep my fictional but parallel timeline ahead of our real one, Queen Elizabeth’s passing on my fictional one was announced a bit ahead of time in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series and the “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy.. (My apologies to the royal family. They have a lot of problems now, not the least of which is the British media.)

That’s about it, unless you want to count Putin’s ousting of Yeltsin, hardly a fair fight considering Putin and his evil oligarchs’ devilish plot to kill any chance for democracy in Russia, at least for the time being. Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth seem rather tame compared to the current rulers of the Kremlin.

But don’t fret. My fiction has plenty of villains: Some flash-in-the pans; others, like Vladimir Kalinin, who also takes down a few of Putin’s oligarchs out of revenge. What are good mysteries and thrillers without some really evil villains? (You can meet Kalinin early on in The Midas Bomb, but he has a starring role as villain all the way to Soldiers of God,)

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The Midas Bomb. This first novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series has some historical significance in my writing career. The first edition (from the old POD, Infinity, no longer in business) shows that initially I saw the NYPD homicide detectives’ cases as standard third-person mystery/thriller tales. Then I wrote a few more novels in the series, decided to rewrite the first novel in first person as Castilblanco that alternates with the standard third-person to match the subsequent novels in the series. (As mostly a self-published author, I’m free to experiment a bit. In The Last Humans, the first title in the “Last Humans” trilogy, everything was first-person; the second two, A New Dawn and Menace from Moscow, alternated between first and third person. In A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, I even alternated between the two heroes in first person!) Does this experimentation sell any more books? I doubt it; but I have more fun writing them. And hopefully, dear reader, you’ll have at least as much fun reading them. The Midas Bomb is a good place to start.

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

If you’ve read my novel Son of Thunder from the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, you’ll know that Esther keeps a special ring found in a Turkish cave and used it as a wedding band for Bastiann van Coevorden at their betrothal that takes place at the end of the novel. It later has a few cameos in some novels of the series that follow.

This ring is special, although in that novel there was only one Lord of the ring! Nothing to do with J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy (really one long saga split into three novels), but a bit of religious mystery never quite resolved, making Son of Thunder a lot more mysterious than other novels in the series. (Esther is still waiting for the Vatican museum’s answer to her queries.)

In fact, the question still remains, now that the series has ended: Should Bastiann keep that ancient relic with its inscription in Aramaic? He and Esther have no male children to pass it onto, although Esther has two older brothers she’s estranged from. (They only exchange Christmas cards.) What will happen to that ring when Bastiann leaves this mortal coil?

I hadn’t thought about that question much. (Seven novels in the series–two are free PDFs downloadable from this website’s “Free Stuff & Contests” web page–follow Son of Thunder, as well as other novels.) But I did what everyone else did not that long ago: Ring in the new year! Okay, that’s a terrible pun. No, this question really arose when I finished The Hobbit (I’d read the Lord of the Rings trilogy as a kid but not The Hobbit).

Van Coevorden’s ring represents a bit of mysticism left over from the most mysterious of all Esther’s mystery/thriller novels. Or, does it just represent a bit of history? Perhaps I should write a piece of short fiction about the fate of that ring and what else Esther and Bastiann found in Turkey? We’ll see.

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Son of Thunder. Esther Brookstone first sets out to prove that Sandro Botticelli, the famous Renaissance artist, was never in Turkey despite what his parish priest claims. The story is told in a document found tucked into the the frame of a Botticelli painting the priest owned; it was tucked behind its frame. She finds out she’s wrong and decides to also search for the tomb of St. John the Divine. Available as an ebook and paper version wherever exciting fiction is sold. (If your local bookstore doesn’t have it, ask them to order it!)

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

I’ve written more than a few British-style mysteries (see the web page “Books and Short Fiction), and questions keep arising as I write that show my ignorance about life in the UK, of course, but visitors to this blog—they could be American readers or authors themselves—might have also considered some of them. These questions aren’t answered in any detail if at all in my British-style mysteries. Perhaps they shouldn’t be, or they shouldn’t even be asked by an inquisitive Yank who lives across the pond in a country with its own many unanswered questions, but I’m interested in the answers.

Here’s my current list:

Do Brits feel like they’re part of Europe or not? I do mention Brexit in my British-style mysteries, more in the aftermath of PM Boris Johnson’s reign than what led to PM Teresa May’s downfall. (In my stories, the latter received more attention for trying to send those descendants of immigrants who helped clean up after World War II back to their home countries. Esther Brookstone’s handyman in her gallery has Jamaican ancestors, and Steve Morgan’s ARO leader has ancestors from Belize.) Brexit caused a whole host of problems, so a related question here might be: Will the UK ever return to the EU?

Did Winnie and his cronies feel like they’d made a pact with the Devil in World War II? This is related to Europeans’ hate-love affair with Putin. The UK is less dependent on Russia’s petroleum exports, but there’s no doubt that part of the world isn’t always comfortable in its support of Ukraine, especially fascist-leaning countries like Austria, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

Churchill’s pact with Stalin followed one old Joe made with Hitler. While Winnie didn’t practice appeasement with Hitler like Chamberlain (or Europeans often do today with Putin), I doubted he liked Stalin very much. Or communists, for that matter (except for Cuban cigars?). Current opinions about Putin, who desperately wants to restore that evil Russian empire, the USSR, and is willing to have thousands of Russian soldiers slaughtered to do it, are mostly negative even among Labour Party members, primarily because the UK thinks of Ukraine as part of Europe even if people in the UK don’t think their country is.

How could Brits have allowed the Iron Lady to lead them into that war for the Malvinas? It was clearly a ploy created by Margaret Thatcher to rev up British pride and make her more popular; but outside the UK, it led many people to believe that Britain was struggling for relevance at best and becoming a bad bully at worst. Participation in a few NATO ops was a lot more noble. Do the Brits also think that Malvinas conflict just Thatcher’s folly? (Note that I don’t call those islands the Falklands.)

What are current attitudes in the UK toward colonialism and their participation in the slave trade? In reference to the Malvinas, there’s some truth in the statement that long ago “the sun never set on the British Empire.” There’s patriotism and pride in that statement. But many outside the UK see the colonial period as causing many problems worldwide, even current ones. From Hong Kong to India, many African nations, Northern Ireland, and Israel, British colonialism left bad feelings bitter hatreds among its subjects. Australia was only a place to send convicts remember, and the slave trade made some Brits a lot of money. Do the UK’s citizens regret any of that?

How did the Brits get rid of Cromwell? That Puritan fanatic created havoc inside and outside England. Perhaps he’s also become a model for religious fundamentalists in the US as well as the UK, although the former are probably more Pope-haters than the latter because the Anglicans (Church of England) aren’t Catholic only because Henry VIII wanted to have a few divorces. Old Oliver was a bit more of a bloodthirsty fascist than Henry, though, especially if you allow for their different eras. Just ask the Irish what they think of Cromwell. How to get rid of fanatical religious leaders of oppressive theocracies like the current Ayatollahs in Iran and future ones like the US House Speaker Mike Johnson and his cohorts seems to be a worldwide problem, hence the importance of this question.

I’m sure that other questions I’d like to ask Brits will keep popping up if I continue to write Brit-style mysteries. Stay tuned.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

My British-style mysteries. The published ones started with Rembrandt’s Angel; the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series ended with nine novels (two are free PDF downloads—see the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). Esther’s stories are linked to the three novels in the “Inspector Steve Morgan Trilogy” and sometimes to my short fiction stories (also found in that list of free PDF downloads). My fascination with British-style mysteries began with Covid-19 enforced “sheltering in place” where I perused many novels that go far beyond anything Agatha Christie ever imagined. (The British publisher Joffe Books has many multi-novel sets that are inexpensive “best buys” in this genre. Visitors to this blog should check them out…and some of mine as well!)

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

Far too often!

The Star Wars series turned me off with its very first film (whatever number that was in their all-too-cute numbering scheme). I knew immediately that it was basically a fantasy filled with references to Japanese ninjas, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s characters (even the names!), and Isaac Asimov’s plot devices (the Foundation). Where were the lawyers at that time who went after plagiarists? (Or the ones even now?) Jedi warriors and fairy-tale princesses with light sabers? C’mon! (Okay, I’ll admit the music was interesting, but I liked that composer a lot more when he was leading the Boston Pops.)

Frank Herbert’s Dune series is even worse as sci-fi but at least it was in book form long before Hollywood screenwriters took a break from writing terrible scripts (e.g. Star Wars!) and tried to adapt those novels to the silver screen (a new Marvel Comics-like version is about to come out). Herbert’s books were already pure fantasy (forget that damn Hugo because it’s also given for fantasy!) filled with magic, mysticism, sandworms, and that miraculous spice existing only on one arid world, a coveted and moneymaking substance that Ponce de Leon might have searched for in Florida if he could get past DeSantis’s anti-immigrant Gestapo. (I’m sure Ron would have arrested him and sent him to New York if that fascist Florida governor and huge presidential primary loser had been around back then.) The Dune series is just more fantasy, whether in book or movie format. (The movies have been worse than the books, but that’s almost always the case!)

Too many people (a majority who have never read a book, by the way…if they can read—Trump can’t) conflate fantasy with sci-fi, and authors and screenwriters exploit them by adding a few starships and blasters to Harry Potter and call it sci-fi. (A silly author like Margaret Atwood might pardon their sins by calling it all “speculative fiction,” of course; she’s become rich peddling her fantasies.) That’s the formula for creating a sci-fi classic, right? Wrong!

Science fiction, sci-fi for short, even if you accept A. C. Clarke’s claim that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic (consider Ugh the Caveman finding some time-traveler’s smart phone, basically a little computer!), must be some sort of reasonable extrapolation of current science. Comsats were created by Clarke in his fiction long before Elon Musk littered near-earth orbits with his space junk! Sure, the farther into the future an author goes with his story, the more bold the extrapolation has to be, and it all often approaches Clarke’s limit. But science fiction stories nowadays have generally ceased to be a logical extensions of current science, stories that often contain clear violations of known physical laws, which is what fantasy does (and all the examples above, I might add).

I read very little fantasy now—I graduated from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter on Mars stories with their Jedi warriors and beautiful egg-laying princesses decades ago. (For all their sophistication, I guess those Martians didn’t have IVF; and John Carter probably never realized an egg back on Earth was already a chicken, so he couldn’t apply that lesson learned to Martian females’ eggs!) I especially avoid fantasy stories if their authors claim they’re sci-fi. (You can comment on this post and tell me if you agree or disagree.)

Or, you might want to read some sci-fi classics written by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and others (even some of mine?) to see how good sci-fi can be when it’s not conflated with fantasy! (By the way, the best sci-fi authors, like me, are ex-scientists. When they’re not, they can easily confuse fantasy with sci-fi!)

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Comments are always welcome. (Just follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, I might send you an ESP-transmitted whack with my light saber!)

“Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection.” There are three complete sci-fi novels in this one inexpensive bundle. The first, Survivors of the Chaos, will seem a bit too close for comfort to what’s going on in the US and the world today. The last leads into the novel Rogue Planet and the Dr, Carlos short stories. (The first book represents well deserved mockery of the current Iranian regime; for the second collection, see the list of free downloadable PDFs on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) These are “evergreen books” (as entertaining, fresh, and hopefully still profound now as on the day I finished their manuscripts), but sci-fi in general can never get old, can it?

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