Category Archives: A Writing Life

318. Too Many Exoplanets

It’s official. The good old days are gone.

About a year ago, I said:

(T)he party is nearly over. We now have the capacity to discover extrasolar planets, and new ones are found every year. Fortunately for latecomers to the planet builders guild, megaplanets are easier to find that Earth sized ones, and NASA keeps cutting funding. Still, it won’t be too many years before you can’t decide for yourself where, within the limits of orbital mechanics, you want the planets of Alpha Centauri or Procyon to be.

Science has a way of getting somewhere a lot faster than you would expect. Manned space exploration doesn’t fit that statement, because it runs on politics, not science.

On February 22, in Nature, it was announced that seven Earth size planets had been discovered circling a single star only thirty-nine light years from Earth. Far more important, all seven orbit within the band of temperature where liquid water is a possibility. By contrast, our system has one such planet, Earth, and maybe Mars for a few minutes on a hot afternoon near the equator in mid-summer – if the ice doesn’t sublimate instead. Seven; its unheard of.

The star is TRAPPIST-1, an M dwarf.

In fact there has been a mini-revolution in the search for exoplanets. NASA’s Kepler space telescope has found more that 4700 potential planets. Many of these will no doubt turn out to be false positives, since the techniques of the search are not perfected, but it is still a staggering number. Most of these were found around stars similar to our sun – where else would you look first? Very few of them are both Earth sized and at the right distance from their star to have the possibility of liquid water.

As I said in Cyan, “planets of no use as real estate.”

Since a mechanical failure in 2013 compromised its ability to orient itself, Kepler has concentrated on observing red dwarfs. To eveyone’s surprise, the planet candidates found around these small, dim stars tend to be more Earth sized. And there are a lot of them.

The TRAPPIST-1 discovery, however, was not by NASA but by the TRAnsiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope group operating out of the University of Liège, Belgium. That explains the use of caps; TRAPPIST is an acronym.

If you want details – and of course you do – the best source is here. This page from the University of Liège is in French, but the video which will self-start is in English, and gives enough details to stir the blood of any space or science fiction fan.

It took me about three seconds to start speculating about what kinds of novels could be written about the exploration of the TRAPPIST-1 system. Suppose most or all of the seven planets had some form of life, all evolving independently. Suppose we write about a paleontological mission on a planet which had vertebral life, then lost it; these dwarfs have a solar wind that operates heavily on planets so close in. Suppose at some time in the deep past, a spacefaring civilization arose on one of these planets, colonized the others, and then died out. Or didn’t die. Or seems to have died until our intrepid explorers begin to poke around.

Okay, I was wrong. The golden age is still here.

317. SF in the Wild

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Cyan is now available for pre-order through Amazon, with the eBook arriving April 17th. Meanwhile, I plan to repeat a few year old-posts that were designed to stir the blood of would-be readers just before an earlier release date that didn’t happen.

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This post was originally number 128. If you are what you eat, I used to be beefsteak, fried okra, and hominy. That comes from growing up in Oklahoma. I also lived outdoors most of the hours of every spring, summer, and fall day, and way too many hours of every winter day. That comes from growing up on a working farm.

If you are what you read, then I used to be an Andre Norton protagonist, at least in my imagination. Although I never met or corresponded with her, Andre Norton was something of a long distance mentor.

Alice Mary Norton legally changed her name to Andre Norton early on, in an era when being a woman was no help to a science fiction writer. I didn’t know that when I first read her; I thought Andre Norton was a man. Not that I thought about it much, but she didn’t write like a girl. Looking back, I see that she actually wrote like a person, but I wasn’t that sophisticated then.

One reason Norton got away with writing gender neutral fiction was that her characters spent most of their time alone. Even in their relationships with others of their own kind, they were loners, if not complete outcasts.

Star Man’s Son was the first Norton I read. In it, Fors spent all but a few pages on a quest away from his people; that was a pattern to which Norton frequently returned. I could easily identify with the solo quest while I spent endless hours alone on a tractor. The only variations in my daily life were whether I was pulling a disk or a hay rake, and which Norton novel was replaying in my head.

Every time Shann Lantee on Warlock, or Naill Renfro on Janus, or any of a dozen other young men found himself stranded alone, or nearly alone, on an alien world, I could look up from my tractor seat at the Oklahoma prairie and say, “Yup, been there.”

The best thing about Norton’s characters was that they didn’t whine about being alone. They liked it. So did I.

I didn’t live in a city until I went to college. I spent my adult life living in the suburbs of a reasonably small city, and taught school in a very small town. As soon as I could retire, I moved to a few acres in the foothills. I would move further out if I could afford it.

I was born not liking cities, and my opinion never changed. It should be no surprise that my first novel was about a hunter surviving alone in the woods, or that my first science fiction novel Jandrax was about a hundred or so humans stranded on an alien world.. My three fantasy novels have a rural and medieval feel. David Singer, in A Fond Farewell to Dying, is a mountain boy who has to go urban to get his life’s work done. And Cyan, due out soon, begins with ten explorers on an empty world, then continues with the story of the peopling that world by hyper-urbanized refugees from an overcrowded Earth.

You write what you’ve lived.

316. Cyan is Here

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Finally, after a long wait, CYAN is available for pre-order at Amazon.

If you click here they will take your $2.99. That’s half price to those who pre-order. Pre-ordering puts you first in the queue and gives you the discount; the book itself will arrive in your Kindle on April 17.

Cyan will be available exclusively to Kindle customers at full price on April 17, and available to all eBook retailers on July 17.

Yea! (The dates I gave in an earlier post are now defunct.)

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It think it would be fair to assume that, if you aren’t reading here for the very first time, you know that I started this blog to support Cyan. By now you know my writing style, and you’re still here, so it’s safe to assume you will like it.

In the days before the internet, writers didn’t have to publicize their own work, unless they were a best seller and went on book signing tours. Writers also couldn’t publicize their own work, so the sword cut both ways. If you had a good book that didn’t find its audience, there was nothing you could do about it.

Now authors can and must be their own publicist. Hence this blog — even though writing it has become an ongoing pleasure.

Now its your turn. Brian at EDGE said to me:

One of our goals is to get 50 reviews posted on Amazon as quickly as possible. Reviews can be posted any time after April 17th. However, there is a catch. Only Amazon customers can post reviews. A qualified Amazon customer does not have to have purchased CYAN to post a review, but they must have purchased something from Amazon in the past.

It would be good for you to contact as many of your supporters and ask if they would post a review. (That’s you.) If they are not currently an Amazon customer, they can become one by purchasing a copy of CYAN any time (and at the pre-order price of 2.99) and then post their review after the book becomes available on the 17th of April.

So that’s it. No hidden agenda. The agenda is in plain sight and always has been. However, I do have an additional inducement.

If you read Cyan, and like it, and review it, and it becomes successful enough to warrant publishers taking on other books of mine, then you will soon see:

Valley of the Menhir

Scourge of Heaven

Who Once Were Kin

All fantasy novels, already written. You might soon see two planned but not yet written sequels to Cyan. You might even see:

Raven’s Run (in Serial now)

Symphony in a Minor Key (a teacher rebuilds his life after a false accusation of abuse)

Both are contemporary fiction. Your kids might even get to read the young adult Spirit Deer. (Either soon or later — I don’t know your life plans.)

Right now, I’m concentrating on Amazon, but if you also send a review to Goodreads, I wouldn’t mind at all.

There is a lot riding on electronic word of mouth.

315. Apprentice in Science

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For eight weeks in 1965, I was a Fleming Fellow (see yesterday’s post).

The gist of the program was that a Fellow was assigned to a research scientist as something like an apprentice. My personal research had been a hybrid of ecology and space science (see Tuesday’s post) Nothing like that was available in a medical research facility; instead, I was assigned to Dr. Gunnar Sevelius who was doing research on determining renal flow through use of radioisotopes. He had just finished editing Radioisotopes and Circulation the preceding year.

Dr. Sevelius gave me a small lab room and access to a supply of radioactive iodine, along with sensors for radioactivity and a strip chart recorder. He sat me down to talk about his work and tell me what he expected from me. He treated me as if I could figure things out for myself – which I could. I didn’t see him often after that, although I hung out with his young lab assistants.

I don’t need to give a lot of detail here. It has all been superseded.

Everything sophisticated in science was crude when it was being developed. Any kid in a high school metal shop today could reproduce one of Goddard’s original rockets — but only because Goddard taught them how. Any trained technician can slide you into a machine and look at images of the inside of your head — but only because to the work done by people like Dr. Sevelius. Everything at OMRF was cutting edge for 1965, and probably none of those machines are even stored in dusty basements any more. Science moves on, and quickly.

Computers? Video monitors? Forget it. A strip chart recorder had a moving roll of paper, a moving head with roll of typewriter ribbon and a striker that made a dash on the paper every time the sensor detected radioactivity. An image of a pair of kidneys looked something like this:

You can see a strip chart recorder at the top of this post. That’s me in 1965, with a haircut that was already going out of fashion.

I learned a lot that summer, not least that I would never again spend eight weeks in a windowless room doing repetitive research. I love the results of science, but the doing of it can be damned boring. I also got to test myself against other smart kids, and be satisfied with the result. Every other Fleming fellow had done more sophisticated work than I had, but they were the products of sophisticated high school science programs, or the children of scientists.

There were lectures and activities for us. I met a scientist who had done research on the reaction of elephants to LSD — two years before I chose to avoid it when it became mind candy.

I learned about Michigan State, and was encouraged to apply there. I got a tour of the basement where research was being done using a sensory deprivation tank. Fifteen years later that became the basis for my second published novel.

I learned about the infamous Dr. Sexauer. From a former fellow, I got the names of two of my former incarnations, in a late night seance. Tidac and Javernan became characters in my three fantasy novels. I wrote about that incident, and it led to an odd occurrence. The OMRF was trying to find all its Fleming Fellows to prepare for the 60th anniversary of the program. I had mentioned the name of the girl who seemed to be running the ouija board. The OMRF had googled her name, found my post, and connected with me. It was good to hear from them again.

When I returned to my tiny high school that fall, I had touched the larger world and I would never turn back.

314. Fleming Fellows

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photo by Nima Kasraie

The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation is a major research institution, but not a household word. Let me explain its importance in my life.

Everything that happens to a writer passes into his memory, sinks to the bottom, and grinds around there, knocking sparks off every other experience. Years later, it emerges, transmogrified, as stories or parts of stories.

My soul as a writer and as a human being was forged on a small farm, working essentially full time in addition to going to school. I was an only child. School and home were kept strictly separated. Except for one treasured cousin, none of my school friends ever entered my house.

I was a very smart child in a very small place. I worked hard, got strong, and loved the outdoor life, but my mind lived in other worlds, brought to me by books of science fiction. I decided to become a scientist. In that pursuit, I was torn between space science and ecology. When I was a high school junior, I put those two together (yesterday’s post).

That same year, among the many standardized tests we took, was the test to become a Fleming Fellow. There was also an application to be filled out in which I was to explain my aspirations and offer any personal projects to prove my capacity. I wrote up my ecosystem in space project.

I was notified that I was a finalist, and scheduled for an interview in Oklahoma City. At that time, I knew almost nothing about the fellowship or the OMRF.

Incorporated in 1946, the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation was dedicated in 1949 by Nobel Laureate Sir Alexander Fleming. In 1957, OMRF started a summer program for students, which was quickly named the Fleming Scholar Program. It has evolved over the years, but in that era, from four to seven Oklahoma High School juniors were recruited, and spent eight weeks at the OMRF the following summer.

In the spring of 1965, I sat before a panel of scientists for my interview. I had expected questions on science. Instead, they asked questions on meaning and morality. What did I think of the bombing of Hiroshima? What did I think of capital punishment? Behind the questioning, they were clearly trying to find out my level of self-confidence, as the interview became quite adversarial at times. After I said that I was still uncertain about my stance on executions, one of the scientists asked, rather sharply, “Don’t you think it is our duty to think about such things?” I remember being irritated at his high-handedness. I snapped back, “I didn’t say I hadn’t thought about it. I said I hadn’t decided yet.”

I said to the panel that I intended to pursue a Ph.D. The whole panel tried to convince me that I should be getting an M.D. instead. I held my ground, and when the interview was over, one of the panelists admitted that most of them had Ph.D.s, not M.D.s.

Fortunately, self-confidence – or arrogance, if you prefer – is something I have never lacked. I received a Fellowship. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

313. Weightless Ecology

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I’ve been putting off this post since I started the blog. It’s embarrassing. I’m proud of what I did, but telling it makes me feel a little like one of those old guys who never stops talking about the night his forward pass won the big game.

Still, if I hadn’t done what I’m going to tell you about today, I would never have done what I did the summer after (tomorrow’s post), and if not for that, I would still be driving a tractor in Oklahoma. So here goes.

1964-5 was my junior year in high school. That was the year I took both junior and senior English because I was running out of classes to take, and that was the year I discovered science fairs. We didn’t have one in our tiny school, but their was a regional competition one county over. I had recently discovered Shirley Moore’s Science Projects Handbook, which was the bible for the science nuts (nerd wasn’t a word yet) of my generation.

America was in space; the Mercury project was completed and Gemini was waiting in the wings. I was enthralled with space, but also with ecology. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was about to make ecology a household word, but no one in my world had heard of it yet. I decided to put the two together and build an “Ecosystem Operable in Weightlessness”.

Lets get real. Boy scientist builds spaceship and flies to Arcturus only happens in the very old pulp stories. I wasn’t going to build something that would actually fly in space. It was an exercise in design, with as much building as I could pull off with limited resources.

The idea was that at that time NASA needed to keep to keep some creature in weightlessness long enough to see what it would do to its body. Laika the Russian space dog hadn’t lasted long, and the longest Mercury flight had been 34 hours. I proposed a design that would put two mice in a closed ecosystem with algae. It was set up so that the algae tank would spin to provide just enough gravity to keep the water separate from the air, but the mice would be weightless in a separate chamber.

The fun was in the details. The mice would be housed in a two part plexiglas bubble, with a wire mesh floor at its equator. Waste would pass through he mesh, carried by the airstream and drop down into the algae tank.

That part actually got built. I made the algae tank of plexiglas, heated and formed around two round pieces of wood. I blew two half domes with a plywood form, an air compressor dragged up from shop class, and an oven borrowed from the home-ec teacher.

As I’ve said before, most of my education came outside of the classroom, thanks to indulgent teachers. They did the right thing, but it would get them fired if they did it today.

I bolted the half domes together through flanges formed during the blowing process. With two mice, Hing and Ho (named after the meerkats in Andre Norton’s Beast Master) in the upper chamber of the dome and a mass of Ankistrodesmus from a local stream in the algae chamber, connected by an aquarium pump, the ecosystem was as far finished as I could manage by the time of the science fair.

The physical result was limited by my resources, but the design went much further. To transfer the food to the mice, I had designed a pump, patterned after a Wankel engine (all the rage in Popular Mechanics that year). It was to send algae laden water up through a tube where it would be flushed over a fine mesh screen. The water would return to the tank on the airstream, leaving the algae for the mice to eat.

I did actually experiment with feeding them Ankistrodesmus. I strained it out of the water, dried it over a light bulb and passed the algae wafer into the mice’s cage. They went wild. You would have thought it was ice cream.

The design called for a small tube to carry a continuous airstream from above the algae water to strike the inside center of the upper dome, bringing the mice fresh air and carrying away waste as it returned. There a larger tube would carry the waste to the bottom of the algae tank.

To get water to the mice under weightlessness, the design called for the airstream from the algae tank to first pass through a Hilsch vortex tube, which split the airstream into hot and cold halves. The cold half was to pass between two thin metal plates. The warm (and moist) half of the air was to play onto the outside of these plates, leading to condensation and a continuous source of water for the mice to drink.

So why am I telling you this? Because this was the first step toward my future.

I didn’t know that at the time. I just did it because it was a challenge and more fun than I had ever had, but it led to a Fleming Fellowship, and that changed my life. more tomorrow.

312. Popular Science

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When I was twelve or thirteen, my great grandfather said to me, “I used to read Popular Mechanics. You should, too.” And he handed me a quarter. It was the best piece of advice any relative ever gave me.

I bought my first popular science magazine, and I was hooked. I was soon buying three a month every month, and occasionally a fourth. Science and Mechanics, no longer published, was the best. Popular Science came next, then Popular Mechanics. Mechanix Illustrated was a lame imitation, but I always looked and occasionally bought, if there was a particularly interesting article.

In school, I usually devoured my science textbooks by the end of the first month of the school year. They provided an important, basic, bare bones understanding. But the popular science magazines put exciting flesh and blood on those bones. I learned more science from those three popular science magazines than I ever learned from a textbook.

Those were the days when GEMs were new. Ground effect machines, that is. There were articles that explained how they worked (what shape plenum chamber do you prefer?) but better still, there were articles that showed guys who had built their own out of plywood and a lawn mower engine, flying down the street of their suburban neighborhoods, six inches off the ground.

When I sent ten scientists to explore Cyan, they used skimmers, which were clearly ground effect machines.

There were always articles on how to take care of your car, and there was the new car issue every fall. You didn’t have to be a science nut to like cars.

There were always stories about the newest, hottest jet plane, including a story about a new safety device that gave pre-recorded error messages into the earphones of a pilot. The Air Force had discovered that the pilot never missed the message if the recording was a sultry female voice. Any thirteen year old boy in America could have told them that. The illustration of that article was a realistic drawing of a helmeted pilot with a tiny, bikini-clad femme whispering into his ear the words that would save him.

These guys knew their target audience.

Not everything between those covers would be politically correct today. I remember the pistol crossbow, a powerful hand-held weapon that shot sharpened six-inch pieces of quarter inch rod. Try making that in your seventh grade shop class. Maybe you could get a merit badge in Boy Scouts?

Probably not.

There were always articles on how to build something in your shop, about the latest tools, or about how to build the tools you couldn’t afford. I was hooked on that, too. My father was a farmer, not a craftsman. If a nail in a board would do the job, he was satisfied, and moved on to the next of an unending set of chores. I wanted more. I wanted to be a craftsman. Today I am, and these are the magazines that got me started on that path.

Eventually, I stopped reading popular science magazines. You can only read so many thousand articles at that level until you have absorbed enough. I moved on, but I didn’t forget how powerfully they ignite young imaginations.

When I became a teacher in a small middle school, all the other teachers were happy to load science onto me, and I was glad to accept. I taught all subjects the first year, but after that it was “science-and”. Every year I taught more science and less “and”.

The first year I subscribed to Popular Mechanics and Popular Science (Science and Mechanics was long dead), and soon I added Smithsonian Air and Space. I bought a magazine rack at a garage sale and put it up in my room. I never threw a magazine away until it was too tattered to read, and after a few years there were a hundred magazines in the rack.

Occasionally, at the end of an hour, there would be a few minutes to spare and I would say, “You can either do homework for another class, or read one of the science magazines.” It was the best advice I ever gave them.

And nobody chose homework.

311. Boys at Work: Starman Jones

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On August 2 through 4, 2016, I wrote posts on what I called apprenticeship literature. This is another in that series.

I discovered Heinlein’s juveniles after I had already been reading science fiction for a few years. I was past their target age, but those books are good novels as well as good juveniles and I still enjoy reading them.

Most of Heinlein’s juvenile heroes were young men who found their way to maturity through work, but they were not apprentices. Have Spacesuit Will Travel comes to mind. Kip worked hard to win and then restore his spacesuit, but he did it on his own. His distant father was no help at all.

The twin Tom in Time for the Stars gets his berth through an accident of genetics.
Although he works his way to the stars, and has a relationship with a wise elder, it isn’t really an apprenticeship since he is doing a new job that no one has done before.

Max in Starman Jones is also an anomaly with an eidetic memory, but the book is essentially about a young man working his way up through the ranks. In fact, Max works his way up two separate ranks.

In this future, work in space is controlled by hereditary guilds. Max, a near orphan, has an uncle who is an astrogator. The uncle has died, but not before leaving his astrogation manuals with Max. Max memorizes them. When conditions at his step-parent’s home become intolerable, Max head out, hoping that his uncle has declared him his heir.

He meets up with Sam, a mostly honest – by his own standards – con man. This is a stock character for Heinlein. When Max finds out that his uncle has not named him, shutting him out of space, Sam procures false papers and gets them both berths on the Asgard, in the steward’s guild.

Max is almost pathologically honest. He agonizes over the decision to deceive, then worries about what he has done for the rest of the book. Still, his need to go to space outweighs his honesty. Sam, the con-man-with-a-heart-of-gold, becomes Max’s first mentor, showing him how to survive in a world so closed down that honesty is not enough. Max learns from Sam, but his innate honesty keeps him from being like him.

On board ship, Max’s eidetic memory lets him quickly absorb the steward’s manual. Don’t we all wish it were that easy? He is put in charge of the animals on board, which puts him in contact with a young passenger who learns of his past and uses her influence to get him moved into the astrogation department. There his early training by his uncle is honed by the Chief Astrogator, and he begins to move up the ranks. He has to admit that he came on board by fraud; the issue is tabled pending their return to Earth, but the knowledge of his coming punishment hangs over Max’s head.

Unexpected events plunge the ship into danger and Max is called upon to save the day. I won’t tell you how. Even though the book was published 64 years ago, if you haven’t read it, you deserve my silence on climactic events.

They don’t all die – you could have guessed that much – and Max makes it back to Earth where he has to pay a heavy fine for his false papers, and ends up a junior officer on another ship. He has found a place in space.

Self-reliance, and technical competence make Max a typical Heinlein hero. Add naiveté and clumsiness with girls, and he becomes a typical Heinlein juvenile hero. Heinlein’s young men always work, and always have some kind of older mentor. Starman Jones is the novel where these two factors come together to fully become apprentice literature.

310. Boys at Work: Howard Pease

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On August 2 through 4, 2016, I wrote posts on what I called apprenticeship literature. Here are two more in that series.

More than any other writer, apprenticeship literature is the domain of Howard Pease.

Pease’s fame was world wide and his stories spanned the globe as well, but where I live he is a local author. Not many people remember him, since his best known books were written in the 20s and 30s. Those who read him, tend to love his work. A glance at Goodreads will find few but uniformly high ratings.

Pease was born in Stockton, California. He wanted to be a writer from grade six. He spent his professional life as an English teacher near San Francisco. Between school years, he shipped out on freighters, and based most of his novels on what he learned there.

He is best known for his Tod Moran books, in which Tod begins at the bottom of the hierarchy of shipboard life and works his way up to first mate over thirteen novels. His friend and mentor through most of those novels is Captain Jarvis.

The Tod Moran books are not politically correct by today’s standards. The anti-bullying squad would burn them if they ever got close enough to read them. Although Jarvis is a mentor, his shipmates are the dregs of the harbors. Tod has to fight – literally – to maintain his place on board. Hazing is a constant theme in all Pease’s books, but the message is not “hazing is bad.” The message is that you have to fight every day to survive in a man’s world.

Try writing that in a children’s book today.

Tod comes on board his first ship having devoured his favorite book, The Lookout: a romance of the sea. What he learns in that book does not serve him well. He discusses with Jarvis how different his world is from his expectations.

Tod smiled ruefully. “But everything is so different from what I was taught to expect.”

“It always is, Joe Macaroni. Before a boy grows up, he has to unlearn all those pretty myths about life and death which have been taught him by tender-minded ladies of both sexes. I feel sorry for the poor kids. They have to go through hell. … Most of them don’t, though. Instead, they commit intellectual suicide; they remain simply children.” Jarvis fixed his keen eye on Tod and his face softened. “Somehow, I feel you won’t do that. You’ll kick off those swaddling clothes. … But I pity you in the process – I pity you.” The Tattooed Man, p. 90

This sounds like the address Pease made to an ALA conference in 1939, where he called children’s literature “wholly and solely a woman’s world . . . (under) tender-minded feminine control.” That address reminds me of Heinlein’s ongoing argument with his editor at Scribner’s, which eventually caused him to stop writing juveniles.

One final note for anyone who is already a fan of Howard Pease: the Summer 2000 issue of the San Joaquin Historian was entirely devoted to him. You will find it on line at www.sanjoaquinhistory.org/documents/HistorianNS14-2.pdf

309. Two Hands and a Knife

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There has been an interesting rhubarb in the back stacks of Amazon, where that company acts as a conduit to a battalion of independent used bookstores. The controversy concerns a book/two books which is/are Two Hands and a Knife.

How’s that for convolution? Do I have your attention yet?

In 2003, Terry Gibson wrote a book called Two Hands and a Knife, a young adult survival story set in the Canadian wilderness. It garnered mixed and confusing reviews. It was almost as if the readers were reviewing two different books.

It turned out, they were.

In 1956, Warren Hastings Miller had also written a book called Two Hands and a Knife. I remember it well. I was in fifth grade at the time, in a tiny school, with no access to bookstores. Our school held a TAB book fair, and I bought Miller’s book. It was superb. I remember it better today, than I remember the books I read last week.

To be fair, it was also probably the first book I ever bought.

When Two Hands and a Knife came back onto my radar about a year ago, and seemed to be claimed by some modern author, my suspicions were aroused. Had some schmuck found an old copy and resold it as his own work?

No, it turns out, he hadn’t.

I made my way to the Amazon page which has a Look inside function and read the first chapters of the 2003 version. It was an entirely different book with the same title and similar plot. Of course, young-man-survives-the-wilderness is a sub-genre of its own, so plot similarities would be inevitable. Remember Hatchet?

Some of the reviewers of the 2003 book were clearly remembering their own distant childhood as well. Some reviewed Gibson’s book in glowing terms that showed clearly they had not read it, but were remembering the Miller book. Some noticed the difference, with disappointment. One hated Gibson’s book enough to give it one star and a “don’t buy”. A few reviewers had clearly read only Gibson’s book, and loved it.

If you’re curious, go to the page and go clear to the bottom. There are supposed to be eight reviews, but every time I go to this page, I only find five or six, and not always the same ones.

By now I’ve read enough of Terry Gibson’s book to know that it is reasonably well written, but not completely to my taste. Fair enough; I’m no longer the target audience. I have tried to find out who the author is, with little success. I did finally get a look at the back of the paperback cover in Google books and picked up this minimal biography.

Terry is a retired self-employed businessman. His love of the outdoors has taken him from North America and Europe to deep within the Amazon rain forest. It’s this ‘call of the wild’ that inspired Two Hands And A Knife, his first novel. He currently resides in central Illinois with his wife Patricia.

This puts him pretty much in my generation. Did he read the Miller book as a child? Or not? Was it floating around in his sub-conscious? Or was Gibson’s book a conscious homage to Miller’s?

Don’t misunderstand. The 2003 book is not a rip-off, despite the crack you’ll find in Goodreads. It is an independent work. But we all have influences, ideas come from somewhere, and I find the entire process fascinating. In point of fact, Miller’s original Two Hands and a Knife was floating around in the back and front of my mind when I wrote my first novel Spirit Deer.

So Terry Gibson, if you someday google your own book title on a lazy afternoon, and stumble across this post, drop me a response. I’d love to talk.

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