Tag Archives: science fiction

710. Star Gates and Menhirs

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Stonehenge: the most famous menhir.

Star gates have been around a long time, often under other names. They have given us passage to elsewhere in science fiction and in fantasy for decades. They seem to work equally well in either genre.

Is a star gate science fiction or fantasy? The term seems to imply science fiction and looks a bit like a wormhole. The concept of a gate to elsewhere, however, could be either or both.

The first time I saw the term was in the title of Andre Norton’s 1958 novel called Star Gate. It was science fiction, but with some magic thrown in. I saw it next as the title of a theatrical movie Stargate in 1994, which had nothing in common with the Norton novel but the title. That movie spun off the television series which everybody remembers. It ran from 1997 to 2007, then spawned numerous additional spinoffs. You can find it on re-run channels any week.

I can’t speak authoritatively of the TV series. Military fiction isn’t in my wheelhouse so I rarely watched it, but I assume the places they were sent to were in our physical universe. That would make it science fiction.

Let’s drop the prefix star and continue.

Heinlein used a teleportation gate to other planets as the basis for his novel Tunnel in the Sky. Gordon Dickson used such a gate in Time to Teleport (a pretty good novel with a lousy title). It’s a fairly common device for authors who don’t feel like inventing a faster than light drive to get their characters to some extrasolar planet.

Also still within science fiction are alternate universes. Sometimes a whole novel takes place in one such alternate without any travel between them. More often, characters from one universe travel to one or more other alternate universes. Sometimes they go in time-space vehicles (example: Heinlein’s Number of the Beast). Sometimes they travel via a gate-like device that sends them directly to their destination.

Andre Norton used such a device in her 1963 novel Witch World to get Simon Tregarth from prosaic Earth to a magical world. Norton would preside over her Witch World as she and a few others spun off novels and short stories for forty years. She referred to the device that transported Tregarth as the Siege Perilous, referring to Arthurian legend, but essentially it was just another gate.

Was Norton’s Siege Perilous scientific or magical? Who knows? Who cares? If you are going in a book to a wonderful place, what difference if you get there by a space ship or you step through a magical wardrobe?

— << >> —

Now, a slight detour. Some time in the mid-sixties I stumbled upon a book. I can’t tell you the title or the author, but if you are a reader you will understand why I can’t remember them all. It explained that for thousands of years there was a culture of menhir builders who left megalithic monuments across Europe and the Middle East. No one knows why these menhirs were built. We now have some notion of by whom, but that wasn’t known when the book was written. It was all a big mystery.

I was intrigued by what I had read. I fantasized about the menhir builders. I wrote an unremarkable short story, then tossed it. Then I more or less forgot about menhirs for a decade, but they didn’t go away.

Years later, I dreamed up this medieval kid whose father was killed, but who didn’t want to seek revenge. I told you about his origin last October fifth.

In 1976 I began to tell his story, and that led me to build a world for him to occupy. Those fascinating menhirs came crawling up from memory and insisted that they become the center of his world. In fact, his world came to be called the World of the Menhir, and I plan to publish the first five novels this year.

The boy’s name was Tidac. I already knew that five minutes after he crawled into my brain in 1972. He had been introduced to me during a seance with a Ouija board in Oklahoma City in 1965. The board (or the lovely and imaginative young lady who seemed to be the one manipulating it) said that I was reincarnated from a Norman prince named Tidac. Who was I to argue with a lovely young lady?

When Tidac crawled out of Beowulf in 1972, I knew him immediately and I knew why he didn’t want to take revenge for his father’s death. He wanted freedom from his father’s shadow. I had wanted my freedom for similar reasons, only a few years earlier.

That’s not coincidence; that’s how a writer’s mind works.

707. A New Start

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A New Start

It is already January fourteenth, but the year is still new and the re-start of A Writing Life is still fairly new. It’s time to present something special.

On April 17, 2019 I was trying to write a review of a novel. I remembered the book clearly but didn’t remember enough details, and I needed to explain why I was going to postpone writing about it. What I wrote then does more to tell why I created this blog than anything else I have written.

— << >> —

I have written quite a few books over the years, but it is never enough. Writing books is just too much fun.

The fact is, reading a book is ten times better than watching a movie, but writing a book is fifty times better than reading one. And takes fifty times as long.

Besides the hundred thousand words a modern novel demands, there are the other hundreds of thousands of words you have to go through while getting to the right ones. And there are all those books you have to burrow through looking for just the right bit of information or inspiration to help you understand how that next chapter is supposed to come out.

Just reading a book for fun gets lost somewhere. I read the things I need to read, and late in the evening I read comfort books, like the thirtieth Nero Wolfe, which isn’t that different from the other twenty-nine.

It wasn’t always that way.

— << >> —

I was an only child on a farm in the fifties. We had one black and white TV that got two channels, which my parents watched in the evenings while I read. Of course I became a reader; what else was there to do? From the time I discovered the county library, there was no time I didn’t have a stack of books waiting for my attention.

But I didn’t talk about it.

My mother read occasional romance novels but she didn’t talk about it. My dad read the Bible, but he didn’t talk about it. The habit started early.

I read books about hunting and outdoor life. I already lived outdoors, but on a tractor. I never hunted, barely fished, and I had never seen a tent. My outdoors wasn’t for play, it was for work, and that wasn’t enough to satisfy me.

Looking back, I know that the place I lived as a boy was rather lovely, in a muted sort of way. It was farm country, lightly populated by humans, but with plenty of birds, and occasional coyotes and possums.

Nevertheless, every patch of ground was either under the plow or turned into grazing land. There was nothing wild. I wanted forests and streams, fish and game, and real snow, along with the freedom to wander through them.

That was all available in books, along with a thousand other adventures to be found all over the globe.

My fellow students in my little school read what they had to read — but nobody talked about it. Nobody read science fiction. Nobody wanted to know any more about science than they were required to know. I was reading and studying continuously, preparing to head for college to be a scientist — but I didn’t talk about it, because no one wanted to know.

When I got to college, one of my roommates was a science fiction fan. We talked about it, but only a little. By then, my habit of silence was pretty well set.

A lifetime later I started this blog. For the first time I got to really talk about the books I love and why I love them. Like right here, right now, talking to you, telling you why I had to postpone a review.

Hi. You see, there was this book called The Road to Corlay . . .

— << >> —

I began A Writing Life in support of an upcoming novel, but it quickly evolved into something larger. It became a how-to, and a “How I did it”, and a “What I’ve learned about how others did it.”

Many of those posts, somewhat modified, are gathered together now in a pair of books for writers called Learning from the Masters (that would be Heinlein, Clarke, et al, not me bragging about myself) and So You Want to Write Science Fiction. Because 2026 will be fully occupied with the Menhir series, they are scheduled for release in 2027. Tentative dates are:

Learning from the Masters

March 17, 2027

and

So You Want to Write Science Fiction

July 7, 2027

705. The Year That Never Ends

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The Year That Never Ends

Once upon a time, in tenth grade, they force-fed me Dickens in the form of Great Expectations. No one should do that to a teenager. It put me off of Dickens for thirty years.

Then I discovered A Christmas Carol, and Dickens rose to the top of my pantheon. I loved the book. I loved the other four Christmas books he wrote in subsequent years. I loved the movies made from the book.

I wanted to write the next great Christmas tale. (Don’t we all?) Instead I wrote a novel that was half Dickensian and half dystopian. It centered around the Clock That Ate Time and the Great Babbage, but it did take place in a variant Dickensian London.

The immediate call to write was both visual and visceral. It was a scene from the musical Scrooge, drawn from the book and repeated in most movie adaptations. Bob Cratchit’s children are waiting for him to finish work on Christmas Eve while staring through the window of a toy shop. And what a toy shop, filled to the rafters with all the kinds of toys that rich Victorian children might be given, but which were forever out of reach of poor children like Tiny Tim and his sister. There were even mechanical wonders like the clockwork strongman who suspends himself horizontally using only one hand.

Who was the man who ran the shop? He was nothing in the story that Dickens told, but I wanted to know. Who built the mechanical man? I wanted to know. What possessed the owner to set up a shop in the poorest part of London, where none of the children staring into his windows would ever have a chance to buy his wares? I wanted to know that, too.

Yes, writers are like that. They are likely to stare at a potted rose and wonder what kind of soil is in the pot.

The novel I wrote is called Like Clockwork. The toyshop is there. It is also called Like Clockwork, and it is overfilled with mechanical wonders all created by the man who runs it. His name is Snap. He is the man who built the Clock That Killed Time, although he has lost all memory of building it. He, and everyone else in his pocket London, will live forever — but at a cost. Every Midwinter Midnight, the citizens gather around the Great Clock to watch the year 1850 end — then begin again, invariant forever.

What follows is the Prolog to Like Clockwork, in the form of a note written by Snap’s wife, Pilar of the Sorrows, as the old year closes.

— << >> —

Prolog. (Or is it an epilog?)

“Tonight Snap has gone down to the Clock for Midwinter Midnight. In just a few minutes, the reversion will occur and I will forget writing this note. It will be midnight of January first, 1850. Not next year, nor last year, but the only year there is.

“It isn’t a bad year and it isn’t a particularly good year, but if it is to be my only year, I want more.”

Pilar laid down her pen and listened, straining to hear the song they always sang at midnight:

The year that ends, but never ends,

That ‘ere again unfolds,

We live that year forever and

We never shall grow old

It was probably her imagination. Surely voices could not be heard over such a distance. She rose to move closer to a window and as she did the note she had written ceased to be. All her memories of the past twelve months ceased to be. Her body sloughed off a year of age and it was January first of the last-this-next-only year.

Again.

— << >> —

You’ll get a chance to read Like Clockwork, but not for a while. There is strategy and pacing in how I intend to release my novels, and that grand plan calls for Like Clockwork to be published no sooner than 2028.

This isn’t intended as a mean tease; its just that I wanted to acknowledge Midwinter Midnight as, unlike Snap’s world, 2025 rolls over into 2026.

702. Reaching Cyan

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Reaching Cyan

The year was 2086, the place, half way to Procyon. Stephan Andrax wrote in the log of the Starship Darwin . . .

There are two chronometers on the bulkhead. One forges forward at the speed of Everyday, ticking off seconds and minutes and hours and days that make sense to the body and soul. The other races. Seconds flitter by. A new day is born every three hours and twenty-two minutes. Einstein told us this would happen, a century and a half ago; when an object approaches the speed of light, time slows down.

Beside the chronometers is a viewport and beyond it are Dopplered stars which sweep through my field of vision as the ship spins. We are nearly six years into our journey. Halfway through our journey. Yet, for me, only a year and a half have passed.

And through all the years and hours of our journey, the smaller, fleeter chronometer will rush ahead at Earthtime while our time is slowed. All those I knew and loved, except my companions here on the Darwin, are aging seven times faster than I am. When we return, my agemates could be my parents, and my parents will be dead.

The mind perceives what the heart cannot comprehend.

— << >> —

Obviously, one of the joys of writing near-future extra-solar exploration is dealing with the delicious complexities that come from working in a relativistic universe. Thank you Albert Einstein.

The novel Cyan opens with the words of Stephan Andrax, but he will not be the main character. He is the great great (I never figured out how many greats) grandfather of Jan Andrax, who gave his name to the novel Jandrax. I wanted an obvious connection between that novel and its sequel (prequel?), but I kept Stephan mostly in the background by making him the captain of the Darwin.

Imagine that you are planning a ten person expedition to an unknown extra-solar planet. Assume a giant starship, designed for travel only in space, and a landing craft to carry the explorers down to the surface. That seems like how things would actually be arranged. What would happen if all the explorers were killed while going about their business? What if the landing craft were damaged beyond repair leaving everyone marooned on-planet?

Contingencies are what planning is all about. If everyone on the ground were killed or stranded, the knowledge obtained up to that point would still need to be transported back to Earth, so the planners of the Procyon expedition arranged to always have one crew member on board the Darwin. They selected an astrophysicist who would be best positioned to study Procyon’s system of planets by staying in orbit, and made him Captain. He would stay with the ship, just like one astronaut stayed in the CSM while two others descended to the surface of the moon in the Apollo program. That made Stephan important but mostly off camera, which is just what I wanted.

The groundside leader was the character I chose be our eyes for most of the action. Stephan Andrax was Captain in space; Keir Delacroix was “captain” on the ground.

Everyone except Keir had one or more Ph. D.s and was at the top of his or her field. Keir was also highly intelligent, perhaps at the next level down, but his skills came from a life spent in the outback of Australia. He was a rarity on overcrowded Earth, a man who had spent his time in one of the few places that was still wild. Each other crew member had a scientific specialty to bring to the study of Cyan. Keir was there to keep them all alive.

I chose the name Keir Delacroix in tribute to the actor Keir Dullea who argued with the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Here is the list of the Darwin‘s crew, alphabetically, with their specialties and their alternate fields of knowledge.

Stephan Andrax    captain (spaceside) – astrophysicist
Debra Bruner        microbiologist – astronomer – medic
Petra Crowley       geologist – soils scientist
Keir Delacroix       groundside crew leader – generalist
Viki Johanssen      anthropologist – paleontologist
Gus Leinhoff         zoologist – biochemist – medic
Leia Polanyi          paleontologist – geologist
Ramananda Rao  meteorologist – cartographer – geologist
Tasmeen Rao       first officer (spaceside) – pilot (starship and landing craft) –  engineer
Uke Tomiki           botanist – biochemist – medic

— << >> —

I have a lot of things to do in this rejuvenated version of A Writing Life, largely having to do with upcoming releases, but I won’t forget Cyan. I will return to talk about how it came to be, perhaps once a month. You can get a jump on all that by typing Syd Logsdon Cyan into Amazon and reading it now.

next week there will be Christmas posts on Tuesday and Thursday

701. Approaching Cyan

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Approaching Cyan

Cyan is the name of a novel and the name of a planet.

I’ve been writing science fiction for fifty years, but I’ve been reading it even longer. When I began, NASA didn’t exist and the word astronaut hadn’t been coined. I was ten years old.

In the science fiction novels that filled my childhood, I rode on a thousand spaceships or starships to explore a thousand planets, but there was one novel I could never find. I never read of the discovery, exploration, and colonization of a planet — all the phases of what would actually occur — under one cover.

I really wanted to read that book. Eventually, I had to write it myself.

The kind of science fiction I prefer — and write — is based on reality, humanity, and scientific accuracy. The key question I continually ask myself is, what is likely to actually happen when the day comes. And the day that interests me most is something past tomorrow, but not too far past.

I can imagine 2050, but it really doesn’t interest me. It will look too much like today. I prefer to look forward a hundred years or so.

The novel Cyan opens in 2086, which seems a contradiction to what I just said, but I began writing it about 1980. It just took a long time to complete.

I also had to keep changing the year dates on what I was writing. Real world manned space exploration had slowed to a crawl. Who could have predicted in 1972 when the last astronaut left the moon, that fifty-three years later no more humans would have gone beyond low Earth orbit? Certainly no science fiction writer would choose to imagine that.

So what planet would I want to colonize? Mars? Of course not. Half the fun of science fiction is world building, and Mars is far too well known to be of interest. It would have to be a planet around another star, and if it was to be colonized in the next hundred years or so, it would have to be nearby, at least in stellar terms.

Actually, any extra-solar colonization in the next hundred years requires a major stretch of the imagination, but science fiction writers are in the imagination business.

So what are out near neighbors in the galaxy? Here is a list:

Sol, our sun, as a starting place.

Alpha Centauri, about 4.3 light years away.

Sirius, about 8.6 light years away.

Epsilon Eridani, about 10.5 light years away.

Procyon, about 11.4 light years away.

Epsilon Indi, about 11.8 light years away.

Tau Ceti, also about 11.8 light years away, in another direction.

Other than specks and oddballs, that is the full list of star systems within five parsecs of us. I will add two more, just beyond five parsecs, because they were part of Gordon Dickson’s writings in his Dorsai novels. You’ve read them, right?

Formalhaut, about 16.6 light years away.

Altair, about 16.7 light years away.

— << >> —

Click here (or type in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars ) for a Wikipedia article that will list 56 of the nearest stars, including some very small ones, and tell you more than you ever wanted to know about them.

— << >> —

Jandrax, my first published novel, was a lost colony story. The FTL ship Lydia malfunctioned during a jump, stranding colonists and crew so far out that they would never return.

The novel Cyan would be a prequel, taking  place hundreds of years earlier in the same imagined universe. It was intended from the first to be one of a group of novels, so I wasn’t just choosing a star and planet for a single story, but deciding what to do with the whole nearby neighborhood.

It seemed during my youth that every author of a novel about early extra-solar exploration landed on Alpha Centauri. I didn’t want that, so I made the planets of that star system barely habitable. Alpha Centauri lives in the backstory, but I don’t plan a novel about it.

Sirius, on the other hand, is 23 times as luminous as the sun. It struck me as a perfect place to put a colony of humans who were quite satisfied to live in space habitats, with no desire to take up planetary life. That became the setting for Dreamsinger, a novel which I have been sparring with for several years now. I offer no predictions about when it will be completed.

As the novel Cyan opens, limited colonization of the planet Cinder, around Alpha Centauri B, is underway. Explorers have not yet returned from Sirius. When they do, half way through Cyan, they will tell of a system unfit for colonization. Later, a group of dissidents will prove them wrong, leading to Dreamsinger.

There are three starships waiting to leave Earth. One is the Darwin, scheduled for Procyon and the as yet unknown planet Cyan. The other two will head out to Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti where they find prime, Earth-like planets.

Writing a story about the exploration and colonization of a prime planet would be a dead end for me. Something not related to the actual colonization would be needed to jazz up the story, and that was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Cyan, on the other had, had plenty of challenges on its own. It was — and was designed to be — a place to tell a story about how exploration and colonization might actually take place.

I’ll tell you more about Cyan next week, but if you don’t feel like waiting, just go to Amazon and type in Syd Logsdon Cyan and you can buy the novel today, as an ebook or as print on demand.

more about Cyan next week

696. Then Life Happened

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Then Life Happened . . .

Donald Maass, noted author and literary agent, said that there are many authors who have “both published and perished”, referencing the publish-or-perish dilemma facing young academics.

In 1984 I was one of those authors.

I had been writing full time for about eight years. Just looking at the dates you would say nine years, but I had taken a 15 month hiatus from writing to become Stanislaus County Red Cross Director, a job of massive satisfaction and hair-pulling frustration.

My third novel publication, Todesgesanga, came in 1984. It was a German translation and renaming of A Fond Farewell to Dying. Todesgesanga means Death Song, which I admit is a more accessible title.

Counting a cover novella in Galaxy in 1978, Todesgesanga was my fourth publication, all by major magazines or publishers. David Hartwell was my agent. If you don’t remember him, he was top notch. He was reading everything I sent him.

Life was good, on the surface, but my two ongoing novels were both fighting back.

Cyan was a bigger SF novel than I had yet attempted. The world building was huge, but by 1984 that part was finished and the novel was well underway. My ten explorers had made the near lightspeed journey to the eponymous planet and had completed their year of exploration. They had returned to a much changed Earth where I provided about 30,000 words of near disaster to disrupt their lives before they returned to Cyan with colonists. They were saved on Earth by the villain of the piece, Salomon Curran, but now that they were all back on Cyan, Curran’s presence had become a problem I couldn’t solve.

Curran was so huge to the story, and such a bastard that he would dominate the rest of the novel if I let him. Cyan would become about Curran instead of being about the colonization process, and I couldn’t have that. I finally killed him off, summarily, and submitted to novel to David Hartwell. He rejected it, and he should have. It wasn’t finished; Curran had to die a different way. But how?

I was alternately writing in Cyan and in The Menhir Series. That work was even bigger in concept. I could write scenes in that world all day long, but which scenes? I still have boxes of lovely, useless text that I wrote before I knew what it was that I needed to write.

I was in the middle of world building, and character building, and arms and armor building, and city building, and religion building, and magic building. Even horse-replacement building. I needed all that to write the right words, but writing words was the way to discover all of that. Some of one led to some of the other, which led to some of the first, which led to . . .

Looking back now, I see that I was doing it all correctly. I just didn’t have a clue how long it was going to take.

Basically, my problem was that I wasn’t making a living.

In those days novelists were given relatively small advances against earnings. If the author’s percentage of the publisher’s earnings exceeded his advance, he got paid more. If he had a best seller, he got paid a reasonable amount, and his next book got a larger advance. Several good sellers in a row, and an author could eat, sleep, and pay his rent. Several best sellers in a row and he would be well off.

That rarely happened. The norm was that a book by a non-best-selling author would never pay back the advance. The authors of those books had both published and perished.

For one cover novella, two novels, and a foreign reprint, I made about $10,000. That is for eight years work. Even in 1970s dollars, I could have made more digging ditches, or on welfare.

Something was going to have to change.

— << >> —

But not right now. Next week we have to talk about Trump again. (Sorry!) Then comes Thanksgiving, which will call out two special posts not related to writing. Our present conversation will continue on December third.

695. The Birth of a Series

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We interrupt this post . . .

     Today’s post is still here, a few paragraphs down. However, last night Prop 50 passed in California, and I have to address that first.

     Most Trump haters and most Democrats are celebrating. I am not, even though I am as anti-Trump as anybody. I understand the logic of the proposition. I understand why so many supported it. If it helps move Trump out of power, great. But . . .

     Proposition 50 is a blatant gerrymandering of California. It is Trump’s evil, perpetrated by his opponents. It disenfranchises about one-third of California voters.

     When those who oppose Trump look for moral leaders in the days to come, where will they find them? Not among California Democrats.

Now back to the post in progress…

This is a rune board, a device for divination in the World of the Menhir.

The Birth of a Series

For me, the road to becoming a writer was convoluted, largely because becoming a writer was never my goal.

I wrote well, including snatches of fiction that never went anywhere. I wrote college papers by the dozen and my first masters thesis, without ever considering being a novelist. That would take five more years. I’ll have to zip through those years quickly to avoid boring you.

In 1969 I was a senior in college. In the first draft lottery my number was 41. That would mean a letter from Uncle Sam saying, “Greetings, Boy, you are now in the Army.” That notice would come five minutes after I graduated, so I joined the Navy on a delay program.

I spent the next four years as head surgical tech in the dental service of the Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital. I became head tech almost immediately on arrival because I was the only enlisted man with a college education.

I stood across from the oral surgeon handling the suction and handing him instruments as we extracted about a thousand impacted wisdom teeth. (That’s a calculation, but not an exaggeration.) We were getting Camp Pendleton marine recruits ready to go to Viet Nam, where wisdom teeth would be the least of their worries.

After nearly four years of that, the Navy let me go three months early so I could go back to school for a masters degree. The war was winding down and the military was cutting back, so they were happy to see me go.

One thing happened during those four Navy years that would change my life. I just didn’t know it at the time.

My wife worked at the base library, and early on she took a reference librarian class at a local college. It was a night class, so I went along with her when I could. One night in the stacks, with nothing to do but watch her do her homework, I took down a copy of Beowulf and thumbed through it. One short phrase jumped out at me . . .

— all that lonely winter —

. . . and I had a vision of a young boy, sitting at an open wind hole, high in a stone tower. It was quite visual, and it came with a full understanding of his plight. The vision had nothing to do with Beowulf, beyond being vaguely medieval. Beowulf was just the trigger.

The boy was an orphan. His father was a knight who had been killed in battle. The tower was part of the castle belonging to the uncle who had taken him in, and the boy was destined to become a pawn to his uncle’s plans. He would to be raised as a warrior with only one task, to kill the knight who had killed his father.

That man was his uncle’s primary enemy. The boy was a means to remove him, with no repercussions against his uncle. But the boy didn’t want to kill anyone. He only wanted to live his life in his own way, and that wasn’t going to happen.

The next day I went to work as usual. In the afternoon, we had a patient cancellation, so I took that hour to write the opening chapter of a novel that would tell the boy’s story.

That was nothing new for me. I had written many first chapters of novels to nowhere when I was younger, but this one felt different. I wasn’t a writer then, and had no plans to become one, but this felt like the start of real story. The year was probably early 1972.

Three years later I sat down and actually wrote a novel. It went unpublished, as it should have. I a wrote another one — Jandrax — that was published. Then I pulled out the twenty hand written pages about the boy in the tower, typed them fresh, and kept going. By the time I had written a manuscript as long as Jandrax, the story was just getting started. I knew I wasn’t ready yet to write the rest, so I wrote another science fiction novel instead, A Fond Farewell to Dying, which was published in 1981.

Time passed. Lots and lots of time.

On Jun 9, 2021, I finished the boy’s story. Actually, he turned out to be a great deal more than just a boy. I made a note to myself that said, “Finally, after 49 years, I am satisfied.”

The result was one very large novel, or a series of five moderately short ones. It would work either way. I plan to release it through most of next year. Overall, it will be called The Menhir Series. Tentative dates are:

Let me interrupt. This was posted on November 5, 2025. The dates then given will not be met and have been removed. As I said at that time, things are fluid.

My new best estimate of publication dates, as of Dec. 3, 2025, are:

The Morning of the Gods

May 27, 2026

Firedrake

July 15, 2026

The Lost Get

September 2, 2027

Whitethorn

October 21, 2026

The Scourge of Heaven

December 9, 2026

Caveat — everything is still fluid in this relaunch of A Writing Life. These are the new projected dates, but much of what I will have to do to make them happen is new to me. Stick with me and I will explain things as I learn them, just like I did while Cyan was being prepared for publication.

694. Our Very Own Alternate Reality

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Why is the bird here? He is a peaceful hope while we look at an ugly reality.

Our Very Own Alternate Reality

In these four posts we have come full circle, through a brief history of science fiction, which was stuffed into an even more brief history of five presidencies. Now we have meandered back to the subject of assassinations..

On November 22, 1963, John Kennedy was assassinated.

On July 13th, 2024, Donald Trump was almost assassinated.

On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, which started this train of posts.

— << >> —

For at least a century, a staple of science fiction has been stories of alternate realities, and many of them begin with an assassination. In Keith Roberts Pavane, the assassination of Queen Elizabeth the first, on the eve of the invasion by the Spanish Armada, returned England to the Catholic fold and gave us a semi-modern world that still looks a lot like the Middle Ages.

Neat idea. Beautiful novel. But would you want to live in it?

Assassins are a strange breed. They are willing to change the future for all of us through an act that is far less certain than a roll of the dice.

Consider John Wilkes Booth. What if his derringer had misfired? We would never have heard of him. He would be lost to history along with the other would be assassin of Lincoln who made an attempt a year earlier.

If Booth had failed and Lincoln had lived, how different would our history be? How different would reconstruction have been? One person, even a well intentioned president, probably could not have completely forestalled the Jim Crow era, but it might have been a great deal less harsh.

A similar question — would the Viet Nam war have been so protracted if Kennedy had lived? No one knows.

— << >> —

You might well ask why I am even bringing up the subject? Assassination is morally wrong. Isn’t that enough?

Are you sure you feel that way? What if someone in 1938 had assassinated Adolph Hitler? Wouldn’t we all be better off?

I think most people would ignore morality — or argue it away — and opt for a world without Hitler. If any one of us had been in the crowd in Nuremberg in 1938, with a rifle, a clear shot, and a sure means of escape, it would have been hard not to pull the trigger.

But what if Hitler’s replacement had the same goals, and the same hatred for the Allies because of the harsh treatment Germany received in the treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I? (It is a legitimate position.) What if the new leader were not an anti-Semite, and all those Jewish scientists had not defected to the west, like Albert Einstein did?

If all those Jewish-German scientists had perfected the atomic bomb first and used it effectively, we might all be dead.

When a science fiction writer sits down to change the world by introducing a change in the past, it can be great fun. I know. I’ve done it. But contemplating an assassination in the real world is a whole different thing.

Of course I’m sure none of you are thinking about doing anything like that. Eh?

Well, maybe one or two of you — and you are the ones I’m talking to. Before you load up your deer rifle and set out to save humanity, I have just one question.

Are you really sure what the result will be? Maybe you should just think it over for a while.

Go sit under a tree and watch the squirrels play. Eat a good meal. Drink a beer. Make love.

You’ll feel better in the morning.

Peace

693. New Wave, New Frontier

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New Wave, New Frontier

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard . . .

John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962

Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon.  Eisenhower began the space program, Johnson saw it through, and Nixon got to be the president who placed a phone call to the first man on the moon. Nevertheless, it is Kennedy we most closely associate with space, largely due to the speech above.

Kennedy’s presidency was short — January 20, 1961 to November 22, 1963 — two years and ten months.

He began by creating the Peace Corps, then failed to provide air support for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He saw the USSR build the Berlin Wall, faced Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and gave support to Civil Rights activists — but not enough support in the eyes of many.

Kennedy was a young man undergoing extreme on-the-job training. He was beloved by many and hated by many — nothing unusual in that — but a full and balanced evaluation of his Presidency is not possible because it was cut short.

What we can say for certain is that he was a modern President in all senses, and it was his charisma that set us on a path to the moon.

And then he was gone.

— << >> —

Meanwhile, regarding science fiction . . .

In 1961 Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust became the first SF novel selected to be a Readers Digest condensed book. That seems about right, since Moondust was Clarke at his most bland.

A Clockwork Orange, The Man in the High Castle, Cat’s Cradle, Dune, and Planet of the Apes also came out during the Kennedy years, and they were not bland.

About that same time a movement occurred inside SF which became known as the New Wave. That’s a problematical name, like Roosevelt’s New Deal. The New Deal isn’t so new 93 years later. The New Wave isn’t so new 60-some years later either. Still, if felt new while it was happening.

If a young SF fan today were to read something from the New Wave for the first time, they would be likely to say, “But didn’t people always write like this?” No, they didn’t. Before the New Wave, SF writing covered new and exciting concepts, but the style was generally pretty stodgy.

The New Wave was the era of Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, and Roger Zelazny. And many others, but I am mentioning my favorites. I had loved SF before these folks came along, but the fact is, they just wrote better than those who came before them.

By the time the New Wave had been digested and made the norm, science fiction had generally reached it’s present stage. It was, and still is, a genre loved by a few, read by many, and avoided by even larger numbers. It’s style and tenor is no longer particularly distinguishable from the mainstream. There are a few best-sellers and a lot of stories that appear briefly then disappear into the ooze of indifference.

There were still a few changes to come before we would reach 2025. Computers would make writing — and especially revising — easier, so books got longer. Much longer. In the seventies, SF novels often ran 50,000 words. Today you would have a hard time selling one unless it was twice that long.

No agent or editor in the seventies would have even opened a Neal Stephenson manuscript.

Computers were at the heart of the other main change since the Kennedy/Johnson era. Special effects made it possible to create believable futuristic movies and television programs. While I offer no comments on the variable quality of story and acting, modern SF movies look beautiful. It is no wonder the center of SF attention has moved from books toward video.

I object to that, but who cares what I think.

— << >> —

When Kennedy was inaugurated, there were about 3000 Americans in Viet Nam. They were not called troops; they were called advisors. By the time Kennedy was assassinated, that number had grown to about 16,000.

Then Lyndon Johnson took over. He lied to the American people. He lied to Congress. He posted weekly kill-counts that were entirely imaginary. He promised victory. He expanded American military activities to adjacent countries. It gained him reelection in 1964, and cost him the chance to run again in 1968.

Nixon won and — in my opinion, since no one will ever know what really went on in that man’s mind — rode the war and the faltering peace talks to reelection in 1972. The he declared victory and pulled out.

Viet Nam fell.

Nixon could have pulled out four years earlier, with the same result. Johnson could have pulled out eight years earlier, with the same result. There would have been one difference, however.

Fifty some thousand Americans died in Viet Nam. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, an estimated two million counting all countries died due to the Viet Nam war. They didn’t need to die.

I occasionally meet Viet Nam vets who wear caps reminding us of their service. I have no quarrel with them. They were sent, they went, they did what their country told them to do. And there but for the grace of God go I.

I was also in that draft, and I enlisted. I spent my four years stateside, but that was nothing but luck. I could have gone over like the ones wearing the Vietnam Vet caps. And if I had, I could now be sixty years in the grave.

Tens of thousands of us knew Viet Nam was a mistake and said so. No one listened. I’m still angry, and I make no apologies for that.

— << >> —

Bouncing back to science fiction again — to the SF of alternate realities — here is the question all this poses. What would Kennedy have done, if he had lived?

We can’t know the answer; we can only speculate. Kennedy made big mistakes, then stood tall against Khrushchev. He learned. Would he have learned enough? Maybe not — but maybe he would have.

Folks, we are living in our very own alternate reality, initiated by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22. 1963.

I also have a question for Oswald himself. Why did you shoot Kennedy that day in Dallas? Did you think you were going to make the world a better place?

What were you thinking?

The discussion concludes next week.

692. The Space Age Begins

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The Space Age Begins

Britain measures eras by the reign of its Kings and Queens. America measures eras by Presidents. In our look at the beginnings of science fiction, we are about to enter the Truman/Eisenhower era, even though neither man will be our focus.

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Hiroshima changed everything.

Science fiction people had read Einstein, or had tried to, so they knew about nuclear fission. They knew that an atom bomb could be built, and were expecting it. A few even got in trouble because they used atom bombs in stories, when the FBI was convinced they had it locked into secrecy.

For the rest of the country, Hiroshima was a shock to the heart.

It didn’t take long for the Russians to get the A bomb. Then we got the H bomb. Then the Russians got the H bomb. Welcome to my childhood.

Suddenly the future had become the present. Everybody was still driving ancient looking cars (no cars had been produced during WW II) and dressing like people in the old movies, but their world had been ripped open by futuristic perils.

Literature reacted to the situation. The Saturday Evening Post, that bastion of American norms, broke tradition and published a science fiction short story, The Green Hills of Earth by Robert Heinlein. Colliers Weekly published Wernher von Braun’s article Man Will Conquer Space Soon.

Von Braun also partnered with Disney to produce three episodes of Disneyland (as the Disney TV program was then called). The first, in March of 1955, was called Man in Space. This was followed by Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond is later seasons. These were humorous and relied heavily on cartoon animation, but they showed American youth what the future held in store.

Eisenhower’s presidency saw a worsening of the Cold War, the rise of ICBM’s to deliver H bombs, and the development of satellites. The push for space flight had been properly begun. NASA was formed in 1958.

Space flight is key to science fiction, but it is by no means the whole of the genre. SF, by its nature, is always out ahead of contemporary science, and the giants of science fiction were producing major works during this period. The main difference from the golden age was that there were more novels, fewer short stories, and people had stopped laughing at the genre.

This was the era of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Issac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, while Robert Heinlein revised his novella Methuselah’s Children into a full novel.

This era also saw the rise of near future “science fiction”. The quotation marks are there to point out that this wasn’t really science fiction at all, because it was reacting, not predicting. Atomic power, atom bombs, jets, and rockets had been the stock in trade of science fiction fifty years earlier when they did not exist. Now they were the stock in trade of mainstream writers because they did exist.

Fail Safe was probably the most notable of these near future science fiction novels. It began as a short story in 1959 and was revised into a novel that appeared in 1962. In it, an American bomber is mistakenly on route to destroy Moscow with nuclear bombs. The American President, who cannot call back the bomber, must sacrifice millions of American lives to avert a world destroying all out nuclear war.

On the Beach was even more somber.  Years after a nuclear war, people of Melbourne, Australia wait for inevitable death as fallout from the northern hemisphere drifts down upon them.

No fun novels for a no fun time.

There were many others. Philip Wylie, who was already an established science fiction writer, turned out Tomorrow and Triumph. I read both in high school.

This new sub-genre of science fiction continued to gain readers who might never have read Clarke or Heinlein. In 1984 it reached apotheosis when Tom Clancy published The Hunt for Red October.

— << >> —

Over the course of this blog, fifty year anniversaries of events from the early space program kept happening, and I kept writing about them. By the time of my covid hiatus, those posts had grown into a book to be called Brief but Glorious.

Of all the books I plan to e-publish, it is the most dubious. Not the text — that’s fine — but I want to illustrate it heavily with NASA photos, and I don’t know what kind of technical problems that will cause. I have tentatively scheduled it for October 2027, but that could change. I’ll keep you posted.

The discussion continues next week.