Just The Caffeine Talking

Return to the Event Horizon!

The second half of my interview with John Michael Godier is now available on his excellent Event Horizon YouTube channel. You can listen to it here. Hear me pontificate about star-mining, slow-motion interstellar colonization, nuclear war, and how planetary scientists have fallen in love with giant impacts.

Pulp Covers!

Here's an article on LitHub about pulp-style covers for some very not-pulp novels. I even remember seeing some of these back in the 1970s. Some are silly, but a few are hilariously wrong.

Still, I kind of wish publishers still did covers like these. I think my own novels could really benefit.

A Darkling Sea: scantily clad Alicia menaced by giant lobster, beefy Rob Freeman wrestling it, knife in hand. Tagline: "An Ocean of Danger — and Passion!"

Corsair: bare-chested beefy David Schwartz, bikini-clad Elizabeth Santiago trading pistol shots with bad guys as a rocket lifts off in the background. Tagline: "A Fortune From Space — Big Enough to Kill For!"

Arkad's World: Arkad, sans shirt, punches tentacled pirates while Baichi in just the shreds of her torn cloak fights off a clawed flying monster. Tagline: "Across a World of Danger Lies the Ultimate Treasure!"

The Initiate: Pretty much the cover and tagline of the actual book, really. Maybe replace creepy horror-novel Isabella with Taika Feng in a femme-fatale pose.

The Godel Operation: Shirtless Zee and Adya in torn skintight spacesuit battling a big boxy robot with eye-beams. Tagline: "Save the Fabric of Existence Itself!"

Why Caesar?

In European civilization, I think it's a true statement to say that the most famous historical figure, second only to Jesus, is Julius Caesar. He's been hero-worshipped more or less continuously since he led his army into Gaul — except for one unfortunate incident involving sixty or so of his political rivals and a lot of knives.

If you think about it, this is really weird. Other historical figures go in and out of fashion. Today's hero is tomorrow's villain. But Caesar has been reinterpreted in every era.

In Imperial Rome, he was literally deified, and all the subsequent emperors used his name as their title. They all claimed his power, his popularity, and his legitimacy. A few even deserved it.

With the decline of Roman paganism and the triumph of Christianity in Europe during the Middle Ages, you'd expect a guy who was a pagan god to fall out of favor. But nope. He was honored as one of the Nine Worthies, the greatest heroes of antiquity, the Bible, and Christendom. A virtuous pagan and a paragon of chivalry. Emperors in Germany and Constantinople still claimed his authority.

When Dante wrote his Divine Comedy and described a journey through Hell, at the bottom layer was the three-headed figure of Satan, frozen in ice up to his waist and eternally gnawing on history's three greatest traitors. Who were those three villains? One was Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. The other two were Brutus and Cassius — two of Caesar's assassins. For Dante, stabbing that one particular Roman politician is as awful as betraying God.  

Another literary genius took up Caesar three centuries later. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is perhaps the most "nuanced" view of Caesar in literature. The man himself gets the usual hero-worship, but Shakespeare doesn't shy away from depicting the gangsterism of his political followers, and shows Brutus as having honorable and patriotic motives. Still, the play is named after Caesar and that's who the audience shows up to see.

The intellectual and political movement known as the Enlightenment was enamored of all things Roman, so Caesar remained as popular as ever. Especially in Italy, where a rather self-interested Roman politician was reinvented as a symbol of national unity and liberation from foreign rule. It must have gnawed at Italian leaders and thinkers of that era to see some Habsburg German sitting in Vienna, calling himself "Kaiser" and lording it over most of northern Italy.

In the Twentieth Century, Caesar's most avid admirer was another Italian politician, whose career was less glorious but did follow much the same trajectory. One would think that association with Italian Fascism would lower Caesar's stock, but that didn't happen. In America he got reinvented as a populist reformer, a proto-FDR brutally killed by "reactionary" Senators.

There are any number of explanations for his invincible popularity. The fact that a hundred generations of educated men in Europe grew up reading about Caesar in Plutarch didn't hurt. Nor did the fact that most of those men also read Caesar's own account of the Gallic Wars.

One must conclude that in addition to being a military genius, Caesar was also the greatest self-promoter in history. His reputation outlived him, his family, and his civilization, and shows no sign of abating. I guess he earned it.

My Canon

In modern geek culture we've begun to use the term "Universe" to refer to a background setting, particularly one which is shared by multiple creative works. The most famous, right now, is probably the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," which encompasses all the Marvel/Disney superhero films and TV series since Iron Man in 2008. There are some odd borderline cases, mostly the result of rights ownership issues, but right now pretty much all live-action films about Marvel characters can be assumed to take place in the same world.

A related concept is "canonicity" — which stories "really happened" in the fictional universe versus which ones are either "imaginary stories" (a term pioneered by DC Comics in the Silver Age) or alternate timelines. The Star Trek universe illustrates this: for a long time the rule was that the live-action TV shows and movies were "real" and thus canon while animated shows, comic books, tie-in novels, and games were not.

There was some permeability, as when the depiction of Klingon society and culture invented by John M. Ford for his novel The Final Reflection and the FASA Star Trek roleplaying game were adopted wholesale by the makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation and thereby became canonical. The 2009 film snarled everything up by introducing a canonical timeline split induced by time travel, so that it's no longer clear which universe is which.

All that throat-clearing accomplished, now I have to grapple with the fact that I seem to be creating a couple of Universes of my own.

Most of my novels and short fiction have been stand-alone works. The world of my first short story "A Diagram of Rapture" has nothing to do with my second story "The Alien Abduction," or my first novel A Darkling Sea. And none of them are connected with The Initiate or "Object Three" or Arkad's World.

However, because I was writing "Abduction" and Darkling Sea around the same time, some concepts and jargon did seep into both. Those two stories can be considered to share the same Universe. Its defining features are:

• Very near-future interstellar travel (basically some smart people discover a convenient way to go faster than light next week, and this sparks a boom in space exploration),
• Star travel primarily a scientific endeavor, under the auspices of the UN Interstellar Cooperation Agency (UNICA),
• Multiple intelligent species, but
• Few technological civilizations.

I may return to this Universe again, especially if I want to do another first-contact story. There are some complications about publishing, but nothing insuperable. Possible names for this setting are "the Darklingverse" or "the UNICA/UNIDA universe." At present it includes only the novel and the short story already mentioned.

My second, and more extensive Universe is of course the Billion Worlds. So far it encompasses one published novel, one published short story, a novel in progress and two forthcoming short stories. In addition, some concepts and ideas from some of my earlier works show up again in the Billion Worlds, so I'm inclined to retroactively put those stories into the same history.

So, the official list of Canonical Billion Worlds Universe fiction, straight from the creator, is:

"Balancing Accounts" (2008) — the dawn of autonomous sarcastic artificial intelligence;

"Periapsis" (2014) — first mention of Deimos as an important power center;

Corsair (2015) — the dawn of private space development and colonization;

"Contractual Obligation" (2014) — collective AI runs a military squad, Deimos shows its ruthless side;

"Calando" (2020) — specifically mentions the Billion Worlds, side reference shows up in Godel Operation;

The Godel Operation (2021) — primary introduction of the Billion Worlds;

"Out of the Dark" (forthcoming) — Billion Worlds short story, references Juren habitat;

"The Paoshi Puzzle" (forthcoming) — involves Adya and Pelagia from Godel Operation;

The Scarab Mission (in progress) — takes place a few years before Godel Operation and involves one character from that book.

By including Corsair I can even create a thrilling canon/non-canon debate about its short story progenitor "The Barbary Shore" of 2007. Let the flamewars begin!

Event Horizon Interview on YouTube

I have been a fan of John Michael Godier's "Event Horizon" channel on YouTube for more than a year now, so I was particularly pleased when Mr. Godier and his team decided to interview me about my new book The Godel Operation. The interview itself was great fun. Our conversation rambled widely, discussing the book, artificial intelligence, apocalypses, the Fermi Paradox, and some topics I'm probably forgetting.

While it's technically a "video" because it's on YouTube, the graphics are mostly just for show. You can listen to it here. Enjoy!

Political-Literary Observation

In the news one constantly hears journalists and government officials referring to "bad actors" when talking about matters of crime and national security. I think that movie reviewers and theater critics are the ones to guard us against bad actors. Soldiers, spies, and policemen should confine themselves to stopping wrongdoers instead.

How's It Doing?

 

The Godel Operation has been out for three weeks now. I've done interviews and promotion — there's an interview on the "Event Horizon" YouTube channel due to drop Friday the 27th. I'm sending out signed bookplates in lieu of autographings. Reviews have been good: Publishers' Weekly liked it, and Paul DiFilippo wrote a glowing piece for Locus. Responses on GoodReads and Amazon customer reviews are also very complimentary.

Naturally, this prompts people to ask how the book is selling. I can track that a little — the Amazon ranking is currently #1430 in "Hard SF," #4645 in "Space Operas," and #6272 in "Science Fiction Adventures." That's pretty good. Store sales, however, are a mystery.

Publishing in 2021 is an odd mix of current cutting-edge tech and practices dating back to the age of Dickens. I write on a laptop, and submit my manuscript in electronic form via email. The book doesn't actually exist in physical form until it's sent to the printer. It's all just-in-time and postindustrial.

But sales information and royalty payments hearken back to the era of stagecoaches and post horns. I won't see my first official sales reports until six months after publication. 

So for now we are enveloped in fog. I hope a lot of people find this book. I think they'll like it. Pass the word.

Retro-Review: Treasure Planet

I recently watched the 2002 Disney animated movie Treasure Planet. I am told by my children that we rented it multiple times when they were younger, but I am sure I never actually watched the whole thing. Perhaps I was in the room while they watched it, but my attention was elsewhere.

My judgement is that Treasure Planet is an ambitious failure. It has nifty graphics, an interesting blend of cel and computer animation, nonstop action, some decent character moments, some hammy supporting voice actors, and a story which doesn't stray too far from Robert Louis Stevenson's classic original.

So why do I call it a failure? Three main reasons.

First, it felt rushed. It weighs in at 95 minutes, which is acceptable for an animated feature. But throughout the movie the interval between setup and payoff was too short. At the beginning, the aged pirate Billy Bones arrives at the Admiral Benbow inn, just as he does in the book. Stevenson's novel gives him a couple of chapters there before he dies, but in Treasure Planet poor Billy (voiced by no less than Patrick McGoohan!) doesn't even make it inside the inn before uttering a cryptic warning, handing young Jim Hawkins the treasure map, and dying.

A couple of scenes later, when Jim boards the ship RLS Venture (cute, Disney) he no sooner meets Long John Silver than he immediately suspects him of being the sinister cyborg of Billy Bones's cryptic warning. Again, in the book Stevenson took time to let his (and our) suspicions develop. 

Given its full feature length, where does the time saved by all this rushing go? To my second reason.

Second, it had too many pointless action sequences. Look, I'm no prude about pointless action. My complaint about the movie Battleship was that it wasn't stupid enough. But Treasure Planet had too many obvious "put that in so we can use it in the video game adaptation" chases with Jim riding his space sailboard through random obstacles. There's a scene with an exploding star collapsing into a black hole which comes out of nowhere, gets resolved by technobabble and handwaving, and serves no purpose in the plot whatsoever. But I'm sure there was a level for it in the game.

Finally, the scriptwriters wasted time and plot space on some stupid character motivation bullshit. Young Jim has (wait for it) an ABSENT FATHER and so has (yep) ABANDONMENT ISSUES and all the boilerplate "character arc" tomfoolery of every other film for young people cranked out by Hollywood. Stevenson managed to convey all the same information without resorting to maudlin flashbacks or having Mrs. Hawkins outright infodumping to another character. In the novel he just assumes the readers are clever enough to notice that Jim's father does not appear in the book, and clever enough to figure out that's why he has conflicting bonds with several different paternal characters in the story (Captain Smollett, Dr. Livesey, and of course Silver himself). Not every character motivation has to be displayed in giant illuminated letters.

Oh, and some idiot had the brilliant idea of including a couple of pseudo-alt-rock pop songs in the film, thereby locking it solidly into the decade in which it was made — a sure way to avoid timeless icon status.

My letter grade for Treasure Planet is a B minus. Adequate but nothing more, which is a shame because it could have been considerably better.  

 

 

 

 

I Will Sign Your Book Wherever You Are

There haven't been any bookstore signing events for The Godel Operation, and I haven't been able to attend any conventions in person. But one of my friends had a brilliant suggestion: signed bookplates! 

I ordered a batch: they're self-sticking bookplates, about the size of a business card, with original artwork (above) by Emily Cambias, showing the logo of the spaceship Pelagia from the novel. It is a proven fact that copies of the book with Pelagia's logo never get destroyed by angry whale cyborg space mercenaries.

If you want a signed bookplate, just email me at billionworldspromo@gmail.com, and I'll get one in the mail as soon as possible. You can have more than one if you want, although my supply is finite. I'll also throw in some bookmarks from previous books and anthologies, depending on what I have.

So anyone in the world can now get their copy of The Godel Operation signed, and I don't have to get out of my chair.

Baen Free Radio Interview

The Baen Free Radio Hour sounds like it should be broadcast from hidden antennas deep in occupied territory, keeping the flame of freedom alive. Actually, it's a podcast. They've got an interview with me up now, about — no surprise — The Godel Operation.

You can listen to it or watch the video version here. Note that the video player doesn't seem to like the Safari browser.