January Sit-Rep

As work begins on the first book in the Starcruiser Polaris series – and there will be an excerpt of the first two chapters available in a few days, incidentally, when they've gone through at least the first stages of my editing process – it seems as good a time as any to outline how things are shaping up after the first four weeks of the year. 'Into the Maelstrom' came out a few days ago, and all seems to be going well so far; the next Alamo book, 'Vault of Eternity', will be out sometime in mid-March, I think, about four weeks after 'Blood of Patriots'.

It hasn't taken two chapters for Polaris to change form, at least to some degree, though I think it will pretty much go to the outline I have laid out for the books in the series. 'Strike Commander', as I have said in the past, was extremely instructive in terms of preparing a fixed-length series, and I'm using everything I learned last year to make this even better. I've got a very good feeling about Polaris, and the characters are already beginning to sing to me, so I'm confident that this is going to go well.

As for said characters, there were some late changes to the line-up, and a complete story arc fell out simply because it just didn't mesh with the rest of the book, and there were no signs that it would change; hence the poor lead managed to lose his fiancé without a single drop of blood being spilt. The replacement, a hard-boiled detective in the Robbery-Homicide division of the Carter City Police Department, and that will make a lot more sense when you read the book. Given that the bulk of the first book is set on an occupied planet, I decided to add a character on the other side of the fence, and the results should be very interesting.

One thing I will say now is that the book will be a few days later than I had originally planned, though I still intend to get it out in February – though the month being short might push it all the way to the wire. The outline ran long, and after the third revision I decided that I was cutting bone rather than flesh, so I'm settling for a book that will probably be nearer 80,000 words than 70,000, though so long as this does not include any padding, I don't think this is a particularly bad thing.

Something else I've decided is that I'll be doing Alamo and Polaris back to back for at least the first six novels of the year, rather than the four I had originally intended. Firstly, this will give me more time to prepare for the other big project, my first serious foray into historical fiction, in the 'Vae Victis' series currently in the planning stages, and secondly this should allow the new series to get a good start, especially if Polaris is going to run longer than the Alamo novels. I had planned a 24-day cycle, but I think that's going to end up as a 'when they are ready' – I won't be giving accurate release dates for that reason, but at the very least you will see a book out on a monthly basis, and hopefully a little better than that.

While I'm working on that, I'll be starting my Roman research, as well as moving another project a little higher up the priority list – the Soviet Space History that I've been pondering for a while. I've always known that it would be two books, one covering the Race to the Moon, the second dealing with the Salyut and Mir programs, and writing this has been strongly in my mind for a time; I might just manage to squeeze the first volume into this year, and certainly I'll be working heavily on my notes for the project. This is something you'll definitely see on the blog, less on the Roman, as I intend a second blog to cover my work in that quarter, about which more in the near future.

Into the Maelstrom is Out!

The Xandari War is over, but the adventures of the Battlecruiser Alamo continue in a new epic saga, a new voyage across the stars…

Captain Orlova has disappeared, vanished without a trace on a secret mission, and as Captain Marshall is recalled to take her place at Alamo's helm for a shakedown cruise to the frontier and a confrontation with the United Nations Fleet, Lieutenant Salazar is tasked with a covert operation for Triplanetary Intelligence that will put him at odds with his commander and his oath, with the fate of the Confederation at stake. Can that Battlecruiser Alamo survive its latest encounter, or is it doomed to fall Into the Maelstrom...

Buy at Amazon

Starcruiser Polaris: Onward Bound

Well, I've finally put the finishing touches on 'Into the Maelstrom', and you can expect to see it out on sale on January 22nd, the start of a new arc in the Battlecruiser Alamo saga. That completed, I'm now free to focus on my next book, the first in the 'Starcruiser Polaris' series. I've written a little about it over the last few blog posts, but I think it appropriate here to outline what my intentions are for this five-book series.

I'd like to think that I've improved as a writer since writing 'Price of Admiralty', almost four years ago. It seems strange to think of how many books I've written since then, and if I'd known at the time that by this point the Triplanetary Universe would be closing on two million words, I wouldn't have believed you. (For the record, it will be 'Vault of Eternity' that puts the saga over that particular milestone.) The 'Strike Commander' trilogy especially taught me a lot, and I'm trying to apply what I've learned to both the new Alamo arc, and the Polaris series.

'Starcruiser Polaris' is intended as an epic. Something I haven't really done before, but want to explore this time – one contained story, spanning five books, with characters scattered all across the galaxy, building up to a series of huge confrontations at the end. A lot of my initial ideas have fallen by the wayside in the course of this – some to be recycled in something I now have planned for 2018, the oft-delayed 'Fox Company', but more in that in the future – but I'm settling into a strong core concept for the series.

Boiled down, we're into the 'Freedom To The Galaxy' mode here, a heroic struggle to overthrow a tyrannical dictatorship against hopeless odds. I could easily have placed this in a completely new setting, but as I've mentioned before, I didn't really see the need. The Triplanetary Universe was always conceived to allow me to tell a variety of stories, and I suspect that if I was to attempt to reinvent the wheel, I'd essentially end up repeating myself – and given that, I might as well make my life a little easier and use the established setting.

What I have done, then, is carve off a portion of space for a 'pocket empire', crammed between the Confederation and the Lunar Republic – and a few seeds for this are in 'Into the Maelstrom', so watch out for those – and set that up as the 'Star League' and the 'Halo Worlds', a half-dozen star systems to use as the setting for this new adventure. There are a heck of a lot of stars in close range of Sol, and more being discovered all the time – especially the hard-to-find brown dwarves. Already, I must admit, certain elements of the background have been rendered inaccurate by recent discoveries, and I've had to make a few soft retcons to make up for it.

I've got four more days of preparation before I launch into the new series, and I can't wait to get started on it. That's always true with any book, but somehow this one feels right. Keeping it as a contained storyline is also important – twenty-eight books, and this will only be my second contained series. Writing an on-going storyline is a completely different challenge, and one that I enjoy, but there is a certain satisfaction in bringing a storyline home. As I said, currently this one rests at five books, and I anticipate the final book in the series being out in October/November. The first three titles are currently, 'Blood of Patriots', 'False Flag', and 'Here Spartans Lie', though as usual, all of these are subject to change...

Starcruiser Polaris: Early Notes

Given that I'm only a handful of days away from starting work on the first book in the series – and incidentally, I might as well get out of the way the announcement that Alamo 23: Into the Maelstrom will be out on January 22nd – I think the time has more than come for me to talk a little bit about what I have in mind for 'Starcruiser Polaris'. I'll say right now that my original ideas have completely gone out of the window, replaced, I hope, by something considerably better. Like with the 'Strike Commander' trilogy, this will be a limited series, not an open-ended one as Alamo has turned out to be. (Yes, I'm still planning Alamo books up to 32.)

I thought long and hard about what I wanted out of a new series, and not coincidentally inspired by a recent movie or two, I thought that it was about time that I went for a 'Galactic Rebellion' concept, though one that I could fit into the Triplanetary universe. Three reasons for that, both story- and business-based. The first is that in the Triplanetary setting – now closing on two million words, amazingly – I have a lot of world-building already done. I know the major players, I know how the starships work, I know the organizations; hell, I damn near live in that universe. The second is that launching it in the same setting as Alamo allows for future cross-over and cross-promotion, hopefully back to Alamo again, and the third is that I'd probably end up duplicating myself anyway. I might as well use what I already have, rather than try and reinvent the wheel!

So, the basic plan – and naturally, this is going to be almost spoiler-free; certainly nothing that you wouldn't get from the first couple of chapters will be revealed here, partly because I'm still working on a few of the details. The core idea, however, is fully established. A 'pocket empire', the Atlantean Commonwealth, on the frontiers of known space has suffered a military coup, leading to the installation of a rather nasty dictatorship; while officially the Triplanetary Confederation cannot do anything about it, there are many willing to take some action, and to help finance the restoration of a democratic government. Not least because one of the Commonwealth's colonies, Lemuria, is one of the richest sources of uranium in known space, still a vital industrial resource.

That means plausible deniability, which brings in Triplanetary Intelligence, and specifically, the recruitment of a group of 'mercenaries'. Former military personnel for the most part, hired to liberate the imprisoned President of the Commonwealth, as the first stage in the restoration of democratic government. Naturally, it isn't going to go anything like as simply as that, but then, I'm hoping that this one will go for five books, to be written over the course of the year. (Which suggests that the final book in the series will be out in November/December, with luck.)

There are three elements to draw my characters from. The first is the crew of Polaris itself, and there I have gone with 'character'. An old, obsolete ship from the Interplanetary War, a design prototype that never went anywhere, stuck in the Mothball Fleet and auctioned off to a shell company, theoretically after being demilitarized. She's forty years old, battered and worn, but still ready for one last campaign, with some interesting weapons tweaks to make her somewhat distinct, and give her a punch in a fight.

Then comes the bulk of the crew, the assault team – we're talking Special Forces here, once again, commanded by a disgraced Lieutenant-Major who took the blame for a covert operation that went wrong, fighting quite literally for his freedom. I'm de-emphasising Espatiers in Alamo for the current run, but they're coming back with a vengeance here, and you can expect a 'Dirty Dozen' vibe to this motley crew.

Third, of course, comes the Democratic Underground, the force fighting back against the tyrants who have enslaved their nation. Maquis, basically, concentrated more heavily on the outer worlds rather than Atlantis itself, with a leavening of ex-military personnel who decided that their service oaths were more important than the wealth and power offered by the junta. There will be one POV character from each of these groups, though I might expand to four in later novels, depending on how the characters develop over the course of the series. Something I do not know as yet. I do know that there will be no crossovers, once again, tempting as it is to bring back some of the characters from Strike Commander – but I'm already using some of them in the main Alamo series, so I think I'll leave that resource for the future. Though I might bring in a few old friends, later in the run. (I did consider this as a Cooper/Bradley series at one point, before deciding to bring in new characters instead.)

As for the setting, well, I have Atlantis and Lemuria fleshed out, the former a bountiful ocean world with a single continent, settled during the 'First Exodus' in the 2040s, following the outbreak of the Third World War; a hundred and thirty years later, it is a booming metropolis of three million people, currently hitting the limits of the available landmass. Lemuria, by contrast, is a dry, desert world, barely habitable but with mineral deposits rendering it extremely valuable. Colchis Station, an independent outpost orbiting a dull red dwarf also features both in the first and second books, a typical hive of scum and villainy of the sort that science-fiction readers are familiar!

Captain Adam West!

Adam West playing a Starfleet Captain? Yes, it happened, and in a surprisingly good ultra-low-budget movie called, for no reason that makes any sense to me, 'Warp Speed'. I've got a history with this film, largely because of the circumstances in which I first saw it – stuck in a remote part of Wales on my own with a three-day hurricane raging outside, and only two channels available on the television. One of which showed this movie no less than five times a day. Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome, but when I got home, I actually sought out a copy for myself.

Let's get the bad out of the way first. This film was made for slightly less than I could find rummaging around the back of my couch. Adam West is the 'Special Guest Star', and I suspect ate up most of the budget. The effects are non-existent, the sets look cheap. Despite the fact that they make a big deal of the 'First Voyage to Saturn', they go on about this being a 'Starfleet Ship', I suspect because a lot of the production crew were Star Trek fans. Don't go into this expecting 2001, or Solaris. Having said that, there is a lot to commend about this production.

Too often, when a filmmaker is confronted with a minimal budget, they press ahead anyway with a plot that they simply can't put on the screen for the money they have, resulting in an embarrassing mess. This production has seen its limitations and instead chooses to do as much as they can with what they have – so while there are no effects to speak of, they don't need any for the tale. The sets look basic, but work reasonably well, and that there are few of them actually makes the setting look cramped and confined – and the director wasn't afraid to turn the lights down, which always helps!

I'm going to be spoiling the hell out of this movie, so if you just want a basic recommendation to seek it out and watch it, stop reading now.

The first spaceship to Saturn, under the command of Adam West, has an accident a half-year out from Earth, resulting in a mission abort. Worse, the ship can't sustain the whole crew, and one by one they are forced to commit suicide/murder to reduce their numbers, until ultimately there are only two left – and one of them must die. The movie actually takes place when the deserted ship gets back to Earth, and follows a psychic investigator trying to work out what happened by, essentially, talking to the ghosts of the crew.

It shouldn't work, but it does, and you can see the investigator getting sucked in deeper and deeper, as you explore a surprisingly complicated story that follows the psychological unravelling of the crew, their addiction to a poker game with life and death as the stakes, their misuse of what amounts to a VR holodeck, and their response to the disaster – which boils down to the crew drawing cards to die, willingly or unwillingly. The characters, mostly, are surprisingly nuanced at times, and it's actually a great shame that this film didn't have a bigger budget; I think it would have been used well.

The acting is mostly half-decent, though the leading man (not Adam West) is rather one-note at times, the rest of the cast do a good job with a good script. The VR machine is used to highlight the crew's psyche rather well, the 'psychic investigator' is a novel way to tell the story, allowing the dull moments to be skipped, and there is a real sense of underlying horror and paranoia in the background. Adam West's Captain has a quite realistic breakdown – actually, he does darn good work in this one, and I think it's a shame that this little movie isn't better known.

Fundamentally, this film is an excellent demonstration that it is possible to do something good on a minimal budget, with the key being a solid story and a good script – neither of those things cost anything other than inspiration and perspiration, and with them in place, you're going to do well regardless of the money you have. Recommended.

2010 Is Better Than 2001. There, I Said It.

I'm going to commit an act of total heresy here and now for a science-fiction fan. In my, admittedly humble, opinion, 2010 is a better film than 2001. There, I said it, and I'm going to stand by it in this post. Now, none of this is to knock 2001 as a cinematic tour-de-force, but at the end of the day, it's actually a fairly dull film to sit and watch. Legendarily, the Christian Science Monitor labelled it the 'Ultimate Acid Trip', and that's a fairly good assessment of large chunks of the movie.

Let me get one thing straight; I actually am a Kubrick fan, but I maintain that after Dr. Strangelove, he started to take a nosedive, and that it is possible that he was one of those artists who actually needed restraints to push against, needed someone with the authority to hold him back, at least at little – and that he didn't ever truly realize that. 2001 drags, and the actors – good, good actors, for the most part – aren't really given much to work with.

2010 is a different matter. Yes, the 'Cold War' plot is a little hackneyed – though strangely, I could make an argument that it might yet end up oddly prescient, and that if the film had been titled '2020', it could present a reasonably accurate picture of future great power politics. It comes down to two elements. Story, and character – which is the true test of any creative work, film or novel, in my judgement.

2010 is a 'haunted house' tale. The Spaceship Discovery is lost, abandoned in orbit around Io, with a strange alien artefact floating next to it, and a crew flies out to investigate the mystery. There are no real action sequences, other than the escape from Jupiter at the end of the movie, and possibly the aerobraking sequence – which actually is pretty accurate. That's something else that this film rarely gets credit for – it's as scientifically accurate as 2001, without being as, well, dull about it. The Alexei Leonov has rotating gravity, and looks damn impressive to boot, and even the slightly dated feel of the interior works when you remember the appearance of Soviet/Russian technology when compared to American.

As for characters, well...2010 has Roy Schneider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren, Bob Balaban...all of whom put in great performances, and all of whom are well worth watching. They have character, there are moments of actual humanity, and that's what is missing from 2001. Yes, I know that Kubrick was trying to make a point about the soulless nature of technological man, I get it, but that doesn't make it more interesting to actually watch, and I maintain that such a plot could have been conjured which would have engaged the audience rather better.

I make this strong case because, well, 2010 has to be one of the strongest influences I have in the creation of the Triplanetary Universe, aside from the 'Terran Trade Authority' books I have referenced before. The Leonov looks like my idea of a spaceship, and the feel of the plot – which is perfectly happy to assume that the audience understands what a 'Lagrange Point' is – is sound, with no over-reliance on spurious action sequences. It's true to the novel, but the actors add a lot of themselves to the work, and the 'alien' influence is, well 'alien', without being over the top about it. I'd have liked to see some portrayal of the 'life in a gas giant' you saw in the book, but the budgetary costs would have been overwhelming, I admit.

2010 is an oddly overlooked movie, and undeservedly so; I can definitely recommend snagging a copy and watching it again; definitely one of the better post-Star Wars science-fiction films, up there with 'Alien', and probably one of Hyams' best works.