Tag Archives: science fiction

May 21, 2024 · 2:01 am

Target the Stars

I am still hoping to write more before the end comes. I have at least one more AeroQuest novel in me. And another Cissy Moonskipper adventure. My heart is still in science fiction, still lost among the stars.

The next Cissy Moonskipper story is about Cissy’s spaceship and crew meeting the Nebulon race in deep space, aboard their space-whale living starships.

Nebulons are blue-skinned humanoids with unique survival abilities. They tend to mostly inhabit deep space and are generally not planet-bound. They also are uniquely resistant to radiation of all kinds. The blue skin absorbs radiation and transfers it along the skin to the two red organs on their cheeks that safely dampen and release the radiation back out into space.

Their homes are basically the space whales belonging to each of the different but vast Nebulon Clans. Each space whale is a titanic creature that is like a balloon, space-faring metallic flesh on the outside with a huge self-contained world inside, complete with plants and animals in their self-regulating internal environment.

Each clan is led by a Great Lord who rules the noble Clan Circle of Wisdom. The Marjaruc Clan is led by Great Lord Seizer Marjac. He is an overly serious and possibly heartless ruler who decides things narrowly for the benefit of the Clan Elite.

So, you can plainly see that I am still world-building for science fiction stories. I believe I will tell at least a few more science fiction stories before it all stops permanently.

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May 19, 2024 · 2:15 am

Philip K. Dick

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There is a major drawback to being so smart that you can perceive the edges of infinity. It makes you bedbug crazy. I love the science fiction that populated the paperback shelves in the 50’s and 60’s when I was a boy. I love the work of Philip K. Dick. But it leads you to contemplate what is real… what is imaginary… and what is the nature of what will be.

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the robot Philip K. Dick who appeared at Comic Con and answered questions

There are numerous ways to investigate life. But it is in the nature of imaginary people to try to find ways to make themselves real. When the replicants in Bladerunner try to make themselves into real people, they must try to create memories that didn’t exist. They try to mirror human life to the extent that they can actually fool the bladerunner into letting them live. Of course, it doesn’t work. They are not real. (Bladerunner is the movie name of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

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It is like that for me as well. Being an imaginary person is difficult. You have to constantly invent yourself and re-invent yourself. By the time you finally get to know yourself, you have to change again so that the anti-android factions don’t destroy you. Although, I think I may not actually be an android.

Does that sound a bit crazy? Well Philip K. Dick’s life story may in fact have led him down the path to really crazy. In 1971 he broke up with his wife, Nancy Hackett. She moved out of his life, and an amphetamine-abuse bender moved in. In 1972, ironically the year I began reading Dick’s work, he fell in love at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention. That was immediately followed by erratic behavior, a break-up, and an attempted suicide overdosing on the sedative potassium bromide. This, of course, led directly to his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly.

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The story is about a police detective who is corrupted by a dangerous addictive drug that takes him down the rabbit hole of paranoia, and being assaulted by the perception of multiple realities simultaneously. His novel Ubik from 1969 is a story of psychics trying to battle groups of other psychics even after they are killed by a bomb. The crazy seems to have been building for a while.

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In 1974 he had a transcendental experience when a lady delivering medicine to his door wore a fish-shaped pendant which he said shot a pink beam into his head. He came to believe the beam imparted wisdom and clairvoyance, and also believed it to be intelligent. He would later admit to believing he had been reincarnated as the prophet Elijah.

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Imagination has its dangers. It is a powerful thing able to transform reality. Science fiction writers often use their imagination to shape what the future will actually make come into being. But it can also turn your mind inside out. A great science fiction writer like Philip K. Dick can contemplate the nature of reality and turn his own reality inside out. It is a lesson for me, a lesson for all of us. Wait, is that a pink beam of light I see? No, I just imagined it.

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Tagged as biography, book reviews, books, humor, imagination, insanity, Philip K Dick, science fiction, science fiction writing, the dangers of imagination, writing

April 2, 2024 · 1:55 am

Why I Wear a Tinfoil Hat

You know by now if you have read what I’ve written, or been around me when people make the mistake of letting me talk about what I want to talk about, that I am a kook. Yes, I believe things that you have been told that only crazy people believe. Why would you want to read any more of that nonsense now? Because it is true and it will impact our future.

I came into a wealth of secret knowledge when I wrote and published my first good novel, Catch a Falling Star. Of course, like most of the things you research on the internet, ninety-nine per cent of everything is big, black rubber hoo-haw lies. I researched a lot of things that I have always been fascinated by, but specifically I investigated UFO phenomenon. I already followed author Stanton Friedman and knew who Bob Lazar was before starting my research, but I wanted to dig deeper and find the truth. My novel, after all, is about close encounters of the third, fourth, and fifth kinds… including an invisible invasion of Earth from outer space. I wanted to portray such events as alien contact and alien abduction as realistically as possible. But then I found stuff like the Disclosure Project headed by Doctor Steven Greer. Did you know he has been collecting eye-witness and whistle-blower information in written and video form since the 1990’s and presenting it to members of congress? There is an immense database of information about contact with UFO’s and the government’s response to it that can be cross-referenced and even corroborates itself. There comes a point at which eye-witness testimony, even loony-sounding testimony, has to be accepted when there is a preponderance of evidence.

The thing that makes the case most strongly for me is the provable amount of cover-up and misdirection that the government has applied to this body of knowledge. They are still doing it. NASA footage and photographic records are open to the public and available online. Lots of people have examined the wealth of evidence very closely and have found things that the government apparently overlooked. There are also an even more impressive number of identified re-touched and faked photos of the Moon and Mars and especially the Earth from space. Things have been removed so that we the people will not see. Some nut-cases even believe we never actually went to the moon. Some of the moon footage and photos are provably fake. (But you can also spot the landing sites of the Apollo missions on the surface of the moon with some of the very good telescopes available now… The proof of our moon landings is there. The stuff was redacted and faked for different reasons… a different cover-up.)

So, why does this matter? Maybe we are better off being protected from this secret knowledge. We are too fragile to take it. There will be riots in the street and the economy will crash. We are safer being ignorant of all of this.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…no!

It’s time we were given the straight poop (because everybody hates crooked poop… at least they should.) Our world is dying from pollution and global warming, yet the alien technology can provide clean, free energy. Rich people are exploiting the poor and the middle class and so much suffering occurs that doesn’t have to happen if we embrace the potential for taking our place in a galactic community that apparently already exists and that we are excluded from solely on the basis of how dangerous our own ignorance makes us.

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December 5, 2023 · 2:20 am

Cissy Moonskipper Meets the Nebulons

The Ship’s Log of the Dark Moon’s Dreaded Luck in the Earther Year 5239, the month of Marching, 23rd day of the month.

I have not ever wrote a ship’s log entry before, but now that Dad is marooned on a faraway star, and both Mom and my older brother Wose are dead, there ain’t nobody else to do it.

I became captain of the Dreaded Luck about a week ago when a Lupin pirate killed Wose, but got disintegrated at the same time that the bullet entered Wose’s big, stupid head. I thought then that I would be the last living being on the starship. And I am only twelve until my birthday in Joon. Fortunately, though, I found the little Lupin puppy-girl that the pirate Lupin werewolf had brought with him. She’s cute and cuddly, not at all like an evil Stardog. I renamed her Friday and adopted her for company. And she told me a bunch of stuff about her pirate pack on the nearby planet. I needed that spy-stuff information to solve my problem of not having any crew.

The ship’s computer, David, was not independently intelligent, so I got help from an AI program called Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter. He helped me train one of the giant spiders in our cargo hold. And he turned out to be a very wise and capable friend. He read and memorized the ship’s owner’s manual. So, he could help me repair the starship and anything that broke down or was running poorly. That took care of the need for an engineer to replace old Wose. He could also teach me how to use the pirate skiff and drive it to the planet so we could secretly steal a pilot from the Stardogs’ prison.

The Crocodile guy went along with me to the planet in his holographic form, transferred from my spaceship to the skiff by data transfer. Friday went along mainly to hold onto me and not be left alone on the ship with only giant spiders and cleaning bots for company. And while we were there, we found and freed a group of Nebulon prisoners. If you’ve never met one, since I don’t know for sure who you are who will read this log, Nebulons are those blue-skinned alien people with bright yellow hair and red cheeks. We Earther-types call them Space Smurfs for some long-forgotten reason. And I didn’t know before we met them how different they really were from us, though also how much alike they are.

Suki, an adult Nebulon lady who was my size but much older than me, not only helped us all escape from the Stardog pirates but promised to use her pilot skills as part of my crew in gratitude for freeing her people. I like Suki a lot. She is also now not only a crewmember but my very good friend.

Suki’s piloting skills and my gunnery skills combined to help us win a space battle against the Stardog pirates. We apparently killed the leader of the pirates in battle, but he also used a virus to kill David, our shipboard computer. Fortunately, the Crocodile Hunter could take over David’s functions and was even better at it than David had been. We left the planet of the pirates with a six-day-long jump through folded space.

But we came out of jump space next to a monstrously huge space whale.

“Oh, my God!” I swore as I was floored by the size of the moon-scaled massive creature.

“Don’t worry, Cissy,” Suki said to me. “I am Nebulonin Clan Vorannac. That space whale is one of our clan.”

And then the super-sized creature moved to swallow the Dreaded Luck whole.

*** This novella is the second book in the Cissy Moonskipper’s Travels series of stories. This is the introductory preface of that story.***

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May 20, 2023 · 1:45 am

Philip K. Dick

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the robot Philip K. Dick who appeared at Comic Con and answered questions

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January 1, 2023 · 3:45 am

Wrestling with Themes

I recently was advised by a fellow blogger to offer a few writing tips on my blog as a way to painlessly market my writing. Okay, I’m a writing teacher, so I can do that. But in my own writing I have hit a snag. Yes, there are things much, much bigger than my humble skill as a writer.

My current novel project, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius has grown into a science-fiction monster. It is not only about a scientist who has secret government connections, but about time travel and people changing into rabbits… or rabbits into people… or boys into girls… dogs and cats living together… No, that is Ghostbusters.

But it has reached a point where the most important theme is incredibly clear and difficult to deal with. The theme I find myself weaving into this story is; “All men are basically good.” Gongah! Wotta theme to try to write! Do I believe it? Of course I do. Can I put the story together in such a way that I illustrate it to the reader’s satisfaction? Of course I can’t. So what do I do? This story has some of the best villains and evil people in it that I have ever written. I can’t kill them off to solve the story’s plot problems (Well, I can, but I don’t want to). I have to show how evil can be redeemed.

My cast of characters include the scientist himself, calmly dealing with time travelers, invading aliens, government assassins, and a group of young boys known as the Norwall Pirates. There is a time traveler who appeared in a book within a book in my novel Catch a Falling Star. There is also an alien space navigator who has been shot by a local Iowa Deputy Marshall and stranded on Earth. Another character is an artificial man, an automaton who has been crafted as a government assassin made from alien technology. Okay, I know you don’t believe I can make serious science fiction out of such crazy-quilt characters, especially with a primary theme like the one I’ve claimed. So, I have to confess that it is not serious in any way, shape, or form. It is a silly fantasy comedy.

So, how do I generate a theme as big and bold and important as the goodness of all men? Well, here’s a secret recipe;

Take one genius who has lost all the people he loves and has to start over with new friends and, eventually, new family.
Add a brother-in-law with mental health issues and financial dependency.
Add a group of young boys hungry for adventure and new experiences and a little bit short on common sense.
Add a paranoid evil government that has secrets it will kill to protect (the factual part of the story).
Mix well.
Add vinegar.
Boil at 350 degrees for a year.

Of course, if you thought I was giving you real writing advice, then SURPRISE! It turns out I have been making it all up as I go along. That’s how you do it. You write and write, knit it all together tenuously, and then edit the heck out of it, hoping to make sense of the whole thing.

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November 14, 2022 · 4:02 am

Nebulons

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Part of the Traveller Role-Playing Game is dealing with alien races. So, as a game master for the Traveller Adventures back in the 1980’s, I had the opportunity to create alien races of my own. Truthfully, the alien Telleron race that I created for the novel Catch a Falling Star already existed in my cartoons and fiction stories before I began playing the role-playing game. The Nebulon Race, however, was invented entirely for the game. Only later did they become a part of my fiction.

Space Cowboys3 So, what are Nebulons? Gyro Sinjarac on the left in the picture is an example from Aeroquest of a Nebulon. They are aliens who are human in every respect except for their blue skin. Interestingly they can even successfully interbreed with Earther humans. This is apparently due to either the evolution of Nebulons from Earther explorers, or, more likely, the galaxy being seeded with Earth humans and Earther DNA by the mysterious alien race known only as “the Ancients”. What is not debatable is that Nebulons have unique skin. The blue skin with high levels of natural copper sulfate in it has evolved as a protection from interstellar nebula radiation. No one who has learned their language and studied their culture has ever identified a planet of origin. Instead, the Nebulons have been a space-born race since humans first encountered them, travelling in their symbiotic space-whale space cruisers. They are a mysterious deep-space race of alien beings who use organic symbiotes, in other words, living creatures, as their pervasive technology.

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Junior Aero makes an excellent example to use to explain what Nebulons are. You can see by this picture that not only does he possess the Nebulon blue skin, but also the bright yellow hair, the red heat-transfer cheek organs, and the small stature that makes them easily satirized as “Space Smurfs” in honor of Peyo’s beloved blue comic characters.

The Nebulons as a race are often cited as evidence of the evolutionary trend of intelligent races towards neoteny, the retention of childlike features into maturity and adulthood. Even the oldest and the most physically fit of the adult Nebulon population resemble children and young teenagers rather than Arnold-Schwarzenegger-like humans. But believing them to be soft and weak like children is a mistake that often yields tragedy for those who contend against them, especially in battle. The Nebulons have often fought in space wars like the 5th Unification War, both for and against the human-led Imperium.

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But the Nebulons are not automatically at odds with humanoid races in any way. They are generally happy in demeanor and temperament, easily befriending other races, even the snake-eyed Galtorrian humans that tend to dominate the Imperium. They seem to be particularly fond of Pan-Galactican Space Cowboys, having helped them during the border conflicts with the mysterious race known as the Faceless Horde.

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So, there is a glop of information about an alien race from my science-fiction comedy writing that you can sort out as you like, and can probably learn from as a science fiction writer yourself. They are probably an excellent example of what not to do when creating a science-fiction-style alien race of your own.

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October 4, 2022 · 3:47 pm

Transportation by Imagination

How does one use the mind to move from one place to another? Is teleportation by mental ability possible? Can we find new ways to travel using only the mind? New worlds to travel to? Of course! Anything is possible once you realize there are no barriers to human imagination. It is possible to traverse even the beginning and the end of the universe itself.

Case in point, I have as a cartoonist tried to come up with novel ways to travel. In Catch a Falling Star I imagined that an engineering prodigy and a scientific genius used recovered alien technology to turn an 1889 steam locomotive with a pair of Pullman passenger cars into a space vehicle using an old hot air balloon and Yankee ingenuity. They used it to fly to Mars.

A friend who read that book, Stuart R. West, who writes teenage horror story mysteries (Here’s a link to Stuart’s stuff!) suggested an idea for an illustrated children’s book about three kids that feed bubble gum to a goldfish. The goldfish urps up a bubble that ends up carrying them off on an adventure through the sky. I drew a possible illustration for that book and killed the idea completely dead. I have a secret super power for taking cute and funny ideas and turning them into things that are totally unmarketable. I wonder if that makes me a super villain instead of a hero. So, the cartoonist in me had to develop other ways to travel that are even more ridiculous.

In Clowntown, a part of my Atlas of Fantastica cartoon, you travel the downtown Clowntown skyway by being flipped and flung along the Clowntown Trapeze-way. It makes for a harrowing ride and it’s really heck to use for trips to the grocery store or coming home again with packages to carry.

Travelling in the part of Fantastica dominated by pirates is even worse. Traveling by the science of Boomology means getting shot out of a cannon naked to get wherever you need to go. It is not something I would want to try in real life, but the cartoon me seems to not enjoy it with only minor bumps and bruises.

So, travelling by means of the mind alone, through imagination, is quite possible… and probably infinitely unwise.

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April 4, 2022 · 3:42 pm

Spacey Stories

I am usually considered a Sci-fi and Fantasy author when anybody tries to categorize me. I learned to write during the 70’s when Tolkien and Michael Moorcock and Frank Herbert were growing bigger, and Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov were gods. Of course, I also have the YA-thing hanging around my neck like a bell. I learned to tell stories being a dungeon master for middle-school and high-school boys back in the eighties. And because it was Texas with a deeply-held and violently-enforced religious fear of anything with demons in it, I was forced to change my role-playing games from sword and sorcery to science-fiction. I played endless Saturday-afternoon Traveller games that could span parsecs and light-years in a single afternoon. And I was one of those game-masters who used humor to build a campaign and keep the players engaged and interested. We had epic space battles and conquered large swaths of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy. When I began turning my Traveller games into fiction, I used the personalities of the boys who played the game with me for characters in the stories. I often used the same plots (applying considerable polish to portions of plot where… well, you know… teenage boys, not remarkably G-rated.) I created things that made me and some of the players laugh, and even feel sad… with deep, cathartic effects, as if we had experienced those things in real life. (The deaths of favorite characters and tragic failures of galaxy-saving plans come quickly to mind.)

I enjoy practically everything Sci-Fi, from Flash Gordon, to Buck Rodgers, to Star Trek and Star Wars… I loved Mechwarrior books and comic-book Sci-Fi like Adam Strange, Hawkworld, and Guardians of the Galaxy (the old ones that came before Groot and Rocket Raccoon). I let it warp and weave my imagination and the imaginary worlds that blossomed from it.
And the ideas continued to morph and change and become stories that I really had to tell.

My first published novel, Aeroquest is a compilation of old Traveller adventures. I published it well before it was ready for market and used a cheap-o publisher that wasn’t worth the free price-tag, They gave me no editorial help and apparently didn’t even read the novel. I will not defame them by name here, but if they sound to you like Publish America… well, there might be a reason.

I love stories about time travel and sci-fi gadgets… trans-mats and starships and meson cannons and sentient plants… oh, my!

And now that I have revealed that I have such a massive nerd-head that I really ought to own Comicon by now, I hope you will not suddenly turn me off and read my blog no more. I can’t help it. I was born that way… and any child doomed to be born in the 50’s and a child in the space-race 60’s was bound to have George-Lucas levels of Sci-Fi nerdism.

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November 13, 2018 · 5:59 pm

Aeroquest… Scherzo 4

Scherzo 4 – Rolling a Twenty

“So, Trav Dalgoda does it again. Your total roll of the dice with your skill of plus eight added to it is an impossible success of twenty. You fly the burning spaceship into a curly-patterned rendezvous with the Leaping Shadowcat.”

“That’s a load of bull-puckie, Mr. M!” said Arturo. “He always rolls a perfect twelve on two six-sided dice!”

“You agreed that he could use his jack-of-all-trades skill to do this.”

“But it’s a plus eight! That is just too unfair for a skill you can use to do almost anything.”

“You let me spend all my adventure points on that one skill,” Eddie said.

“He’s right you know. And besides, if he were to fail that role, then the two ships could crash, killing your two characters as well as his.”

“And mine too!” said Amanda. “Trav rescued Madonna from the slaver pirates of Mingo remember.”

“Yes,” said the game master, “and her little blue son too.”

“Aw, that little bugger is just an NPC that you put into the story. I really don’t care if he dies.”

“Eeuw, cold-hearted woman!” said Eddie.

At that moment, Dr.Hooey opened the front door of the young teacher’s apartment.

“Oh, hello. My time machine must’ve had another brain fart and brought me to the wrong time and relative dimension.”

“Wait a minute,” said Eddie, “Who the hell are you?”

“Yes, exactly, but maybe hell is a bit too strong. My name is Dr. Hooey. I am looking for a place to leave a baby from the distant future.”
“A baby?” Amanda gasped.

“Oh, yes. And who are you, young lady?”
“I’m Amanda Lilliput and this is my boyfriend Arturo Castrovalva.”

“Would you like to raise a baby from the future?”

“Um… no, thank you.”

“May I ask what you people are actually doing?”

“It’s a science fiction role-playing game. These former students of mine are all playing space-faring characters in a space adventure set in the distant future,” said the goofy-looking teacher.

“Oh, my. That is somewhat worrisome. Are you sure you don’t want a space baby from the future?”

“Oh, I do!” said Eddie.

“No, he really doesn’t,” said the teacher. “Thank you anyway.”

So Dr. Hooey left and closed the door behind him.

“That was weird,” said Arturo.

“Mr. M, I need to make a new character for the game,” said Eddie. “He will be a time traveler, and I will call him Dr. Hooey.”

”

‘

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Tagged as Aeroquest, science fiction

Tag Archives: science fiction

Target the Stars

Philip K. Dick

Why I Wear a Tinfoil Hat

Cissy Moonskipper Meets the Nebulons

Philip K. Dick

Wrestling with Themes

Nebulons

Transportation by Imagination

Spacey Stories

Aeroquest… Scherzo 4

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