Tag Archives: science fiction

My Own Race of Aliens

In Catch a Falling Star, the only good novel I have actually in print so far, I have a race of aliens called the Tellerons.  They are an unusual sort of green men from Mars.   They are green,and they have a base on Mars, but they are from a distant star system in the local group and the swampy world called Telleri that orbits that far star.  The ones in my book come from the space station their empire established in the Barnard’s Star system, where the characters in my stories were all born.  They are also not men.  They are amphibianoid beings, frog people.  They have never set foot on the home planet.  Here are two aliens who are crucial characters in Catch a Falling Star.

My Art 2 of Davalon

These two are Farbick the Navigator and young Davalon the tadpole.  Farbick is a very wise and loving male Telleron who gets foully treated for his racial differences.  I know you and I can’t really tell by looking, but his race is Sindalusian Fmoog.  You can tell by the yellowish cast to his amphibian face.  Oh, and there’s something funny with his ears.  Davalon is the son of the Telleron captain, Xiar.  He loves Farbick who has been more of a father figure to him than Xiar has.  Dav is unusually bright for a Telleron, just as Farbick is recognizably more competent than others of the Fmoogish race.  You might actually think, if they were the only two Tellerons you ever met, that their people are highly inquisitive, intelligent, and have no racial prejudices at all.  Of course you would be highly incorrect and most sincerely wrong.

I have started work on a sequel to Catch a Falling Star.  I am calling it Stardusters and Lizard Men.  It follows the crew of Xiar the Slightly Irregular’s Base Ship in their adventures following the invasion of Earth.  They accidentally fix the on-board computer systems by correcting a math error in navigation that had been present for more than 100 years of star travel in the Telleron Empire.  Of course this means that all of their space coordinates for every destination they know are wrong.  And so, without hope of ever returning anywhere else in the universe, they arrive at Galtorr Prime, the planet of the infamous carnivorous  reptile people.  They will have to colonize or die.  And the Galtorrians are just like Earthers, except, they have a society that is even more corrupt, greedy, prejudiced, and hateful (if such a thing is even possible).  I hope to show in this story what human society may become on the path we are currently following, so it will be a kind of post-apocalyptic bit of science fiction set on a world that is not Earth.

My Art

These two female Telleron tadpoles are Brekka and Menolly.  They are dancing to Mickey Mouse Club music because Tellerons, quite naturally, have been totally corrupted by Earther television shows.  Galactic English, the language all Tellerons speak, is based on the language of old I Love Lucy television episodes, the favorite show on the home-worlds of the entire empire.

George Jetson

Meet George Jetson.  He is named after one of his father’s favorite shows from the 1960’s.  He is one of the Telleron tadpoles that will take the lead in exploring the dark and dangerous planet of the lizard-guys.

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My Tinfoil Hat for UFO’s

I have been a conspiracy-theory nut for some time.  Back in the 1970’s, my father and I went to a movie called Chariots of the Gods.  It presented the insane theories of Erich von Daniken as if they were fact.  It mentioned the Nazca Lines, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, and other ancient wonders and seemed to show depictions of ancient aliens in the art of those cultures.  My father and I were convinced by his arguments and thought there really must be something to it.  I went to college with a real hunger to learn more.Erich von Däniken

I was disappointed to learn later that the man was a completely unprofessional, untrained archeologist, and that he may have actually stolen his main thesis for the Chariots book from Carl Sagan and  I. S. Shklovskii in their book, Intelligent Life in the Universe.  Sagan would go on to say;

“That writing as careless as von Däniken’s, whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times.  I also hope for the continuing popularity of books like Chariots of the Gods? in high school and college logic courses, as object lessons in sloppy thinking. I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of von Däniken.”

—Carl Sagan, Foreword to The Space Gods Revealed (quote and citation borrowed from Wikipedia)

So I went through a number of Sagan-influenced years of my life saying that there was no sound reason to believe that out of an infinity of places to visit, interstellar tourists would want to come and visit here.  Does a normal, sane tourist want to go to an island full of cannibals?  Our movies, after all, always depict us killing, dissecting, or taking advantage of alien visitors.

But then I discovered the whole story of the Roswell, New Mexico crash in 1947.  Convinced at one point that the crash really was a Project Mogul weather balloon, I began to discover the work of another alien-visitor-obsessed gentleman by the name of Stanton Friedman.  This man is much harder to dismiss.  He has a master’s degree in physics and spent fourteen years as a nuclear physicist “for such companies as General Electric (1956–1959), Aerojet General Nucleonics (1959–1963), General Motors (1963–1966), Westinghouse (1966–1968), TRW Systems (1969–1970), and McDonnell Douglas, where he worked on advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and compact nuclear power plants for space applications.[2] Since the 1980s, he has done related consultant work in the radon-detection industry. Friedman’s professional affiliations have included the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and AFTRA.” (quoted from Wikipedia… I know, I know… but this is all verifiable information, not made up or imaginary like von Däniken’s.)  He is also the first civilian to investigate the Roswell crash.  He began by interviewing the air-base’s intelligence officer during the incident, Major Jesse Marcel.

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More and more I became interested in the phenomenon and the people who research it.  I have a pretty good list of liars and clowns who talk about aliens, and I will use some of that in a future post.  There is comedy gold in that topic.

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But I do believe that aliens are real and have visited our planet.  I began researching the topic again for my novel, Catch a Falling Star, because it centers on an alien invasion and a clash between incompetent space travelers and single-minded Midwesterners who can’t possibly believe.  There are just too many people surfacing with stories to tell about alien encounters, UFO sightings, and government cover-ups.  People like Nick Pope, a former Minister from the British government, Paul Hellyer , a former Defense Minister from Canada, Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo astronaut,  and numerous technicians and inventors from McDonnell-Douglas and other aircraft manufacturers are coming forward in legions to testify that things like this are very real.

My Art 2 of Davalon

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Today’s Purely Pencil Paffooney

Life on Mars

This pencil drawing was done in 1980, before I wrote my first science fiction novel.  In fact, I had only written one and a quarter novels before this, both things hopelessly horrible, flawed, and discard-able.  So, I hope you gain a goofy insight or two into the kind of nonsense young Mickey had in his head when he was still in college, and only a student teacher.

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Mai Ling, Deadly Mutant Little Girl Ninja From Outer Space

Mai Ling

 

One must always be careful of the most deadly creatures to be found in the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy.  That’s why it is good to note that one of the most deadly creatures, which is also one of the most necessary to avoid, is the teenage girl just entering the mixed blessings of puberty.  Mai Ling, pictured in this Aeroquest Science Fiction Public Service Warning Poster, is a particularly lethal specimen of just such a creature.  At about thirteen years of age, she is possessed of not only deadly ninja skills, trained to fatal perfection, but also telekinetic Psion mutant skills.  She can use her telekinesis to propel weapons in ways that weapons were never meant to be propelled at speeds of up to GOLLY GEE WOO-WOO WOW THAT WAS FAST!!!  If she shoots at you with the slug-thrower pistol she often carries, you are not only merely dead, but literally most sincerely dead because even if she misses you, she can redirect the bullet into whichever vital organ she wishes, and being the age she is, that probably means something in the highly sensitive and highly embarrassing personal middle area.  She can also bang you dead pretty effectively with any stone she decides to pick up and fling.  Her left arm is sheathed in accelerating electro-magnetic Gauss-effect armor that will turn a stone into faster-than-the-speed-of-sound projectile capable of blasting its way through the walls of the boys’ shower room.   You dare not cross her.  Don’t challenge her authority.  And, for goodness sake, don’t make comments on handsome young members of boy bands, because you never ever can anticipate which one she will be in love with this week… er… today… er… this minute.

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Ray Guns for Sale!

Ray Guns for Sale!

After the invasion ended in defeat for the frog people from the planet Telleri, I found I had a leftover box of these Zillokahsitter Skortch Rays. Zillokahsitter makes a very fine ray gun, not that I ever bought any before, but a couple of my little green friends told me so. They are very useful for removing old paint, unwanted neighborhood dogs and cats, grouchy relatives you don’t really want around any more… Did I mention they disintegrate things completely? Atom by atom? The only drawback is… once a thing is skortched, you will not be able to put it back together again. That’s what happened to my wife’s hair dryer… but please don’t tell her that. I’m not sure how to price these. I was thinking about selling them for the five dollar shipping and handling only. I have to get rid of them before my kids play with one again. The principal at the middle school may never be the same again.

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April 17, 2014 · 2:04 am

Writing Good Villains

Right now in my writing I am in need of a sinister villain.  The story I am writing, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, is the story of a super genius who has lost all the people he loves in a terrible fire caused by a lab accident.  The themes of the book include that human beings are inherently good.  Another theme is that those good human beings need other human beings, friends, family, acquaintances, experts, clowns, entertainers and those people who will ultimately help a person define himself and become the person he or she is meant to be.  The science fiction in the story includes instances of time travel, electro-magnetics, genetic manipulations of age and even species, alien encounters, and robots who are nearly human.

So how do I make a good villain to support stuff like that?  Villains are by definition not good.  They pervert the basic nature of human beings to serve their own selfish ends.  Goldfinger uses his financial and technical genius to defeat James Bond and enrich himself with Fort Knox’s gold.  Of course, he’s a bad guy, so the good guy, Bond, defeats him.    Moriarty is a dastardly villain who tries to outthink and outwit Sherlock Holmes for the selfish satisfaction of beating Sherlock, possibly to prove himself the most intelligent force in the universe.  Of course, he’s also a bad guy, and when both he and Sherlock plunge over the waterfall, only Sherlock survives to be victorious.

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My villain has to be so caught up with self benefit, that he must be willing to pervert goodness and cause others to suffer and die.  What better villain, then, to use other than the government assassin robot that the genius rebuilds into a pseudo-replica of his own son?  And because of his robotic, soulless nature, violent government assassin programming, and human elements introduced by his re-animator, he becomes a philosophical and existential mess.  The assassin Crackerbutton is transformed into a boy-robot whose cooling unit overcompensates for loss of mass and turns him into the Snowboy.  Okay, I know I should explain why he’s evil and how things work out, but forgive me if I save that for my book.  In a selfish and perverted way, I am seeking to entice you into buying that book and reading that book to see if the Mickey-villain stands any chance at all of being what I am claiming it to be.

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Space Ninjas and other Bright Ideas from a Dim Bulb

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As cartoonists go, I am rather a failure and a flop.  I have not made a single dollar on my cartoon art.  Instead it has all gone into lessons at school, charity programs, and various role-playing games with geeky boys.  Still, I have brilliant insights into what would make good adventure fiction, especially for geeky boys.  You take outer-space teenage travelers, turn them into ninjas with ninjitsu powers, and then give them special mutant mind powers like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, and clairvoyance.  Little Mutant Space Ninjas I call them.  And, yes, I know how lame and goofy that all is, but I love it.  I think others will love it too.

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These are a few of my Aeroquest mutant space ninjas.  (Left to right; Taffy King, Billy Iowa, Gyro the Nebulon, Sara Smith, Sensei Ged Aero, Ham Aero Junior (an adopted Nebulon), Shu Kwai, Jadalaqstbr, and Alec Songh.)

Kids identify with child heroes.  They also like action, adventure, and wild Sci-Fi special effects.

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This it Tiki Astro, the artificial boy.  He’s an ultra high tech metaloid (robot) who is made to be practically indistinguishable from a real boy.  He was built by his “father”, a metaloid nanny-bot that was infected with Ancient technology and adopted the pseudonym Happy Jack.

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Space ninjas have to be really cool and really really destructive to capture the interests and imagination of today’s young boys.  This ninja boy is Sejii Killer, the son of the space pirate King Killer.  He can single-handedly mow down whole armies of minions and deadly Nathir plant men.  He can seriously alter the populations of whole worlds.  That’s the kind of killer kid I need to put into space ninja cartoons.

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So look out, World!  My cartoon ninja kids from outer space are on their way to invade your sci-fi dreams and adolescent fantasies.

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Space Ninja School

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In 2014 I should be able to get back the rights to my 2007 novel Aeroquest.    I would very much like to re-work it and publish it again.  It was a kind of original project that was not created solely by me.  In the 1980’s and 1990’s I played role-playing games with boys that needed a mentor.  I began with the Dungeons and Dragons game from TSR.  But South Texas has a strong Baptist presence that fears imagination, especially if it involves dragons and demons.  So I had to change it to a Star Wars inspired game called Traveller.   With a star-spanning fictional empire and a band of dice-rolled characters, we conquered the galaxy together for about one hundred and fifty game years.  I used my story-telling abilities to carry the game forward and keep the boys enthralled.

So, the characters in the book are not completely created by me.  They reflect the qualities, manners, and choices of the players.  Even the most important character, the teacher-hunter-explorer-hero Ged Aero, was created by someone else (although I have for the most part made him into me).  The story is overly complex because it was directed by the players and the decisions they made as they tried to solve the problems the game master (me) put in front of them.  I think I can fix that given time.  I should never have tried to publish it when I did, but the Publish America company gave me the chance to publish for free and tempted me in ways I never should’ve fallen for.  I am glad I didn’t try to do this with more important stories that I was working on at the time.

Central to the story is the space school in which Ged Aero teaches.  It is on the oriental planet called Gaijin (the word in Japanese for stupid foreigner).  It is a special school.  Ged’s is the only class, and all the students have special abilities, mind powers, that are like Ged’s own shape-shifting ability.  There are telepaths, telekinetics, kids who mentally control the heat and cold in the air, teleport, mentally change molecules, and even foretell the future.

I don’t recommend you buy the book as it is now (a strange bit of advice from a starving artist and author) but I hope to one day turn it into something much better, more entertaining, and worth reading.

The Paffooney that accompanies today’s post is a class picture of all but three of the teenage Psionic space ninjas.

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Wrestling with Themes

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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;

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

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In 1969, the summer after I had to travel to a new school in another town, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon.   I stayed up and awake that entire summer night, as did my whole family, watching everything the TV was able to show.  I vowed to myself that summer that I, too, would one day walk on another world.  My fantasy was, as I’m sure most thirteen-year-old boys in the entire world agreed, was to be the first Earth man to set foot on Mars.

I set out to get myself into the Air-Force Academy in Colorado Springs.  We visited there during one of our yearly family tent-camping car trips.  It was an elegant, pristine dream.  But life has a way of putting needle holes in the balloons that make up the loftiest of dreams.  I developed bursitis and eventually arthritis by the time I was eighteen.  My eyes were always too myopic to ever become an astronaut.  Then Challenger blew up.  Reagan, who didn’t believe in the U.S. Government as a way to accomplish important things, or at least, didn’t believe in spending money for such things when that money didn’t go into the pockets of his rich friends, changed young boy’s dreams.  Our trajectory towards Mars was slowed.

So, do you let dreams die?  Never me.  No, not I.  I would still travel there.  But I could not take my physical body.  I would have to go by the ship of imagination.  I would have to rely on the fantastic inner eye.

Some of my junior high English students and I took up role-playing games.  We graduated from Dungeons and Dragons into the space fantasy game called Traveller.   We fought space wars, built space colonies, absorbed Doctor Who, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and The Last Starfighter.  All things were possible.   With a role of the dice, you could save the universe.  And so my novel Aeroquest was born.

Catch a Falling Star and all the stories I have percolating now continue that plan, that goal, that young boy’s dream of placing his feet on another world.  Today’s Paffooney is a symptom of that illness, not an absolute definition of it.  Young Buster Crabbe, if you can’t tell, is the human boy in the picture. 

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