Jon Frater

And Now For Something Completely Different…

November 12, 2020 by Jon Frater 1 Comment

…a new web site!

It’s not, you know, completely new. But as 2020 dragged on to its ninety-eighth year and my Battle Ring Earth space opera series slated for a drop in early 2021, I was starting to feel like a bored teenage with a bottle of hair dye…I needed a new place to put my stuff. I had all the parts I just didn’t know how to put them together in a way that would stand out.

Enter the guys at Mod Farm Design. The result is as you see. Look at this thing. Look at it! New links, new graphics, new forms, and everything works. I’m especially happy with the sample frames for the books on sale: try before you buy a la digital pub.

Anyway, I’m learning all the new gear myself, so I’ll get back to that. Click around the offerings while you wait…

Introducing Chronicle Worlds: Legacy Fleet

May 23, 2019 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

In the twenty-sixth century, mankind has discovered the secret of interstellar travel and colonized scores of worlds hundreds flight years from Earth. But in the 26th century, an alien race–a microbial collective known only as The Swarm–brutally attacked Earth and her colonies. Humanity barely survived and vowed to never let it happen again.

Now, 75 years later…it’s happening again. And Humanity has a lot to learn about the use of the word “never.” As the United Earth fleet loses its best and strongest ships to the Swarm onslaught, only the older Legacy Fleet ships and their experienced, driven commanders are up to the task of defending earth and her colonies.

This is the world of Legacy Fleet, a new anthology based on Nick Webb’s Legacy Fleet trilogy: Constitution, Warrior, and Victory, an amazingly popular science fiction series. Into this universe comes Samuel Peralta, creator of the well-known Future Chronicles anthology series. Together, they’ve combined their writing talent and publishing experience to create a whole new treat: the Kindle World: Legacy Fleet series.

Links to this great work are here and in the sidebar. And it’s still at the launch price of .99 cents, but that won’t last forever. Enjoy!

The Smartest Ones in the Room: A Review of Hidden Figures

January 16, 2017 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

In 1961, America was all about the mission. A directive that sounds simple was but was anything but. The Space Race between the USA and the USSR was on. Both sides were engaged in a game of technological Can You Top This? and the Russians were winning. Cold War America was held in the grip of a simple fear. The Russians had already proved five years earlier that they could built a rocket capable of pushing an artificial satellite into orbit. The logic from there told us a simple story: If a satellite could be pushed that far that fast, then what was to prevent them from putting a nuclear bomb on the top of that rocket and flying it over to the US? World War II was only a decade and a half into history and the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh in American minds.

Into this setting we meet Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson (played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae respectively), three black women who work as “computers” at NASA, calculating the trajectories for Project Mercury. They are part of the West Area Computers Group at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Despite their clear experience, talent, and proficiency with the work–and the ambition to improve their skills and experience–1961 Virginia is not an encouraging place. Despite making use of her skills, Johnson’s supervisor won’t allow her to put her name on the report she writes or attend briefings on mission updates. The local librarian would rather throw Vaughan out of the building than allow her to borrow a book on FORTRAN so she can learn about the newly installed IBM mainframe. And while she contributes to figuring out how to improve the quality of the Mercury capsule’s heat shield, Jackson can’t be trained or hired as an engineer without taking the advanced classes that are only available at a whites-only institution.

Hidden Figures is a movie about achievement and racism. History, until relatively recently, has tended to forget or ignore the stories of individuals who contributed significantly to our national success if they didn’t fit the narrative. It makes its point without being high-handed or manufacturing drama for the sake of a conflict. The setting provides conflict enough. 1961 Virginia was was a time and place where segregation was considered utterly normal, even banal. We’re shown this in a series of small but essential scenes on the NASA campus: Johnson’s most annoying problem isn’t her work load or her co-workers, it’s the fact to just going to the toilet entails a 40 minute trip from her office to the colored-only rest room on the other end of the compound. It’s not until her boss is made aware of this that he realizes just how insane the law is. His solution is to tear down the white-only signs from the building. Segregation doesn’t fit the Mission, so out it goes. Time is precious. Get back to work.

That’s really the point of the film: segregation doesn’t fit the national mission. It’s an archaic, emotional reaction to a shallow need to feel superior to those around us based on superficial differences. The decision to do away with it is one we never really made.

On that note, we could do worse than to encourage women and girls to get involved in determining our national mission.

So, be the smartest one in the room.

Be essential to the mission.

Demonstrate your ability, skill, and competence to the world.

And if the existing mission is detrimental to the country, then let’s create a new mission that isn’t.

In the meantime, make noise. Make them notice you. Make it clear to those who don’t value you that you must be valued. More importantly, show them why. Show them what you have done. Demonstrate your vision to anyone who will listen. Do it now.

Happy MLK Day. Go see this movie. Now.

Introducing Chronicle Worlds: Feyland

June 29, 2016 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Imagine if you will, a world of the future. A world where rich kids are chipped to run automated houses and fly in grav-powered limos while poor kids watch their families dissolve into poor health and struggle to manage the bare necessities. The only thing that brings these groups together is the VirtuMax corporation, an entertainment giant. Its newest hit is an immersive VR high fantasy game that is both addictive and incredibly popular.

But in this world, the veil between fantasy and mundane reality is beginning to shatter and admit the resurgent realm of the Fey. And they are looking to borrow whatever they must from the mortal world to maintain their existence.

Welcome to the world of Chronicle Worlds: Feyland, the latest installment of Samuel Peralta’s insanely popular Future Chronicles anthology series, and the first of his new Chronicle Worlds titles.

Chronicle Worlds: Feyland brings stories from leading authors to the crossroads where individual imagination and gamer sensibility meets author Anthea Sharp’s USA Today best selling Feyland series of YA fantasy books.

Twelve authors contributed to this volume, and every one of them brought exceptional story telling and skills and gamer sensibilities with them into the project. A brief rundown of the work is as follows:

“MeadowRue,” by Joseph Robert Lewis takes the story of an existing Feyland character: a de facto sea hag who must deal with a human girl who has courage and honor on the brain; “The Skeptic” by Lindsay Edmunds, shows how seeking to quantify the impossible but true can bite you on the butt. “The Sword of Atui” by Eric Kent Edstrom felt like a particularly gruesome episode of Sword Art Online, complete with server hacks and apparent game master cameos. “The Huntsman and the Old Fox” by Brigid Collins reminded me of my own experience as a parent gaming with a gaggle of teens and tweens.

“Unicorn Magic,” by Roz Marshal manages to take the story of a girl’s love for her horse and make it both gripping and uplifting.

My own contribution, “The City of Iron and Light,” tells the story of Sabine Jade, a lonely teen who has no idea just how far down the rabbit hole goes…but harbors a burning need to find out.

“The Gossamer Shard” by Dave Adams, shows what the World of Tanks might be like if its players blundered into the Unseelie realm; “The Glitchy Goblin” by K.J. Colt is a dark little tale of broken promises and crushed dreams that will actually make you feel for the goblins (no small task). In comparison, “On Guard” by Deb Logan, is the essence of the short story form: compact, compelling, and utterly without wasted words.

The two final selections, “An Artist’s Instinct,” by Andrea Luhman, and “Brea’s Tale: Passage,” by Anthea Sharp, share a mystical quality of presence. Both tell a story of a young woman struggling to transform herself into something new, but take very different approaches in the hows and whys. Read both back to back and you’ll see what I mean. In fact, you should real this entire book in order, front to back. Leave nothing out. Trust me.

But I think my favorite tale from this volume is “Tech Support” by James T. Wood. Consider: Ranjeet Nagar of Kochi, India is a young man with a strong work ethic and a family to support. He works as a tech support jock for VirtuMax, walking players of Feyland through their technical issues. Ranjeet is a compulsive puzzle solver and some of the wackier calls coming over the phone lately have got his creative juices running wild. But there are problems at work: his job is in danger of vanishing, the crazy calls describe things that cannot exist in the game, and Ranjeet cannot afford a proper VR set so he can’t even log into the game to see the weirdness for himself.

All that becomes irrelevant when Ranjeet finds a woman on the street being attacked by the same demons reported by players. Utterly disregarding his safety and prospects, Ranjeet enlists the help of a co-worker and his ex-fiance, who does have a full-D VR set and is an expert player, to track down the source of the incursions and set things right.

I think in several respects “Tech Support” is the most ambitious story in this set. It takes place entirely in India, flips the dominant theme of player vs game on its head, and manages to maintain a convincing level of engagement and suspense from the first sentence to the last.

That said–and the only thing really left to say here–is that at a launch price of .99 cents, and fifteen solid entries into the world of anthology fiction, Future Chronicles creator Samual Peralta and Feyland owner Anthea Sharp have created something genuinely new and compelling. Fans of gamerpunk, high fantasy, and science fiction will all have something to enjoy here.

Available Now

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My Expocalyptic Stomping Ground

May 20, 2016 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

The rule is: write what you know. Years ago, I worked in a retail software store in lower Manhattan in the financial district. I had regular contact with the locals, the NYSE market makers, the stock brokers, the office workers and the early finance types who orked in the area. When the idea for The Taste Makers came to me, I developed it into a story about Wall Street and the environment. Most recently, the school where I work moved to the same neighborhood. After walking my old beat for a few weeks, I can say that things now are not exactly how they were in 1989, but the basics haven’t changed much, either. I think I managed to catch the tone of the neighborhood in my writing.

One thing that doesn’t always come across in descriptions of lower Manhattan (including my own) is just how closely knit everything is. It’s a twenty minute walk from City Hall Park down Broadway to South Ferry, with tourists and natives alike packing every sidewalk and street corner. Traffic moves at a snail’s pace, while red lights, stop signs, and traffic cops represent strong suggestions rather than hard and fast rules of the road as far as pedestrians are concerned. And while I can’t bring any of you closer to this part of the city, I can bring a few choice bits of the city closer to you.

So. A brief tour…

Julie Meyer works at Ponzick, Fitch, Schuster, and Schiff, a fictional firm that lives at 40 rector street…a completely real location. The irony here is that 40 Rector is also the home of a number of NYC government offices (City of New York, Office of Labor Relations Health Benefits Program has the most impressive title). Look at the spotless lobby. The elevators, however, are dimly lit murder boxes. If there is any portal from normalcy to a horrible, horrible, apocalypse, it’s those elevators.

A very different book... — A very different book…

Meanwhile across the street we have the Clinton beer garden. No, I haven’t actually spent any time there, but plans are in the works for an after-work get together some Friday night. I want to stress that I had no clue this place even existed when I started writing over a year ago. I had the memories of my time in the dim past and had made a few excursions down to the area (my wife works further up Broadway). Had I known this place existed, I’d have written a very different book.And probably had way too many samples of the local brews (So. Many. Bottles)

Leaving the building, we head up Rector street. Notice how how the buildings seem to rise out of the ground, choking off your light and threatening to so the same to your body? That’s most of lower Manhattan. It’s one of the few neighborhoods in the city where you can look out your window to see a glass and steel tower from a few years ago bumping up against a tenement from 1919. Narrow streets, kamikaze pedestrians, and construction awnings are all part of life down here.

At the end of Rector street–where it joins with Broadway in a T-intersection–the brown stone spire of trinity Church rises on the left. In The Taste Makers, Julie and her stalwart crew take refuge a few blocks further up Broadway, in St. Paul’s Chapel, a church in the Trinity family with a similar but distinctly different architecture. St Paul’s also at the moment has half a block of construction barriers in front of it. Trinity church makes the better photo, at least, today.

In real life, it’s a ten minute walk uphill, even while dodging traffic and other people. Imagine doing it while blind and with armed guards rushing down the street to secure the neighborhood, who are shooting at you.

The perfect place for an Expocalypse…

Get The Taste Makers Now!

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The Expocalypse Arrives!

May 14, 2016 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

“The Taste Makers serves up an apocalypse easily worthy of The Joker’s most diabolical of schemes. Frater executes The Gotham/NYC food scene with a savvy panache and a spicy menace that, pardon the pun, cuts like a knife. This is one weird serving of an Apocalypse that’s singular, and frightening, in vision. Try a slice and stay for dessert… It’s deadly fun.”

— Nick Cole, author of The Red King

Buy it on Amazon!

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