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Books

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 Chronicle Worlds Legacy Fleetinterstellar 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!

Filed Under: Books, My projects, Publishing, Reader Advisory, Sci-Fi, Small press, Writing Tagged With: Future Chronicles, Legacy Fleet, science fiction, space opera, spaceships, speculative fiction

My First Superhero Story

November 2, 2017 by Rob McClellan 2 Comments

Disclosure: I’m a rabid fan of the MCU. I love the acting, the writing, the sets, the costumes, the whole shebang. But other than a brief flirtation with the New Mutants in the late ‘80s, I’ve never really collected Marvel’s comics. I know the characters and I followed the grand story arcs, but I’m not feeling the burn the way I did when I was in college.

So when editor Steve Beaulieu asked me to write a story for his superhero anthology, Collateral Damage, I accepted.

[book_cover not_author_book=”collateral-damage-superheroes-and-vile-villains-3″ align=”right” size-keyword=”medium”]Then, I panicked.

I thought: what am I doing here? I don’t know superheroes! I can barely read the print in a comic book any more. How do you write a story about…?

Wait a minute.

As I thought about it, I realized something: Maybe I can’t write about a superhero. But I can write about the people who deal with them. The normal people. The humans. Even the supers who never made the grade.

And that’s what I did.

My story is titled “Fixing Sniper Girl” and it’s a bit of X-Men meets Gunslinger Girl. A dude with language superpowers retires from active duty, to be called back when his old team—a real super-group—is unable to deal with a high tech assassin. It was terrific fun to write and it’s available from the Amazon store right this minute. Pick up a copy of Collateral Damage if you feel so inclined, and a review would not go amiss. And if you’re really looking for a good time, pick up a copy of HaHaHa! the supervillain companion volume. Above all, enjoy!

Filed Under: Books, My projects, Nerd Alert, News & Announcements, Writing Tagged With: Marvel, my stuff, superhero, writing, X-Men

Legacy Fleet: Colossus is Live!

February 14, 2017 by Rob McClellan Leave a Comment

It’s up! it’s live! It’s for sale as part of Nick Webb’s insanely popular Legacy Fleet series on Amazon’s Kindle Worlds!

As I mention in the Author’s Notes section of the book, Legacy Fleet: Colossus was of a universe that I spent a lot of time in many years ago: Palladium Books’ Robotech RPG. While writing those books was a ton of fun, I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters and situations I’d built after we parted ways. I wanted to write more, introduce new characters, cooler ships and gear, and come up with extended stories. Sadly, that door closed. But the ambition never stopped.

So when Nick Webb made his Legacy Fleet series available for new contributions via Kindle Worlds, I knew I could finally bring all those ideas back to the front burner. Colossus is the result.

Take a look, and enjoy!

Filed Under: Books, Library Resources, My projects, Publishing, Sci-Fi, Writing Tagged With: colossus, Legacy Fleet, pew-pew, space opera

2017 Isn’t ‘1984’

January 30, 2017 by Rob McClellan Leave a Comment

2017 isn’t ‘1984’ – it’s stranger than Orwell imagined

John Broich, Case Western Reserve University

A week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s “1984” is the best-selling book on Amazon.com.

The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.

Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in domestic control.

Oceania demands total subservience. It is a police state, with helicopters monitoring people’s activities, even watching through their windows. But Orwell emphasizes it is the “ThinkPol,” the Thought Police, who really monitor the “Proles,” the lowest 85 percent of the population outside the party elite. The ThinkPol move invisibly among society seeking out, even encouraging, thoughtcrimes so they can make the perpetrators disappear for reprogramming.

The other main way the party elite, symbolized in the mustached figurehead Big Brother, encourage and police correct thought is through the technology of the Telescreen. These “metal plaques” transmit things like frightening video of enemy armies and of course the wisdom of Big Brother. But the Telescreen can see you, too. During mandatory morning exercise, the Telescreen not only shows a young, wiry trainer leading cardio, it can see if you are keeping up. Telescreens are everywhere: They are in every room of people’s homes. At the office, people use them to do their jobs.

The story revolves around Winston Smith and Julia, who try to resist their government’s overwhelming control over facts. Their act of rebellion? Trying to discover “unofficial” truth about the past, and recording unauthorized information in a diary. Winston works at the colossal Ministry of Truth, on which is emblazoned IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. His job is to erase politically inconvenient data from the public record. A party member falls out of favor? She never existed. Big Brother made a promise he could not fulfill? It never happened.

Because his job calls on him to research old newspapers and other records for the facts he has to “unfact,” Winston is especially adept at “doublethink.” Winston calls it being “conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies… consciously to induce unconsciousness.”

Oceania: The product of Orwell’s experience

Orwell’s setting in “1984” is inspired by the way he foresaw the Cold War – a phrase he coined in 1945 – playing out. He wrote it just a few years after watching Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carve up the world at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. The book is remarkably prescient about aspects of the Stalinist Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China.

Orwell was a socialist. “1984” in part describes his fear that the democratic socialism in which he believed would be hijacked by authoritarian Stalinism. The novel grew out of his sharp observations of his world and the fact that Stalinists tried to kill him.

In 1936, a fascist-supported military coup threatened the democratically elected socialist majority in Spain. Orwell and other committed socialists from around the world, including Ernest Hemingway, volunteered to fight against the rightist rebels. Meanwhile, Hitler lent the rightists his air power while Stalin tried to take over the leftist Republican resistance. When Orwell and other volunteers defied these Stalinists, they moved to crush the opposition. Hunted, Orwell and his wife had to flee for their lives from Spain in 1937.

George Orwell at the BBC.

Back in London during World War II, Orwell saw for himself how a liberal democracy and individuals committed to freedom could find themselves on a path toward Big Brother. He worked for the BBC writing what can only be described as “propaganda” aimed at an Indian audience. What he wrote was not exactly doublethink, but it was news and commentary with a slant to serve a political purpose. Orwell sought to convince Indians that their sons and resources were serving the greater good in the war. Having written things he believed were untrue, he quit the job after two years, disgusted with himself.

Imperialism itself disgusted him. As a young man in the 1920s, Orwell had served as a colonial police officer in Burma. In a distant foreshadowing of Big Brother’s world, Orwell reviled the arbitrary and brutish role he took on in a colonial system. “I hated it bitterly,” he wrote. “In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts…”

Oceania was a prescient product of a particular biography and particular moment when the Cold War was beginning. Naturally, then, today’s world of “alternative facts” is quite different in ways that Orwell could not have imagined.

Big Brother not required

Orwell described a single-party system in which a tiny core of oligarchs, Oceania’s “inner party,” control all information. This is their chief means of controlling power. In the U.S. today, information is wide open to those who can access the internet, at least 84 percent of Americans. And while the U.S. arguably might be an oligarchy, power exists somewhere in a scrum including the electorate, constitution, the courts, bureaucracies and, inevitably, money. In other words, unlike in Oceania, both information and power are diffuse in 2017 America.

Those who study the decline in standards of evidence and reasoning in the U.S. electorate chiefly blame politicians’ concerted efforts from the 1970s to discredit expertise, degrade trust in Congress and its members, even question the legitimacy of government itself. With those leaders, institutions and expertise delegitimized, the strategy has been to replace them with alternative authorities and realities.

In 2004, a senior White House adviser suggested a reporter belonged to the “reality-based community,” a sort of quaint minority of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.… That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”

Orwell could not have imagined the internet and its role in distributing alternative facts, nor that people would carry around Telescreens in their pockets in the form of smartphones. There is no Ministry of Truth distributing and policing information, and in a way everyone is Big Brother.

It seems less a situation that people are incapable of seeing through Big Brother’s big lies, than they embrace “alternative facts.” Some researchers have found that when some people begin with a certain worldview – for example, that scientific experts and public officials are untrustworthy – they believe their misperceptions more strongly when given accurate conflicting information. In other words, arguing with facts can backfire. Having already decided what is more essentially true than the facts reported by experts or journalists, they seek confirmation in alternative facts and distribute them themselves via Facebook, no Big Brother required.

In Orwell’s Oceania, there is no freedom to speak facts except those that are official. In 2017 America, at least among many of the powerful minority who selected its president, the more official the fact, the more dubious. For Winston, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” For this powerful minority, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make five.

The Conversation

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Filed Under: Banned Books, Books, Politics, Still True Today, Uncategorized Tagged With: 1984, Orwell, politics

Reader’s Advisory: The Handmaid’s Tale

January 19, 2017 by Rob McClellan Leave a Comment

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is an old favorite of those who would make unpleasant books go away, and was listed 37th on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Banned Books from 1990 to 1999. It was challenged in 2001 in Dripping Springs, Texas by a group of parents who declared it anti-Christian and pornographic. Also quite recently, the Judson School District Board in San Antonio, TX overturned a ban of The Handmaid’s Tale by the superintendent. Ed Lyman had ordered the book taken out of the advanced placement English curriculum when a parent complained it contained sexual and anti-Christian content. A committee comprised of teachers, students, and a parent had recommended the book remain in the class, but Lyman said he felt it did not fit in with the standards of the community.

To be fair: violence, certainly. Sex, absolutely. Anti-Christian, perhaps, if you happen to believe that Jesus was all about wielding obscene levels of wealth and power against the meek. Pornographic, no. There is nothing arousing about the situations found in this book.

The world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a grim one. Women are second-class citizens in the recently formed Republic of Gilead. Women may not own property or carry money. All dresses and hats come with veils. They may not read, write, or (occasionally) speak unless spoken to.  Older women are often pressed into service as domestic Marthas, ruled over by Wives. Because of falling fertility rates in Gilead the younger and hopefully more fertile women are sometimes assigned as Handmaids, expected to produce children for the elite rulers of Gilead. Early in the book, it’s suggested that the suicide rate among Handmaids is quite high.

Meanwhile, older women, barren women, homosexuals and criminals are declared Unwomen and sent to colonies to enjoy hard labor cleaning up environmental disasters, toxic chemical spills, or other similar work. Secret police, known as Eyes, are everywhere.

All this is told to the reader through the eyes and voice of Offred, a Handmaid who’s assigned to an older military officer (the Commander.) Her job is to produce a child for the couple, which is unlikely, as the Wife believes that her husband is actually sterile—a dangerous thought, as Gileadan law says that only women can be sterile. Desperate to manage the situation, the Commander’s Wife arranges for Offred to sleep with Nick, her husband’s driver, in an effort to get her pregnant. Nick and Offred become attached to each other. Eventually, Nick tells her that he can get her out of the country if she’s willing to trust him. The book ends with an assumed contact of Nick’s leading her into an unmarked van, although whether she’s being saved or led to her doom by Eyes is left unsaid.

You don’t read a lot about the men in this society directly, since Offred’s dealings with them are sharply limited by the rules she lives by. Men are either in charge, as the Commander is; or they serve those in charge, as Nick, his driver, does; or they populate the military and police forces that maintain order. The pecking order is rigid and there is no escape. Men conform or die, their bodies to be hung in a public square as a testament to the Gileadan manner of justice. Simple.

The most frequently cited reasons for banning this book are the description of Christianity found in its pages. However, the fundamentalist government depicted in the book merely uses certain images found in Christianity as a tool to maintain militarily enforced rules of society. For an environment supposedly espousing Christian values, Christ himself–who commanded his followers to love the poor, tend the sick, comfort those in prison, and abhor excessive wealth–is nowhere to be found.

That said, the folks who complain about the sheer brutality of the book’s worldview may have a point: violence is the center of the Handmaid’s world. Society at some point in the not too distance past was disrupted when a cabal of fundamentalist-minded military officers executed the civilian government and declared themselves rulers over God’s kingdom. Wars against the infidel are endemic; a news show described by Offred mentions the execution of Quaker and Baptist rebels, and the forcible uprooting of “Children of Ham” (i.e., Blacks) to North Dakota. Jews are given a choice: convert or leave for Zion. There’s some question as to how many of those put on the boats ever arrive at their destination.

The violence that Offred experiences is more psychological than physical, although she says at one point the Wives are allowed to beat Handmaids as long as they use bare hands, since “there’s scriptural precedent.” Handmaids have no names except for those assigned (Offred, Ofglen, Ofwarren, etc.) by the management. Money has been replaced by pictograph tokens they can use to buy food at the local grocery; even the store signs have been replaced by wordless logos. The ostensible reason for this—the reason the Handmaids are told during their training as state-sponsored breeders—is that it’s for their own protection. Women are too valuable, they’re told, to have to deal with such types of stress.

So here we are. 2017 and Handmaid’s Tale is every bit as creepy as it was when first published in 1985. In a way it’s worse now. The Commander’s Wife, a genteel lady named Serena Joy, was, in her prime, a televangelist who railed against the horrors of modern life and worked tirelessly to bring about the world she now lives in, a world directed by “Christian” values and enforces “traditional” family life. One imagines that she’s resigned to being the head of a household rather than a self-directing individual in a world of business, power, wealth, and religion. One expects that she’d imagined herself being rather more free and/or powerful than she is allowed to be by the leaders she helped bring to power.

As we head into a new presidential administration, it’s worth remembering that this book was meant to be a cautionary tale of a dystopian reality. But…there are those who would use it as a handbook to create a future they very much want to see.

Let’s do better than Gilead did.

Filed Under: Banned Books, Books, Literature, Politics, Reader Advisory, Religion, Writing

Introducing Chronicle Worlds: Feyland

June 29, 2016 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Chronicle Worlds Feyland CoverImagine 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

[books amount=”1″ size=”200″ featured=”chronicle-worlds-feyland” review=”0″ show_label=”0″]

Filed Under: Books, Free Press, Library Resources, My projects, Nerd Alert, Publishing, Reader Advisory, Sci-Fi, Small press, Writing Tagged With: anthologies, Chronicle Worlds Feyland, fantasy, Future Chronicles, gamerpunk, science fiction, shared universes, short fiction, short stories

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