Jonathan James Commer, Charismatic Rebel

If anyone had paid attention to Jack Commer’s son before this day, it was to jeer that the kid had emerged non compos mentis from his stunt in Alpha Centauri, that he was an egomaniacal fool and that it served him right to have his brains burned out.  And weren’t his father’s brains also burned out and shouldn’t he get lost along with his son and scheming wife and sycophantic kid brother Joe as well?

But there now seemed to be a hundred Jonathan James Commer fan clubs, all urging him, the Typhoon II, and its “jolly mad crew” on to glory.  “The Rebellion is Now!  The Rebellion is Us!” clamored one particularly effective post by Salla Hurtif, a young female SolNet commentator Pat had always had the hots for.

Patrick James, Inventor of SolGrid

“The SolGrid Rebellion against the Enslaving Hive Mind!” screamed another by Porr’fd/Gllun, the most influential Martian commentator.  Maybe only five Martians bothered to write commentary for SolNet anyway, but Porr’fd had managed to stay fairly sane through the recent static and was unusually lucid in his article.

And he was right.  SolGrid was a catastrophe.  Pat had thrown it together way too fast in December, figuring he could patch errors in the beta release, but now he fully understood that the Alpha Centaurian software he’d so painstaking memorized was a core irrationality that no patch could ever fix.

He stared at his console in disbelief.  There would never be a SolGrid II.

–from Draft Four of The SolGrid Rebellion

Commer of the Rebellion had been the title of Jack Commer, Book Six for the past two years, but after four drafts I’d never been sure it was the true one.  I couldn’t put my finger on why Commer of the Rebellion sounded a trifle highfalutin, or why “Commer” was a great-sounding character name but didn’t add much to this title.  Possibly COTR could be considered ironic in that we have to discover exactly who is leading a “Commer rebellion,” but the reward isn’t that great; though the first draft tried to hide the perpetrator for a few chapters, in later versions I knew I had to reveal the main rebel at the beginning.  I was starting to worry why the perfect title wasn’t coming, wistfully recalling how in childhood I had a penchant for coming up with superb if pompous titles which somehow had a kid marketing genius about them:

• February 11, 1971: Doomsday
• Slave Boy of Venus
• Blast Off Into Eternity
• Horror in the Twentieth Century
• Journey to the Center of the Sun

But then I reflected that four of the first five Jack Commer novels underwent title changes, and each time a sometimes painful wrench from attachment became the joy of encountering the perfect novel name:

• Jack Commer, Commander, USSF  became Jack Commer, Supreme Commander
• Nonprofit Ladies became Nonprofit Chronowar
• Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar became Collapse and Delusion
• OutCurve: Legends of the Stellar Trolls became The Wounded Frontier.  And I found an old note that said–I don’t really remember seriously considering this–that the original idea was Mandy, K’sla, and the Regeneration of a Planet.

So, as I’ve done for many other novels, I reverted to an earlier list of titles, added several more, and circled reverberating words for a few days.  Here are the various titles considered since the 2014 initial novel notes:

• Against the Grid
• Architects of Extinction
• Architects of SolGrid
• Architects of the Rebellion
• Architecture, Rebellion, and SolGrid
• As Opposed to the Ends of the World
• Commer of the Darkened Rebellion
• Commer of the Extinction
• Commer of the Rebellion – the working title for Draft 1, chosen 7/28/14
• Default Darkness
• Default Extinction
• Default Forces
• Extinction Forces
• Forms of Darkness
• Forms of Extinction
• Hackers/Engineers/Builders of Rebellion
• Hacking the Rebellion(s)
• Immortality
• In this Controlled Opacity
• In this Opacity
• Rebellion
• Rebellion Forces
• Rejuvenation and Extinction
• Secrets and Withholding
• SolGrid
• SolGrid and Rebellion
• Structures of Extinction
• Surveillance and Extinction
• The Abolished Millennia
• The Abolished Rebellion
• The Abolished Star
• The Commer Extinction
• The Commer Rebellion
• The Darkened Grid
• The Darkened Rebellion
• The Default Rebellion
• The Generations Vanish
• The Grid Darkness
• The Grid Rebellion
• The Grid Upheaval
• The Hopeless Grid
• The Human Darkness
• The Long Rejuvenation
• The Negated Rebellion(s)
• The Scattered Millennia
• The Scattered Rebellion(s)
• The Solar Extinction
• The Solar Gamble
• The Solar Mind in Revolt
• The SolGrid Fantasy
• The SolGrid Rebellion
• The Star Rebellion
• The Structure of Rebellion
• The Surveillance Grid
• The Vanished Star

The SolGrid Rebellion Sculpture

After some consideration I proposed Architects of the Rebellion, with “architect” magnifying the meaning of rebellion in a way “Commer” does not.  But the suggestion left me cold; it did the same for my beta readers.  My wife Nancy looked over my long list of possible titles and fastened upon the word SolGrid, the proposed Hive Mind for the Sol System in The Wounded Frontier, Book Five.  Another day passed and I asked her what she thought of The SolGrid Rebellion, which I’d initially worried might sound like a mainstream thriller title.  “Yes!” was her response, as was that of Kara D. Wilson, YA SF author and outstanding beta reader.  Their enthusiasm has sparked my own, so now I’m fully behind The SolGrid Rebellion.  I think it captures the essence of Book Six.  I’ve been so happy with the title that when I finished a sculpture this week I had to call it The SolGrid Rebellion as well.  Somehow the sculpture eerily fits the themes of the novel.

copyright 2016 by Michael D. Smith

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