Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

NOW! – or – Early Marketing Efforts

Posted on January 15, 2015 by Michael D. SmithJanuary 15, 2015

NOW! The official Trip to Mars movie poster

Not long ago I was astonished to rediscover childhood Jack Commer marketing tools. As outlined elsewhere, my first Jack Commer, Supreme Commander plots unfolded in the fifth grade, and by the eighth I’d abandoned the draft of The Martian Marauders at 110 pages, eventually returning to it a few years ago and seeing it published as a modern science fiction novel.

Nevertheless the evidence clearly demonstrates that I had a vigorous marketing campaign in gear even in 1965. The following samples show the influence of advertising I was exposed to as a child. They reflected my joy in writing but probably also compensated for the fact that I had little confidence in my everyday kid self. But I also I think I’m seeing hints of mockery, of fledgling satire, at work here.

The Official Jack Commer Space Stories Logo, ca. 1965

The ads postulated new titles I can’t recall planning, and assumed that my novels and stories would naturally be translated into movie form. Of course! There was even a Jack Commer logo showing Jack Commer and his spaceship as the prime connection between the ruined Earth and humanity’s new life on Mars.

While these advertising efforts didn’t exactly seed demand for my work–I can’t recall any saturation coverage of my stories in mid-sixties magazines and television–they did remain safely stashed in ancient folders, stalking me for decades so that one day they could confound and embarrass me.

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Commer of the Rebellion – Characters and Some Rough Draft, Part I

Posted on December 21, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJuly 12, 2020

Some characters from the first draft of Jack Commer #6, Commer of the Rebellion, now in progress. The text is taken from the rough draft, about two hundred pages so far, and is obviously open to revision.

Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, United System Space Force, 2076

We had the most amazing talk this afternoon! Lying there naked in the sun! About me finally being able to quit! Could I really do it? Am I really ready? Didn’t I tell her I was? Then I get this goddamn call and she runs off to Venus and she’s pissed off?

Amav Frankston-Commer, Jack’s Wife, Planetary Engineer

“It’s so stupid!” Amav snarled. “So goddamn stupid! He just faked his way through all that counseling! Nodding and smiling to everyone, telling everybody what they wanted to hear–and now this! Damn him to hell! I’m not gonna figure this one out for Jack! I just refuse!”

Jonathan James Commer, Jack and Amav’s Son and Former Emperor of Alpha Centauri

Before this day, if anyone on SolNet had paid attention to Jack Commer’s son, it was to ruefully muse about how Jonathan James had emerged non compos mentis from his stunt in Alpha Centauri, what an egomaniacal fool he’d been to try to become Emperor, and it served him right to have his brains burned out, and weren’t his father’s brains also burned out by this time and shouldn’t he get lost along with his son and scheming wife and sycophantic kid brother Joe as well? But now there appeared to be at least 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.

Jackie Vespertine, Professor of Exobiology at the University of Mars

“Now that’s one solid female! Or at least I thought she was! Could she really have gone off the deep end like that? I gotta tell ya, Laurie, honestly, like a man says to a woman he really respects and admires, I really have had the hots for Jackie for years now! I mean, what a chassis! Even Suzette lookin’ like a damn teenager can’t hold a candle to her! Face it, Jackie Vespertine is, like, perfection! She always has been! Her rejuvenation was, like, classic! Didn’t take away from that classy sexiness of hers, like you know, man to woman now, just being honest, you know! I mean, she’s never given me the time of day but I think she knows I’d be after her if I could. Man, oh man!”

Patrick James, President of SolGrid, Inc.

Wait! I see the hack! Just align it with the probability of–yeah! And Feedback Stasis would do that! Okay! So IF SDCloak > 0 THEN Comm:Merge;// {CALL VectorAlign, ELSE FeedbackStatis} :** CALL L-SpacialLoop}. THAT’S what I was missing! Okay! Test.

Suzette Borman, Lee Borman’s Wife and Jonathan James’ Lover

“Well, she can’t touch me and she knows it! I have all my forty-two years of experience with men, repackaged with all my adolescent hormones just–just raging, Mr. Patster! You know, I can’t help but tell you that maybe something could have happened between you and me, dear, it’s just that–I can’t! I belong to JJC! Then again, who knows what might happen on this trip?”

“Who knows what might happen?” Suzette repeated. “To all of us?” She pulled his hands off her chest but held them for a few seconds before letting them drop. “Jonathan James said I would be his Empress! Can you match that, dear Mr. Patster, with all your fourteen-year-old sex urges?”

Robot Laurie 283

“Well, when the Ywritt brought my John back to me, and I was so scrambled, and powered down, and so depressed, well, I realized I have a lot to answer for! I really messed up last year, and I realize I’ve got to atone! And so I’ve sworn to wear a 283 sweatshirt for the rest of my existence! That may sound strange, but actually, I have an endless supply of 283 sweatshirts in a hundred colors! A lot of ‘em are low cut, because I know John likes ‘em that way, but really, I figure everybody needs to know that it’s me, just a poor simple HAVOTT robot, not the real Laurie! I don’t want anyone to ever confuse us again!”

Z’B, Emperor of the Martians

“WE ARE DONE WITH STAR DRIVE? THIS IS A CRAPPY SHIP WITH BAD STAR DRIVE!” came into Pat’s mind along with horrifyingly detailed mathematical proofs of the amount of suffering a Martian central nervous system could take before exploding.

Major Carla Posttner, Head of USSF Detention Services

“I knew you two had the whole USSF hierarchy in your pocket,” Posttner hissed. “Sir. And I knew you’d once again circumvent Detention Services protocols in the handling of your own son. I do note that you have failed to obtain Form 303, ‘Warrant for Fugitive Arrest,’ from DS and that apparently you’re not intending to arrest Jonathan James Commer as a common criminal. Therefore, jurisdiction would devolve upon the Court of the City of Marsport, and in my liaison capacity as Councilwoman for the Fourth District–”

More About the Jack Commer Series

Spaceships

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJuly 12, 2020

I recently realized that I keep blowing up expensive spaceships, and that there’s a new Typhoon spaceship (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) for every book in the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series. Though I skipped a Typhoon in Book Three, I apparently unconsciously made up for that by having both a III and a IV in Book Four.

According to the received wisdom of the Jack Commer series, the Typhoon Project began in 2028 with the experimental Typhoon E (briefly alluded to in Book One, The Martian Marauders) and by 2033 the first operational version, Typhoon I, had demonstrated its ability to destroy the planet Earth with the Xon bomb. Its sister ship, the upgraded Typhoon II, was the theater stage for Jack Commer’s debacle-rich failure to negotiate an end to the Sol-Alpha Centaurian war in 2035.

I finally drew the 2028 Typhoon E experimental craft this year. I decided it should look appropriately clunky as a test bed for the first augmented nuclear drive engine and Xon bomb delivery system. Created during the buildup to war with the Central Asian Powers, it had 1/20 light speed, unheard of at that time, and a crew of four. Crews of both Typhoon I and Typhoon II rotated in and out of this project.

The 1965 drawings of the Typhoon I and Typhoon II for the first childhood version of The Martian Marauders took care of any concerns I had visualizing the action for my childhood plot:

When I input the ancient manuscript into EasyWriter II in 1986, I traced and neatened the same drawings and, though crude, these sufficed to see me through the modern revision of The Martian Marauders in the early 2000’s.

But while working on later drafts of Book Two, Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, I needed a better grasp of the Pod, which was hastily engineered between summer 2034 and the beginning of the Typhoon II mission to Alpha Centauri in February 2035. From Book Two, Jack Commer, Supreme Commander:

He didn’t like the idea of a Pod attached to his sleek ship in the first place. It was like carting around a fashionable Marsport condominium, with its huge central recreation room, sixteen personal compartments for use by the three Martians and seven humans on the flight, as well as negotiation rooms where, everyone hoped, treaties would be hammered out with the Alpha Centaurians. The saucer had a kitchen, food to last several months, showers, exercise machines–and sixty-four Xon bombs in the lower compartment. These, added to the normal complement of four Xon bombs in the Typhoon II’s nose, along with the powerful pair of PlanetBlasters mounted on the back and belly of the craft, gave Jack the capability of destroying several solar systems in the course of an eight-hour work day–if negotiations failed.

In writing Book Three, Nonprofit Chronowar, I figured I should know how the evacuation passenger shells worked. Early 1964 drawings showing the full engine blast from the end of Typhoon I going straight through the passenger shell would obviously obtain fatal results for both shell and passengers, so I came up with a shell slung under the belly of the Typhoon, similar to how the Space Shuttle held its main fuel tank. Pegasus, the passenger shell mentioned in Nonprofit Chronowar, could hold 1,140 people. That particular shell would probably have to be somewhat larger than this model:

Collapse and Delusion, The Wounded Frontier, and Commer of the Rebellion all required ongoing development of the Typhoon series, and again I needed to nail down the theatrical stages on which the characters interacted. The Typhoon III series, designed in 2038, was a major upgrade in size, Star Drive propulsion, and weaponry, and by 2076 there were thirty-five Typhoon III-class ships, including the first two ships, Typhoon III and Typhoon IV.

Typhoon V in 2075 and its descendants Typhoons VI and VII were another major design evolution, intended to move humanity beyond warfare in the immediate solar neighborhood to the exploration of distant star systems. To build the Typhoon V in 2075 cost roughly one-sixteenth of the Sol economy. The 2076 models, Typhoon VI and Typhoon VII, though the same size as the V, were vastly improved and were built faster and cheaper with the aid of new technologies from Iota Persei and explorers returning from the realm of Garr/thahg.

I first drew the Typhoon I spaceship in childhood, as early as 1964, for there are drawings of the triangular-winged space plane in my sixth grade Trip to Mars. I knew at the time that there was a U.S. Air Force project, Dyna-Soar, a late fifties-early sixties precursor to the Space Shuttle, but though I seem to recall having an actual plastic model of it, I don’t think Dyna-Soar was a basis for the Typhoon design; though the two ships are close in size, they look quite different.

I drew the Typhoon I over and over, but this wasn’t my only spaceship. I recently unearthed from my archives over a hundred spaceship drawings from the sixties. While most were simply aesthetic reworking of existing multi-stage rocket ship designs you could get from any science fiction movie, some also sketched a rocket plane similar to the Typhoon:

All these designs showcase the difficulty of envisioning a three-dimensional spacecraft, with some sane chance of actually being able to fly, when you primarily want to draw a cool-looking, dangerous object. The Typhoon’s “augmented nuclear powered engine” and its subsequent Star Drive are ludicrously tiny, but that was part of the point, as even as a child I envisioned exponential technological growth in our near future.

Spaceships page on sortmind.com
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander overview page

CommWealth!

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Michael D. SmithMay 16, 2020

My novel CommWealth (no, there’s really no exclamation point in the title) has been accepted for publication by Class Act Books. Publication in eBook format is scheduled for June 2015.

CommWealth describes a society where there’s no legal claim to private property. Any object from your house to the clothes you’re wearing can be demanded by anyone, to be enjoyed for thirty days before anyone else can request it. The main characters are actors in a theatrical troupe who try to adapt to this chaos, but they get investigated by CommWealth authorities and wind up starting a suicidal revolution. This may be slightly dystopian, but it’s not science fiction. I don’t know if you’d call the novel mainstream/literary or not; I confess I’ve never really understood what either of those terms really means to the publishing world. CommWealth also has some hilarious moments–although I know it’s terrible to laugh at your own jokes–but then again this isn’t a “humorous” genre either.

In addition to my Jack Commer science fiction series from Double Dragon Publishing, I have several other non-SF novels, and I’m happy to be able to at least get a start on putting some of them out there.

The image isn’t intended for the book cover; it’s just a painting I did long ago when I was writing the first draft. It shows several of the main characters gathering at the Cup of Fog coffee shop, the main theater stage for the story. CommWealth actually evolved from a ’90’s novel I wrote called Property, but the book is much revised and definitely a modern Mike novel. (It has to be! Allan had a laptop that had all of a 140 MB hard drive back then!)

There is (as there always is) more info on sortmind.com, including the start of a character images page.

A Writing Biography, Part III: Unhappy Kid Interlude, Yet Two Novels, Sort Of

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJune 27, 2019

Mickey Smith, Spring 1967 copyright 2014 Michael D. Smith

The author, Spring 1967, with his upper lip recently slashed by the Siamese god Ming, perhaps in retribution for “The Saga of Billy Bam, Basketball Star.”

Or: Wandering in the Wilderness with New Discipline, the Consciousness Expansion of Adolescence, and Many To-Do Lists

This is an odd period to write about, and only this year, after I made plans to write about first The Gore Book and then The Blue Notebook (Parts I and II of this history) did it hit me that before a new opening up in 1968 there was a third period, in which I wanted to write, made plans to write, and did write, but produced nothing deeply satisfying. No real expression was coming out, just a mix of science fiction irony, disaster, and failure. Writing was still emotionally necessary and I never abandoned my desire to be a writer, but the output was increasingly becoming an obligation. Somehow I was disconnected with it and unconfident. I was still writing kid stuff as I was starting to grow up, and it was coming out pretty dark.

It’s pleasing to consider Writing History Part I (The Gore Book) or Part II (The Blue Notebook), but there’s a bewildering blend of fascination and depression in looking at Part III, 1964 childhood to 1967 young adult. The style matures greatly from the sixth grader’s Trip to Mars through the newly teenaged author of the Martian Marauders with his slight investigation of emotion, up through the troubled youngster writing tales of failed Gemini launches and catastrophic Mars missions, accompanied by some surprising kid erudition about space flight procedures gleaned from following the space program. While the TV show The Outer Limits never grabbed me the way The Twilight Zone did, I can see the effects of the often psychically nauseating Outer Limits on Part III work. Though there weren’t as many titles as either of the previous periods, there was overall more output, including two attempts at novels. The Part III stories are longer works, more ambitious, and some were placed in binders as if I were publishing a little book.

As Part II mentioned, my only sixth grade story, submitted in October 1963, didn’t obtain the praise I expected from my new teacher. There’s something murky about the circumstances surrounding “One October Day” which I still can’t quite place, but I know that this story marked the end of a fun and productive era of writing. Though I dropped two more stories into The Blue Notebook, one from each of the seventh and eighth grades, after that little failure I knew that the Notebook era was over.

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A Writing Biography, Part II: The Blue Notebook

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJuly 12, 2020

A previous post, The First Childhood Appearance of Jack Commer, covered the origin of my space hero Jack in the fall of 1962 and my elation at writing the story “Voyage to Venus” for a fifth grade spelling assignment. That story opened a happy new era in my writing (see Part I, First Efforts in The Gore Book) and led to thirty-three more stories collected in The Blue Notebook.

Mickey, Fall 1962 copyright 2014 Michael D. Smith

The author’s fifth grade mug shot, probably Fall 1962, at the time Jack Commer was created.

I’m not sure exactly when I compiled them into a blue loose-leaf notebook, arranged by their event dates from 1860 to the year 6000, and wrote “BEST S.F. FROM EARLY Mickey Smith RECORDS” on the cover. But it was probably before all the stories were completed, as I knew as I was making them that they had to be preserved. All of them were shared with several other kids or else read aloud to my fifth grade class.

I wrote twelve stories for that class, of which eleven survive. We were told to write stories into which we were to work something like ten new spelling words. I discarded the first story, an insipid detective plot I vividly recall hating as I composed it, but I also remember that after “Voyage to Venus,” the second story starring the newly-minted Jack Commer, I was eager to save them all.

So eleven for class, and twenty-three composed on my own. Two were plotted with my fifth grade friend Vernon Cramer. “Smith and Cramer” was yet another writer association in addition to the epistolary exchanges of MSSR with Sabin Russell in New Jersey, though unlike MSSR, Smith and Cramer never had bylaws and was more of a series title I could plaster on some of the stories. But I wrote everything myself. I realize now that I’ve never thanked Vernon for his strange energy that further propelled my imagination. So thanks, ancient friend, you turned out to be one of my teachers. I know I’ve thanked Mrs. Grammar (that really was my fifth grade teacher’s name) a thousand times over the years.

Mrs. Grammar’s fifth grade spelling assignments encouraged me to create, and I’ve never forgotten this special era where I grew as a kid writer. In addition to coming up with some fantastic plots and high energy writing that riveted everyone in the class, I also made my share of writing mistakes–a couple stories were bad ripoffs of movies I’d just seen, and sometimes I was boring, or I gave up and turned the story into a joke. I kept the failures anyway; at the time I wouldn’t have been able to put into words that the mediocre stories were a great learning experience, but of course that’s what they were.

In The Blue Notebook period I wholeheartedly embraced the idea that I was a writer. I recall my eagerness to write at my desk the night before a story was due. Not only did I have full confidence that I could fit the spelling words into the narrative, but I also knew they’d assist me and that the resulting story would move in odd directions. I remember one night looking in the telephone book for character names–actual novelistic research! I was also aware that I was easily mastering adverbial phrases and dialog where others in the class could not. It all seemed natural, in retrospect as if I’d done this in a previous lifetime and was now simply picking up where I’d left off.

Okay, so a lot of my spelling was atrocious. Otherwise, the style is damn fluid for fifth grader rough draft.

One of the bizarre aspects of The Blue Notebook is the massive amount of flippant self-promotion I plastered across the beginnings and ends of stories, the flavor of which I’m sure I picked up from book covers, TV commercials, and movie posters. All this would probably have been fertile ground for a child psychologist. “The Gap in the Earth,” for instance, begins with the admonition that this is “A great novel by Mickey Smith.” At the conclusion of “February 11, 1971, DOOMSDAY” we are told: “In three months the Earth will be at war with Guacoazezama. Don’t miss it!” There are outlandish series titles like “Case 3 of the New Fritening Experiences,” illustrated ads for the stories, movie poster come-ons, concluding statements blaring that “This has been a Mickey Smith Film Presentation,” complete with unreeling film showing stills from the story, and unabashed declarations that Mickey Smith is, like Sabin Russell, O.O.T.T.G.P.O.E. (one of the two greatest people on Earth).

The best stories instinctively seem to grab the reader with some grotesque dinosaurian or alien terror shock in the first paragraph. Again I must have picked this technique up from movies and television. And titles like “Horror in the Twentieth Century,” “Monsterville, U.S.A.,” “Blast-Off to Eternity,” “Slave Boy of Venus,” and “Journey to the Center of the Sun” were designed to hook the reader just like the titles of Grade B science fiction movies.

“The Body Shrinker,” one of the last stories I wrote during this golden age, probably the summer of 1963, ends with an advertisement for Trip to Mars, the first Jack Commer “novel” which wouldn’t be written for another year. So I must have been planning ahead for something I knew would be long and ambitious.

What a glorious ride it all was for a fifth grade kid!

In sad contrast to this opening up, I turned in a science fiction story in October 1963 to my new sixth grade teacher, and I felt that she unreasonably slammed it down–even though in checking the story now I find that she wrote “Interesting and imaginative. Be careful of spelling” on it! Yet I felt extremely put down, don’t ask me why. It’s possible she told me later that I shouldn’t be turning in fiction; all I remember from the rest of the year is slogging through turgid social studies essays. It’s interesting that I have no tangible proof of any such disrespect, but feel it strongly to this day and can clearly see that this story finished off an era. But that’s for Writing History Part III: Unhappy Kid Interlude, or Wandering in the Wilderness, or whatever I eventually decide to call it.

I think I was fearful of writing the story in the first place; it came out constrained and pedestrian, so maybe that was part of the overall karma here. In any case I didn’t write any more fiction for either that class or for myself until Trip to Mars the next spring–but again, that’s for Writing History Part III. But don’t be too hard on my teacher, either–the next month, on November 22, she had to tell the class that Kennedy had been assassinated.

Only two stories were added after fifth grade: “The Attack of the Martians,” I think from the seventh grade, and “The THING From Planet X” from the eighth. Neither story has the kid sparkle, and they belong to that subsequent period where I really no longer thought of myself as a writer. But I guess I wanted to consider them part of the exalted Notebook.

If any human being cares to read this far, following is the order–by date of their events–of the stories in The Blue Notebook. Later titles given to original “Spelling” titles are in brackets. Many of the dates were assigned months or even years after the stories were written.

The Gap in the Earth (1860)
The Monster (1942)
Spelling [Soldiers in Germany] (1943)
Spelling [The Purple Turtles] (1950)
Spelling [Matt Norsen’s Jail Break] (1954)
Danger: Dinosaurs! (1959)
The Body Shrinker (1960)
Gore [Tyrannosaurus Attacks U.S.] (1963)
One October Day (1963)
Scattered Poison (1963)
The Time Barrier (1963)
Spelling [Prehistoria] (1964)
Visitors from Venus (1965)
The Bloody Secret of Dinosaur Cave (1966)
February 11, 1971, DOOMSDAY (1970-1971)
Horror in the Twentieth Century (1971)
Spelling [Epedition to Mars] (1972) [Misspelling could invade titles as well!]
SOS Dinosaurs (1975)
Monsterville, U.S.A. (1980)
The Attack of the Martians (1984)
Visitors from Venus (1985) [Yes, I used this title twice!]
Blast-Off to Eternity (1987)
Slave Boy of Venus (1994)
Harry Patterson: Public Menace #1 (1998)
The Worst War in History (2018)
Spelling [Voyage to Venusian Death] (2030)
Spelling [Voyage to Venus] (2033)
Jupiter’s 1st Visit (2035)
A Voyage to Jupiter (2037)
The First Expedition of Saturn (2040)
The THING From Planet X (2049)
Journey to the Center of the Sun (2971)
Spelling [It] (5994)
Spelling [The Edge of the Universe] (6000)

I still have The Blue Notebook and the original MSS. of all these stories, as well as Word versions complete with all misspellings. Of course I had to input them! I recognize that there’s no literary merit in these childish things, but it was fun to write them and fun to input them decades later, just as it’s been fun to write this blog post.

There will probably be a Part III to this epic, as I’m finding it interesting to explore the childhood ups and downs at the beginning of a lifelong writing career. I’ve even laid out possible parts IV-VII, which would take me up to the present, but those feel more like an optional exercise.

A Writing Biography, Part I: First Efforts in The Gore Book

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Michael D. SmithNovember 5, 2014

Mickey and Ming April 1959 copyright 2014 Michael D. Smith

The author being briefed by his Muse the year before the car accident and the beginning of his writing career

I wrote my first stories in July 1960 in Fair Haven, New Jersey, around the time of my second operation for a head injury in a car accident earlier that year. I was seven years old.

My friend Sabin Russell and I began collecting our new science fiction stories into a loose pile of paper which grew to be about an inch high, unbound, never placed in a box or folder. These sheets came to be called The Gore Book. The paper was probably blank, not lined, because the front side of each page was a landscape-mode illustration, the back side the actual story, written again sideways or “landscape,” and if the paper were lined, the handwriting would have been perpendicular to it. The stories were usually just one page, though some went to three, and involved monsters, aliens, spaceships, and, of course, “gore.” I believe my first story, which may have been the first story in the resultant Gore Book, was about a jet pilot whose oxygen mask came off. [The accompanying illustration is similar, though it dates from a couple years later.]

We thought of “gore” not as blood but more as background violent civilian deaths, necessary to our plots, like the hordes of extras buying the farm in the Grade B 1950’s science fiction movies we were nurtured on, including The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The Giant Behemoth.

So why was I too scared to finish watching The Giant Behemoth? (At least I think that was the movie in question.) Sabin and I had declared we’d both watch it on TV that evening, he at his house, me at mine, alone in the downstairs recreation room with my parents out for the evening. But I got freaked out during the first scene and turned it off. Later I felt ashamed of myself for failing to see the movie through, as if I’d somehow failed our Gore Enterprise. Despite my mortification I’m sure I told Sabin I didn’t finish it. It would have been impossible to fake my way through any subsequent analysis of the film, as I vividly recall us doing with Journey to the Center of the Earth. But I can’t recall his reaction.

Our collaboration was the birth of MSSR, though I don’t think we called it that just yet. Of course MSSR was a subversive tweak of the USSR, the Ultimate Enemy we were brought up to fear.

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Laurie 283 from The Wounded Frontier

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJune 27, 2019

In 2075 Laurie Lachrer 283, a Heroes and Villains of the Thirties robot created as part of a collector’s series in the 2040’s, has joined robot General John J. Douglas’s Robots Rights League. From the fifth book of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, The Wounded Frontier, to be published by Double Dragon Publishing:

“Dammit, man, where have you been?” General William C. Scott shouted in his thick brown bathrobe.

The airlock recycled and General John J. Douglas burst inside. “Aw, cut the theatrics, mon gen’ral! Surely you weren’t waiting up for me! I know it’s past your bedtime, but really!”

“Where have you been? It’s almost ten o’clock! You aren’t allowed–”

“Hey, mein Führer bahstad, I was out exploring the big city! And along the way I found the most fascinating hardware!”

“Oh! Colonel Lachrer! I didn’t see you there! Thank God! I thought the damn robot was unaccompanied!”

“Good evening, sir! The robot Douglas and I are at your service, sir!”

“You–that–that’s–excuse me, Colonel, but–what are you doing in a thirties uniform?” He looked closer. “A thirties Airman First Class technician’s uniform, I might add? Jack told me he was making you physician/engineer on the V!” Then his jaw dropped. “Jesus!” He recovered, eyes narrowing. “John, I can’t believe this!”

“Beautiful, isn’t she? Had my eye on ’er for quite a while now! Finally convinced old Buckmaster to sell! Hell, he’s had her on Maintenance Standby for the last fifteen years–took us half an hour to get ’er charged up enough to even say hello!”

“But I feel quite fit now, sir!” said Laurie Lachrer Serial Number 589-356914-391HQS, the 283rd of 1,013 total Laurie Lachrer units. “Believe me, it’s a relief to be able to think again after all those Entity Cycles!”

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Top of the Hour

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Michael D. SmithSeptember 12, 2014

Consider that the top of the hour is the same everywhere: 10:00 AM in Dallas, 4:00 PM in London, 11:00 PM in Beijing, 12:00 AM tomorrow in Tokyo …

There may be some renegade time zone somewhere whose inhabitants insist that it’s really x:45 at the above times, but the fact is that the clock hits the top of the hour simultaneously all over the world.

And so it must be that billions of people have someone they need to meet, somewhere they need to be, something that must be completed, some obligation to fulfill, some ordeal to endure, some pleasure to look forward to, at the top of each hour.

In other words, there are billions of human psychic collisions taking place every time :59 gives way to :00.

So when someone comes up to you at 11:53 AM demanding extra snappy service because she’s on a tight schedule (and you’re thinking, yeah, me too, lady, I have lunch in seven minutes and your hassle is probably going to wreck everything), you probably shouldn’t remind her that she needs to get in line as there are 3,233,844,208 people who ALSO, at this exact moment, have something dire coming up at the top of the hour. It will just increase her stress to realize that not only is she not Number One, but also that the entire planet is reeling with the shared anxiety of hitting the target of Whatever Seems to Be a Matter of Life and Death at :00.

Characters in novels rarely seem to exhibit this time concern. Sometimes they do have to watch the clock to catch a plane or defuse a time bomb, but all that is just the demands of the plot. In most cases the characters seem to have infinite amounts of time as they go about acting out the events of the story, and for that matter they don’t seem to worry much about their bank account, their car’s transmission, or their hissing, water-wasting toilet unless for some reason those concerns form part of the plot. A novelist has to filter out these details for the sake of getting a sane number of pages written, but might want to consider that, as does any other person on Earth, these characters have a thousand mini-crises running through their heads every day–and way too many of them are coming together at the top of the hour.

Character-Driven Boasting

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Michael D. SmithDecember 20, 2016

I need to keep reminding myself about characters. Because I almost fell into this trap working on the notes for the sixth Jack Commer novel, Commer of the Rebellion. Boy, I really was straining for a dazzling plot, but it was just months of frustrating mush until some characters stepped forward to remind me why I wanted this novel in the first place.

Thus the following is a note to myself, not intended as hoary advice from some pro to the novice:

Characters are everything as you should know by now. You lose sight of what’s real whenever you’re trying to figure out how to make the plot work. Trying to force your characters into some enthralling plot designed to wow the reader is a disaster. The problem is that the mind-blowing plot, reduced to a one-sentence elevator pitch, is ideal for marketing purposes. In fact, I’ve bought novels on the basis of the fascinating one-sentence blurb only to gag at the artlessness of characterization within the book.

Never tout your own fiction as “character driven” or as part of some “new literary science fiction” trend–we’ve heard that one for decades anyway. Don’t even write a review of someone else’s book in that regard. If you have to say that, you’re just trying to hoodwink people into believing you’re some master of characterization, or your reviewed author is. Make your fiction demonstrate that your characters are primary; let the potential reader determine what these characters are from a sample chapter or (as must sometime regrettably happen) from your marketing. As for reviews, if an author does a particularly great job with his or her characters, you can certainly praise that skill without resorting to vapid cheerleading.

And in any case, who’s really a “master of characterization” when starting a new novel? It’s all an experiment, it’s exploration of the unknown, and you can’t tell in advance what these inner archetypes will say or how well you’ll be able to take the dictation.

Yes, I’ve been guilty of saying “My novels are character-driven.” I think almost everyone pays lip service to this concept. And while I’ve understood deep down that characters are primary, I’ve all too frequently tried to first create a plot that would ideally mix characters into some high energy event matrix “the way I want them to.” But that’s not giving them free enough rein. Concerns about the plot, including the ending before you’ve gotten there, inhibit the flow of the raw people investigation any novel demands.

Bottom line: you shouldn’t have to say that your characters have depth. They just better self-evidently flow or else you don’t have a novel. The challenge is not how you can finagle some entertaining characters, because there’s no standard classroom method, no tricks for gussying them up so you can fool yourself and your reader. Characters are totally dependent on how honest you are with yourself. Boasting about your characters is simply authorial anxiety, of which there’s a lot floating around.