Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

The Wounded Frontier, Including Stellar Trolls

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Michael D. SmithDecember 18, 2020

When a star thirty-four light-years away vanishes, leaving the infrared signature of a Dyson sphere inexplicably built in one week, Supreme Commander Jack Commer readies the untested Typhoon V for the star Iota Persei, roping in a talented replacement engineer doubtful of Jack’s command capabilities, and cajoling a navigator beset by decades-old combat trauma into postponing his retirement for one last risky mission.

The Wounded Frontier, Book Five of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, is now republished by Sortmind Press.

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Replacement engineer Laurie Lachrer, shown on the cover, was a minor character in Book One, The Martian Marauders. An Airman First Class technician assigned to service Jack’s 2034 ship, by 2075 the rejuvenated Laurie has become the foremost physician/engineer in the United System Space Force.

The working title of the book was a mouthful, Outcurve: Legends of the Stellar Trolls. I can’t really recall what “Outcurve” was supposed to mean, but I postulated a race that would lurk under our superspace bridges (just like the troll in The Three Billy Goats Gruff!) to block our way to further exploration.

We’ve always longed to reach those impossibly distant lights, and so concepts of superspace and wormholes, either human-generated or else just existing for us to discover and exploit, have formed the backbone of so much science fiction. But what if we encounter something that decides to block those journeys?

The Wounded Frontier was originally published in 2018 by Double Dragon Publishing, and the republished novel has, like the previous four in the series, undergone some editing clean-up while retaining identical plot and characters. Since the Double Dragon publisher had outlined that every new book in one of his published author’s series would also be published as long as it met high standards, The Wounded Frontier was the first novel which I knew would be published before I even began outlining it. That was a very interesting and also sobering experience. Though it’s the fifth book in the series, I’d already completed the first three novels and finished Draft One of the fourth book at the time the first novel, The Martian Marauders, was accepted for publication in 2011. Therefore I approached the composition of Book Five with a mixture of confidence and awe, determined to make it even better than the previous four.

The first hint of the Wounded:

“Hey, Jack, this is Lee,” came over the intercom.

Jack slammed his fist on his armrest. “Dammit, senator, are you quitting too?”

“Huh? What’s going on, Jack? I just got this message from Marsport.”

Jack shook his head. “You don’t know that Draka and Will both just quit the USSF? Just like that?”

“No, wow, I had no idea! I’ll have a talk with ’em if you want. But really, this is more important.”

“What’s more important, dammit?”

“Look, I just got a call from Ranna.”

Joe swiveled at the mention of his wife’s name. “So why’s she calling you?”

“And how is she calling you?” Then Jack remembered Borman’s new Senator Comm equipped with superspace radio. Although events a few weeks ago had forced Jack to shatter Borman’s specialized comm, Borman had asked Joe to bring a new one when the Typhoon III came to pick up the IV crew.

“It came on the official business circuit. Ranna said the Time Committee was in emergency session, and she had to get right back to it. Said she was sorry she didn’t have time to chat with you, Joe.”

“Politics,” Jack muttered. “I thought the damn Time Committee was wrapping things up now.” Joe’s wife Ranna was the Chronology Coordinator on the Time Committee and was number two in the organization behind Dar, but now that Dar had retired, who knew how the Committee would fare? But with the end of all Heuristic Time Transitions on May 29th, which finally closed the 2013-2075 time disturbances created by the Alpha Centaurians, wouldn’t the Committee just be studying the whole phenomenon from a historical perspective?

“Well, the thing is, Jack, the Time Committee got involved because there’s really no other explanation that anyone can see.”

“For what?”

“Well, this star just disappeared. Well, not exactly disappeared, but–”

“What star?”

“Iota Persei. It just suddenly disappeared. They don’t know exactly when, because it’s not like we’re monitoring the damn thing every second. It was there a few days ago as far as they can piece it together, then a few hours ago an astronomer noticed it was gone.”

“Gone? How can that be?” Jack pulled out his comm to refresh his memory. They were all supposed to know all the stars within fifty light-years of Earth, but it was a long list and it was difficult to keep them straight. He scanned the first couple lines:

Iota Persei. Yellow-orange main sequence dwarf star. 1.3 mass of Sol. Distance from Sol: 34.36 light-years. Age: approximately 8.1 billion years.

“We can’t do any fine observations with our sensors while we’re in Star Drive,” Joe pointed out, “but as soon as we’re out we’ll run some.”

“That’s fine. Lee, did you say the thing disappeared? Not a supernova?”

“That’s the thing Jack, it just winked out! As far as visible light, that is. They started measuring the infrared, and Jack, they say it’s totally consistent with a Dyson sphere!”

Jack’s mind raced. A giant shell around a star, capturing all its energy, except for that infrared leak. “That’s not possible! It’d take thousands of years to build one, and the engineering problems, the orbital mechanics, would rule that out.”

“Jack, all Ranna’s saying is that our measurements point to a Dyson sphere.”

“It can’t be!”

“Unless it is,” Joe put in. “Who are we to say it can’t be done just because we can’t understand the orbital mechanics? All they need is smart enough computers.”

Nobody had ever considered that the fascist Alpha Centaurian Grid, linking twenty trillion citizens of the seventeen suns of the Alpha Centaurian Empire to their psychopathic Emperor, might have had an important benefit to Sol. Now the United System Space Force embarks on exploration beyond Alpha Centauri only to encounter a far worse predator that, unknown to anyone, has been kept at bay for thousands of years by the Centaurian Grid. What exactly lies outside our comfortable circle of firelight?

Series background

Collapse and Delusion, The Seven of Cups, and Unexpected Redemption

Posted on November 30, 2020 by Michael D. SmithNovember 30, 2020

The ongoing stylistic cleanup of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series continues, with Collapse and Delusion, Book Four, just republished by Sortmind Press:

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Collapse and Delusion picks up from the last exploding spaceship scene of Book Three’s 2033, and takes us to Nonprofit Chronowar’s promised wedding of September 17, 2038, where Alpha Centaurian security forces time-kidnap Jack Commer’s infant son Jonathan James to 2049, along with Phil Sperry, the greatest systems engineer in USSF history, as well as former art gallery director Hedrona Bhlon. While Phil succumbs for the second time in his life to Centaurian brainwashing, struggling with soul-wrecking guilt about his treason to the human race, Hedrona refuses to Convert to the worship of the Alpha Centaurian Emperor and is sent to become a gladiator in rocket-powered death duels invented to distract the Centaurians from the looming May 14, 2053 demise of their empire.

We finally land in 2075 with all the core characters still active, thanks to new rejuvenation techniques, and we follow Jack and his wife Amav on their journey to a backward agricultural world to get a look at the disintegration of the Centaurian Empire in the aftermath of its lost war with Sol. Their estranged son Jonathan James has chosen to remain secluded in the shattered Centaurian empire and has written a bestselling novel about the collapse of Alpha Centauri, a book which also manages to heartlessly ridicule one “Hack Blommer, Supreme Salamander of the United Sneeze.”

Phil Sperry copyright 2013 by Michael D. Smith

Phil Sperry, former USSF physician/engineer

Though Collapse and Delusion focuses on the broken relationship between the insolent, ego-saturated Jonathan James Commer and his parents, it also dwells on the character of Phil Sperry and themes of psychic survival. Locked for years in shared telepathic despair with trillions of Alpha Centaurians, Phil feels cast out of humanity, in contrast to his lover Hedrona’s heroic adaptation to new life and new energy. Yet, brainwashed once by the Centaurians in 2035, then for a second time from 2049 to 2053, Phil finally understands that his hellish decades of delusion have in fact been necessary so that he can face the third and most tempting fantasy. And this time he offers a solution to free not just himself but twenty trillion lost Alpha Centaurian souls as well.

Of course, there’s no way he can suspect such future redemption on May 14, 2053, his last day of Brainwashing II:

The Seven of Cups looked like any sled other except for the bright color scheme: the royal blue HEDRONA BHLON painted along the stern, and her personal blue, yellow, and red Tarot card across the top surface of the sled. The sled was a flat slab of metal seven feet wide, eleven feet long, but just six inches thick. The twelve thrusters, each a four-inch circle, were recessed into the aft panel. Likewise the two-inch maneuvering thrusters along the sides and top and bottom corners of the craft were flush with the surface to keep the aesthetic impression of a cold hard rectangle.

The interior of the slab consisted entirely of a HtkARR 658 Prime Antimatter engine, except for the volume required for a thousand rounds of two-inch explosive shells and a feeding mechanism up to the gun mount.

Hedrona Bhlon copyright 2014 by Michael D. Smith

Hedrona Bhlon, Foremost Gladiator of the Sled

Phil looked away from the creepy image on the surface. She’d deliberately chosen that damn Tarot card to gall him. He should never have admitted it scared him. Did she really want to take advantage of any weakness she could find? The card was human pollution, just one more infiltration of the Centaurian system. It was killing them.

He had to calm down. Nothing was killing them, nothing was killing their dear Emperor, all was well, didn’t they all know that down deep?

No, that was the illusion. They were dying. The Tarot card was real and they knew it.

Phil couldn’t stop the accelerating anxiety. Since all events throughout Alpha Centauri were instantly known by all citizens, as mediated by the wisdom of the Emperor, the Alpha Centaurians had never worried or speculated about the future. But ever since the Martian Emperor Dar had broadcast relevant portions of his Amplified Thought proofs that the Empire would cease to exist on May 14, 2053, something evil had found its way into the Grid.

They’d never needed fortune-telling, but now it was everywhere, imported from Sol. Tarot and I Ching and Ouija boards and God knew what else had all leaked in. Everyone was using it. They knew it was blasphemous, but they had to have something to combat Dar’s goddamn astrology, didn’t they? To combat today, May 14, 2053?

Phil was ashamed that each time he came to Cssarr he made Hedrona sit with him over his own Tarot deck. On every reading she insisted that the cards spelled doom on May 14, 2053, and Phil heatedly offered a counter-interpretation based on the same cards. But even as the Alpha Centaurian citizen knew perfectly well he was right, the human being still within him knew he was blowing smoke.

It was the Seven of Cups that came up, every time, whether Phil asked the Tarot about himself or the Empire. It was the Waite deck image, the man shocked to confront seven cups floating in the clouds, each holding a promise: love, sex, fame, riches, power, even mystical revelation. They were all so obviously illusions. And they annihilated Phil even as he wanted them so badly.

And Hedrona would laugh. As he shivered and babbled all his fears about the Seven of Cups, she’d cackle with delight. She’d painted the card on her sled to tell the entire Empire that Phil’s whole life was an illusion. He was deluded, the Empire was deluded, and everything was collapsing.

Series background
Waite Seven of Cups

Nonprofit Chronowar Redux

Posted on November 24, 2020 by Michael D. SmithNovember 27, 2020

Former space pilot Joe Commer inadvertently time-travels from 2036 Mars to wreck the first 2028 conference of the Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, scaring the nonprofit delegates with tales of the imminent breakdown of the solar system and war with a psychotic Alpha Centaurian Empire. Tormented by his role in dropping the superbomb that ended the Final War but rendered Earth uninhabitable, Joe has quit the United System Space Force, much to the disgust of his older brother Jack, Supreme Commander of the USSF. Meanwhile, in the audience, feckless young Urside Charmouth is horrified by the revelations, fearing that he’s ruined the universal timeline with his own drug-like Heuristic Time Transition experiments.

The republished Nonprofit Chronowar, Book Three of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, is now available from Sortmind Press.

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The cover, created for the book’s first 2013 publication by Deron Douglas, intuitively picked up on my central image for the novel, the evacuation of Earth after the Final War, with spaceships on the tarmac lined up to depart this planet forever. I’ve always been floored by the cover, not only by the 1950’s spaceship motif that reverberates with my earliest reading of science fiction, but by the evocation of my own vision of the opening scene for a hypothetical Nonprofit Chronowar movie, a scene hammering in the guilt Joe Commer keeps returning to in the third novel.

The novel focuses on the second Commer brother Joe, as well as new characters Ranna Kikken, director of the ludicrously hopeless Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, and the much younger Urside Charmouth, despairingly in love with her and journeying through time looking for alternative Rannas to love him back. The book, laced with Joe’s war guilt, does seem darker than the rest of the Jack Commer books, but it has always been an ambitious undertaking. The scenes of passenger shell disasters are still a little hard to take. So far this book has been the most difficult to reedit: not only with the series’ new compression of chronology from 2020-2033 to 2028-2033, but also with some fleshing out of a few topics; time travel can be rough!

Yet, as with all six books in the series, the reedited Book Three has no changes to any plot or characters from the first 2013 edition. I compressed the first thirteen years of the chronology to five, but aside from changing a few things people say and some explanations, the book’s structure is unchanged.

Heuristic Time Transition in Brief

Heuristic Time Transition came into public consciousness with Amherst von Goertner’s popular book, Guide to Heuristic Time Transition in 2027. Von Goertner was a popular professor/writer on HTT and spiritual matters. He’d been researching the phenomenon since 2023 and claimed to have done 55 HTT trips. His influence peaked with his book’s publication and his resulting Internet blog, television appearances, and scholarly reviews of other books on the subject.

He was not an Alpha Centaurian plant but several Centaurian operatives were assigned to monitor and influence him.

Though many people claimed to have Time Transitioned, society as a whole treated the phenomenon like accounts of out-of-the-body experiences. HTT was basically a rumor and a fad between 2027 and 2036.

Then in 2035 physicist Anton Glasgow at the University of Mars published research claiming to verify Heuristic Time Transition as a real physical phenomenon, though his investigations were limited to quark behavior. Even then, other scientists considered HTT merely a theoretical possibility.

But beneath all the controversy was the fear that some time-traveling bozo was eventually going to destroy the universal timeline. The fear was not unfounded, because Heuristic Time Transition was designed to produce precisely that result. The Alpha Centaurians just naively assumed that all such extinction would be limited to Sol.

Italicized Thinking at its Height

To say that I had overused italicizing thinking for many years is quite an understatement. I often wonder where and why I picked up this habit; all I can remember is thinking that it was adding some sort of spice to my fiction. Well, some occasional italic thinking can bring out new flavors, to continue this rather awkward metaphor, but nobody wants you to dump half a carton of salt on your novel. The first three Jack Commer novels simply had too much of this spice, and it seemed to reach its apotheosis in Book Three, marring its drive and vision.

I’m still amazed at just how much italicized thinking, CAPITALIZED ASTONISHMENT WORDS, and … babbling … ellipses–and hyphens–2013 Nonprofit Chronowar contained. There was so much italicized thinking to redo, in addition to the new series chronology having most of its effect in this novel, that I found I’d generated numerous new errors in my first reediting pass. Sometimes I’d review a redone paragraph and notice things like:

How she Ranna be allowing this?

Which hopefully I can laugh at. I have gotten quite humble about just how many errors you can leave in a manuscript with the best of intentions.

Conceptual Update, Including Bonus Excerpt

Chronology compression sparked some thoughts about how we could have developed massive new tech in the 2028-2033 period, especially considering that in 2020, very little of what I describe for eight years from now seems possible. There was one allusion to a possible explanation in the 2013 Nonprofit Chronowar, where USSF Public Relations Head Robbert Geswindoll, who worships what he calls Celestions, muses about new tech:

Formidable weapon, eh? Shatter-enhanced Electron Oblivion Sequencer, just developed over the last couple months. Our top engineer says the idea for it came to him in a dream. A dream inspired by the Celestions! Praise the Celestions!

I realized that the Centaurians’ attempt to manipulate time might have other unintended consequences, i.e., the leaking of their brilliant but often faulty technology into human science from 2028-2033. This actually stabilizes the entire series chronology starting in 2028. So I added the bolded paragraph below, where Alpha Centaurian refugee Polot tries to explain things to a very drunk Urside Charmouth, who’s inexplicably found himself at a 2075 party celebrating the end of all Heuristic Time Transition:

“Alycia told me about Alpha Centaurians. The war, how bad it is and all. Are you seriously saying they started all this HTT stuff?”

“My Chronowarp was just to view the past. Theirs was to participate, to destroy. They wanted to land in your rear and wreck your solar system before you ever had a chance to develop Star Drive. But they also got hold of my permanent HTT technique and took over lost souls, the way I took over Huey Vespertine.”

“That’s crazy! You’re just playing some sort of mind game!”

“You don’t believe they had hundreds of agents among you? That they made up the whole religion of Celestionism to brainwash people into becoming part of the Alpha Centaurian Grid?”

“That Celestion thing? That stupid cult? You’re saying Celestionism is really–”

“Yep. One giant stealth maneuver! They even got to be buddies with your Central Asian Powers, and they gave CAP the Xon bomb.”

“That’s crazy!”

“They inadvertently gave you guys a hell of a lot more. Where do you think all this new high-tech stuff has been coming from the past few years? The AC’s were boggled when they found out that their Celestion BS was leaking AC tech to you guys! The AC versions were usually more primitive, like the Warp Transfer they’ve never gotten straight. But suddenly some Earth scientist wakes up from a dream about how to make Star Drive! The Zarj were horrified to watch you guys subconsciously getting inspired by all their own tech!”

“Look, man, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a jerk, I mean, sure I’d like to believe you, but I’ve seen so much the past few weeks, all this stuff about Mars and this Final War, and Alpha Centaurians, and I just can’t take it!”

“Right, right. Anyone would be utterly discombobulated, I’m sure. Especially if they’d been driving themselves batty for months experimenting with HTT.”

Urside opened his mouth. “I need more wine to process this.”

Series background

Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, with a Nod to the Crab Emperor

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Michael D. SmithNovember 11, 2020

With the shocking suicide of spaceship Typhoon I, the four Commer brothers are reduced to two. After the Final War, the evacuation of Earth, and battle with Martian terrorists, is eldest brother Jack fit to lead the United System Space Force? He leads a peace mission to the fascist Alpha Centaurian Empire, but his marriage to planetary engineer Amav Frankston unravels under the pressures of his new command. He loses his crew to Centaurian brainwashing, and he and Amav are hauled before the dismembered Crab Emperor to face the Maximum Alpha Centaurian Torture.

The republished Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, Book Two of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, is now available from Sortmind Press.

Amazon paperback
Amazon eBook (Kindle format)
Smashwords eBook (multiple formats)

As with all six books in the series, the reedited Book Two has no changes to any plot or characters from the first 2012 edition. The 2012 cover, an image by first publisher Deron Douglas of Double Dragon Publishing, originally lacked a Book Two designation, but over the years this cover has worked out delightfully as an image for the entire series, featuring as it does Jack’s intrepid wife Amav Frankston-Commer.

Several people have told me this is their favorite Jack Commer novel. In writing it, I worked through some intriguing emotional themes. Four of the chapters are crew diaries, each offering a different angle on the ongoing Centaurian attempts to convert Jack’s crew to worship of the Crab Emperor. As his Typhoon II personnel undergo alien brainwashing one by one, Jack Commer has ordered the surviving crew to keep diaries to track their mental states. But the diaries mainly probe or bounce off Jack’s shadow side as his confused, petulant, and even violent nature erupts in response to the crisis. The painful disintegration of his marriage is thrown into fresh light by his wife Amav’s last entry. And a near-catatonic twelve year-old boy manages to tweak Jack’s ego with one final science fiction entry which Jack uneasily dismisses as pornographic.

The Crab Emperor

A dream of the dismembered Crab Emperor effortlessly slid into the novel. Definitely powerful, and probably worth some psychological analysis. Translated into the novel, the dream pinpoints the moment when Alpha Centaurian Ship’s Archivist Polot discovers the true nature of his beloved Emperor, with whom twenty trillion Alpha Centaurians are expected to remain in constant telepathic contact.

This same giddy terror was everywhere in the Receiving Hall. Where was the Emperor? The source of the Wisdom of the Grid? What the hell was that box doing there?

The faces of those standing near betrayed obvious panic. Most of these nobles and functionaries, like Polot, were seeing the Emperor for the first time. Others had been in previous attendance, but their demeanor, though more controlled, appeared no less disquieted.

At a signal from Glarzj the audience rose. Now Polot could see through the glass cover of the box. The Emperor was a Scihk. One of the revolting crab monsters from the Alpha X water world. Polot could feel the entire audience gag. That entire planet had been declared a forbidden Zone of Psychosis after the Chemical Wars seven centuries ago.

A woman next to Polot made the mistake of gasping: “Oh, flidpzxbck, what a pile of scluzzk!”

A Tarl guard instantly hauled her out of line and pulsar-tubed her head off. She collapsed to the green tile, which, interacting with a damaged organic being, secreted noxious chemicals that turned the rest of the woman’s body into twisted strands of blue gas.

Everyone pretended not to notice. Polot met the gaping eyes of Jack Commer. Then Jack, then everyone, turned back to … the Emperor. The Crab Emperor.

But the Emperor wasn’t a real Scihk Crab. He couldn’t be. The Crabs were five feet wide and stood four feet high on their six legs. This one looked like a Crab that had been cut up with a laser and shoved haphazardly into the purple box. Except that the creature was alive. Its yellow-orange legs writhed and thumped in that enclosed space, blood gushing through the moist tissue of scores of disconnected body parts. Every motion contradicted another. Nothing fit together. At times the creature seemed to be on the verge of thrashing right through the glass and flopping in pieces all over the floor.

One of the prisoners threw up. Two guards were on the woman Polot recognized as Sheila McCasland. Pulsar tubes appeared and flashed. Even as she hit the tile, two thirds of her blasted to nothingness, Sheila looked more complete, more at harmony, than the Emperor could ever possibly hope to be. She turned to blue gas.

Series background
The Original Crab Emperor Dream

The Martian Marauders, Now Digitally Remastered for Your Enjoyment

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Michael D. SmithOctober 20, 2020

The republished The Martian Marauders, Book One of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, is now available from Sortmind Press.

Amazon paperback
Amazon eBook (Kindle format)
Smashwords eBook (multiple formats)

After the sale this year of the original publisher, I’ve decided to republish all six books in the series and add a new seventh book. All are receiving error corrections and fresh editing, especially the first three. But in all cases these are stylistic corrections; there are no changes to any of the stories, any aspects of their plots, and none of their characters.

What I’ve done with The Martian Marauders is like a modern digital clean-up of something like the 1960’s Star Trek series. You could decide to watch the original faded color shows … or you could opt for the digitally remastered, much more exquisite experience.

So The Martian Marauders is definitely digitally remastered. I really did use amazing modern word processing tech on this project!

I’m also compressing the first thirteen years of the series’ chronology to five, which mostly affects the first and third books. But aside from changing a few things people say and some explanations to make all six novels in the series congruent, the chronology edits also don’t structurally alter the books.

Condensing the timeline also feeds into the intriguing idea of how we might react to some overwhelming near-future catastrophe, in this case an inexplicable breakdown of the solar system, and how we might come up with some unheard of rescue technology by the end of the 2020’s. Though our scattershot response to COVID doesn’t really encourage much optimism, nevertheless, when faced such a series of existential astronomical disasters, wouldn’t we ramp up our science and engineering in an astonishing hurry, just as two twentieth century world wars, as well as the Cold War, brought quick, fantastic technological development?

I sanitized old formatting in The Martian Marauders manuscript by using what Smashwords calls “the nuclear option,” i.e., saving the entire text to Notepad, then copying and pasting to Word, stripping all formatting and styles. This results in extremely clean text. While I think most authors would gulp at so drastic a solution, I finally realized that the Word formatting in the first three books had been riddled with underlying formatting complications. I’ve since learned to use Word styles more efficiently.

So after nuclear war on The Martian Marauders, I had to thoughtfully decide what I wanted included as far as italics and italicized thinking went–very little as compared to the first version.

I marvel at the new polish and readability I’m able to impart throughout. Especially worthwhile is a heightened awareness of word choice, and grappling with the mortifying psychic shadow of typos and conceptual errors. I forced myself to thoroughly reread any new edit, as many of my worst errors have come from fast editing that passes spellcheck but leaves a few deleted words hanging around the paragraph. It is awful to again and again stumble across correctly spelled phrases which were obviously mangled in editing, or incorrect words you’ve glossed over a hundred times, like:

They were going they to the spaceport.

Yes, there was something to this being quiet and taking in all in.

Jack sighed. “Fine, John. Let’s go ahead and patch it though us so we can all hear it.”

Somehow grammar check doesn’t catch most of these. And it’s so easy to read that paragraph over and over and over through the years and never catch it, along with editors and readers. I had been so sure when the book was originally published in 2012 by Double Dragon Publishing that it was perfect and contained no errors at all.

Republishing also sparked the urge to design a Sortmind Press logo based on a crop of a 2009 painting which I’ve used for Sortmind Press, and, as any avid reader of this blog will note, is also cropped for the blog header image. The new logo wound up on the back cover of the paperback.

New work on The Martian Marauders has been a psychic gift. I feel the book is no longer something I finished in the past according to my talents of the time, but a piece of writing that reverberates with present consciousness. I feel quite energized again about digitally remastering the whole series. I’m getting the books the way I want them. I feel that I’m finally bringing out the real stories–which, paradoxically, have always been there. Yes, it’s space opera in one sense, but I’ve also explored a lot of my literary territory here.

I boggle at the rough page and word count totals for the series, the first book done, the rest undergoing edits:

The Martian Marauders	383	97,434
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander	198	58,608
Nonprofit Chronowar	272	74,941
Collapse and Delusion	228	59,124
The Wounded Frontier	319	84,368
The SolGrid Rebellion	333	90,136
Balloon Ship Armageddon	277	70,626
	2,010	535,237

Two thousand pages. Half a million words. It never seemed like that much when I was writing them one by one.

This is the first time I’ve seriously considered, now that I fully own the publishing process on the series, that I really don’t have to end with Balloon Ship Armageddon, Book Seven, originally envisioned as the last book in the series. I’m free to go in any direction. Although there are some problems here, since Seven posits, and the unwritten Eight calls for, Jack literally saving the entire universe. What would be left for a Nine?

From the opening of The Martian Marauders:

The five hundred-mile-wide crater had been thoroughly radar-mapped, though nobody had ever seen it. They all knew the ground was still burning eight months later. Copilot Joe Commer looked away. All he could picture was the red-orange lava beneath all that soot.

“You know, I still can’t believe it,” he muttered. “Those were the Himalayas.”

His older brother Jack shrugged from the command seat to his left. “Are the sensors deployed?”

Joe took a breath. “Yep, they’re out. All five up and running. No problems.” Far to starboard hung the icy white fragments of the moon, beginning its eons-long spread into a complete ring. Joe listened to the whirring of the ventilation fans and the beeps of the electronics. The Control Room of the Typhoon I was brilliantly lit, and the reflections of its interior curved through the cockpit window, obscuring the line of twilight on the ruined planet below.

It was the first run where they hadn’t come to pick up a passenger shell. Nothing to do but drop off a few sensor satellites. Nobody else to rescue, nobody who wanted to be rescued. They were really saying goodbye.

Joe shuddered at the charcoal blanketing most of the planet. He could all but smell the death below. How could he ever have lived there?

The United System had declared June 5th the final day for mandatory evacuation, and three days ago the USS Celeste had picked up four hundred refugees, all against their will. There were only handfuls of human beings left down there anyway, all doomed, but they’d made their choice. What good did it do anymore to send USSF troops into the refugee camps, taking casualties fighting the diehards, just so they could haul a few survivors back?

Series background

The Jack Commer Resurrection

Posted on July 18, 2020 by Michael D. SmithJuly 18, 2020

I suppose that could be a clever novel title if I ever do an eighth Commer novel, but it refers to the republication of my Jack Commer, Supreme Commander SF series. My publisher, Double Dragon Publishing, was sold to a British publisher earlier this month, and although I had a choice to continue with the new publisher, I decided I really want to self-publish the series so I can update the books, especially the first three, at my leisure. At this point I own the six covers and have new ISBN’s ready for publication by Sortmind Press.

I’d actually made my decision long ago and had already made extensive notes for updating this series. In 2018 and last fall I’d reread the entire series, and while I definitely see all six published works as a complete expression, each with its own valid soul, I was bothered by the overuse of italicization and some other stylistic problems in the first three novels. They’re still great stories but I found the style overdone, even jarring in places, as opposed to the smooth story-centered workings of the last three.

There’s also the vexation of finding typos in a published manuscript and having no control over their correction. Back in 2012 Double Dragon had generously allowed corrections of numerous typos in the first two books, but somehow during a 2015 re-upload of the files the original manuscripts and their errors were reinstated. Can’t figure that one out, but it has definitely irked me.

A further issue is the chronology of the series, which seemed radically distant when I began the first book years ago. Asteroids start falling into the sun in the spring of 2020, and more solar system disasters pile up through the twenties. Finally we get the Final War in 2033, which forces humanity to emigrate to Mars. A recent blog post bemoaned my series finally going out of date this year, reinforcing the lesson to set your SF stories decades, maybe centuries ahead. Which is one reason why the series jumped to 2075, with rejuvenated characters, starting with Book Four.

The problem is that much of The Martian Marauders plot centers on the timing of spaceships moving between planets in the solar system arrangement of June 2034. Although my spaceships are so fast that they don’t need months-long orbital mechanics calculations to arrive at other worlds, they do have their speed limits and the planets really are depicted at their June 9, 2034 distances. Pushing the entire series a couple more decades into the future would unravel all that. Doable, but a huge error-prone job, and the anxiety 2036 characters have in Book Four about the long wait for the 2053 cessation of time-scrambling warfare would be lost.

Recently I’d considered leaving all the chronology intact and marketing the series as “alternate history” with 2020 asteroid disasters and the resulting worldwide unease mirroring our COVID 2020 anxieties. But that stank even as I conjured it.

But when the news about Double Dragon hit last week I had an immediate and wondrous inspiration, seeing the chronology problem in a way I hadn’t considered before. I could use 2028-2033 as five years of apocalyptic unease, in counterpoint with dizzying technological advance, and keep the same chronology after that. Yes, in eight years the series will again be out of date, but somehow this all makes emotional sense. Since I’m ready to move on from Jack Commer, I want to polish up Books One through Seven, have them out there, and move on to more literary work. If I return to space opera I’ll make a new series.

The change from Double Dragon also clears up a problem I was about to address with the publisher, namely, how to proceed with the seventh and last Jack Commer novel, Balloon Ship Armageddon, currently in final manuscript polishing. I’d figured Double Dragon was about to close and had already decided to self-publish BSA through Sortmind Press, but it was a relief not to have to do any back and forth with the publisher about Book Seven. Knowing I can proceed with the novel on my own terms, with my own cover, is a great boon. I’m not sure where Balloon Ship Armageddon will come in the new updating. I really don’t want to wait until Books One through Six are all done, though that may be the most logical path.

I’ve scoured sortmind.com and blog.sortmind.com for all mentions of Double Dragon as well as buy links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other venues. I didn’t revise the history of the novels or mention of normal publication news over time, though, just removed incorrect links.

It’s funny how the Double Dragon change, in tandem with the Balloon Ship Armageddon finishing the Jack Commer universe, has made me realize how important the series has been to me, including its weird eighth-grade origin. Yes, it’s space opera, but I’ve also explored a lot of my literary territory here. And now I’m seeing a closed circle which I want to perfect.

Publishing all seven is going to be a big task, but I accomplished stylistic revisions of The Soul Institute and CommWealth fairly easily the same way earlier this year. Above all I want a calm, centered, orderly process, and in the meantime I must get started with some new writing. It’s not unreasonable to think I could publish one of these novels per month. And exactly as with The Soul Institute and CommWealth, I’m changing the style of the first three books, not the plot or the characters. In compressing the first thirteen years of the chronology to five, I’m changing a few things people say and some explanations, but that won’t affect the structure of the books. I’m not about to start rewriting the novels. I have full trust in all seven of them.

Jack Commer, Supreme Commander Series – Overview

New CommWealth Paperbacks

Posted on July 4, 2020 by Michael D. SmithJuly 4, 2020

The CommWealth system, introduced just six months ago, has outlawed all private property–including the right to your own body. Two paperback editions are now out for the republished CommWealth:

Amazon trade paperback
Lulu.com mass market paperback

eBook versions are also available:

Smashwords eBook
Kindle eBook

And there is a new CommWealth interview on Smashwords.

Overview

Introduced six months ago, the CommWealth system has outlawed private property. As the story opens, playwright Allan Larson is walking in the rain, spies a new Porsche, and demands the owner relinquish the car. By law, the owner must comply. Everything is free in this society. You just ask for it. To avoid subtle retaliation, there’s a thirty-day waiting period before the former owner can ask for anything from the new owner. People do try to hide as much of what they’ve got as possible, but they’re castigated as Hoarders, and surprise inspections of homes, and publications of people’s inventories, are common. Often you’re called up at night and asked for several of your items, with instructions on where to leave them for pickup.

Allan has adjusted well to this new society, easily claiming umbrellas, mansions, and motorcycles from fellow citizens. Still obsessed with his ex-girlfriend Lisa after their breakup, Allan invokes the laws of CommWealth to demand ownership of her. Meanwhile bicycle mechanic and fledgling actor Richard Stapke seduces Jill Constantine, co-owner with her husband Steve of the Cup of Fog coffee shop, headquarters of the theatrical troupe Forensic Squad.

After a drunken Richard discloses that he’s secretly been writing novels and plays for years, Allan incautiously spreads the word that Richard’s a genius. But an official CommWealth claim is made of Richard’s entire literary output, and the resulting five-volume Stapke Intimacies not only reveals Jill and Richard’s affair, but brings to light a twisted history of betrayals, double agents, and murder that propel Steve Constantine and other Forensic Squad members into a suicidal revolution.

The concept of property touches us all in deep psychological ways we often don’t want to think about. Just think about “your toothbrush,” for example. The exaggerated ideas in CommWealth nevertheless encompass real ethical concerns:

Theft, greed, unconsciousness, hiding, cowering, power-lust, political intrigue, manipulations, danger, courage.

Insinuations, hoarding, unfairness, envy, demands for pity, demands for others to share, obligation, guilt trips.

Beneath the apparent farce are these realities: privacy, dishonesty, cheating.

CommWealth Background and Character Images

I Threw Jump Grenade a Little Further

Posted on July 3, 2020 by Michael D. SmithJuly 4, 2020

A psychopathic Junior Dropout Basketball League star kills a radio announcer with hand grenades, then blows up an entire sports arena to erase all witnesses.

Published by Sortmind Press, Jump Grenade is now available in numerous eBook formats from Smashwords. I published this short novel on Amazon with Kindle Select status in October 2019, but in the meantime decided that I’d rather have more places and formats for the eBook version, and so, after Select status expired this June 28th, I also published the eBook on Smashwords. Once you buy from Smashwords, you can download the book from its website in numerous versions:

EPUB (for instance, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple Books. Kobo, etc.)
Mobi (Amazon Kindle format)
PDF
HTML
and other formats shown on the product page

Smashwords also ports the book for sale at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and other venues. Jump Grenade is still available in these formats:

Kindle eBook
Amazon Trade Paperback
lulu.com mass market paperback

Bonus! Ineffable Satanic Software Horror

I’d assumed I could make a quick upload of Jump Grenade to the Smashwords site after the book’s Select status expired on Amazon, but I found myself locked in a truly insane struggle which I couldn’t solve through 1:00 AM and which I finally had to force myself to disengage from. The problem was the Mobi version which displayed all red font in some attempts, and a mixture of black and red font in others. And so I plunged into the maddening whirlpool of “doing the same thing over and over in the expectation of different results.”

I do give myself credit for sticking with different experiments and at least I didn’t collapse at my desk at 3:45 AM hammering away at Ineffable Satanic Software Horror. I knew around 12:50 AM that one last experiment was all I had left and that I had to shut down and rethink this. And much refreshed by sleep, and after checking a troubleshooting passage on smashwords.com, I found that there was a Body Text style in red font, that, though not currently used in the document, was underlying/influencing the Normal. Once that style was removed, the book finally went through all right in Mobi (Kindle) format.

Then the next day I found that I needed to finagle and resubmit the document to ward off some mysterious Table of Contents problem in the EPUB version. I didn’t even want a table of contents! But after my Satanic lesson I just calmly figured out the problem and in so doing restored the dedication to my wife Nancy which I initially assumed wouldn’t work in this version.

All very educational. I seem to have a little better understanding of Word styles now and if I ever want to build a table of contents, I have the tools. I do try to keep the novel clean with only two styles per document: Normal and Centered. But others seem to lurk.

Super Bonus if You Keep Reading this Post! A List of Major Characters

Billy Bolamme, sixteen-year-old wunderkind of the Junior Dropout Basketball League, a shamanic force of death and destruction who changes his name to Ocean Singe Horror on an LSD trip during a basketball game
Guenevere “Universe” Ryder, art gallery receptionist, Billy’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend, and unwitting accomplice in thirty thousand murders
Hiram Pebley Bolamme, Billy’s father, coach and owner of the Bolammes basketball team, an ineffectual, dreamy art gallery owner as well as a wealthy do-gooder who started the Junior Dropout Basketball League with his wife Madeline
Dan Ryder, Bolammes regular announcer, Universe’s father, and the man who must finally summon the courage to confront Billy
Frank Chester, former Bolammes player, now Bolammes co-announcer, but unfortunately quite doomed

Double Extra Bonus! Other Characters

Madeline Bolamme, Billy’s mother and the director of the Bolamme Center for Hurt Feelings
Mongar Frederick, detective with the Plattville Homicide Bureau
Emala Ryder, Universe’s mother and dean of the Billy State University School of Library Science
Jonathan Mueller, surviving witness of the Baltimore disaster who dies after giving testimony about Billy’s involvement

Jump Grenade Background

The Blank Zen Interview

Posted on June 27, 2020 by Michael D. SmithJuly 3, 2020

I’ve done about a dozen web interviews and I always found them like writing a midterm exam where, despite all the agonizing left-brained hassle, you felt you’d pulled something valid or interesting together. In response to these interviews I came up with my own set of questions I might ask another author, but I find they work just fine being left blank. They can serve as issues to muse about without having to sit down and hash out any final answers.

What would you like to see in a positive review?

Postulate a negative review. What would the inevitable troll with an axe to grind say about your book?

Or: write a scathing negative review of your own book. This may seem like marketing suicide, but it may spark some interesting self-evaluation. Just don’t publish it.

Why is your genre inspiring to you? Why are you working in this genre?

What do you fear most in contemporary society? Is there anything in your writing that reflects that?

What do you find most assuring, impressive, or rewarding about contemporary society? And is there anything in your writing that reflects that?

Is there any way your writing expresses an appreciation of human civilization since the beginning? It may be quite a stretch to answer this, but even a shirtless cowboy should be able to BS his way through this one.

Given all the book blurbs from other authors you’ve read, analyze your own book blurb as to its chances of snagging interest or a sale.

Do you use facts files, character files, etc.? At the end of a novel, are they useful? Well-ordered?

Which of your characters do you think your readers would find most memorable? Least memorable? For the least memorable, how could you rewrite/upgrade that character?

How do you promote or market your work? Are there efforts that you feel are more productive than others?

How do you take care of your prime writing instrument, your body?

Have you kept some of your earliest writings? Do you ever return to analyze them for strengths, failures, ongoing life themes?

Is self-publishing an option for you? In what ways does it affect how you approach your writing?

Do you have a sense of your work progressing towards higher levels? Or does that not interest you?

Recent Smashwords interview featuring CommWealth

The CommWealth Republication

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Michael D. SmithJuly 22, 2023

A. Property

What if anyone could ask for anything you owned and keep it for thirty days until someone else wanted it … your home, your car … even your body? Members of the Forensic Squad theatrical troupe find themselves leading a suicidal revolution against the CommWealth system, which has outlawed all private property.

CommWealth was originally published in 2015 by Class Act Books, but after it became apparent earlier this year, after queries to fellow Class Act authors and to Amazon, that the small publishing house had, as far as anyone could tell, ceased to exist, Sortmind Press was right there to step in. I checked my Class Act contract and found I could sever it by giving 60 days’ notice, and that technically it had lapsed without renewal in 2017 anyway. The entire experience has been a valuable lesson, but the important outcome was that I was able to get a freshly edited version of my novel published as:

Smashwords eBook (which ports to Barnes and Noble, Kobo, iTunes, etc.)
Amazon trade paperback
Amazon eBook
lulu.com mass market paperback

B. Copyediting

The original 2015 cover

As with the April update of my flagship novel The Soul Institute, the changes are a thorough copyediting rather than revision. The novel has the same plot and characters, just with a much improved style, mainly clearing up an old habit of relying on italicized character thoughts, as well as overuse of exclamation points.

I was surprised to find so much italicized thinking lingering in the 2015 version, as I thought I’d cut a lot in the final Class Act edits. In translating italicized character thoughts back to narrative, I found there was a low-key, conversational aspect to them which fits the tone of the novel. Much of it simply wasn’t needed, repeating what should be obvious to the reader. A made-up example of such overreach:

Gunshots echoed crazily and McPherson collapsed on the concrete, a softball-sized hole in his chest.

Oh my God! They shot him! He’s dead!

Interestingly, there were cases where I let characters just speak their thoughts and saw that they worked much better as speech. Usually italicized thinking is intended to be information withheld from other characters, yet sometimes it was perfectly in character for the person to just speak his or her line.

I wound up translating all italicized thinking back to narrative thought. There is not one italicized thought in this novel now. It just worked out that way.

As with the 2020 Soul Institute copyediting, I also cut as many hyphens and ellipses as I could, along with meandering “Well … uh–I mean–” dialog. Of course, if that punctuation did add strength to a passage, it stayed. But usually it doesn’t mean anything to the reader.

I find it strange that I ever veered onto the florid stylistic path of over-italicization. I feel I’m returning to my real voice after what may really have been an unconscious and misguided desire to perfume my writing to attract publishing suitors. I looked up the one phrase I thought so apt in query letters from the last major push for publishers, this one dated 12/17/09:

The University of Mars aims for high energy, humor, intense character interaction, and strong emotion. Extensive use of dialog and character thoughts are used to keep the feelings flowing through the narrative.

I now see that as deluded. And I just now noticed that it’s ungrammatical; it should be “is used.”

C. The Covers

1) The main cover, replacing my Property painting image. The original one was okay, but didn’t really pop. My wife Nancy was instrumental in converting me to this choice from several other great ones, but this image really does work well for getting across what the book is about.

2) The mass market paperback cover. Lulu.com has redesigned its publication process but I found that the template for making a single image cover wasn’t working well for the main image. But this led me to go back to a wraparound cover experiment I’d been playing with, which bleeds nicely to the entire cover, front and back. There was something electrifying about developing this cover with its quirky approach to the CommWealth themes.

D. Next Steps

I’m very pleased with a clean-up which has made CommWealth a much stronger novel. And because of the high energies I’ve felt doing this book along with Akard Drearstone, Sortmind, Jump Grenade, and The Soul Institute, I feel that, after some time experimenting with space opera SF, a return to literary novels is the next phase. I have to admit I’ve soured on submitting to outside publishers; it just seems like a waste of time, and for what? To repeat small publisher Amateur Hour? Getting that sort of publishing credit is close to useless and you can see what happens when the business flops.

So the energy seems to be to write well, and write new stuff, and publish it well on Sortmind Press and try to figure out sane ways of marketing and selling. To push the revamped CommWealth and The Soul Institute, for instance. Not to take a dozen science fiction novels to a book fair and just get the reaction, “Well, you sure write a lot!”

More CommWealth Background