United System Space Force leader Jack Commer has resigned to probe a dangerous cosmic irregularity, elevating physician/engineer Laurie Lachrer to take his place. But when she finds herself inexplicably transported onto his suicide mission, she must struggle to assert herself as the new supreme commander. Meanwhile fascist elements overthrow the United System and hunt Laurie as a traitor, and a malfunctioning, decades-old robot, in love with her, writes a sardonic science fiction novel asserting his own control over the narrative.

Published by Sortmind Press

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The excellent cover art comes from Kara D. Wilson at Emerging Ink.

Supreme Commander Laurie, Book One in a series of the same title, follows Laurie’s new challenges. I decided from the beginning not to plot an entire novel series at once, but to throw whatever I had into Book One now and let subsequent novels explore newer themes. The first book pulls Laurie forward as the main character and pushes Jack back into a supporting character role. But along the way a couple interesting new characters threatened to take over the narrative.

Pulling Laurie

Laurie Lachrer was one of my favorite people in the Commer series. She began as a walk-on with a handful of lines in Book One, The Martian Marauders. As a nineteen-year-old USSF airman first class in 2034, she was mainly present to amaze the rest of the novel’s characters that Jack’s feckless younger brother John had such a stunning, super-intelligent girlfriend.

Forty years later Laurie became a main figure in the Commer series’ fifth book, The Wounded Frontier. By the 2070s she’s abandoned a succession of low-level United System Space Force jobs to reinvent herself as physician/engineer on the newest Typhoon spaceships, and though sixty-one, rejuvenation technology has kept her and most other series characters looking thirty to forty.

In the last Commer book, Jack decides to retire. But before flying the brand-new Typhoon VIII spaceship into a star in a doomed attempt to probe a dangerous cosmic irregularity, he issues a rather offhand last will and testament that promotes the stunned Laurie to admiral and makes her supreme commander of the USSF.

Her challenge is to assess whether she has what it takes to really be that leader. But as she begins to understand that the anomaly threatens the structure of the universe she’s finally driven to claim her new responsibility.

Pushing Jack

It was difficult at first to shoo Jack offstage, as well as other Commer series figures, but as I began focusing on Laurie, Jack naturally receded into a secondary character. Of course there’s no way the new book can ignore his final mission in Balloon Ship Armageddon, especially since Laurie mysteriously gets added to his crew on his dubious enterprise. This in turn led to further meditations on the nature of the anomaly at the center of the universe.

Since the novel emerges from his SF series, Supreme Commander Laurie includes relevant details of the Commer history to get a sense of how Laurie tackles her new role. But Books Two and beyond will definitely need much less, if any, of that background.

Surprises

Two ostensibly minor characters unexpectedly evolved into major forces: the insouciant Mickey Mal Michaels and the deluded but secretly honorable Major John West. Both are decades-old robots from the collector’s series Heroes and Villains of the Thirties, both eager to receive the latest robotic software upgrades.

A Lieutenant Mickey Mal Michaels HAVOTT robot was created with as much detail as its programmers could find about the dead Typhoon I turret gunner, including his online writing journal of 2.6 million words and his secret aspiration to be a science fiction writer. Absurd chapters of this interstellar anti-hero’s Fathom the Doomboat Stars are thus mixed into the narrative. The robot’s style is bombastic, sarcastic, and polluted by his insistence that he can just guess what is happening in the novel’s plot by using his AI methods to sort through billions of possibilities. But the weird thing is that he usually gets close.

After finishing the book I was struck by the stylistic similarities with Michaels’ style and my recently published Man Against the Horses! Four Theater of the Absurd Novelettes, which features four long freewheeling stories I wrote at age twenty-two.

Can Mickey Mal remain in the series? He does get sent on various celestial duties which we assume he’ll never return from. But who knows?

Robot Major John West, another HAVOTT recreation of a Martian Marauders character who died in battle in June 2034, finds himself in thrall to the new fascist president of the United System, Robert Easterling. Always eager to rise in the USSF organization and serve his human masters, he’s just been appointed Director of USSF Public Relations, since he’s a top expert with the USSF’s new business model of Frenzied Performance.

However, when sleazy Detention Services head Carla Posttner destroys the Typhoon VII spaceship at Easterling’s urging, West is horrified and begins to realize where his duty lies. Now he feels ashamed of ever having kowtowed to Easterling and his business jargon, and vows to rectify things as a loyal USSF man.

West was never arrested for his role in the fascist takeover. He might return in Book Two.

The first book also introduced some relatively minor characters I want to explore in subsequent books, including Typhoon III copilot Commander Mavis Wheeler, Detention Services guard Cadagasgar Wirlmann, Jonathan Commer navigator Lieutenant Pam Jonson, and Typhoon VI copilot Commander Saxon Greenhill. Though Greenville met an unfortunate demise during the Typhoon VII obliteration, he can always be reconstituted as a robot.

Selling Books

My final edits produced what I now think is a good novel. The cover kicks my ass to move forward with new kinds of marketing. If ever there was a cover to sell a book, this is it.

Most authors moan about marketing. I’ve had various seasons of committing to it, then withdrawing in favor of concentrating on the art itself, and I’ve heard other authors say similar things.

But why bother to write this stuff and publish it if you don’t make a valid effort to sell it? I decided not to immerse myself in marketing schemes in 2023 as I accustomed myself to retirement, but now I see there may be new tactics to explore. Above all cut out “marketing theater,” tasks that seem to promote your work but waste time and don’t give anything in return.

What reverberates for my writing right now:

• Pushing Supreme Commander Laurie with a real eye to selling it. I like the term “selling the book” rather than “marketing the book.” If SCL is important, I should act as if it were!
• Focusing on my flagship novel The Soul Institute with a new wraparound cover and a new feel to the printed object.
• Continued musing on new kinds of fiction. Not necessarily beginning a new literary novel this year, but being open to it.
• And of course also musing on SCL Book Two.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Supreme Commander Laurie Background
Emerging Ink
Kara D. Wilson