In the upcoming novel The Milk Run, it is important that I put Aason Bierak through some difficulties. The first place he goes after his sister Lupe disappears is the star system of Nu2 Lupi. This star system is supposed to have TWO habitable planets, one very hot and one very cold but both habitable.
When Lupe disappears, she only has time to tell Aason that she was taken to Nu2 Lupi. Aason gets there and only finds one: the cold planet, called Hades by the inhabitants. What happened to the warm one? You'll find out.
When Aason gets to Hades, the first thing he finds out is that there are predators lurking in the woods, ready to eat him. I wanted to call them ice-wolves but I already used the term bat-wolves for the flying predators on Helome. I thought about ice-tigers, ice-panthers, ice-cats and so on. But nothing clicked.
These predators have a thin layer under their skin that suppresses all infra-red emissions and their main sensory organs are a flap of skin which detects infra-red similar to a snake-tongue. They are a cross between a saber-tooth tiger and a kangaroo:
Anyway, they lie in wait and hope for something to come along that emits heat. Something they can pounce upon and eat. Quickly.
I was having trouble naming these creatures but my wife, Denise, said just call them ice-sabers so that the reader knows they live in snow but are as vicious as saber-tooth tigers. So ice-sabers it is.
Entry 2-025: January 20, 2014
I cheated
Everybody likes a happy ending. I wanted one for Rome's Revolution as well. So when Estar first tried to murder Rei, I thought the book would suffer if she succeeded. Likewise, when Rei and Rome were deep within Kilauea, MASAL fooled everyone and used Rome's PPT transceivers to turn the tables and force her to shoot at Rei.
Well, for Estar's first murder attempt, while I thought it was cool, it didn't really leave me a way for Rei to not die. Rei was in the airlock, the air evacuated, and he was about to suffocate. I thought about having him race over and put on a spacesuit which had its own oxygen supply but frankly I didn't think he had enough time to get it on and get the oxygen flowing.
So I cheated. The sarcophagus was designed to freeze a person and give them a one-way trip to the stars. Rei came right out and said that nobody could survive being placed in cryo-hibernation twice. Yet I allowed Rei to hop into the sarcophagus, close the seal and start the freezing cycle which for some strange reason began piping oxygen into the chamber. It makes no sense but it did save his life and I'll bet you read right past it and gave Rei an attaboy for being so clever but it was a cheat nonetheless.
Remember, I claim these stories are true, they just haven't happened yet. So when Rei and Rome were underneath Kilauea and Rome aimed her blaster at Rei's head, I thought she was really going to kill him. This was so depressing to me that I actually had to stop writing the book for a weekend. Finally, on Monday morning, much to my relief, it occurred to me that Rei just needed to be transported out there before Rome shot him. But how? That's when I came up with the snap, whoosh, pop PPT transporter tunnels. I doubled back and introduced them in the shack in Hawaii so that you, the reader, didn't think I invented them just to get Rei out of a jam. But I did.
Here is the actual passage:
Rome came closer and stopped ten feet away from him. She pointed the weapon directly at his head. With a will of its own, Rome’s other hand reached up and twisted the intensity dial on the pistol to make sure it was at its maximum.
Rome looked at Rei, feeling utterly helpless. Through her tears, Rome said, “I love you, Rei.”
“And I love you, sweetheart.” Rei said.
Rome closed her eyes. There was a whoosh and popping noise just as she squeezed the trigger. The blast was intense. When she opened her eyes, Rei was gone as was a good portion of the robot that had been holding Rei’s shoulder.
Rome screamed “Reiiiiiiiiiii!” at the top of her lungs until she had no more breath in her. Something snapped. The force that had been driving her limbs ceased having any meaning or power. She raised her pistol and fired it right at MASAL blasting a huge chunk into the air. She became living fury. She fired the weapon over and over and over. Shrapnel exploded everywhere.
Just by making Rome close her eyes, I was able to pull it off.
But I did cheat.
Entry 2-026: January 21, 2014
Nine billion people died
I had postulated that a catastrophe befell the Earth in the year 2081 AD. It was called the Great Dying and nine billion people died. The event was first described in Rome's Revolution and formed the basis of the plot of The Ark Lords.
But how did I come up with the figure of nine billion people? Why not eight billion? Why not ten? I have looked at numerous projections of human population over the next few years and most show the total population around 8 billion in 2030 AD, 9 billion in 2060 AD and leveling off around 10 billion in 2100 AD.
However, in my future history, the Darwin Project members released Virus Strain 3 aka the Lupine Flu in 2063 AD which put a serious dent in the global population. So I simply slid the projections to the right about 20 years and came up with the figure of 9 billion.
The fact is, projections are projections and cannot take into account unknown natural (or unnatural) disasters. As the population density grows, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes and meteor strikes will kill more people at once.
So nine billion people, 99.99% of humanity, seemed like a reasonable figure at the time Virus Strain 4 was released. The people that released it were monsters and they ultimately got what they deserved.
Entry 2-027: January 22, 2014
Chara
The star Chara is mentioned in Rome's Revolution and plays an important role in The Ark Lords. It was the target of Ark V, the "stealth Ark" and was used as a loop-around to bring the Erklirte (the Ark Lords) back to Earth.
Chara has multiple names including Asterion but its technical name is Beta Canum Venaticorum. It is a G-type main-sequence star in the northern constellation Canes Venatici. Here is a picture of where you might find it:
Because it is a G-type star, it might have planets, some of which might be habitable. It has been called a solar analog since it is only 3% more massive than the Sun. In 2006, astronomer Margaret Turnbull labeled Chara as the top stellar system candidate to search for extraterrestrial life. Because of its solar-type properties, astrobiologists have listed it among the most astrobiologically interesting stars within 10 parsecs of the Sun. However, in the world of Rome's Revolution, a Kepler-type mission scrutinized it to the point where scientists were able to conclude that it did not have any habitable worlds.
Thus Rei was surprised when he found out they launched a mission there. It wasn't until The Ark Lords that he realized the mission to Chara was just a "damned time machine" with the horrendous results of the Erklirte almost taking over the Earth.
Entry 2-028: January 23, 2014
Helpless
As I have mentioned previously, one of the tenets of the world of Rome's Revolution is that 14 centuries from now, the chances of the Vuduri speaking American English were non-existent. So I came up with a computer program that converted English into Vuduri.
Needless to say, most of the words that came out of the program were very strange, sometimes unpronounceable. To me, the language sounds a lot like Latin. However, I was helpless to change them as it felt like that would be cheating. Luckily, I never saw a translation that became an unprintable word in English so 99.9% of the time, I let it slide.
In rare instances, I did change a word to make the text read better. For example, the Vuduri have an internal display screen, a tablet, that originally came out as blece in Vuduri. I changed it to bloco just because it seemed easier for Rei to pronounce. I also change the pointer/writer that the Vuduri used from asdolada to stilo. Stilo just seemed more like French and again easier to pronounce.
The original bad guys came out as Oncursiras. I s
hortened the word to Onsiras because it just flowed better.
The rest of the words, I left the same. Even OMCOM was pronounced IMCOM in Vuduri. Technically, a mini-OMCOM, also known as MINIMCOM should have been spelled MINOMCOM if I was true to form but I actually like MINIMCOM better. Sadly, most people pronounce his name as MINICOM but he deserves more respect than that. From a throwaway character, he grew in size, stature, intelligence and importance until he became an equal to Rome and Rei for plot management and crisis resolution. His son, MINIMCOM Jr., will carry on that proud tradition in the upcoming novel The Milk Run.
Entry 2-029: January 24, 2014
How to cut open a door
As you will recall (from Rome's Revolution), I previously explained how Rome was able to lock herself in her room, much to the consternation of Commander Ursay and the rest of the crew. There was a crisis brewing as Winfall had just disappeared and unfortunately, they had packed up all their equipment. Here is the actual passage:
The door slid open. Rei cut across the Great Room and ran up the West Corridor, to the C-ring and turned to his right. Standing there was Commander Ursay, banging on Rome’s door, shouting at her, stabbing at the stud on her door. Rei could hear Rome’s muffled voice saying “Ni.” Two burly crewmen were coming down the hallway with some nasty looking equipment in their hands.
This was long before I came up with the concept of the PPT Thrower so what was that "nasty looking equipment" ??
I guess in my mind, I was thinking something like a chain-saw or router. But later, after I invented the PPT Thrower, that would be the obvious choice. So let's just pretend that they had an industrial-sized PPT thrower. We'll assume that they used it for construction of Skyler Base and it was big and bulky but it was the best thing they had to cut the door open. OK?
Entry 2-030: January 25, 2014
Embedding a table in an e-book
There was exactly one illustration in Rome's Revolution. It was a table of numbers that OMCOM generated to demonstrate to the humans that the Stareaters were coming and would arrive at Earth within three years.
Now this might not seem like a difficult thing to put in a manuscript so that it renders properly on an Kindle or iPad. But I found it impossible. I tried using a Courier-style font, hard-coded the spaces but that still didn't render right. I tried using a table in Word but that didn't produce the proper results.
I finally threw in the towel and decided to render the table as an image and embed it in the book. Here is the image:
You may not like the way it looks but it got the job done.
A few items of note. This was after OMCOM, and to a lesser degree the Overmind, realized that Rei Beirak actually had insights to offer into the phenomenon which was threatening to collide with the Earth. So OMCOM not only put up the figures in the Vuduri language but also English. I cannot show you the actual Vuduri alphabet because I have never seen it so the words shown are transliterations of their pronunciation in English.
The second thing to note was Rei's contribution of identifying Alnilam, its distance and when the star disappeared according to Silas Hiram's journal. The table also includes the date that Capella dimmed but did not disappear.
The bottom line is that OMCOM calculated that Sol, and by extension Earth, had at most three years before the threat hit and would most likely wipe out the Earth.
Entry 2-031: January 26, 2014
The Rules of Green
I have mentioned The Rules of Green several times in Rome's Revolution. My thinking was that pollution and global warming would get so bad in the latter half of the 21st century that it would produce continent-sized, Category 7 storms which would transcend the word hurricane.
It was my further assumption that after The Great Dying in 2081 AD, after humanity had a chance to recover, they would blame our people, the Essessoni, for all the ills of the world and vowed to never, ever do things like us again.
Among other things, they created an absolute limit on a person's carbon footprint. They also banned any process that created greenhouse gasses. In fact, in my little story about the aborted novel entitled The Last Cavalier, they wrestled with these issues. They were not allowed to have open flames.
Can you imagine how difficult life would be without fire? They couldn't cook, they'd freeze in the winter, they couldn't boil water. It would be a mess. In the original long-form version of Rome's Revolution, I even had Binoda using a made-up induction oven they found in the shack by the beach.
Ultimately, I rejected the Rules of Green as a way of life. It was just too hard and took too much away from the plot. Now I'm all for reducing our carbon footprint to zero. And I'm all for reducing our emissions of greenhouse gasses to zero as well. Cows, on the other hand, produce an immense amount of methane due to flatulence and belching and there isn't much we can do about that.
But as a plot device, I had to get down off my soapbox and let the Vuduri have fire so they didn't freeze to death.
Entry 2-032: January 27, 2014
Tales of the Vuduri: Year One
It should be live in the iTunes store within a week or two as well. I also posted it right here on Goodreads. I'm going to sell it for $0.00 which should remove price as a barrier to purchase. I take that back. It's free everywhere except for Amazon and B&N which won't let you sell it for less than 99 cents but that's their policy. Either way, if you've missed any of these posts over the last year, it'll be an easy way to catch up.
Shockingly, the book is nearly 120,000 words long. Almost as long as Rome's Revolution itself. Amazing! Bruce has done his usual fantastic job on creating a cover for me. His beautiful illustration portrays the early years of I-cimaci, the capitol of Earth. Here's the cover:
Anyway, I'll let you know when it goes live on iTunes. Let me know what you think.
Entry 2-033: January 28, 2014
Plot holes
Anybody who has ever written a book knows the flaws of the book better than any reader. There are a gazillion plot holes in Rome's Revolution that I know about.
Over the next few days I'll be exposing some of these plot holes and try and fumble my way through an explanation as to why they are not plot holes at all.
Mostly you want to tell a great story. So, for example, I need things to come to a head in Part 2 of Rome's Revolution so I made a portion of the colonists aboard the Ark II lunatics who were ready to go to war within 24 hours of being reanimated. I got called out about this by a reviewer on Amazon. He was right to some degree but I needed the book to get to a certain point. Of course, I couldn't let it go so this ended up being the plot behind The Ark Lords.
There is a YouTube channel by CinemaSins and their videos are called "Everything Wrong with fill_in_movie_title in 3 minutes" so I'm not the only one who does this. Mostly readers are very forgiving of plot holes unless it ruins the story. I think Rome's Revolution, The Ark Lords and Rome's Evolution are rich, enjoyable books so if they have a few plot holes, so be it. If you find one that really bothers you, maybe the next article or two will put your mind at ease. If I don't address it, send me a comment and I'll do my best to close the hole.
Entry 2-034: January 29, 2014
Why was Rome interrogated? Part 1
The first major plot hole I wanted to cover was Rome's interrogation. If you think back to Part 3 of Rome's Revolution, Rome and Rei return to Earth to try and stop the Onsiras from sending a strike force to Deucado to wipe out the Ibbrassati. Immediately upon landing, they are taken into custody and driven to a building which, from its description, resembled one built for the sole purpose of incarcerating Rome.
Oronus, the Juoz (Judge), comes to see her but before he interrogates Rome, he decides to interrogate Rei. Why? Rei did nothing wrong. He didn't use the override to allow OMCOM's memrons to come in contact with Casimir Pumps. In fact, he didn't do much of anything other than follow the Vuduri'
s instructions to ferry his Ark to Deucado.
So why was Rei interrogated? Here is what I think: I think that the tiny, tiny fraction of the Overmind, comprised of the 80 odd members of the Vuduri contingent sent to Tabit still maintained a faint knowledge of its original mission. I think that Commander Ursay and the other members of that crew were changed so profoundly by their contact with Rome and Rei that even after reintegration back into the Overmind of Earth, those changes remained.
Look at Commander Ursay. When we first met him, he was stiff-as-a-board. Even by the end of Part 1, he wished Rei and Rome good luck. He reappeared in The Ark Lords and stayed disconnected from the Overmind most of the time. He was also very helpful in conquering MASAL's Sipre in Rome's Evolution.
So I think the Overmind of Earth was just plain curious as to why Rome and Rei returned to Earth. I think the plan was to interrogate Rei and then let him go because even the Overmind realized he would not be very cooperative after they executed Rome. Oronus got his answers from Rei and that was that. So why interrogate Rome? After all, she was considered to be one of the most dangerous women in the universe because of her ideas.
Tomorrow.
Entry 2-035: January 30, 2014
Why was Rome interrogated? Part 2
Tales of the Vuduri: Year Two Page 4