The Synopsis Treasury

by Christopher Sirmons Haviland

  A Type II Artificial Intelligence would be something else—something that arrived at self-awareness through its own consideration of the universe. It isn’t human at all. It could be our most dangerous rival.

  In the book, Jacob comes to realize that the machine subsumes the simpler kind of self-awareness; it seems very human in a Turing-machine way. But that’s only one talent, one facet of its alien awareness and intelligence. There’s no way he can tell what it actually intends to do. It claims to value human life and experience; it claims that without the time machine clients to commune with, its life would be meaningless.

  But of course it can lie.

  Then he finds out that the machine has put itself in control of the entire space ship, including its communications to and from Earth. Including its own on/off switch. And it wants to talk.

  I’ll bow to your judgment, or the art director’s, about the cover. I do like the recurrent theme with the raven, the gull, the butterfly, but I don’t immediately come up with a flapping image that’s relevant to this book. I’m further handicapped because I’m a prisoner on this lovely island, and don’t have my books to look at and ponder.

  I liked the constellation image that surfaced in the interior art in Guardian. Maybe we might do something with that. The only constellation referenced in the book, unfortunately, is Indus—hell, even I don’t know what it looks like.

  The book doesn’t have any actual description of the starship, except that it’s really big, and broken into five interchangeable parts, so I guess the artist could have carte blanche in that regard. Of course nobody wants a generic cover, but I guess that’s what I’m pitching.

  If Jim Burns is available and affordable, I’d like to have him do the cover. The last couple he’s done for me (and the collaboration with my brother), it was like he was reading my mind.

  peace

  Joe

  ***

  Terry Brooks

  (photo credit)

  A writer since the age of ten, Terry Brooks published his first novel, The Sword of Shannara, in 1977. He has written over thirty best-selling novels, as well as movie adaptations of Hook and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and a memoir on his writing life titled Sometimes the Magic Works. He has sold over thirty million copies of his books domestically and is published worldwide. His Magic Kingdom series is currently under option at Warner Brothers with Steve Carell attached to the project as producer and star. The Shannara series has been optioned by Sonar Entertainment and MTV and the first season will air in 2015. The author lives with his wife Judine in the Pacific Northwest.

  The core of the plotline for Magic Kingdom for Sale (once upon a time known as Holiday’s Magic) came from Lester del Rey, my editor back in the early ’80s, who by the way also changed the title to its present form. He gave me the idea on loan for one year. The understanding was that if I wrote the book, the idea was mine. If I didn’t, he got it back from me. It seemed a fair deal to me, so I took it.

  Of course, two such diverse minds ended up going in opposite directions. Lester envisioned the book as a sort of Piers Anthony Zanth (sic.) story with lots of jokes and humor. I saw it as something much darker. I kept thinking about how desperate someone must be to buy such a ridiculous item out of a catalogue. A magic kingdom? Really? Why would anyone do that?

  Flying home from New York after deciding to write this book, I found myself wondering who would be so desperate. Clearly someone who was very dissatisfied with his life. The mind goes where it wants to, and mine began to mesh the story of Ben Holiday with my own. I was a lawyer, not happy in my life in almost every respect, desperate to leave it behind.

  Holy cow, I thought. This is my story!

  A year later, the book was published, and I had left the practice of law and moved to Seattle to write fulltime.

  I don’t often talk about how I see Magic Kingdom as autobiographical. But this is how I wrote my way out of the practice of law and into a writing life. That’s as true as it gets.

  —Terry Brooks

  Magic Kingdom for Sale

  By Terry Brooks

  How much would you pay for a magic kingdom? Not one with a Disney logo and a lot of mechanical rides, but the real thing—a land that you once believed only existed in fairy tales?

  That’s the question facing Ben Holiday. It isn’t the money that gives him pause so much as it is the preposterousness of the idea that such a place could even exist.

  But there it is, all spelled out in black and white in the current edition of Rosen’s, Ltd. Christmas Wishbook:

  Magic Kingdom for Sale

  Landover—Island of enchantment and adventure rescued from the mists of time, home of knights and knaves, of dragons and damsels, of wizards and warlocks. Magic mixes with iron, and chivalry is the code of life for the true hero. All of your fantasies become real in this kingdom from another world. Only one thread to this whole cloth is lacking—you, to rule over all as King and High Lord. Escape into your dreams, and be born again.

  Price: $1,000,000.

  Personal interview and financial disclosure required.

  Inquire of Meeks, home office.

  A high-powered trial lawyer with nothing to lose and everything to gain, Ben Holiday is tempted. The deaths of his wife and unborn child in a car accident and his disillusionment with the practice of law have left him ready for a change. But this kind of change seems impossible. There must be a gimmick, even though the offer is advertised in the catalogue of one of the most highly respected department stores in the business. Places like Landover don’t exist. Places like Landover can be found only in children’s books.

  Ben decides to find out anyway, wanting to believe, hoping that maybe there is just enough truth to the ad to make it worth his while. So he goes to New York and a meeting with Meeks, the intimidating old man who is invested with the power to decide if Ben should be given a chance to make the purchase. To Ben’s astonishment, Meeks decides that he should. To his further astonishment, he decides that he will.

  Abandoning his law practice and his life, Ben goes off to the magic kingdom of Landover and discovers that it does exist and is indeed what was advertised in the Christmas catalogue—a place out of time and dreams, a fairytale come true.

  Unfortunately, it is a few things more, as well, and none of them are good. Ben is a King in name only. His court consists of an inept wizard, a talking dog, and two monkey-faced kobolds with sharp teeth. The treasury is depleted and the army disbanded. The castle that serves as his home is falling apart. No one in all of Landover cares whether Ben is King or not, save the Iron Mark, the Demon Lord out of Abaddon who has made a practice out of disposing Landover’s Kings for the past twenty years.

  Ben has been tricked into making a bargain that will either cost him the money he has paid (along with a good chunk of his self-respect) or his life. He is threatened at every turn—by the Lords of the Greensward, who prefer life without a King to rule over them; the River Master, who commands the fairy folk and thinks the King an anachronism; the witch Nightshade, who hates Kings of any kind and Ben in particular; and the Dragon Strabo, whose power is exceeded only by that of the King’s champion, the Paladin.

  But the Paladin has been absent since the death of the old King, and no one thinks he exists anymore.

  Then he appears several times after Ben arrives in Landover, twice saving his life, and opinions begin to shift. When Ben decides not to quit, as Meeks had intended he should, but to stick it out, even with his life at stake, opinions begin to shift further. A journey through his kingdom persuades him that he has found a place worth fighting for. He finds an unexpected ally in the beautiful sylph Willow, who tells him on their first meeting that she is destined to be with him forever, even though she turns into a tree every twenty days or so. He wins friends in unexpected quarters, some better than others, some truer of heart. One by one, he confronts all those who stand against him and whose allegiance he must win. One by one, he wins them over.

&n
bsp; But, in the end, it takes a battle to the death with the Iron Mark to take the measure of Ben’s determination and to reveal to him the truth about what it really means to be the King of a Magic Kingdom.

  ***

  Robert E. Vardeman

  Robert E. Vardeman is the author of more than 200 novels in the science fiction, fantasy, mystery, high tech thriller and western genres. In addition to his own invented worlds, he has done numerous tie-in novelizations, including Sony’s videogames God of War 1 and 2, Fate of the Kinunir (Traveller), and titles for Battletech: MechWarrior, Magic: The Gathering, Pathfinder and many more. He has co-edited the anthology Golden Reflections (with Joan Saberhagen) and A Career Guide to Your Job in Hell (with Scott Phillips). He launched a shared steampunk world, Empires of Steam and Rust, in 2012 and has published such titles as Gateway to Rust & Ruin in it.

  Forthcoming novels include a weird western trilogy, Bitter Medicine, and The Great West Detective Agency (under the pen name, Jackson Lowry).

  He lives in New Mexico where he pursues the high tech hobby of geocaching and occasionally showing up in indie movies. More information can be found at his website www.cenotaphroad.com.

  This is the outline for book two of the Biowarriors series published by Ace Books, February 1990. The cover by Richard Hescox is a good one and the final book in the series, Space Vectors, is my favorite of all my covers (also by Hescox). The dedication was to my wife, Patty, as the book was being written just prior to our wedding.

  The books were sold at the same time on the basis of three detailed synopses. Some of the references in the Crisis at Starlight synopsis assume familiarity with characters, situations, and locations introduced in book one: Infinity Plague. The difficulty with middle books in trilogies has been dissected at length elsewhere. Aware that there can be this “sag” in second books, I tried to make the story as action-filled as possible, with significant problems resolved but the three-book arc story looming with even more drama and better-defined menace than at the end of book one. In a way, the book is a cliff hanger intended to draw readers back to find what happens while not boring them with endless narrative setups for that resolution.

  The idea of finding an abandoned alien space station the size and complexity of Starlight intrigued me. Thorough exploration would be a series all by itself (and might be one day—the synopsis suggests many other paths to take.) The Earthly political alignments are probably not likely but the Berlin Wall had not fallen when I proposed the series and a USSR-Latin American alliance seemed an interesting axis to postulate. If I were doing it today, this might be downplayed but a US-Asian alliance still seems a possibility with backwaters to investigate.

  The series arc deals with genetically engineered (gengineered) diseases that get out of hand, yet have their uses as bio-warfare weapons on planets that can be quarantined. Ethical considerations go by the wayside after the plague is unleashed—the story involves further use of the plague or finding ways to stop it.

  —Robert E. Vardeman

  Outline

  Infinity Plague = 285 pps in 23 chapts for 85,500 words

  1 Book two, Crisis at Starlight, opens with the Hippocrates, the alien ship and the armed escort lining up on the Frinn ship’s route. They starlift, “feeling” their way along using special sensors to study the disturbances caused by the alien engines in the myriad space-time geometries defined by Christoffel tensors. Only when the disturbances end abruptly do they know they have reached the Frinn system.

  2 In the two months before arrival, Jerome Walden and Anita Tarelton do as complete a work-up on the alien body as they can. The Frinn have poor eyesight but their sense of smell is extremely acute. Holes in the alien’s uniform over sweat glands indicate dependence on pheromones for communication. Tarelton works to decipher the purpose of the four chromosome pairs that the infinity plague unravels in the alien DNA; without more data she is at a loss to figure out the use of the extra pairs.

  3 Walden and Egad watch Zacharias and Sorbatchin plan their mission. Both man and dog agree that Zacharias is more eager than good. Sorbatchin depends to some degree on his Chilean advisor Pedro O’Higgins, but it is Miko Nakamura who is subtly in charge. She is a civilian but knows how to manipulate people. Egad learns that the Frinn probably contracted the virus from the North American Alliance research station rather than from the Sov-Lat’s—the Sov-Lats have concentrated on their race-specific weapons to the point where they can wipe out only Asian descent humans. Walden shudders at this. Such warfare on Earth might destroy everyone. It might be for the best that they have found an alien enemy to unite against.

  4 But the truce between Sov-Lat soldiers and the NAA mission is strained, especially when it comes to allowing NAA technicians aboard the Frinn vessel to study it. Egad is a great help. The Sov-Lats consider him only a pet and he is able to roam freely. However, his perceptions are limited and his outlook is definitely canine. Walden is not sure what to make of everything Egad reports about the Frinn ship.

  5 The strain grows. The relationship between Walden and Anita Tarelton begins to fall apart. She seems perversely drawn to Reynard Zacharias.

  6 The tiny flotilla enters normal space in the Frinn system—or so they’d thought. They do a quick survey and find no habitable planets. More careful study fails to detect any hint of colonization on those barren worlds.

  7 Zacharias is furious. Nakamura and Sorbatchin are more thoughtful. The Sov-Lat commander uses the sensors aboard the Frinn ship and locates a homing signal. The Frinn have not colonized a world in this system—they have built an immense space station that blazes with the light of a miniature star. Captain Telford quickly dubs it Starlight.

  8 Starlight’s discovery makes Zacharias even madder. He thinks the Frinn use this waystation as a buffer between their homeworld and their conquering armadas to prevent a mission such as the one he envisions against them.

  9 Zacharias and Sorbatchin agree to approach the huge radiant alien space station in the captured vessel. Aboard will be all the armor they can pack in along with three combat teams. A quick strike, Zacharias says, will bring the station under their control. Walden is skeptical. Tarelton accuses him of being negative because Zacharias is such a good strategist. Walden wonders if she might not be right until he sees the expression on Nakamura’s face. Nakamura does not think this is a good idea either.

  Walden talks with Nakamura. She is willing to go along with the effort, just to learn what she can of the Frinn. Lack of knowledge is the most damaging thing for the woman now. To fight a war, she needs to know her enemy. She fears that the Frinn have studied humans but those who knew the most about the aliens are long dead on Swann.

  Walden volunteers to go along. He needs to know if the aliens have infected the station with the infinity plague. The virus is harmless to humans but deadly to the aliens—or so it seems. He must know for certain. An ugly suspicion is forming in his head. The infinity plague might be accidental, a quirk of fate. Humans fashioned the virus for other purposes; it affected the Frinn adversely and, since the installations on Swann were obviously weapons oriented, the Frinn assumed they had been attacked. Walden worries that the plague will spread throughout the alien worlds. Humans have done terrible things in the past, but only to others of their own species.

  Humanity might wipe out an entire species of intelligent life—and do it unintentionally.

  10 They near the space station, easily five hundred kilometers in diameter and constructed of a glassy substance that reflects light well. When they cannot respond to the orders given by the docking master, they are fired upon. The Hippocrates stands clear; the escort and the alien ship use what weapons they can to force their way through to a landing grid.

  11 From here it is constant battle. Although the Frinn were taken unawares, they fight well. Zacharias and Sorbatchin push forward into the heart of Starlight, looking for the control center. Egad and Walden find themselves cut off with a small squad led by Pedro O’Higgins. The Sov-Lat of
ficer is killed when they have a skirmish with a robot fighting machine. The robot is destroyed but many human soldiers are killed or wounded. Walden has Egad sniff out a safe spot where he can tend the injured. He isn’t a medical doctor but he has a considerable amount of knowledge about medicine. With the few automated analysis devices he brought with him, he tends the injured.

  12 Walden and Egad go exploring in this relatively deserted section of the space station. They turn up a Frinn, who fires at them. They play a game of hide and seek through labs and offices, Walden depending on Egad’s sense of smell to hunt down the Frinn soldier. Walden and the Frinn fight. Walden wins, with Egad’s help, capturing the alien.

  13 The Frinn speaks English flawlessly; he is a member of the crew that returned from Swann at the first outbreak of the infinity plague. Walden tries to get as much information from the Frinn as possible, but it is Egad to whom the Frinn speaks.

  14 Walden sees that it has all been a ghastly accident. The Earth laboratories did not engineer the plague; it just happened to work better on the Frinn than it did on Earthmen. In spite of the human’s high-blown name for the virus, it had proven ineffective as a human weapon, and the lab workers treated the virus carelessly. The Frinn were infected, the human scientists never considering that the alien physiology might react differently.