Spoilers circle on G+

I'm going to post ongoing bits of things I'm working on on G+ -- no massive spoilers, but if you're interested in reading them, +1 or otherwise respond on this post and I'll add you to the list.

On Art

You can’t define art.

You can’t define storytelling.

You can’t define writing except in the most trivial and reductionist way: “words strung together.”

There are no rules. We tell young writers there are rules, because it helps limit the size of the problem they’re wrestling with, but really there are not. There’s technique, and that’s helpful and important: a command of technique is the difference between hit and miss and the ability to reliably produce competent work. But techniques are not rules.

There are no rules of writing I’ve ever seen that do not have exceptions – and let’s not waste our time with “the exception that proves the rule,” since this is merely a phrase misused by people who don’t understand it – it merely meant, in its original use, that the rule had been proven false.

Rules that have exceptions are guidelines, not rules. Orwell’s five rules famously contain a sixth that effectively says, “Except when the rule makes no goddamn sense for what you’re trying to do.” Elmore Leonard has ten rules that should be required reading for young writers – but which some great writers violate repeatedly to good effect. (Leonard, being a great writer, is as aware as Orwell that his rules are merely guidelines: his essay on his rules of writing finishes with an example of Steinbeck breaking these rules to good effect.)

Some rules I’ve had thrown at me over the years – once by Damon Knight, who said I’d convinced him, when we were done:

“A story must not be boring.” Says you. I’ve been bored by lots of stories.

OK, how about: “A story must not be intentionally boring?” Well, Waiting for Godot certainly appears to be.

“A story is a person with a problem.” It can be. But not always: sometimes a story is about something unambiguously good happening to a person.

Maybe even just: “A story must be about a person?” No? One of my favorite pieces of my own writing is a story about a tree, On Sequoia Time.

*

Stories are just a subset of all the kinds of art out there.

Recently a screenwriter I otherwise respect argued that the television show Dexter, far from being one of the best things on television, wasn’t even art: it was pornography, an exercise in pandering to the base instincts of its audience.

I am not writing to defend or even to praise Dexter. I don’t care if you like it, if you think it’s bad trash or good trash or simply brilliant. (I’ll go with “simply brilliant.”) Practically nobody likes George A. Romero’s Knightriders as well as I do, and that’s fine; I’m long past requiring external validation for my tastes, and I still watch Knightriders every year around my birthday, regardless of the opinions of others. (It is one of the best independent American movies ever made, by the way, despite being too long and having a few lapses of tone here and there.)

But the bright line used to consign Dexter to “porn” was this: that art must challenge us (and thatDexter did not, in this writer’s opinion.) That it must take our expectations and confound them, must make us reconsider what we know or believe to be true –

– and absolutely: this is one of the real functions of art, a vital and important function. But it’s not the most important function and it’s not the place where we divide work into “art” on one side and “porn” on another. Art, to borrow a terrible cliché (and Orwell would tell me not to do this) … is an elephant. We see the parts of it that we respond to, we become aware of art because it moves us. The parts that we don’t respond to are not art … for our purposes: but they may be art for the purposes of our neighbors, who are of different ages and genders and backgrounds, who have different life experiences and skills and lovers and friends and family.

Should art challenge us? Yes.

Should it uplift us? Yes.

Warn us? Yes.

Scare us? Yes.

Teach us new things? Yes.

Reinforce what we know to be true? Yes.

Entertain us? Hell yes.

Connect us to one another? Yes.

Let us see through someone else’s eyes? Yes.

Remind us of our common humanity? Yes.

Remind us of the ways in which we’re unusual, or even unique?

… yes.

Art is whatever you experience as art: all that’s required is that some person or persons, in an intentional act, created something that, when you encountered it, caused an emotional or even spiritual reaction in you.

… and there are no rules. There’s technique, and mastery of technique is one of the differences between mediocre and good artists; though probably it is not as important as conviction.

There is a language of art that we’ve learned and taught to one another, and that language changes by art form and by time and by culture and by person. But there are no rules, none, not a one: just people traveling down their personal roads: and for all of us, wherever we are this year, the horizon is the same distance away.

Programming People

The speech I gave at Singularity University yesterday morning.

I wish G+ did friendlier URLs....

https://plus.google.com/107286020910913706370/posts/3tkCqaStaEf

DanielKeysMoran.com

Pretty much what you think -- a redirect to my G+ page.

danielkeysmoran.com

Google Profile ...

gplus.to/fatsam

I may post some more to this blog, but mostly I'll be there.

Thinking about going to Google+ ...

Not sure how that'll work, but I'm getting about 20 pieces of spam mail a day (for a while now) from Blogspot spammers. It's wearying. Should be less of that on G+, looks like. If you send me a request at danielkeysmoran at the gmail domain, I'll happily add you. If I do move off Blogspot as a permanent matter, I'll make sure there's a public presence elsewhere, and the last post on this blog will point to it.

Singularity University; Datawatch

I'm (very probably) going to be giving a speech at Singularity University on August 3rd. Not clear where this is in San Francisco, but I'll find out -- probably won't have time to socialize in any case. 21st Century Biotechnology. It looks like this might be the start of a longer relationship with them, which would be interesting.

On another subject:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/231000131

In the case of many hackers, such as those dealing in stolen financial information, chats will take place in private, with new members coming into the group only if they know an existing member. However, in the cases of Anonymous and LulzSec, some of their chatrooms are public. The FBI has set up shop in numerous social media sites, going undercover where necessary to root out hackers and other online criminals, and it would not be surprising if they were actively monitoring IRC channels in this case.

~~~~~

Interesting times. The lulzsec/anonymous crowd is playing for money now -- I hope they know what they're doing. I'm sure some of them do, but not all of them. The problem with groups like these is that any break in pure anonymity is lethal -- you can't trust anyone. People you know well and trust are the biggest threat -- a drill bit on the knee will make almost anyone talk.

And these guys are charging full speed into knee drilling territory.

Been busy ...

Having one of my periodic low-availability stretches. I've got a hundred odd emails to respond to, a trade paper copy of AI War to get out the door, various other tasks I've promised people ... and I started a new job about 8 weeks ago that's been mostly a disaster. Very nice people -- horrible mess. Won't name the company, but really, the only thing I've got to compare this to is a couple of experiences with startups that went belly up. These guys are a 100 million a year in revenue and aren't going to fail, but it's 1995 in this particular IT shop. The *rest* of the company seems to be well run (or they'd be out of business, given the mess in IT) but man, in the universe of "didn't know what I was getting myself into," this is a world beater.

Fuck yeah! Osama bin Laden dead, US forces have his body ...

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_17971424?source=rss&nclick_check=1

Books up on Amazon

Emerald Eyes, Long Run, and AI War: Big Boost, are available on Amazon. For some reason Last Dancer hasn't made it through yet. Got my first sale and my first five-star review (probably from the same guy.)

http://amzn.to/eeI91R

"This is the best science fiction story I have ever read. I'm not going to describe how wonderful this book is because I do not have the time to do it properly."

That's a review. :-)

New Covers - EE, TLR, TLD. Angel Greenwood.

The Amazon covers. They'll go up in new editions on fsand as well, and you'll be able to download them if you like. Last thing we were waiting for to put them on Amazon/Apple/B&N etc.

Goodbye, Sarah Jane

Elisabeth Sladen, aka Doctor Who's Sarah Jane, passed away today. Just heard. I've seen most of the episodes of "The Sarah Jane Adventures," but my sons have watched every episode at least twice. Three years ago, when it premiered, it was at least as popular with my youngest as "Doctor Who" itself -- more their speed. Now my youngest is 9, that's probably no longer true ... but it was a good show for them, at the right time. We'll miss her.

I guess we're watching "School Reunion" tomorrow.

For Fans of Gregory Mcdonald

Just ran across this.

http://brucedesilva.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/gregory-mcdonald-creator-of-fletch-still-has-much-to-teach-us-about-reading-and-writing/

Opens with de Silva's thoughts on Mcdonald (interesting, but not the jewel of this blog post) ... and then goes into an interview with Mcdonald, one I'd never seen before.

de Silva thinks that Mcdonald's in danger of fading and being forgotten -- that would be sad. Fletch and Confess Fletch are two of the best books I've ever read, certainly both in the top 10 of all mystery books.

A while back I posted my top 50 favorite novels to my Facebook profile -- I'll repost it here -- and yep, two Mcdonald novels make the top 30:

~~~~~

Mentioned to a friend he'd written one of my 20 favorite novels recently; a couple weeks ago I got That Email, the one where someone wants your list of Every Good Book Ever Written. So, here it is. The only ground rules were that no book I'd only read once could make the list, and nothing I hadn't read within the last ~15 years could make it -- my memory's not that good. There are several novels that got dropped because I hadn't read them recently enough -- David Gerrold's third Chtorran novel, Spinrad's Bug Jack Baron, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Wallace's "Infinite Jest" dropped because I only read it once. OTOH, Gerrold's "Man Who Folded Himself" made it in because I just reread it about a month ago and it was vastly better than I'd recalled....

The first two novels are my favorite novels, the clear #1 and #2. After that, a different day would get you a different order -- though the broad bands (I broke them up into 5 groups of 10) wouldn't change that much, I think.

My 50

1-10

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

USA Trilogy, John Dos Passos

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin

11-20

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Great Sky River, Gregory Benford

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein

The Green Ripper, John D. MacDonald

100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Great Sky Woman, Steve Barnes

Merlin Trilogy, Mary Stewart

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammet

Confess, Fletch, Gregory Mcdonald

The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

21-30

Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis

Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert A. Heinlein

Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

Protector, Larry Niven

Streets of Laredo, Larry McMurtry

Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett

Pale Gray for Guilt, John D. MacDonald

Life, the Universe, and Everything, Douglass Adams

Fletch, Gregory McDonald

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

31-40

Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

Heroes Die, Matt Stover

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, Poul Anderson

Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov

Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

“The Sacketts,” as a body of work, Louis L’Amour

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Frederik Pohl

The Perfect Thief, Ronald J. Bass

The Man Who Folded Himself, David Gerrold

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

41-50

The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

Flynn’s In, Gregory Mcdonald

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milo Kundera

L.A. Confidential, James Ellroy

Demolished Man, Alfred Bester

Doomsday Book, Connie Willis

Hyperion, Dan Simmons

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins

Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven

Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammet

I cheated a bit. There’s no Sackett novel that would make this list by itself, but I have gone back to it repeatedly over the years. (I might have snuck in Steve Perry's Matador books under the same theory, but I only read most of them recently and I've only read most of them once -- but they do for me very much what L'Amour does.) I also cheated by throwing the entire Merlin trilogy in there as a single book – fuck it, it’s my list, and I never read that a book at a time; I start off with “The Crystal Cave” and read through “The Last Enchantment.” (And hardly ever bother with the fourth, “The Wicked Day,” which Merlin’s not in.)

Two “Great Sky” titled novels in the top 20. You know what to do now, authors, if *you* want to get onto this very exclusive list.

If I were including children’s novels, Susan Cooper’s “Dark Is Rising,” Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Series, various Patricia McKillip novels, and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia would certainly make it in.

Twenty-five years today since "Graceland"

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

"Boy in the Bubble." A line from this song has appeared in every CT novel to date -- "Lasers in the junble," "bomb in the baby carriage," "age of miracles and wonders," and in AI War, "Don't cry, baby."

A Freeway In My Back Yard

Now available at Amazon as well as FS&. My remaining novels -- the four Continuing Time books, Armageddon Blues, Terminal Freedom ... and then somewhere down the road, possibly even "The Ring" -- I'll post about here when they become available on Amazon. (Or in the case of "Armageddon Blues," Amazon and FS& pretty much simultaneously.)

I'm going to settle on either Lulu or CafePress this week for POD. I have zero expectation I'll make any money off POD, but I'm sure willing to be wrong.

If you've bought off FS& already, the update will be ready a little later today -- version 1.1, which includes epub & kindle for the first time. (Getting the screenplays to look OK in both those formats was difficult, but we got there.) You can, as always, download the new version for free.

~~~~~

If you were a fan of "Quantum Leap," go see "Source Code." Amy and I went to a matinee this morning, and while it mins some of the same territory as QL, it does so knowingly and gracefully and is a pretty little jewel of a movie. Scott Bakula's telephone-only cameo includes an "Oh, boy," just for people like us.

Ebook reviewers

If you're a reviewer of original ebooks for a reputable website or publication (or know one you like), drop me a line. Thanks.

"as insubstantial as a Peaceforcer's promise."

Shared this on Facebook, reposting.

Opening of "Live Fast and Never Die" -- it used to continue immediately with the main action, but since there's going to be a delay between books -- I gave Trent a vacation. Just some bits. He meets a girl:

~~~~~

“ANOTHER PITCHER OF margaritas, please. Wait.” He glanced at the girl on the hammock beside him. “Strawberry? Melon?”

“You look like Adam Selstrom,” the girl said in English that was better than Trent’s Portuguese and no worse than his French. “With blond hair. And younger, of course. Did anyone ever tell you that? Melon.”

The girl’s name was Allison. She was Brazilian, of apparently Asian background despite the blonde hair and blue eyes, neither obviously from a makeup key. Trent didn’t know how old she was – above 21, he was pretty sure, despite the presence of her parents on the atoll. In any event her father hadn’t said anything to him yet.

“Melon,” Trent told the waitbot, which bobbed its head at him and trundled off. “Yeah,” Trent told Allison, “I get that sometimes. Don’t see it myself.”

~~~~~

Her father, a squat middle-aged Brazilian Unification functionary, had given Trent the evil eye – her mother had simply failed to see him, as though he were as insubstantial as a Peaceforcer’s promise.

~~~~~

Allison’s voice was a little startling. “Have you been here before?”

“Rangiroa? No.”

“What made you decide to come here?”

Trent thought about Mohammed Vance, who by now was tearing apart the seams of the world looking for him.

“Did you know,” he said to Allison, “that there are twenty thousand islands in the South Seas?”

FS& Facebook Page is up...

The FS& Facebook page is up and running. We'll probably start relying more on that to issue updates about non-Moran titles, rather than this blog. If you want to stay abreast of what's happening, go to FSAnd.com directly, or "like" this page on Facebook.

There will still be blog posts here when something cool happens, but I won't publish every new title to this blog any longer.

Margaret Weis, "Star of the Guardians" Book One

The Lost King is for sale at fsand.com.

I'm quite pleased about this one. Margaret Weis Productions will be using the fsand.com typeset books for all their epub and kindle publishing -- we're just leading them by a short period. We'll have 15 or 16 more titles from Margaret and the writers she represents, in the near future.

Amy edited this when it was originally published. She was really happy to get a chance to work on it again.

The rest of The Star of the Guardians series will be up on fsand.com fairly soon. The others will follow as MWP gives them to us.

CafeExpress Print on Demand?

Anyone got experience with them?

Omnibus

The Continuing Time Omnibus Edition (including The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost; The Last Dancer;The Long Run; and Emerald Eyes) is available for purchase at fsand.com. It's $22.99, or about five dollars cheaper than all the books purchased separately.

Dreadnaught, by Steve Perry and Michael Reeves

Sometimes it's cool to be me. I got to see this book in mss. -- I didn't know at the time I'd get a chance to publish it, as well. On Sale at fsand.com.

Behold Eilandia, a pre-industrial world with vast seas, about to embroil itself in a bloody global war. Here is a major fantasy in its first publication anywhere, a wide-ranging tale of kings and thieves, magicians and soldiers, priests and sailors, aswirl with intrigue, swordplay, and assorted magicks. A rollicking adventure from New York Times Bestselling authors Steve Perry and Michael Reaves. Available in epub, mobi, pdf, and html.

Last Dancer ver 1.0; updated AI War, EE, and TLR.

"The Last Dancer" is available for sale at fsand.com. An omnibus edition of all four Continuing Time novels will be available later tonight -- I'll update the front page of FSAnd when that happens with a graphic & link.

Anyone who's bought a copy of "The AI War, Book One," or "Emerald Eyes," or "Long Run," version 1.1 of those books is available now on FSAnd. You should be good to download them -- they're much cleaner than earlier copies, and have been tested on a much wider range of devices.

Also, new works from Steve Perry, and some new material from Margaret Weis Productions will be appearing on FSAnd -- Perry tonight, Margaret Weis probably on Monday.

Big Boost Edition 1.1 this weekend -- bug fixes, typos

About a dozen typos and some formatting problems (computer speech not rendering at all in epub/mobi) will be fixed. If you run across something not working, drop me a line.

We'll probably also have reworks of EE/TLR and a new render of Last Dancer -- we've gotten better at producing epubs in particular since the earlier books. If you've ever bought a copy, you should be OK to download the new files, when uploaded. They'll all be marked in the download file name as "1.1".

Spoiler Thread for AI War

Post any comments you have about the book in this thread. Nowhere else, please. Thank you.

The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost

"I am sore wounded but not slain

I will lay me down and bleed a while

And then rise up to fight again"

Cover art by Angel Greenwood. Available for sale at fsand.com -- and only fsand.com, for the immediate future.

The cover.

It's good to have friends. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Angel Greenwood is easy to adore even before taking her remarkable talent into account.

A probable cover

A possible cover ...

Challenger explosion

The Challenger explosion -- I recall something about the joints on the solid fuel rockets being mounted upside down? (So that liquid could seep in, which led to the failure of the o-rings.) Am I remembering correctly? Anyone? I've tried googling this for about the last hour and I'm not finding anything.

Melissa du Bois

I posted this to my facebook page, so I guess I'll post it here. This is the last text I'll be posting from the book before it becomes available (and don't ask.)

~~~~~

ACCORDING TO HER father Ernest du Bois, Melissa had been born a soldier. He was not a military man, and did not understand why God had blessed him – that was always his phrase, even when presented with intransigence that would have undone a lesser man – with a child so stern and unyielding. But Ernest was himself gifted with patience, if not understanding.

When she was four Melissa’s older brother Vincent died. Vincent was two years older than Melissa, and later in life her memories of him were just flashes, images and impressions; but her memories of her parents’ grief were clearer, sharper, altogether more lasting. Her Mama, Rebecca, withdrew from the world so severely that, looking back years later, Melissa suspected she had been suicidal, though Rebecca did not kill herself.

When Melissa began school that fall, it was not Mama who took her to St. Margaret’s: her father walked with her, every morning, holding her hand all the way there. It was her first strong memory: her hand, in Papa’s, on the way to school, morning after morning. When he picked her up in the afternoon, he wouldn’t hold her hand unless she asked him to, and she rarely did. They walked home together discussing what had happened that day, in school or work. But in the mornings she would take his hand, stepping out their front door, and not release it until she had stepped through the front gate of the school.

MELISSA WAS BORN on August 4, 2046, in Narbonne, a small town near the Gulf of Lyon, in the Mediterranean. The town had only some forty thousand residents, the year Melissa was born. It was not quite a beachside town, though Melissa and her parents lived inland only ten kilometers.

Melissa’s mother was a therapist, and her father a nurse. After her brother’s death, for most of two years, her mother did not work much. It made no real difference in their lives; there was enough money, new clothes, food, medical care. The essentials of Melissa’s life was secure, and would have remained so barring a disaster depriving her of both parents. Fortunately no such disaster occurred: her mother, with the passage of time, resumed an interest in the day to day details of their lives together, though by then the cast of Melissa’s relationship with her mother was set; Melissa would rarely seek Papa’s approval before deciding upon a course of action, and never Mama’s.

SHE GREW TO adulthood in Narbonne. Her parents rarely traveled even on business, and never for pleasure: Melissa had never left Narbonne until, at thirteen, her school had arranged a field trip to the Louvre. It was 630 kilometers to Paris, not an unreasonable distance on one of the bullet trains that networked France; except that Narbonne was too small to have a stop. The nearest stop was in Beziers, a nearby town about twice the size of Narbonne.

That morning they arose early and caught a bus to Beziers, then boarded the 6:15 A.M. Express to Paris. The Bullet rode through an evacuated tunnel just barely wide enough for it. It scared some of her classmates: at its top speed the Bullet traveled through the vacuum at nearly 600 kilometers per hour. It wasn’t so bad in the underground portions of the tunnel, when you couldn’t see anything, but during the portions where the Bullet rose above ground, the sense of speed was frightening, and some of Melissa’s friends had to close their eyes.

Melissa wasn’t worried about the speed as such; the rapidly passing landscape did not frighten her. She was thinking, though, about an incident six years ago, when she’d been seven: a Bullet in New York had been destroyed in a terrorist attack. Terrorists had left a bowling ball in the tunnel. The Bullet had vaporized the bowling ball, but it had also made contact with the side of the tunnel. In the resulting crash everyone aboard the Bullet, over eight hundred people, had died.

No one claimed credit. Melissa, at seven, had been baffled by that. She was clear that the ideologs who had committed the attack were wicked – “wicked all the way through,” she had informed her parents – but she had been baffled by the intent. If the terrorists did not claim credit, who would take them seriously when they made demands? Clearly they wanted to scare people – not that she was afraid, she assured her parents, because France was safe, not like Occupied America … but it made no sense to her.

But even while telling her parents that she wasn’t afraid, she wondered if she was really. She’d never been on the Bullet – maybe if she were riding it, knowing what might happen, she might feel differently?

Six years later she found that no, she wasn’t frightened, not even a little. But, riding the train, she had flashes of what she would recognize later as anger, thinking about the sort of people who would destroy something like the Bullet, take all those innocent lives, and not at least accept responsibility for their actions. It was, she concluded, that they were afraid – afraid to stand and fight, because they knew they would lose. So they used the tools of cowards, and struck at the weak rather than the strong.

It was the first consciously political thought she’d ever had.

THE LOUVRE MADE no real impression on her. She saw Voleur’s masterpiece, Je Suis Le Fleuve, while she was there, and found it not to her liking: a red monochrome, a river flowing through a darker, redder jungle. “I Follow The River,” or “I Am The River,” the painting’s name meant: Melissa was sure she was not a river and equally certain she didn’t want to follow what looked a river of blood.

The Mona Lisa left her cold. The Venus de Milo was broken and in Melissa’s opinion wanted fixing. She despised The Oath of the Horatii; weeping women to one side, men playing with swords to the other.

Their tour guide took note of her lack of interest at one point, and told the joke that many visitors to the Louvre hear at some point: “A woman visiting the Louvre,” the tour guide said patiently, “said, ‘I don’t think much of it.’ And a guide, overhearing, said: ‘Madame, one does not judge the Louvre; one is judged by it.’”

“The Palais du Louvre,” Melissa responded, “is a collection of buildings, and surely incapable of judgement.”

The tour guide, who seemed a pleasant young man, was taken aback. He stuttered slightly. “Since 1793, f-for generations, very wise men and women have chosen –”

Melissa interrupted him. Had her Mama been there she would have scolded Melissa for it; even Papa might have, for manners were important in their house. But she interrupted anyway. “I think my judgement better than theirs,” she said firmly, “in choosing what I like. De gustibus non est disputandum,” she added, displaying one of the benefits of a rigorous Catholic education: she could not really speak Latin, but she read it adequately and at thirteen she could quote in Latin as well as anyone.

Their tour guide ignored her after that, which suited her.

They had an early dinner in Paris before heading back, and that dinner stayed with Melissa in later years. The restaurant they ate in was not very good – the school’s budget was limited – but it was as good as her mother’s cooking and a little better than her father’s, and quite a bit better than what she ate in school. She did not realize they’d been taken to one of the cheaper restaurants available, and had she known, would not have cared.

They ended up sitting outside, watching the sun set while the City of Light came alive around them. The pedestrian traffic picked up as people came out for the evening. Melissa drank an after-dinner hot chocolate, watching the sophisticated crowds swirl about her, the young couples in the first bloom of love, old men and women cautiously navigating the traffic, still holding hands, some of them, as if they were still middle school sweethearts, and in the first and clearest of her life’s goals, knew she wanted to live in Paris forever.

SHE GRADUATED FROM high school first in her class, at the age of fifteen, more than two years earlier than most of her childhood friends. She was accepted, as everyone had known she would be, into the PKF Academy at Marseille. They wouldn’t accept students under sixteen, but Melissa would turn sixteen in August, just in time to attend the start of classes in September.

Marseille was 180 kilometers away from home in a straight line– 250 kilometers following the curve of the French coast around the Mediterranean, if one traveled by land. As no Bullet train connected the two cities, and her parents could not afford a car capable of flying directly across the sea, she had to travel by older rail, at a travel time of four and a half hours – which mean that she would have to live in the dorms in Marseille, and not see her parents except on weekends.

It bothered her parents more than it bothered Melissa. They were proud of her, of course – they were French and they were patriots and a career in the Peace Keeping Force, for a girl of her talents and inclinations, was an obvious path. But they were not ready to let go yet, particularly Rebecca. No one brought up her brother Vincent, but no one had to – the shadow of the dead child had hung over all of them, more lightly in recent years, but never forgotten.

Melissa would not miss her classmates; the girls were older than she was and disliked her; the boys older and intimidated by her. She had already said good-bye to her few remaining childhood friends from before she had jumped grades.

She had a last summer together with Mama and Papa before classes started. They spent a lot of it at the beach. Ernest was lighter-skinned than either Melissa or Rebecca, and couldn’t tan and refused to use any of the lotions that would have temporarily altered his skin to withstand the sun better; he didn’t trust the science behind the temporary alteration of the skin’s DNA. Melissa had inherited Rebecca’s skin: she quickly turned brown in the sun and could stay out in the sunlight through the heat of the day without burning or becoming overheated.

Rebecca and Melissa played volleyball in the sand as often as they could find competition, while Ernest sat under an umbrella and read on his handheld. They usually beat other women, and sometimes played and beat men – though men and boys who had lost to them once had a habit of making themselvs scarce. There was such a thing as male ego.

“I wish Papa liked volleyball,” Melissa said at one point, as they sat in the beach chairs by the volleyball nets, drinking water from their sports bottles, waiting for more competition to arrive. A few windsurfers were busy out in the bay, though there was just barely enough wind to keep their brightly colored sails full. “He wouldn’t quit just because he’d lost a few games.”

Rebecca smiled at her. “No, Papa is an unusual man. Better than most of them. He just can’t handle the heat.”

Melissa nodded. She knew that well enough. They went running together in the morning sometimes, when it was cool, all three of them, and Papa’s endurance was at least as good as theirs, perhaps better. “I just wish we could do more things together.”

Rebecca said simply, “I wish you wouldn’t go.”

Melissa shook her head without answering.

“Not this year at least,” Rebecca continued. “I wish we hadn’t let you skip two grades.”

Melissa shrugged. That, she knew, had mostly been her father’s doing anyway. It hadn’t been important to him – he knew Melissa was bright, knew she was driven, and while none of this appeared to impress him particularly, seemed perfectly content that Melissa should have her way in most matters. If she wanted to study harder material, he was content that she have the chance to. If it meant she would leave home for university (or, as it turned out, the Academy), earlier than she would have otherwise, well, all children left home eventually.

Of course, from Mama’s perspective, it meant that she was losing Melissa two years too soon. “Mama, I’m going. I’ll perform well. When, in eight or ten years, they offer to make me an Elite” – Melissa had no doubt they would – “I will accept.”

“You’ll never have children,” Rebecca said very quietly.

“No,” Melissa agreed, “I won’t.”

HER SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY came and went, the summer waned, and the day before she went to Academy they went rowing in the morning on the Canal de la Robine, had lunch at the beach, and then had dinner together at home. Her mother cooked Melissa’s favorite dinner, fresh bread with mushroom chicken and artichoke hearts over wild rice, and her father baked a blueberry pie – their respective strengths. Neither was a great cook, but the resulting dinner could not have been improved on in the best restaurant in Paris, for Melissa’s purposes.

The dinner proceeded pleasantly, and afterward they watched the 100^th Anniversary reissue of an old flat classic, Lawrence of Arabia. It was Ernest’s favorite movie, and Melissa had never seen it before. For the reissue the studio had retrofitted the old movie with depth, traceset cues for smell, taste, and touch, plus the usual viewpoint options. Ernest hadn’t bothered asking if anyone else wanted those things; he turned them all off, positioned the flat screen at the front of their holofield, and they watched the movie as it had been produced, a century before. He didn’t even enable the French audio track; all of them spoke English well enough. He did, in a very limited compromise, turn on the French subtitles.

The movie immediately became one of Melissa’s favorites. It was a product of its time – a movie made in 1962, portraying the last days of World War I. In its three and a half hours only one woman’s face was seen, a nurse in the final scenes. It was not supposed to be a homosexual romance, either – in those days, even in 1962, such things were considered perverse and no one would have made such a movie. It was clear that the story’s – hero was not too strong a word – hero, T.E. Lawrence, was gay, though Melissa was not sure if Lawrence himself was supposed to be aware of it; in those days people often hid such things even from themselves, the social stigma against it was so strong. But it was a love story, regardless; between Lawrence and the young prince, Sherif Ali, who fought together, successfully, to free the Arab tribes from the rule of the Turks.

When the movie was over, Ernest said, “We must go to bed now, and you should too.” Her parents were coming with her on the train to Marseille, though they would not be permitted to enter the Academy with her; the Academy discouraged parents even remaining in town after dropping their children off, and Ernest and Rebecca would return to Narbonne the same day. “Perhaps you should not mention this movie when you talk with your new friends at Academy,” he went on.

It seemed an odd piece of advice. “Why?”

“In some circles it’s thought subversive,” he said. “They’re wrong, they lack imagination to think so. The Unification of our time is not the Turkish Empire of World War I … but some people have argued the connection, and some people take the argument seriously. Twice foolish,” he added. “David Lean” – the film’s director – “and the writers died decades before the Unification War. The movie is based on T.E. Lawrence’s writing from after World War I. They are reading intent where there could not possibly have been any.” He paused. “But be careful anyway. You have been raised in a patriotic household, but where you are going, you will meet patriots who will make us seem suspect and insufficiently proud.”

Melissa could not imagine such a thing (though it turned out that, as was so often the case, Papa was right.)

She kissed them both and went to bed. Later that night, something awoke her, some low noise – she lay in bed motionless, wondering what it was – a bird? – before she realized it was, from her parent’s bedroom at the other end of the hallway, with two closed doors between Melissa and her parents, the sound of her mother crying.

MELISSA DU BOIS’ four years at the Peace Keeping Force Academy in Marseille were without doubt the four best years of Melissa’s life up to that point. At least some of the men were not afraid of her – with the exception of her own father they were the first men she had ever met whom she had not completely intimidated, with her looks, her body, her athleticism, her intellect, her poise and reserve, or by all of those things in short succession.

Finding men who were not afraid of her was surprisingly pleasant. She was not tempted to sleep with any of them – they were usually upperclassmen and too old for her, and she knew her parents would have disapproved. “Men do not value what comes too easily,” was all Ernest had said on the subject, but Melissa thought it likely he was correct; he had been correct about most of the things he’d bothered to state explicitly, in her life. Melissa was still a virgin at sixteen, and in no hurry to change that.

But there was no denying the attention was enjoyable.

MELISSA LEARNED TO speak idomatic English and passable Chinese. She learned a pragmatic grasp of hand to hand combat, most of which consisted of harming your opponent quickly and savagely and then separating long enough to acquire a weapon. She learned to use every common weapon and how to improvise a startling variety of weapons from common objects. She learned to recognize a bomb, and how to build one.

She learned psyops – how to interrogate a prisoner, how to survive interrogation if captured. How to gain trust, how to manage distrust.

She studied Unification Law and PKF regulations. She studied military history and economic history and politics; one fairly technical paper she wrote on the evolution of intragovernmentalism into supranationalism, and how those things flowed directly from the lessons of World War II and became the basis of the European Union and later the Unification, aroused enough comment within the Academy that it was submitted for publication to a well regarded historical journal, not long after her eighteenth birthday.

A common subject, regardless of class, was the problem of Occupied America. Over four decades after the end of the Unification War, the Johnny Rebs were still functioning – not effectively, in the opinion of most of Melissa’s instructors, but still functioning and worse, popular. Stories about the Rebs, movies about the Rebs, portrayed them as heroes, as patriots – not in a proper sense, not patriotic to the idea of the stable and just society that only the Unification had ever provided to humanity in the entire history of the word; but to abstractions of justice and liberty that were impossible to measure.

“Make no mistake,” one instructor pointed out at the end of a period of discussion, “by any metric you care to name, Occupied America is a better place to live today – we leave aside the question of New York for the moment – than at any time in the history of the American people. They live longer, they live healthier. Infant mortality has decreased to nearly zero. Hunger is rare and starvation nonexistent. Drug and alcohol addiction is a fraction of the problem it once was. Crime of all sorts – violent crime, murder, rape; nonviolent crime, burglary, embezzlement, theft – are at levels previously unknown in American history.

“One would think they would be happy … but they are not. And were not, even before the Troubles began in New York. For Wednesday, a paper giving your theory as to why.”

AT LEAST IN part due to her excellent English, at the age of twenty-one she found herself walking a beat, showing the flag, airing the uniform … in the city of Santa Monica, California, Occupied America.

California was a state Melissa could only just have found on a map before her arrival in it; she knew not much about it otherwise, for all her studies at Academy concerning Occupied America. Los Angeles she knew something about – the part of it called Hollywood had been the most productive source of filmed entertainment during the twentieth century, and Humphrey Bogart had lived there.

Santa Monica, it turned out, was a beach town completely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles. It reminded her a little of Narbonne, though it was wealthier and more crowded. The beaches reminded her quite a bit of the beaches at home; she found herself going down to Santa Monica and Venice beaches when off duty and playing volleyball with complete strangers. Her accent was still obviously French, but for the most part the people on the beach didn’t seem to care about that, at least not as much as they cared about her killer spike.

She spent most of a year in Santa Monica, teleconferencing with her parents to stay in touch. Her mother got nervous if Melissa didn’t call at least twice a week, despite Melissa’s assurance that she had landed in one of the softest, safest patrol jobs any Peaceforcer on Earth could have dreamed up – but with twice weekly calls, Mama was calm enough, if not noticeably happy. (“Happy is her job,” Papa said once, when Melissa was still very small. “You can’t make another person happy. Our job is to love her whether she is happy or sad.”)

Melissa thought her mother’s worries excessive, but it cost her nothing to check in regularly, to send messages back and forth during the course of the day; though she did get in the habit of blocking personal calls on her earphone while on shift. It was only a little white lie to tell her mother that her C.O. disapproved of personal calls – he did, but he wouldn’t have known unless he’d had cause to review her call records, and it would have taken a disciplinary review before he’d have been permitted to look.

As it happened, in December of 2068, he had cause to look.

LATER MELISSA BUILT up an idea of what had happened that day, only three days before Christmas. The last thing she really remembered was sitting in a PKF Armored AeroSmith at the intersection of Wilshire and 15^th Street, explaining wearily to her Captain who was on the phone and twenty kilometers away that she’d had no choice but to override the autocomp and fly directly to the UCLA Medical Center of Santa Monica, because the ambulance wouldn’t have gotten Pierre to a doctor in time. He had chunks blown out of his torso so large that his uniform was the principle thing keeping his spinal column from the air.

After that Melissa didn’t really remember much. She didn’t remember what had happened prior to that, either – at one point a bullet had clipped the back of her skull, digging a furrow in the bone and causing bleeding just the other side of the bone. She’d been, in fact, closer to dying than her partner, and it had required brain surgery by one of Los Angeles’s best human surgeons to save her.

Her performance review decided that Melissa had killed four of the Rebs; her partner had only accounted one. The remaining six had been killed by PKF Elite within minutes of their arrival onsite. The citation added to Melissa’s record concluded that she had directly saved the lives of at least twenty of the Reb hostages – all members of a group of Chinese Christian tourists visiting the U.S. for Christmas.

And they did, Melissa made a point of telling her mother, check her personal phone records before issuing the citation.

IT TOOK A while for her promotion to come through; it was the summer of 2069 before she made Detective. She was twenty-two years old, and along with her promotion came the invitation PKF both feared and desired: she was invited to apply for the Peace Keeping Force Elite. Others might have hesitated, but Melissa knew of no one as young as she who had ever received an invitation: if she turned it down, she knew the odds of receiving another, ever, were poor.

ON AUGUST THE fourteenth, 2069, Melissa du Bois and forty-six other members of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force took their seats aboard the Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, a SpaceFarer vehicle that had been retained to take them to the Elite surgery facility at Spacebase One at L5.

The cabin in which they were to travel had forty-eight seats. After Melissa and her fellow PKF were seated, there remained one empty seat – the aisle seat next to Melissa. No one seemed to know who it was for, but it was soon apparent that the ship would not be taking off until whoever it was arrived.

Melissa waited patiently for a few minutes, then took her handheld out to read. She was halfway through a classic her father had recommended, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” and had managed to get lost within it again when a tall young man wearing business clothing, carrying a briefcase, was led into the cabin and made his way to the empty seat beside her. Young as he was – he was her age, Melissa guessed, maybe even younger – twenty? Melissa wondered who he was, what gave him the pull to keep their ship grounded until he arrived. She didn’t look directly at him, just studied him from the corner of her eye while continuing to page through her novel.

He sat down and strapped himself in, put his briefcase in the safety web beneath the seat: handsome, blond, and quite strikingly beautiful blue eyes.

He turned to her and smiled, and Melissa allowed herself to look up from her handheld. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Trent the thief. Is there anything I can steal for you?”

Raising funds for fsand.com

Looking to raise money to hire a programmer for fsand.com. To this end, I am selling the original manuscript for "The Long Run." Opening bid is $1000.

Also available, Emerald Eyes

Here. The rest of the backlist should be up reasonably soon. The stuff that was made available on ImmunitySec is still free, and will remain that way -- what you're paying for here, if you are, is having the books converted into epub and mobi.

Terminal Freedom

Available for the first time as an ebook. As with all FSAnd titles, Terminal Freedom is DRM free and available in PDF, HTML, EPUB, and MOBI.

"Terminal Freedom does for books what Pulp Fiction did for films; it is wickedly funny, beautifully written, snidely overconfident. What more could you want from a book?" - Kevin J. Anderson

"If Tom Clancy had written Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the result would have been Terminal Freedom." - eluki bes shahar, author of the Hellflower Trilogy

"This is the funniest book ever written, and very possibly the best book I, personally, have ever read." - Marilynn Moran.

Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon by Matt Stover

I take particular pleasure in being able to make these two available again. FSAnd.com is offering them for sale in epub, mobi, html, and pdf formats. These were Matt's first two novels, and they're superb -- Jericho Moon, the sequel, is in particular one of my very favorite novels.

Iron Dawn

The Age of Heroes is over. The walls of Troy fell ten years ago, and the bright morning of civilization around the eastern Mediterranean is crumbling into adark age of war and savagery -- but for Barra the Pict, axe-wielding barbarian princess from the far-off land of Albion and her mercenary companions, war and savagery are business opportunities. When she and her friends make landfall in Tyre, the jewel of Phoenikia, the city is already under attack by ahidden enemy armed both with bright bronze and with black sorcery. For Barra, that adds up to silver.

Light? Dark? Who cares? She's the girl with the axe.

Jericho Moon

The kingdoms of Canaan are crumbling under a brutally relentless invasion. Now the last surviving Canaanite king has sent out a call for mercenaries to defend his capital, and where there's money to be made by spilling blood, Barra the Pict, gigantic Leucas of Athens and wily Kheperus, master of Egyptian magics, are sure to follow. Especially this city, built high upon an escarpment, with walls that dwarf those of fallen Jericho. And the invaders are only barbarians, after all, more a horde than an army. Easy money.

Or it would be . . . but the city is Jerusalem, and the invaders are the Israelites under the command of the invincible Joshua ben Nun, and the gods of Canaan have chosen Barra for their champion.

Angels, gods, blackest sorcery and shining courage take the field in one final battle for the fate of Canaan.

Winner take all.

Steve Perry and Michael Reaves (and Matt Stover...)

Two new books, one by Perry and one by Perry with Reaves, are available on fsand.com.

Spindoc: Venture Silk is a corporate spindoc in beautiful Hawaii, twisting the news to serve his bosses when his girlfriend is murdered. Silk is pulled into a web of intrigue beyond the kind he has learned to spin. Spies, rogue agents, and religious fanatics, all armed and dangerous, turn Silk's life into an adventure he never saw coming, and death lurks around every corner.

And...

The Omega Cage: Set in the "Matador" Universe ... When Smuggler Dain Maro runs afoul of the criminal organization Black Sun, he is framed and convicted for murder, then shipped to the galaxy's worst prison. It's a one-way ticket to a hellhole planet -- nobody comes out alive, and nobody has ever escaped from The Omega Cage. Until now …

~~~~~

I'm extremely pleased to announce that two long-unavailable novels by Matt Stover are available now on fsand.com. Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon are two of my favorite novels, and if you've read anything by Matt, you'll understand that:

The Age of Heroes is over. The walls of Troy fell ten years ago, and the bright morning of civilization around the eastern Mediterranean is crumbling into a dark age of war and savagery -- but for Barra the Pict, axe-wielding barbarian princess from the far-off land of Albion and her mercenary companions, war and savagery are business opportunities. When she and her friends make landfall in Tyre, the jewel of Phoenikia, the city is already under attack by a hidden enemy armed both with bright bronze and with black sorcery. For Barra, that adds up to silver. Light? Dark? Who cares? She's the girl with the axe.

There'll be another post tomorrow when we do a co-promotion with Overworld.tv about these, but they're available now.

Iron Dawn

Jericho Moon

Jack LaLanne -- An Appreciation

Apparently Rush Limbaugh mocked Jack LaLanne. For dying despite his vegetarianism. At 96 years of age.

There are very few great men in this world. But Jack was one. He plausibly added a million years of life, and many millions of years of better life, to the human race, by his presence on this planet. How many people lived longer or lived better because Jack LaLanne was there for decade after decade after decade, proving it could be done and encouraging them that THEY COULD DO IT.

I'm hardly ever shocked, but my God. Rush, listen to yourself.

MILLIONS OF YEARS OF HEALTHIER, HAPPIER LIFE ... for all of us ... because Jack LaLanne was a member of the human race.

Because Jack LaLanne was the best of us, the absolute best of what being human is, and walked the walk and told us that we could walk the walk, too, and made us not believe it, but KNOW IT. "Look," he said year after year, "here I am. Here's what I do. You do it too!" And people did, by the damn millions.

Jack LaLanne might have done more measurable good for the human race than any other human being of the twentieth century. Think about THAT.

I wasn't going to write about Jack LaLanne's death, despite having done jumping jacks with Jack when I was a boy, despite the fact that his presence in my life is one of the reasons I didn't have a heart attack at 44, like my father, why today at 48 I can run full court basketball for 2 straight hours. Folks, I bought the man's damn juicer (which was terrible) ... to this day when I exercise, I almost always hear Jack LaLanne's voice in my head. "One more!"