Category: Literature

My schematic, based on a sketch kindly provided by an alien visitor

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For several months now, I have been at work on the sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major, which for now I just call Fugue II. I’ll give it a real title later. Fugue II is a much more demanding novel involving much more science fiction. There also is a historical element that is critical to the plot. It has required a great deal of research, most of it in thick tomes published by university presses. I sometimes think that I should include notes and a bibliography with Fugue II, just to show that my radical ideas don’t always come out of thin air.

There will be time travel in Fugue II. This technology belongs to aliens, who will allow earthlings to use it to help get earth out of the nasty predicament that I left earth in at the end of Fugue in Ursa Major. I think I’ll not say just yet where (and to what time) Jake and a few other earthlings will be going. But, when they get there, a deep stack of scholarly tomes will discipline my imagination in describing what they find and what they do. I am completely out of bookshelves, and there are many stacks of books in my room, some of them three feet high.

With our current understanding of physics, is time travel possible? How about faster-than-light travel? The opinions of physicists differ. But, if time travel or warp jumps are possible, then we can say a great deal about the conditions necessary to do it. To try to understand the physics of these conditions, I have relied heavily on Roger Penrose, a mathematician and physicist who is now an emeritus professor at Oxford. I have read a number of Penrose’s books. His mind is simply magnificent. I don’t have the math to truly follow him everywhere he goes, but I get the gist of it. A 10-year-old tome of his (1,100 pages long) has been my guide for the physics involved in the plot of Fugue II. The book is The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.

But back to time travel and warp jumps. As I see it, to travel in time you’d have to be able to control a seriously powerful source of gravity. OK. A black hole could provide that. You’d also have to be able to control a source of negative energy density. Never mind what negative energy density might be. It’s enough to know that you won’t find it in many places. But one place where you will find it (we think) is in the ergosphere of a rotating black hole. If you read the Wikipedia article, you’ll find that it was Penrose himself who first described this, back in 1969. But again, you don’t have to worry too much about the physics. The key point is that rotating black holes generate the forces we need, if time travel and warp jumping are possible.

I’ve left it to the aliens to do the necessary engineering. It involves an enormous piece of machinery — a tubular helix (or spiral) big enough to allow a rotating black hole to pass through it. The travelers go winding through the hollow helix tube while the rotating black hole is passing through the helix. You enter one end of the tube in the here and now, and you come out the other end somewhere or sometime else. The machine can take you back in time, except that it can’t take you back to a time earlier than the time the machine was built. Alas, it cannot take you to the future, because of some complications related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It can, however, return you to the present after you’ve traveled to the past. The same device can be used for interstellar travel with no time tweaking, depending on how you manipulate quantum fields inside the helix. (Don’t ask — it’s an alien proprietary secret.) As a travel machine, it can fling you across space faster than light, depending on how fast the helix is rotating. The axis of the rotating helix (the direction in which it’s pointing) determines the direction in which you jump. And sure, you can jump through the middle of a star or a galaxy if you want, because you went straight from point A to point B in an instant, and you were never at any points in between. But if you fling yourself to some far-off galaxy, take care that you know how you’re going to get back, because you were traveling in an ordinary spaceship, and the jump machinery was left behind.

How did the aliens solve this problem? They made multiple jumps to the same location (always near a suitable black hole), sending along the necessary materials, and built new jump machines at points of interest all over the galaxy and beyond. So space travel involves slower-than-light transport for relatively short distances and a network of those enormous jump machines for faster-than-light interstellar travel.

As I understand the science, I cannot imagine a warp engine that could be built into a space ship. Far too much mass (and therefore gravity) is required, and the gravitational and tidal forces involved are exceedingly dangerous. These forces would rip human beings and machines apart. Therefore, as I see it, a warp engine would be more like a catapult. The catapult would remain where it is, but it would push you and your space ship through a worm hole as long as the travelers and their space ship were far enough away from the tremendous gravitational and tidal forces involved in opening a worm hole.

Faster-than-light travel is a minor element of Fugue II‘s story. It’s a story about people, really. But where the plot involves science (or history), I want all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed. I’m a radical and a heretic, but I rarely just make stuff up. What really drives my imagination is dreaming about how we might get out of the awful times we live in, and what we might do about the fact that the wrong people are running the world and have run the world for a long time.

One of these books is a hot read.

John Twelve Hawks’ newest novel Spark was released on Oct. 7, and I actually bought it that week. But I was slammed with election duties during the month of October, so I put the book aside until quiet times returned. This is because I knew that Spark would be a barn burner of a page turner. It was, and I read it in a day and a half. Brilliant writers like John Twelve Hawks don’t really need yet another glowing review, so I’d like to get off onto a sidetrack for a moment — readers.

I have become fascinated with bad reviews, because bad reviews tell writers something that writers need to know. I’ve recently gotten into the habit, both with books I’m about to buy and books I’ve already read, of looking at the most negative reviews that can be found on Amazon. This probably started when Fugue in Ursa Major got its first 3-star, as opposed to 5-star review. I was insulted by the reader/reviewer’s sheer stupidity, and I needed to assure myself that everyone’s books are misunderstood. There’s a rule among writers about never responding to a bad review. But there is no rule that says you can’t respond to bad review of someone else’s book.

Here’s a snippet from the “most helpful” negative review of Spark, which has the headline “Meh.” I’m fixing the reviewer’s multiple typos:

“Honestly, the first half of the book was so dry and boring, I really wasn’t sure I would be able to finish it. … Part of the problem was the bland writing since the protagonist has no feelings, diagnosed with Cotard Syndrome (delusion of being dead) that there is no dimension to him. I really didn’t like him much or even care what was going on.”

Why do people who know (or care) so little about novels, characterization, and storytelling even bother to read? They are stuck inside their own tiny minds, not seeking any sort of expansive experience in a book but rather seeking to have their own smallness affirmed. But any reader with a clue about how stories work knows that, if a writer starts a story with a character who is incapable of affect and who thinks he is dead, then that character is going to undergo some sort of transformation during the course of the story. A good reader also will be alert to what’s between the lines. Maybe the author wants us to think about our feelings and when feelings matter (or don’t matter). Maybe he wants us to think about what’s worth living for, or whether we’ve even alive at all. A good reader also will know that, very often in good stories, characters change during the course of the story, and the nature of that change is an important part of what that story is about. It’s like starting with a hard-hearted character like Ebenezer Scrooge and asking ourselves, “What kind of experiences might change this bitter old man into someone warm and caring?” Thus Charles Dickens gave us A Christmas Carol. What if a clueless reviewer wrote, “I just couldn’t get into this story. The Scrooge character was just so one-dimensional and mean that I couldn’t care about him. So I couldn’t finish this book.”

Bah! Humbug!

If John Twelve Hawks (he’ll almost certainly Google up this review and read it) will forgive me for plugging my own book in a review of Spark, I got a similar comment in a review of Fugue in Ursa Major on the bad-taste book site Goodreads:

“The main character was a basket case unable to form relationships and he is saved. Only a hero that Ayn Rand would love, but I could care less.”

She is talking about my Jake. (Coincidentally, John Twelve Hawks’ main character in Spark also is named Jake.) As a bad reader, she does not understand that if a writer starts a story with a character who is having trouble with relationships, then during the course of the story that character is probably going to learn something about relationships. As for Ayn Rand, the reviewer is so insensitive to the clues that every writer lays between the lines that she can’t detect that I abhor Ayn Rand. I suspect that particular reviewer was blinded by her rigid political agenda. Reading, to her, is about comfort and confirmation in her own tiny world.

But back to Spark and the mystery of John Twelve Hawks. I’ve written about him previously, here, here, and here. He is a master of the hot read. I read him partly to study his style, in particular his action scenes, because I’m not good at writing action scenes. His prose is the kind of prose I like — transparent prose that tells the story without language getting in the way. In fact we’re hardly aware of language at all. His style is very cinematic, which is why I was not surprised that he got a big movie deal for Spark.

What I would love to know is how he learned to write. It can’t be just raw talent (though he has plenty of raw talent), because every writer works from a theory of writing whether he knows it or not. John Twelve Hawks dots all the i’s and crosses all the t’s. Everything is properly foreshadowed. There are no wrong notes. He stays on course for his destination: a ripping good conclusion. By the end, all the many threads of the story have been tied together, and every character has gotten his lines just right and played his role perfectly. It’s a masculine, muscular style that would not work for the kind of stories that I want to tell, but it’s perfect for the stories that John Twelve Hawks tells.

Which brings me to what I think is the most important question we might ask about John Twelve Hawks as a writer. Why does he choose to tell the kind of stories he tells? Having asked that question, I’m not going to try to answer it. Because only writers, not reviewers, can speak to readers on a question that important. But I think it’s much more than wanting to deliver a hot read. And, whatever his purpose is, I’m pretty sure that I wholeheartedly agree with him.

“Intelligent, mysterious, a perfect book for a movie; loved it!”

In time for the holidays and winter reading, I’m offering autographed copies of Fugue in Ursa Major. The cost is $15.

If you’d like to order a copy, please send an email to fugue@acornabbey.com and include this information:

1. Your name and mailing address

2. Whether you’d like to pay with a check or by PayPal

3. A name (if any) that I should include with the autograph

4. The text of a brief inscription (if any) that you’d like for me to include with the autograph

I will reply to your email with information on where to mail your check or how to pay with PayPal. After I’ve received your payment, I’ll send you the book by U.S. Postal Service priority mail.

The cost of priority mail alone is more than $5, so this is a bargain and doesn’t really earn me much profit. But I thought that loyal blog readers who bought the book in eBook format might also like to have a real copy of the book.

Fugue in Ursa Major went on sale today. You can buy it in pretty much any format you want — paperback, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, or Apple iBooks.

Here is a link to the Amazon editions.

I regret that, several times, I’ve made optimistic projections about when Fugue in Ursa Major will be released for sale. Then I keep missing the targets.

My new target date for release is June 20. I am reasonably confident that, even if I miss that target date, I won’t miss it by far.

The novel is now in its third round of revisions. I am really fortunate to have excellent first readers, and I have taken their suggestions very seriously. With each round of revisions, I think the book has gotten much better. Not only do I have the first readers’ markup on the proof copies to work with, there also have been many discussions around the dinner table, or around the fireplace, with significant quantities of wine consumed in the process. Literary labor is hard, hard work. Literary work also sometimes involves damage to an author’s ego. But I think that serious writers roll with the punches from their first readers and then get to work to make the story better. After all, it’s the reader’s experience that matters, not the writer’s. Not that readers call the shots. But it’s OK to argue.

One of the things that became clear was that Fugue in Ursa Major demands a sequel. The second book of a series must knit nicely with the first, so many of the revisions have involved background and setup for the sequel. A lot of work has gone into thinking about the characters, getting to know them, and getting them right.

Every self-published writer is terrified of not selling many books. I am, of course, developing a marketing plan for Fugue in Ursa Major. I’ve also gone to a good deal of trouble to ensure that the book is published with my own imprint — Acorn Abbey Books — rather than the publisher being listed as not my own Acorn Abbey imprint but instead one of the providers of on-demand printing. The book will be available for sale through Amazon, of course. But bookstores, it seems, don’t like to order books from Amazon. Bookstores will, however, order from small publishers as long as the orders go through their usual channels. So a considerable amount of work was involved in setting up the book for on-demand printing from Ingram, from which bookstores and libraries order books. This area of publishing and book distribution is changing rapidly. But I was in the publishing business for much of my life, so I am better prepared to navigate this terrain than many self-published authors. We shall see. Release day approaches.

In any case, I wanted to let blog readers know that I’m working as hard as I can to get the book out in June.