Is the Journeymen coming true? Pt 2

 When the 'modern' Journeymen arrived on Earth they found that their forebears had indeed settled, and had used their superior knowledge and technology to become the leaders of what we now think of the ancient world.  All those superior civilisations run by kings and pharaohs were created by the original Journeymen.  Sure, they had played around with the locals, diluting their alien gene pool, but had also managed to keep enough of that pool untainted.

The new Journeymen, stranded on Earth with no viable means to return in the immediate future, undertook to create a system that protected the original Journeymen, helped to preserve their lineage and steer technology to create a system to get the genetic material back to the home planet, a process that would ultimately take thousands of years.

To complicate matters, on the comet journey tensions had run high between one genetic faction led by Arlgon and the commanders of the mission, which created a rift that spanned the generations that travelled together and continues to this day.  To keep the various Journeymen varieties identifiable the new Journeymen called the original Journeymen 'Colonists', the breakaway faction the 'Sons of Arlgon', usually shortened to the 'Sons', leaving themselves to be just the 'Journeymen'.  There is a fourth relevant group to consider that should have been just the original human species, but as mentioned above, the Colonists liked to play home and away, hence all human DNA is in part alien.  They are the majority of the population, considered disposable by the Journeymen, almost certainly includes you and me and are called 'Interbreds', or IBs.

From the off the Journeymen strove to move into positions of influence, supporting but not challenging the Colonists.  Slowly they manoeuvred to make the Colonists more ceremonial than active players and occupied senior positions to direct policy.  Think in terms of the current King of England and the senior Civil Servants.  Not all the senior Civil Servants are likely to be Journeymen, just enough to ensure that particular ship is steered the way they want.  And not all Journeymen are in the Civil Service - they spread out across all important branches of modern day living from controlling the media, to running the universities, to managing tech companies, to anything that helps meet their prime objective to get Colonist DNA to the home planet.

Not every Journeyman is high ranking and not every high ranking Journeyman is the best candidate for the role they occupy - ever been beaten to a job of a lifetime by someone who is technically inferior to you?  Welcome to the unfair world of the Journeymen.

And the Sons?  After all these years they are still the natural enemies of the Journeymen.  They care not one jot for the Journeymen task and truth be told, they give a damn about this planet.

In the next part I'll explain how the modern world can be explained by the Journeyman story.

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In the US Bronze is on a countdown promotion starting Sunday 14th September at $0.99 for the eBook, rising to $1.99 on the 17th September before reverting to the full price of $2.99 on the 20th September.  All promotions commence at 8:00 am PDT on the stated days.

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Follow me on Twitter: @RayASullivan

email me at raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com

Check out my comedic ramblings as Throngsman on www.newsbiscuit.com

     

   

 

Bronze - The Detectorist Detective

 

This post is really overdue.  I published Bronze in September 2023 and actually thought I'd blogged about it.  Clearly I was wrong, so this post is a belated attempt to put that situation right.

Most books have a genesis backstory, an event or a conversation that gets the thought processes churning.  My first two books, Parallel Lives and The Journeymen were both originally short stories written working away from home in my last few months of Royal Air Force service that kept tapping away at me.  Skin, for all it's near future politics mixed with the largely unresolved WMD issue that we went to war for was in many ways a parallel story of the manufacturing company I was working for at the time.

The Last Simple was inspired by the ludicrously short chapters in the Dan Brown (and other writers') books, and Project: Evil was simply inspired by catching the end of a Roger Moore Bond movie and thinking 'how the hell do you go about project managing a secret lair for a megalomaniac?

Digital Life Form was sparked by a conversation about where tech will go in the future - we'd just bought one of those new-fangled Tom Tom Sat Navs.  That was written in 2011 and most of the tech was pure Sci Fi - what we would now call AI and self driving cars was only vaguely talked about. 

Hotel California was, obviously, inspired by the song but quickly took on a new meaning.  I still refer to famous folk leaving too soon as new residents.  Bronze, on the other hand, was someone else's idea.

I'm retired now, but two years ago I finalised my fifty-one circuits of the sun as a wage slave, working as a lecturer in a Welsh technical college, teaching maths and science in the aeronautical engineering department.  I worked in a small office, with just five of us in a room that was technically overcrowded.  My desk was in a corner facing the only door, so the other guys (it was an all-male environment until I left, my replacement has moved the diversity dial and is doing a great job).  You've probably assumed I was probably the oldest in the office and you'd be correct with the other four ranging from just under forty at the time to mid fifties.  Not only was I the only one who taught the tough academic stuff at that time, I was the only one who wrote stuff - books, satire, occasionally blogs.  That sentence will be relevant in a paragraph or so.

Given the age of the other guys it shouldn't come as a surprise that three of them seemed to go through a mid-life crisis simultaneously.  They'll deny it, but one by one in early 2023 they all bought soft top sports cars.  I'm not being a critic - I'm jealous, I missed my mid-life crisis, probably because I had a major life change leaving the RAF and buying my first and so far only house while learning to survive in civvy street in my mid forties.  Anyway, first one, Steve, bought a Mazda MX5, a second, Jason, bought a BMW - don't ask what model, it had a soft top and probably didn't have working indicators - and the third, Simon, bought an Alfa Romeo Spyder.  It's on the cover of the book, if you're into these sort of things.  Simon is a keen detectorist and extremely knowledgeable about British history.

Anyway, the three amigos started meeting up at the weekend, parking up three soft-tops abreast at a café on the Horseshoe Pass or somewhere in the Llyn Peninsula to have a coffee or two and put the world to rights.  Then one Monday, after one of these meetings, Jason entered the office and said he'd had a great idea for a TV show.  He was telling the room, but looking directly at me as I shuffled maths worksheets for my first lesson.  Apparently he'd been following Simon in the Alfa and it came to him - Bronze the Detectorist Detective.  A TV show each week with Bronze solving a crime.  I pushed for more, but that was it really.  I went off and taught my lesson and pretty much forgot about it.  Until break time when he brought it up.  And lunch.  And afternoon break.  Remember the sentence about how I was the only person with a writing background?

Obviously the brief was a little thin, so quietly I gave the idea some thought.  Although I'm no detectorist - I have literally bought and used one for the first time in my life this year for messing around with the grandsons on the beach - I have a long term friend from my Airforce days, Dougie,  who was and is an armourer and who drifted into Explosive Ordnance Disposal, or bomb squad as his calling is often called. He trained in EOD and was involved in clearing war graves in the Balkans as the Serbians often booby-trapped them.  I recalled Dougie recounting some of his experience on a fleeting visit to me after we both had left the RAF and it had stuck with me.  Doug kept in the industry, has worked near the DMZ in South Korea, was part of the team that cleared the Falklands of land mines and works clearing brownfield sites in the UK these days. So I created an amalgam character, only known as Bronze, who had a military career in the Special Forces and in EOD and who was now consulting as a civilian, just as Dougie does today. Dougie wasn't in the Special Forces, BTW, that was the usual artistic exaggeration.

I created a synopsis that covered chapter by chapter what would roughly happen in the book and set it mainly in Mold, north Wales, a very nice town not that far from my home but with a diversion to Pristina as part of a murder mystery.  For the benefit of North American readers, the grungy stuff that forms on your windowsill and in the shower is spelled mould over here - the town isn't musty! Bronze, as well as being a consulting EOD specialist is also used by police investigating serious crimes by using his skills to look for buried evidence and is roped in by north Wales Constabulary to assist with the investigation of a man found in a field just outside of Mold with his head almost cleaved in two.  Scattered around the man are what look like bronze artefacts but turn out to be from the Copper Age and originating in the Balkan region.

By the way, if you've never heard of the Copper Age it's because we didn't really have one in what we now call the UK - we went from Stone to Bronze pretty much in one leap, but in continental Europe Copper was the metal of choice for a long time and, despite not bothering with it as a pure metal much, north Wales was home to one of the largest copper mines in Europe.  The other large one was in the Balkans - the book is fun, fast, violent, scary and yet educational.  Dougie provided lots of background information on how bomb disposal operates and I've tried to incorporate that in the story in an authentic way.

The book weaves a seemingly unrelated crime and a serial terrorist bomber from Bronze's past with the investigation of the crime literally in his own backyard.  For a bit of fun I incorporated the office people into the characters, not always in a flattering way.  To be fair I did something a little scary as a writer - I set up a shared folder in the public part of my cloud and gave them all access as the book developed.  Being a little mean I stopped sharing the story after a very dramatic cliff hanging moment, so they had to wait for the book to come out to find out who survived and who didn't.

I'll post the first couple of chapters on the blog in a day or so, for you to sample it.

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In the US Bronze is on a countdown promotion starting Sunday 14th September at $0.99 for the eBook, rising to $1.99 on the 17th September before reverting to the full price of $2.99 on the 20th September.  All promotions commence at 8:00 am PDT on the stated days.

The book is available in eBook, paperback and hardback formats, there are links to all my books below

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Follow me on Twitter: @RayASullivan

email me at raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com

Check out my comedic ramblings as Throngsman on www.newsbiscuit.com

   

   

 

Life on Mars, and over the Moon about it

 I grew up in the Sixties having been born in the late Fifties.  It was a golden age in some ways and to a pre-pubescent boy the space race was one of the most exciting things around, culminating in the moon landings in 1969.

Of course the Sixties weren't perfect.  I was raised as one of six in an industrial town in north Wales.  My dad was middle management in a large steel works and probably was well paid but the benefits of that were offset by the number of mouths he raised.  Consumerism wasn't a word or even an idea - stuff lasted for as long as it could be made to and hardly anyone aspired to new cars or home ownership.  None of these things were problems - I never went hungry and didn't feel disadvantaged, still don't.  They were simpler times, great music was happening and something as basic as  transistor radio was the epitome of indulgence.

The space race, though, showed an alternative reality.  It's easy to look back on those days and the basicness of the technology the astronauts had to work with, but it was a close to science fiction without actually being fiction you could get.  Unless, of course, you're a conspiracy theorist believing it was all filmed in Burbank.

Roll on the Seventies and music really got a grip on me - everything from Glam Rock to Motown (having started influencing me towards the end of the Sixties).  In my teens now I was interested in other  distractions although space still fascinated me and Bowie provided the track to my years.  I was convinced in the existence of aliens and believed that UFOs were a thing, but life as always got in the way and as Punk Rock, a genre I never really got into, kicked off I had joined the military and my aeronautical engineering career.  Oddly I became less enthused with space, but with retrospect, space had started to become a little stale.

The moon landings had finished - to be fair after Apollo 13 it was a hard act to beat - and the Space Station was embryonic.  The Space Shuttle caused a stir but was deliberately low-key, almost day-to-day.  The Shuttle disasters reminded us that it was actually still a high-risk affair but with earning a living, raising a family and avoiding the worst of Eighties music space faded into the background.  Of course then came the Nineties and in retrospect the Eighties music wasn't too bad after all.  The Noughties gave me a similar appreciation of the Nineties.  I have no idea about the recent teens, having focussed on the blues.

But now it's getting all interesting again - I have two grandsons, one seven, the other three - and as they grow up towards their teens humans are returning to the moon, Mars is going to be explored and who knows, colonisation on Mars might be an employment option for them in their twenties.  The older one is aware of the International Space Station and has watched it pass overhead but currently space is a slow burner for him, however I'm sure his generation is going to have an exciting time watching the build up to the next moon landings and the colonisation of Mars.  I hope to be able to witness these events myself, just a bit wary of the soundtrack to be honest.

After years of baby steps it looks like we're suddenly going full pelt.  Space tourism is looking like a reality for a select wealthy few and pushing back the boundaries of near space is happening on a weekly basis.  The reasons for this are apparently clear - our wish to discover new ground is one touted reason, the need to be ready for the next asteroid impact is another.  I proposed an alternative a while back with The Journeymen and the sequel, Day of Reckoning - books about the longest game played ever to curate and send ancient DNA to a home planet with a very distorted set of values driving it.

Both of those books are available in eBook and paperback format from Amazon and if you have  Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited they can be read for free.  I'm convinced they are fiction, but I think that about the Burbank link to the moon landings, and a lot of people disagree with me on that score, so who knows?

Four books on free promotion

Amazon are running a free promotion on four of my books in the next week - Hotel California, Assassin, The Journeymen and Parallel Lives.

Make a bookmark and download them while they are free.

Hotel California is the story behind where celebrities go after they 'die', where they retire to.  Inspired by the song by the Eagles it follows the trail of a British punk rocker who retires to the remote location and a life of luxury after faking his death in LA but realises he has made a mistake.  He teams up with an octogenarian rocker called Elvis who has spent the last forty years plus scheming to escape from his self imposed prison, but they'll need the help of a British music journalist, Aiden, to help them escape.

Assassin is a dystopian novel set in an England in the near future.  Democracy has been suspended, ties with Europe and the US have been severed and it follows the extraction to safety of a scientist hiding from the government agents by a man known as the Assassin - a gun for hire to almost anyone but the people who made him what he is - the congress, which is the name of the governing body of the country in the book.  Worth reading now as the sequel is in progress as I type.

The Journeymen is the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories.  Don't understand how your boss got the job? Can't stop shaking your head at the antics of the people at the top?  The Journeymen might just provide you with answers to this and many other questions.  It's a thriller too, and you'll be hanging on by the seat of your pants.

Parallel Lives is my first novel, written a long time ago.  It's science fiction and a thriller.  Some of the Sci-fi stuff is now real stuff such is the pace of change but it has a sneaky twist that many readers miss altogether.  See if you can spot it (hint - it has a reference to a character that later appeared in Hotel California)

Enjoy.

Working from home

Writers, even part time writers such as myself, are used to working from home.  I've a sneaking suspicion that even the most successful of authors are unlikely to have an office away from their home for the purpose of writing.  Sure, a few will have dedicated rooms in their homes that they use, possibly, exclusively for the purpose of producing prose, but I reckon most of us don't.

I'm very fortunate in that I actually do have a dedicated home office room complete with a custom built oak desk and bureau - we had them built by an artisan woodworker twenty years ago or more when I was studying with the Open University and, partly because it is a timeless design and the builder was such a good craftsman, it's still as good as new.  Perhaps the odd bit of distressing here and there, but that's the beauty of this type of furniture.  The room's not used exclusively for writing - far from it - we have a wall mounted TV and a leather recliner sofa in the room as well, and during the late autumn to early spring we both use it as our TV room in the evenings.  Most of my work, all year round, is actually crafted on my knee regardless of which room I'm spending time in.

In fact my second novel, The Journeymen, was written in large part on a Palm PDA - remember them? -with a folding keyboard.  It was very portable and until it let me down on a transatlantic flight in 2003 it had become my go-to resource.  I guess that failure was my personal wake up call - I'd written a large part of the battle scene in the Journeymen on board the facility on the comet between the J-Men and the Sons of Arlgon and the battery failed, taking several thousand words with it.  I dragged a foolscap pad out of my bag and scribbled down what I'd just spent a large part of the flight typing.

However, like a lot of you guys, I've been working from home - mainly by email - as a result of the Coronavirus crisis.  The desk has really come into its own.  I've resisted the temptation to sit on the sofa and put my feet up for the slightly irrational feeling that it wouldn't feel like work if I did that, even though the end result would be the same.  And maybe that's one of things about writing, why I can choose to write on my knee, on an aircraft, on a bus or wherever.  Because writing doesn't feel like a job.

And because we can access all our work resources via VPN and can chat using WhatsApp it feels like I'm still in the office.  I just don't have to face students four or five times a day, and I'm not complaining about that.  I'm sure the lockdown is going to result in a lot of issues for many people, most need some form of physical social interaction and at the time of writing this lockdown looks like a long haul but I've been practising (anti) social distancing most of my life, so I should be OK.  I may even find time to complete my tenth novel.  Even if I don't, I reckon my Kindle will take a hammering this summer - when I'm not working from home, naturally.

If you're looking to stock up on reading matter to weather the lockdown - it looks like practically everywhere on the planet is going through lockdown at the moment, then at the time of writing - 24 March - Digital Life Form is free to download.  It looks like that offer is good until about 8 a.m. Friday morning, UK time.  Be my guest.

If you're entitled through subscription to download Kindle Unlimited books for free then you can choose any of my titles, to keep you occupied when working from home loses its appeal.  Otherwise I like to think they're reasonably priced.  Links to them all below are to the Amazon US site - I'm sure you'll be redirected to your regional website if you are outside the US.

Hotel California
Assassin
The Journeymen
Journeymen II: Day of Reckoning
Project : Evil
Digital Life Form
The Last Simple
Skin
Parallel Lives

Accessing my books

Sometime last year I relinquished the domains to my websites - selling ebooks is far from lucrative and for the last few years my online presence was costing more than it was raising.  Consequently if you have been trying to use the links in any of the 500+ blog entries I've made you'll have found the websites don't exist anymore.

While it is clear some of you are still finding your way to my books, I fully understand the issues with searching the bookstores.  Consequently I'm going to list links to the books in this blog post and hopefully over time will embed it in the posts that still attract traffic.

Feel free to browse these books at your favourite store.  I'm focussing on US, UK, Australian and Canadian bookstores initially as these make up 99% of my sales, but if you'd like links to bookshops (and I'm thinking Amazon really) then email me and I'll update.

Smashwords (international - covers all regions)

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

The Last Simple

Project: Evil

Assassin

Amazon US

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

Project: Evil

Assassin

Amazon UK

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

The Last Simple

Project: Evil

Assassin

Amazon Australia

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

The Last Simple

Project: Evil

Assassin

Amazon Canada

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

The Last Simple

Project: Evil

Assassin

Barnes & Noble US

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

The Last Simple

Project: Evil

Assassin

Did the FBI need Apple support at all?

The fight against terrorists is one of the most difficult any country can undertake. Having spent a significant portion of my working life checking the underside of my car before setting off to work I'm aware of how terrorists can affect your perception.

I've been watching the debate between Apple and the FBI regarding unlocking the San Bernadino bombers' phone with mixed emotions.

On one level it seems perfectly sensible to access all of the data ASAP to effect the arrest of any accomplices - and experience tells us that terrorists rarely act alone.  Then there comes the news that a specialist company has unlocked the iPhone without Apple's help, avoiding the need for messy legal action.

I've been of the opinion for some time that actually the FBI will have hacked that phone long ago.  If we were dealing with a British intelligence outfit, MI5 or 6 (correctly referred to as SIS) then probably we'd never know they had the phone in the first place.  If they did mention they were having difficulty in hacking it, it would mean they'd hacked it ages earlier and were hoping to lull someone into a false sense of security or make them run for their lives - to see who they ran to.

Now I read that the FBI could have accessed the contacts without the four digit code - friends who use Apple devices claim this too - but there was a need to access the data in a way that could stand up in court in a way that could refute any allegations that the data had been modified on the way.  I understand the chain of custody rules, appreciate that they are important, but dammit the perpetrators are long gone and most of the information could have been obtained through a subpoena to the terrorist's phone company anyway.

So I'm afraid we've all been treated to a smoke and mirrors charade.  The FBI almost certainly didn't need to access that phone per se, and I'm afraid I consider that Apple colluded in a stage managed way to assist the FBI, not impede it.  We'll probably never know, of course, because that's how the game is played. The FBI look like they're amateurs while they home in on the other terrorists and Apple look like they have the moral high ground. By the time we know more most of us will have forgotten this episode.

If you enjoy the concept of doublespeak and conspiracy theories you may want to consider The Journeymen (currently free) or the more tongue in cheek novel DLF, available through all good ebook retailers including Smashwords (which the links take you to).  Please note that due to Amazon rules beyond my control The Journeymen isn't free there, but rest assured an Amazon friendly copy can be downloaded from Smashwords.

The Journeymen available for free

For a limited period I've set The Journeymen as free on iTunes, B&N, Kobo etc. Currently this book is priced $0.99 (or £/€ equivalent) on Amazon but if that's your Ebook reader of choice then there's no good reason why you can't report a lower price elsewhere - Amazon usually price match.

The free offer should either be active now or will kick in the next day or so. If you've been reading the blurb and considering giving it a go then now's the right time to do so.

The Journeymen is two stories interwoven into one. The main story is about Tom Roberts, a space vehicle designer who becomes targetted by a group known as The Journeymen. The back story tells the tale of how the Journeymen came to be here in the first place, while introducing you to the colonists, the Sons of Arlgón and, of course, the Interbreds (or IBs). By the way, in all probability you are an IB: if not you'll know the back story and will almost certainly be dangerous.

Be warned, The Journeymen is violent. It's also thought provoking and for a limited period, free.

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Visit my Book Website here

 

    
    Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

Flying Saucery

As a sometime Sci-Fi author I should be grateful for the concept of flying saucers - every fictional genre needs its own consistent back story. As a general rule I've tended to create my own back stories and so far have managed to avoid both little green men (I'm colour blind, so it wouldn't make sense anyway) and I've definitely avoided flying saucers. In fact my forays into how we could potentially be visited by aliens has included travel on the back of a comet and bacterial infection from space via meteorites.  Interestingly both concepts have been mooted in the serious scientific press in the years since I wrote about them, but of course I'm naturally selective about which ideas to remind you all of.

I have a strange position on flaying saucers, UFOs and alien visitors. The science fact part of me understands the rational, science based limitations on travel between adjacent star systems which, if you factor in the general theory of relativity makes the likelihood of us being visited highly unlikely.  Probably as unlikely as me winning the National Lottery, in fact.  However, despite the appalling odds and my mathematics degree I still find myself buying the ticket, in part because half of what I pay goes to good causes and anyway, someone wins most weeks.

But the bit that really skews my views is that I saw and reported a UFO sighting when I was a teenager. I couldn't explain what I saw back then, can't now, so I'm pulled between my memories and my logic.  It was October 1970 or maybe 1971.  I was walking with two friends across a field towards Ewloe Castle - the same Tudor edifice that I described in Skin - and the time was just before 8 PM.  There was a flash of sheet lightning without an accompanying crash of thunder.  We all saw the flash and I noted the time.  Three minutes later, chatting away like only teenagers do, there was another flash.  Irrationally I decided to see if there would be another flash three minutes hence, so was the only one of the three looking towards the sky when the third and final flash took place, at about the three minute mark.  Directly in my line of sight, illuminated for a fraction of a second, were three egg shapes in a sort of vee formation. The sky was rendered milky white by the lightning flash and the three egg shapes were marginally whiter.  A fraction of a second later the sky was dark again, the shapes were nowhere to be seen and my friends were still looking at the ground avoiding stepping in something mucky while I was trying to get their attention.

Anyway, I drew a picture when I got home and wrote a letter to the Ministry of Defence who replied some time later to state that there was no aircraft activity recorded in that area at that time.  They were adamant that I hadn't seen anything and as I've gotten older, I've tended to believe them.  I certainly haven't experienced anything like it since.  Yet my memory has remained remarkably consistent over the years.

I hadn't given this event a thought for some time, not even when writing my science fiction stories, but tonight I stumbled over the origin of the term 'flying saucer'.  It's an interesting tale because the phrase has embedded itself into the culture of science fiction and the whole UFO scene.  It seems that one of the earliest reports of flying craft was reported in 1947 when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold observed craft scooting across his path while flying.  When he landed he gave a potted report to friends at his local airport and took off to carry out a flying job.  By the time he returned the press had descended on the airport and he undertook a number of interviews.  Now it seems that Kenneth was highly consistent in his accounts of what he believed he saw and he has been keen to emphasis he never coined the phrase 'flying saucers'. He did, apparently, state that the erratic movement of the craft he saw was akin to saucers being skimmed across a pond.  Somewhere along the way a reporter, maybe an editor, changed that to 'flying saucers' and the phrase stuck.  Importantly many of the subsequent sightings of UFOs included the assertion that they were flying saucers.  Perhaps we see what we are conditioned to expect? Maybe the reporter's misquote was fortuitous.

Kenneth was convinced he saw something that day and reported four more sightings in the following years.  I haven't, maybe I'm too busy watching where I'm stepping, perhaps I'm too keen to stay indoors after dark, or might I be worried that I'll see something unexplainable for a second time, something that contradicts my science sensible head.  Because if there one thing I believe in less than flying saucers, it's coincidences.

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Visit my Book Website here

 

    
    Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Assassin Available for Pre-order Soon

My latest novel, Assassin, is nearing completion and I'm expecting it to go on pre-order soon.  The ability to place books on pre-order is a new innovation for self published authors, a service that only the publishing houses enjoyed previously.  Of course all self published authors beat the drum ahead of launch date, but in reality this has always has a whiff of vapourware about it.  However Smashwords, the distributor of my books to Apple, Barnes and Noble and Kobo has introduced a pre-order system that the big ebook providers have agreed to.

So how does it benefit you and what does it mean to me?  Well, for the majority of authors, including myself, it probably doesn't provide much of a benefit.  It does allow pre-orders to accrue until launch day and on that day all the pre-orders are counted in one lump, which may just raise the visibility of the book a tad higher than without it.  It also allows the book to be previewed in advance of the sales period, giving readers a chance to think about it before it arrives.  It does provide a structure for the final edit - that is a job that can always be postponed due to other commitments if we're not careful, but a real deadline, well for a completer like me that's the kind of stress that helps.

For the reader, well, it allows you to think about a book and still be the first on the block to read it.  Probably not the highest priority for many of my readers, although I do have a loyal core of you that do seem to buy every book I write.  For those who like to think they are helping their personal favourite authors, it's a chance to help elevate their profile to let others know about them.  It's also an opportunity for authors to reward the loyal and one way that is suggested by Smashwords is to provide those who email evidence of a pre-order the opportunity to receive a promotional code to obtain an existing book from the canon for free.  I'll be looking into that as a tool.

So what's Assassin about?  Well, it's a return to the multi level novels I wrote in The Journeymen and Skin, that is, it has two stories spread over two time periods interwoven with each other.  It's set in the not-too-distant future, in a UK that has temporarily suspended democracy as part of the ongoing war on terror, being run by the congress.  It starts during the fledgling congress period at the time of the worst terrorist attack ever to hit mainland UK, a defining moment that reinforces the stance of the government and oscillates between then and events at the time of the fourth congress.

John is an engineer who falls victim to the terrorist attack that destroyed the Queen Elizabeth the Second bridge and almost killed him.  While being debriefed by congress agents his family is targeted by a mysterious person known only as Morris, a journey that results with John becoming a gun for hire, a dedicated killer known as the Assassin.  He finds himself holed up in a beach hut in Cornwall during a terrible storm with a beach bum who discovers John's secret.  They are destined to spend the night stuck in each other's company while the storm plays out and John decides to tell his story of how he came to be the Assassin as a way of proving he means his co-resident no harm.  Except his resident isn't all that he appears to be and unknown to John there are a couple of congress soldiers staking out the hut, intent on killing one of them and capturing the other.

As the night progresses, John's tale of his past unfolds as the present develops, and we find ourselves living his story alternately through his eyes and as a remote viewer.  Needless to say there is a lot of action throughout the book and the dénouement, currently being crafted, is packed with two concurrent storylines that lead to resolution of the past and the present.

Assassin has been a long time in development, having been started back in 2006 and worked on between other writing projects since.  It was born out of events at that period when the UK and US governments both sought to extend the war on terror in part by curtailing civil liberties, moves that were roundly resisted by many people.  While the menace that terrorism presents has necessarily resulting in a natural curtailing of our liberties for the greater good, some of the proposals seemed so at odds with what we regard as democracy it looked like we could end up as totalitarian as the states we aim to resist.  This book in part looks at what could happen when that battle is taken so far as to remove democracy, and the distorted world it could create.  It's not a political statement, nor a libertarian rant against anti-terrorist policies, but it does aim to make the reader consider these in passing.

There will be more information about Assassin and its release date in the near future, as well as excerpts from the book as a taster.

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Rosetta Craft to land on Comet

A European Space Agency spacecraft, Rosetta, is to attempt to land on a comet travelling at high speed through space at over 24 thousand miles per hour.  Clearly these kind of velocities are difficult to attain using current technology so the Rosetta craft has spent over two years circling Earth and Mars to build up a slingshot effect.

The project has been likened to trying to get a fly to land on an speeding bullet.  Just to make it even more difficult the craft has been out of contact and in virtual hibernation mode for the last two years as it built up speed.  Engineers are attempting to regain contact today so that they can control its flight mode.

Apart from the fact that this is an interesting subject in its own right, my attention was caught by a brief mention in the latest article on the subject that revealed that the Rosetta craft launched in March 2004.  It was about that time that I started writing the first draft of The Journeymen, a part of which details the trials and tribulations of landing a spacecraft onto the surface of a speeding comet.  Another coincidence is that the book featured ESA engineers as the main characters, but I guess there's a limited number of space agencies to pick from.

The ESA scientists and engineers may be pleased to hear that the fictional attempt succeeded, but you often find fiction less stressful than pushing real boundaries.  Unlike my version, which was an attempt to piggy-back on the comet to make a journey that would have been otherwise impossible, these people are attempting to carry out some real life research into comets, trying to understand what they are composed of, how they decompose during their journey and what they might contain.  I'm sure the consortium that has just invested large amounts of venture capital into attempting to mine precious minerals from orbiting objects will be watching pretty closely too - I'm not convinced right now about the economics of their venture, but seeing as mining the minerals from the comet also played a significant part of The Journeymen storyline, including a particularly bloodthirsty battle in space, then I'm also interested in how they get on.  It may be fiction, but I always hoped that the ideas could be feasible in the long run - that's what makes writing such an interesting venture.

So good luck to the engineers on their attempt to regain control and I'll be watching this project closely.

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Is Mars Trip a Reality?

You've probably heard about the project to send a group of people to Mars on a one way trip.  It doesn't sound that great a deal on the surface - you agree to travel to a planet with a guarantee that you won't be coming back.  In fact you will be establishing a new human frontier, be expected to bring new life onto the planet and develop the community.  Given that the human race has only managed to send a few sensors and a rover to the red planet so far - and the UK contribution was to drop an extremely expensive sensor from a great height to create the ultimate splat image on the surface - then there is clearly a lot of development work needed and fast.

Unlike the moon missions, where the astronauts only needed to survive on the moon for a few days and the transit time to and from the rock orbiting the Earth - or at least survive a few weeks of filming in Burbank if some sceptics are to be believed - the inhabitants will need a complete environment conducive to surviving the rest of their life and continuing for the life of their offspring.  Of course this won't be a one way drop off and see you affair, I presume the project includes continuing support with resupply drops.  Hopefully they will be more successful than the UK efforts so far.

I've been watching this project with a certain amount of interest, not because I think it will work or even happen, but because it mirrors part of the storyline in The Journeymen, my second novel.  In that book there is a significant sub-plot where a community has to travel through three generations to a distant planet and they are all recruited to ensure they have a suitable DNA mix to make sure there aren't any inbreeding issues, they have the right skills to make the mission viable and the correct mental attitude to survive.  I won't spoil the story, but needless to say, there are issues.

Presumably for this project they want fit and healthy people young enough to raise children with sufficient technical skills to make such a venture self supporting.  So engineers, doctors with surgery experience, scientists and the like.  Given that the mission is ten years away and that they will need to be reasonably young when taking part, getting the mix of skills and experience is going to be a challenge given that they've had the first recruitment drive.  It seems that over 200,000 people applied world-wide and that has been whittled down to under 2,000 applicants.  Seemingly the project managers were disappointed that only 200,000 people were prepared to go on a one-way mission.  I'm surprised that many did.  Why would people volunteer for such a mission?

Well, there is the pioneering spirit, and interestingly the largest group of volunteers were from the US, a country with a strong pioneering history.  To be fair many of the volunteers weren't the right stuff, in fact a bit barking by all accounts - especially the couple who sent in a video application in the nude. How warm do they think it is up there?  Of course there were many reasons and motivations for applying and for me, one reason would be to get away from so-called reality TV, you know, the TV that puts strangers together in an unrealistic environment and watches their every move.  A bit like sending a group to Mars on a one-way trip, in fact.

Indeed there is talk of turning the whole saga, from recruitment, through training and off to the red planet you go as a reality show.  My gut instinct is that the whole thing is a reality show project with a remote possibility that it could end up as a Mars mission.  The research for the project, the development of transport and living quarters and all the other big bucks technological requirements aren't funded yet.  A $400,000 research contract with a major US space company is due to be paid at the end of January and is only $300,000 short at the moment, which should indicate the feasibility of this project.  And whether they plan to send a handful or a bus full of travellers to Mars the project is going to cost billions, so I'm far from convinced it has enough legs to make it off this planet, let alone all the way to Mars.

But they've secured the first volunteers, who may be too old and infirm to make the journey by the time the funding is found.  Which is great, because it means they can select unqualified, uneducated sociopathic morons as the first potential travellers, lock them up in a mock Mars compound for years on end, film them bickering and send the FBI in when one of them goes postal with the Colt 45 conveniently left lying around.  All streamed 24/7, of course, preferably through a subscription service.  Such a service may generate enough funding to actually run such a project but will also save me the problem of accidentally straying onto the reality show as I'm way too mean to pay for subscription. 

They say they may run another recruitment campaign soon, to bolster the candidate pool and haven't ruled out anyone who applied the first time applying again.  Perhaps we will see the couple in the buff after all. Maybe I'll review my policy on subscription services.

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Nurturing Nature

It's a long established debate - are we born or made the person we are? The Nature versus Nurture argument has taxed the finest minds for generations and quite a few of the more modest intellects around, to put it politely.

The Nature argument supposes that genetics deals us our hand to deal with life. To be sure, there's a compelling view to the notion that the gene pool we were dipped in determines our potential. It certainly reinforces the views of some prejudiced individuals - who are quick to dismiss people because of their parents' achievements (or lack of). Conversely it can be used to provide certain offspring with opportunities based on a perception of the parental potential. It's probably true in many cases that the offspring of rocket scientists will be academically gifted, however it isn't a given. On the other hand the children of manual workers often percolate to the top of the academic pot. Of course, just because your parents were blue collar workers it doesn't necessarily follow that they didn't have academic potential, just fewer breaks.

Which brings us to the Nurture argument. This says that your background and environment determines your likelihood of succeeding in life. It certainly seems that some people get to the top regardless of ability. We've all worked for bosses that have lived what seems a charmed life and it just has to be that they are getting promoted above better, more talented contemporaries. If you've read The Journeymen and its sequel, Day of Reckoning, then you'll know I have explored this aspect in fiction in some detail. It may be fiction, but there's a lot of real life observation in there that just seems to feel like it fits.  Perhaps I'm just a born cynic - back to Nature, then.

But writing a Sci-Fi novel underpinned by an unproven conspiracy theory is no more scientific than any other lay opinion. Most people today believe that both Nature and Nurture play a part in our lives, especially the developmental part of it. The tricky part is working out the division of responsibility between Nature and Nurture. A major recent study has moved the argument forward.

Over two thousand pairs of twins have been evaluated to see whether the genetic mix they share or the environment they were raised influenced their eventual academic results. They came from diverse backgrounds, hence had a wide variety of environmental influences to help or maybe hinder their progress. There was also a mix of identical and non identical twins in the study. The variety of backgrounds has the effect of smoothing out the Nurture impact, leaving the results based on identical versus non-identical twins to compare the impact of Nature.

If Nurture is the predominant parameter in this study then the identical versus non-identical results shouldn't vary much. If nature is predominant, then there will be a difference between the two types of twins. The reason for this is that non-identical twins are like any other sibling pairs with perhaps one difference; their environmental influences should be more or less the same, no older brother gets more attention than younger sister situations. Identical twins should, in the main, share the same academic abilities and environmental opportunities. Given that both Nature and Nurture are expected to contribute to some degree there wouldn't be an absolute result, just potentially a bias or not.

So, what did the study find? Well, identical twins scored the same (give or take) 60% of the time in science, mathematical and language subjects but the non-identical twins scored about a 40% correlation. The split is less defined in artistic disciplines, apparently. This suggests that although the environment can hold back or propel individuals in a disproportionate way, the genetic mix we are born with is the predominant element. If we're dealt a weak hand, then that's our lot, by and large. But if we're dealt a reasonable hand, as long as we're not artificially held back we have the same chance to succeed as anyone else, in principle.

Of course this result, while a major indication that nature has the upper hand, demonstrates that Nurture, or society, has the potential to hold capable people back or push the wrong people forward.  So maybe The Journeymen might not be that far off the mark after all.  Or, if you take a look at another of my books, Digital Life Form, you'll learn that one of the only two rules in life that matter is that life ain't fair.

The other rule covers all other eventualities, for twins, identical or not and the rest of us.  Shit happens!

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