I will announce the date of the competition tomorrow – it will probably be the end of the week or over the weekend.
Four AUTOGRAPHED PAPERBACKS of THE KHEKARIAN THREAT will be going out to the first 4 readers who answer a question correctly. The answer lies somewhere in the first four free-to-read chapters. Don’t leave it to the last minute!
Here are the links to the first four chapters:
Inspired by television science fiction – and mortified by political futurism passed off as sci-fi and thrust upon me to read by my elders – I determined to create a brand new world of space adventures.
Why was everyone so dour in the books I read? I rarely could get near enough to any character to care, and the whole political thing left me cold anyway, although admittedly, I was very young (around ten years-old).
While those old ideas of future oppression are now crowding close around us, with advocates enthusiastically pushing to make it a global reality, I still look for adventure over doom-and-gloom any day.
Of course there’s adventurous science fiction out there now. It’s been a few decades since those sad days when I couldn’t find what I wanted in sci-fi and so determined to write it for myself. I’m pleased to see full human characterization now, not two dimensional anymore. There are adventures and real excitement, individuals coping with whatever they need to on a personal basis with realistic settings and proper human reactions. It’s wonderful!
Be one of 4 lucky winners to win an autographed paperback of The Khekarian Threat!
I haven’t got the date yet, nor indeed the question (such things are in the hands of my Competition Organizer), but I can tell you that the answer lies somewhere in the first four chapters, which are FREE TO READ RIGHT HERE:
There is no progress without imagination – None – Every innovation has come about because someone sat and thought for a time and worked out how something might work, then figured out how to create it.
From making fire and designing the wheel, all they way up to skyscrapers, computers and landing on the moon, imagination has been the thing that made it happen. It’s the most powerful tool we have. Hand-in-hand with manipulation, it’s a most destructive force used against mankind, but used kindly and openly, it’s our greatest provider.
Every story takes you on a journey. You will know roughly what sort of journey it will be, although you won’t know exactly where you will end up, nor what surprises await you, just that you are guaranteed a journey – The story and characters both might be bumpy or smooth, with twisty curves and great heights, or dead straight and direct – but whoever you meet and however long your journey is, reading a book and delving into worlds, adventures and situations unfamiliar to you is an adventure to be savored.
That, to me, is what makes picking up a book so exciting. You just don’t know what gem you might discover or what lasting impressions it will leave you with.
If you love the action you were thrown into and the people you encountered, then the adventure is even better if it is part of a series. Yes, you enjoyed the ending, the story closed, but there’s more yet and that’s got to be the greatest thing of all – seeing another doorway offering more to discover.
It won’t be the same journey but a new one, and this time you have a clue what the terrain will be like. This time you will be traveling with friends.
That’s my definition of a good book and a good series.
I’m searching for exciting new pics to use – Yes, I know, I love what I had, too, but maybe it’s time to find something that tells more of a tale and connects more with characters and action and locations.
There’ll be scenery. And skies. And adventure, if I can find any. Gosh, that means people. I do intend to get something beautiful and keep to colorful, and I’ll try not to get lost in the crowd.
I will keep my planets and stars because I love them too much and they say “sci-fi”, but I’ll lose the abstracts (mostly).
You’ll have to let me know what you think about the new lot when I start using them. 😀
I always write what I want to read, and I always write what I want to write – and why should sci-fi be “pure” while all other genres are allowed to have LIFE?
Fortunately, science fiction nowadays DOES have life, yet the concept remains, particularly when it comes to sex.
I have been told numerous times that sci-fi doesn’t usually have sex in it, for instance, and that it is a different genre and writers shouldn’t mix genres. I usually reply that when the cowboy in a Western gets the girl in the end, no one says that’s a mixed genre of Western and Love story. Usually they get my point at once.
As a kid, I really didn’t like most of the science fiction available, including (actually, especially) the big name authors. Mostly it was too dour. It could be that I was reading above my age level, but what I really wanted was adventure and spaceships and alien planet colonization.
It’s the weekend, so here we go again – I’ve got some good posts back there during the last year, but unfortunately, I’ve got some waffly bits, too (no surprise there), yet this one caught my eyes and the theme is basically sound, so let’s look at some tech stuff (don’t worry, it’s not that tech), this time exploring why I mix some technologies in the sci-fi I write – I apologize in advance for wandering off course during this post-from-the-past and go on about living on the land, but do bear with me, my waffle does circle around and comes back to danger and guns (mostly ignoring the danger and leaving the guns inside) which hopefully shows the mentality that downplays a need, and also results in people choosing low-tech over high.
I almost edited out the waffle, but then you’d wonder what had been there, so I may as well leave it as is.
Bloodstone Sci Fi 