Fifty Shades of To Defend the Earth

So another commenter is asking about a third novel in the To Defend the Earth Universe. We're grateful and so glad someone enjoyed TDTE and To Survive the Earth so much they want more of it. We have ideas, lots of them. Space battles among the moons of Saturn and Pluto, an attack on the alien home world, and liberating Mars.

But reality hit those ideas like a fly swatter. TSTE just didn't do very well. We remain baffled. 

We don't have much buzz for the project anymore and if we are going to do a space series, we'd much rather our ideas go into the 2543 project. This would be our version of The Expanse*, but with aliens showing up through a wormhole and forcing Earth and Mars to work together. Three books. Someday.

At this point it's not a matter of can't. We can write whatever the hell we want. If we decide to write Fifty Shades of Will, there's not a goddamn thing anyone can do about it. We just don't want to writ about TDTE right now.

[But you do want to write Fifty Shades of Will-Ed]

Someday, TDTE we mean.

[Sure you do-Ed]

We'd like to point out that we waited 30 years for Jerry Pournelle to finish Janissaries. We really need to read the final novel. Also, we really need to re-read the previous three novels. Should we dig through the boxes in the basement or just order new ones...?

*Season 1 is the best season of TV science fiction since season 4 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 4 of The Expanse is almost as bad as season 1 of TNG.

Will's Good Idea for the week of 7-21-19

Short stories.

We have two short stories on Amazon. At some point we'll take them down as nobody reads them anyway. 

We also have a few completed short stories about interplanetary settlers on Alpha-Centauri, the first written in 2006. 

Maybe we'll write a couple of stories in  the To Defend the Earth universe. 

And perhaps there's another story to tell about Jake and Patricia.

Next year we'll put together a short story compilation.

Write That

So we cracked open The Final Storm yesterday and realized it's 50,000 words. That's like a month's work, people.

So let's focus on that between now and the trip to Europe this August in which we will commiserate with our new French friends.

On the future projects front we are expending some mental energy on To Liberate Mars and have come up with some good ideas. God, it's fun thinking of stuff like that. 

On a related note we are a very amateur astronomer and have a telescope up here in the Stroock Northern Strategic Direction (Berkshires, Massachusetts). Last night we pointed the telescope at Jupiter and saw two of her moons. Also, Mars is making a close approach. Those interested can simply pop outside after 10 EST, and look in the south/southeast sky. Mars is a giant red dot. You can't miss it.

Write This?

As noted before, and again, and again...we've spent this year trying to clear the decks.

We're wondering what to do with 2019.

Maybe we should make 2019 the year of To Defend the Earth.

Recall, To Defend the Earth and To Survive the Earth are story compilations of man's struggle against alien invaders.

On background the alien Jai come from Epsilon Eridani and have three inhabited worlds. They're more or less like us and only a few centuries ahead technologically. No FTL. No wonder weapons.

We already have one theme set:

To Liberate Mars.

We think one volume might be To Attack the Earth, from the Jai POV. That would certainly be at least a few short stories if not its' own volume.

But what else?

Any one have any ideas that they'd like to see?

 

Will's Good Idea for the Week of 7-1-18

We'd like to get back into the To Defend the Earth saga. We have lots of ideas. One of them is for a short story about a French ship battling the Jai somewhere in the solar system. We've been mean to the French in our writing. We have some fans over there and we'd like to make it up to them. Dickens did the same thing with the Jews.

We always planned To Liberate Mars, a campaign talked about in The Battle of Ceres and we thought about doing a straight-up Robotech ripoff and having a human ship warped out to Pluto and having to fight its way home. This would be the prelude to another novel, To Strike the Stars, where man sends a fleet to the Jai home system of Epsilon Eridani. 

Good ideas all, we think. But we're going to have to see some pickup in the sales department before we start them.

Survivng the Earth

After the events of To Defend the Earth, America endures a long, cold winter. We thought it'd be interesting to explore that in To Survive the Earth.

In one short story we see a small town on the Green River in Western Kentucky trying to survive the coldest winter in memory. The ground is frozen. Sunlight stabs down through the ozone depleted atmosphere and reflects off of a foot of packed snow. People barely have enough to eat. And then FEMA drops off several busloads full of urbanite refugees and orders the town to take care of them.

We see this story through the eyes of Officer Rick Hollander, number two man on the police force, who is charged with keeping order.

Heisenberged

Selling books is an exercise in the Heisenberg Principle. One cannot predict that a book will do well, only the likelihood that a book will do well.

[You just know that from Breaking Bad-Ed]

Actually, Ed, in the early 2000s we read a lot about physics, bitch.

To minimize uncertainty we stick with what we write. That is, we write a lot of exploding tanks, tension filled cabinet meetings, etc.

Our first successful book was To Defend the Earth. This is a collection of short stories about alien invasion culminating in the Battle of Luna- say it folks, 'Space-Dreadnaught'.

We followed up on this success with To Survive the Earth. However, Heisenberg reared his ugly head, and the book bombed.

We really don't know why. To Survive the Earth has all the goodies, including a blockbuster battle story where the Indian Space Navy attacks the alien base on Ceres. So if you like that sort of thing...

Battle Extraordinaire

Our all-time most favorite battle ever, Robotech: Battle cry:

Part I:

The screen just bursts with detail and action with excellent pauses and jumps from shot to shot.

And Part II:

The tension here is almost unbearable.

We first saw this 30 years ago and we haven't looked back since. We've even nipped a few lines of dialogue here and plugged it into To Defend the Earth, 'SDF-1 to base command, our fighter squadrons have initiated contact with the enemy.'

Dread-nought!

Over at The National Interest, talk of reviving the old battleship:

In laying the groundwork for battleship modernizations, there four things that must happen for any successful update. The Iowa-class battleships were designed in the late 1930s, and a lot has happened in the last eighty years. First, the ships must be highly automated. The ships originally sailed with crews of up to 2,700 personnel, later reduced to 1,800. The U.S. Navy is no longer a draftee service, and personnel costs in the all-volunteer Navy are major expenses. Prime candidates for automation are older mechanical systems, such as the three sixteen-inch gun turrets, each of which has a crew of over a hundred, and the power plant and engineering.

Why not? Those things are damn near unsinkable and would be a perfect platform for a battery of electromagnetic rail guns. What a simple of pure firepower. It worked in To Defend the Earth:

Rediscovering Galactica

As mentioned before once Battlestar Galactica went off air it pretty much disappeared from public view. The last time we saw it was in 1984, aired on reruns on WOR, Channel 9.

We would not see BSG again until 97-98 when the Sci-Fi Channel reran it.

Watching the show as an adult was a revelation (we'll get into that in another post) and kindled within us an urge to write for the first time in years.

I went looking for info, but frankly there wasn't a lot out there.

I did find this site, Kobol.com. The owner, Chris Pappas, lovingly gathered all the info and facts he could find about BSG, including the old writer's guide, scripts, etc. This site has been around for 20 years and what the reader will see if he clicks over is pretty much Kobol.com looked like in early 1998.

Glen Larson and company did a good job describing how the Galactica worked, He gave us specs and some tech info. That said if one wanted to know if Galactica had anti-ship lasers, missiles, etc, the info just wan't there. He didn't even really know how many battlestars there were.

So I wrote some fan-fic. Basically Commander Kane leads a squadron of four battlestars on a raid deep into Cylon territory where they destroy several baseships, space stations and planet-side facilities. Alert readers may notice the similarity between this bit of BSG fan-fic and the Battle of Luna in To Defend the Earth.

Heh.

Battle Extraordinaire (mine own)

Recent events have me thinking about To Defend the Earth. Ten years ago I was writing about Mid-Course Interceptors and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense' batteries. Now the former has been tested and the alter deployed, all in response to the Norks.

By the way, we plan to wrap up Tiger's Tail this weekend.

Parts of To Defend the Earth are ten years old now.

Of course the book begins with the line, 'Madam President'....I wrote that line in 2006 and figured it'd be Hillary! Alas it was not to be. So the president morphed into a vague Midwestern mayor and uber-liberal. I thought that would be more interesting. What you want some pistol-packing Sarah Palin Type? Well, just go ahead and read To Survive the Earth, you get plenty of that there.

[Sarah Palin type? You might as well have put an 'I love Alaska' T-shirt on her-Ed]

Oh I can think of some things I'd like to put on Sarah Palin.

[Really?-ed]

Anyway, I always liked the way the combat sequences turned out in To Defend the Earth. Here's one with all that missile gadgetry.

As we rolled up to the command bunker we saw several missile contrails streaking into the sky. We heard several sonic booms as air force jets raced north. Just as we stepped the bunker there was a series of large, loud explosions to the northwest.

In contrast to what was happening outside, inside the bunker everything was calm. Technicians sat at their computers. A few aids walked back and forth between the banks of terminals. General Lutch stood before a large flat screen. He sipped a cup of tea as a pair of red dots made their way down the island’s northwestern coast.

He sipped his tea and said, ‘Keep the fire coming.’ A blue triangle off the coast flashed. A second later a sinking ship icon appeared next to it. ‘Damn,’ said Lutch.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked Scott.

‘Means one of the S-A-Gs just lost a ship.’

‘S-A-Gs?’ Denny asked.

‘Surface Action Groups.’

We weren’t supposed to bring any recording devices into the bunker, but I still had my cell phone on me. As things got tense I hit the record button. I’m not sure who Lutch was on the phone with but it was someone high up for sure. There was a lot of military talk but basically two Jai ships, one of those big carriers and what turned out to be a transport were making their way along the coast.  Here’s the money graph.

‘Tell the national command authority that I need my nukes released…that’s right…this is a formal request…Hold on? I need to fire now… ok….ok….no I haven’t asked the Icelanders…I don’t have time for this…alright.’

He hung up the phone and issued orders. ‘Alright, weapons free. Nuke those incoming ships.’

Getting right to the heart of the matter, as far as I was concerned, I asked Scott, ‘Any danger to use?’

‘I dunno.’

We heard air raid sirens.

What exactly they fired I didn’t know at the time. I later learned that one of the cruisers in the surface action group fired off a trio of nuclear tipped cruise missiles. They nabbed a pair of smaller ships, those bombers that were about to cause so much trouble for the Marines, but the carrier ship and the other large ship, I later found out it was an assault landing craft survived.  The nukes scarred them off the though and the Jai withdrew into space.

A few hours later they came back. This time a barrage of missiles preceded them. These took out suspected missiles sites and troop concentrations. The missile attack was followed up by Jai bombers. A great air battle erupted over the island. Denny went outside and shot some footage but all she was able to get was contrails and some distant explosions. She did capture some footage of a parachute, one of ours. General Lutch kept throwing aircraft in the fight, with heavy casualties resulting, but it wasn’t enough and the Jai were able to seize control of the air.

With air superiority achieved a pair of Jai carriers escorted an assault ship into the atmosphere. Lutch had one last surprise for them though. While they were still in the upper atmosphere he committed a squadron of ASAT armed F-15 Eagles. None of the missiles got through but they did complicate the Jai descent, forcing them to pause while they dealt with the Eagles. This last ditch effort was joined by a battalion of THAAD missiles, and finally, the battery of Mid-Course Interceptors that had been deployed to the island. They scored a couple of hits on one of the carriers but that’s all. The Jai landed at Stadur, a village at the head of a deep fjord on the northern coast about 80 miles from Reykjavik. One carrier stayed behind with the assault ship.

A Marine battalion was stationed nearby and within minutes a recon team was on sight and beaming footage back to Lutch. Denny and I saw it projected on the big flat screen. Two ships lay at anchor in the fjord. They were massive. Actually the assault landing ship was even larger than the carrier. A pair of great doors were were opened. A causeway had been erected to the shore, across it moved vehicles, one by one. The camera man zoomed in on one vehicle, it was some sort of tank. On the shore were soldiers, alien soldiers carrying rifles and clad in body armor. You could clearly see Jai giving orders and directing squads to different points on the shore.

Le Pen, Le France, Le Merde

As France has been targeted for terror in the last few years our stance on that nation has softened a bit. Up until recently we were in the 'cheese eating surrender monkey' school of thought. After Charlie Hebdo, The Bacalan, Nice, and on and on we can't quite muster the contempt we once had for those wine drinking pussies.

The frogs even came out looking pretty good in To Defend the Earth. Just wait till you see what they're up to in World War 1990: The Final Storm.

Please let it be known that we've felt nothing but for contempt for France since they refused to allow our bombers to overfly their territory when we smacked the Libyans in '86. We'll let the Prime Minister speak for us:

They still are.

Macron has a decent lead against Le Pen, high 50s vs low 40s. We don't know enough about French political dynamics to try to break down the race, though we doubt Macron will win by such a margin.

We think this Macron fellow will be next president of France. Macron and Le Pen are debating today. In 2007 the Royale-Sarkozy debate changed the course of the race, maybe Le Pen will be able to do so as well.

We'll see.

We'd like to address one point about France and old grudges.

Back in 2003 France elected to support Saddam Hussein, hoping among other things to avoid the scourge of Islamic terror.  How'd that work out?

Life Imitates Will Stroock

Via Vox Day we learn that China is mobilizing troops in Manchuria against North Korea. In conjunction with the President's deployment of two carrier battle groups to the region, this is interesting.

We suspect that the deployment of Chinese troops is just a diplomatic message to the whack job running North Korea. But what if it isn't? We were stunned when President Trump ordered the strike on Syria. What if he and the Chinese have had enough?

Well, someone's already written a book that covers this. From To Defend the Earth's 2nd chapter:

Six hours into their massive assault, Chinese field commanders reported that the lead brigades of two infantry and two mechanized divisions were across the Yalu and fighting to consolidate their bridgeheads. The already battered and shell-shocked North Korean troops, desperately fighting in isolated and ever shrinking pockets, could not hear the drone of engines high above, the second wave of transport aircraft carrying crack Chinese paratroopers south to Pyongyang. As planned Liao-pen ordered two reserve infantry divisions to begin crossing the Yalu. Once across these divisions were to advance along two axes toward Pyongyang, one near the coast, and one further inland. The 4^th Armored Division would come up behind these two divisions for an eventual dash to Pyongyang.
Liao-pen had been concerned that Kim would lob Scud Missiles into China. He didn’t. Instead he launched them at Japan. None got through, however, as the Japanese Navy’s Aegis destroyers shot them out of the sky. Several dozen North Korean jets also tried to fly across the Sea of Japan, but these were engaged and destroyed by the Japanese air force. By noon the Americans reported that a brigade of the 82^nd Airborne Division had secured Yongbyon but could find no weapons of mass destruction. Again? Liao-pen said to himself. Most importantly as far as he was concerned, the coastal column had pushed more than thirty kilometers inside North Korea and was reporting that resistance was slackening dramatically. The inland column was about halfway to Pyongyang.

Indian Victory in Bangladesh

So I got my start writing magazine articles. Even though I've had a few out last year, I really don't do it much anymore. Writing in magazines has taken me as far as it's going to take me. The rates aren't great and you're at the mercy of editors who may well forget they even have your stuff (I'm looking at you Decision Games) only to see it flushed out a decade later (not kidding, Decision Games).

Anyway a lot of my stuff over time has found its way to various magazine internet archives. Below is Indian Victory in Bangladesh.

I wrote it just after the great Indian war hero Sam Manekshaw died in 2008 and I stole his name for my story about the 1st Indian Armoured Division battling aliens in To Defend the Earth.

Many of the photos in the article I got myself. I had to call India at five in the morning to do. Their defense mnistry's PR department was quite surprised. Overall the were very responsive and sent me the exact ten photos I requested.

Anyway here's Indian Victory in Bangladesh:

While India began a slow, steady climb toward a stable and prosperous democracy, Pakistan fell victim to military coups in 1958 and 1968. The coups, led by the West Pakistani military, only served to exacerbate the already growing rift with East Pakistan, which felt largely ignored and taken advantage of by the western part of the country. In the early 1960s, East Pakistanis, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, began agitating for reform and called for the ruling government in West Pakistan to relinquish control of all domestic affairs in the east. When Sheikh Mujibur’s Awami League won an absolute majority in the national assembly elections in the fall of 1970, the military government of General Yahya Khan refused to call the assembly to order and appointed a new military governor for the east. This move, in turn, sparked outrage in East Pakistan and led to massive and sometimes violent demonstrations....

Great Sci-fi: Arrival

Arrival is last year's alien movie staring Amy Adams among others.

Arrival is also what we call the beginning of the alien invasion in To Defend the Earth.

Needless to say my crack legal team is preparing a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the studio. Robert Shapiro is lead council.

Anyway, I watched Arrival yesterday and I have to say I'm impressed. This is a smart, well done movie with its own aesthetic.

Basically aliens show up, but they think and communicate in a completely different way than us. In comes Amy Adams, linguistics expert. She not only cracks the alien's language but teaches them to understand our own language and way of thinking. Her work with the aliens is life changing, life altering, really.

Now one of the things I like about this flick is that in the background we see humanity freaking out. We got riots, we have paranoid countries acting paranoid. Just like To Survive the Earth also known as exhibit B in the upcoming legal epic. Amy Adams' linguistics team is under intense pressure to figure out why the aliens are here and where they come from.

This movie also deals with 'big picture' sci-fi issues and has some great twists. Really the whole point of the movie is those 'big picture' issues. In the end Arrival is about life and choices. I really can't say much more without spoilers.

I hope the people responsible for the chick Ghostbusters disaster watched. Rather than proclaim 'Look female scientist!' Arrival is a movie about a strong, in charge female linguistics expert.  The character stands on her own. They might learn something.

Publish This!

One of the great things about writing in 2017 is one can reach one's fellow indy writers. I know a bunch, including I'm glad to say the High Sparrow of indy writers, Chris Nuttall. I think he gets a royalty just for his name of the holy sepulcher being typed.

Anyhoo, recently I was chitchatting with my friend James Young about our halcyon days reading sci-fi. Now back in the 80's [oh good god, not another 80's post-Ed] one had two places to get books. Walden Books or B Dalton and that was pretty much it.

James and I were huge military sci fi fans at the time, but frankly the genres was hard to find. To their credit both chain book stores had pretty good sci-fi sections, but the shelves didn't carry a lot of books about space marines, and star carriers, and warp dreadnoughts and such. We both accumulated fairly large libraries of military sci fi, but this took decades. Even now my 80's-90's era collection fill just a few boxes. These are of course the works of David Drake, SM Stirling, David Weber and for me, his most benevolent eminence Jerry Pournelle.

If one goes to Amazon and peruses the digital shelf one will find a bountiful list of books that fall into the military sci-fi category. Their one nearly universal trait (Drake and Pournelle and Weber are still going after all), they're almost all indy writers. There they are, tales of Space Marines, and imperial interstellar battle fleets and dare I say, alien invasion.

We, the indy writers, much maligned by the traditional writers and the Big 5 publishers, are writing the novels we were looking for in our youth. And you know what? We're making money doing it. Man, the Big 5 publishers really missed the boat on that one. Oh well, they'll always have The Devil Wears Prada.


 

Rolling Castro's Folly

Well as Doc Holiday (the Val Kilmer version, mind you) would say, Castro's Folly is rolling. We've cracked the top 25 of our category in the US, Great Britain and Australia, where we are threatening to go to number one. We've blown past people like Harry Turtledove and Philip K Dick. We're 'only' in the top 100 in Canada, which still ain't bad mind you. I guess you just can't sell a book about blowing Castro to bits in a country that just made his son Justin Trudeau Prime Minister. I'm not kidding about that, by the way. His mom used to hang with Castro, and well, compare the pics. He never did look anything like Pierre

Anyway, the Castro's Folly surge is a relief. Because my previous release, To Survive the Earth, is a failure. After six months its got one review. One freaking review.

This was and is stunning. To Defend the Earth was my second book and it did well. I've recounted before my thrill at seeing the sales meter move up a couple of ticks everyday. After watching A line Through the Desert no sell at all, TDTE was glorious.

With To Survive the Earth, Its not so much that I was worried that I had lost my touch, or my fan base. I was terrified that the market was changing and people were moving away from Kindle.

Phew.

What does this mean for my alien invasion universe? Nothing good. At this point we might keep writing but only put out a Kindle/Nook version. That would cut the publishing costs in half. We might run a single ad in a friendly publication.

Castro's Folly success means there's no reason not to press on, and we are frankly wondering why we would ever stop writing this series.

10 Years On

It was about ten years ago that I started writing To Defend The Earth. I was working my day job, a substitute teacher at Bernards High School, when I began Guitars and Stars:

Grant sat on the blanket in the cool October night contentedly strumming his guitar. The notes drifted across the hill, but there was no one to hear except for Kristin, who was busy gathering her clothes. Two hours before he had been playing guitar in ‘Cal’s Drinkery’, where a hundred people had gathered to watch Arrival. Since everybody was glued to the TV no one had really noticed him, except for two girls playing pool near the stage. One of them wore snug jeans and sandals, and when she bent over to shoot, Grant saw she had a sunburst tattoo above her tailbone. She was shapely, with big brown eyes and long brown hair. Seeing them look over at him, Grant switched from testosterone fueled classic rock to more ‘sensitive’ songs. It was Led Zeppelin’s Tangerine that finally drew Kristin over to the stage. Grant and Kristin chatted for a while, and then ditched her roommate for the hill overlooking town, ‘to get a good view of the aliens, if they come our way,’ he had said....

I always liked that scene.

Actually, part of the idea had been percolating in my head for a decade. From Presidential Briefing.:

From: Secret Committee for Extraterrestrial Defense
To: POTUS
RE: Extra Terrestrial Defense
Top Secret: Not to leave the Oval Office

Madam President:

The Secret Committee for Extraterrestrial Defense (SCED) would like to congratulate you on your historic victory.

I first worked with the idea for an English class presentation waaaaaaay back in the summer of 1996. It stuck with me through the next ten years.

It did well, seeing something actually sell, after watching A Line through the Desert do absolutely nothing, was quite a thrill.

We have a squeal now, of course, To Survive the Earth. I began thinking about that one almost as soon as TDTE was out. The ideas just kept coming to me.

They have been ever since.

Getting Warmer

Just in time for my work on the Centauri stories:

Currently named Proxima b, the planet is about the same size as Earth — approximately 1.3 sizes larger — and seems to have liquid water among a mostly rocky terrain. The find is not only incredible because of its similarity to Earth, but also the fact that it's near the star, Proxima Centauri, closest to our sun. Scientists have yet to determine whether or not the planet has an atmosphere, which would be crucial for life to survive there.

This is incredible news, I think.

Then there is this:

Scientists detected a strong signal in space, but is it alien life or just noise?

The signal, which was detected by a Russian radio telescope, could potentially be produced by some sort of extraterrestrial civilization, but there's no current way to confirm that.
The signal comes from the star HD164595, which is about 95 light-years away and it's 99% of the size of our sun. It also has at least one planet, HD164595b, which is believed to be the size of Neptune and has 40-day years.

 It's almost as if there is momentum toward the discovery of alien life.

Of course, in To Defend the Earth, the Jai come from Epsilon Eridani and in To Survive the Earth, we learn more of them are making the 12 light year journey. Speaking of, TStE has its first review, and lets just say, I still got it:

Very well-written, established characters, engaging action, intriguing premise, compelling themes, and a terrifying enemy that is not at all unlike us.

So read up!

While you still can...