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.

World War 1990: NL- Oud en Nieuw Edition

Via valued consultant Hans Boarsma, New Years in the Netherlands:

Looks like the Dutch are giving Florida Man some stiff competition.

Well done Nederlanders. Well done indeed.

Now we know what you people are thinking. In NL some Dutch guy is going to confront the Soviets with Roman candles.

Say no more, friends, because we already did that in To Survive the Earth.

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.

To Survive the Earth

In To Defend the Earth we didn't go much into the Alien Jai invaders. Who were they? What did they think of all this? With To Survive the Earth we answered some of those questions.

In the story, Craziest Ivan, a Russian naval captain is captured by the Jai after the former's failed attack on Jai occupied Venus. Our captured Russian learns something of the Jai home system, three inhabitable worlds, their history, and even sees some of their cinema. Everyone gets very friendly....for a while.

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...

To Bomb the Earth

To Defend the Earth was our second book. To Defend the Earth was highly successful so we wrote a sequel.

In To Survive the Earth the reader gets six short stories. We see suburbanites battling aliens, captured Russian naval captains, AR-15 toting Girl Scouts hiding out in the mountains and the Indian Space Navy attacking the Alien Jai base on Ceres.

For some reason To Survive the Earth bombed. This has always been a mystery to us. The book has good reviews. 

We always wanted to get back into this universe. For that to happen, you people know what must be done.

They're Out There

Via the Daily Mail a pointy head insists life is out there and quite possibly close by:

Alien life could be discovered within the next two decades – but, these lifeforms will be far from intelligent beings, one expert claims.
According to astronomer Chris Impey, scientists are likely on the verge of detecting microbes on a planet beyond our own, with nearby candidates such as Jupiter’s moon Europa thought to contain some of the conditions to support life.

We agree. Given the conditions on Europa or Titan we'd be shocked if there wasn't life down there. Heck in To Survive the Earth the Jai invaders are eating an eel they farm from Europa and the Indian Space navy won't use nukes there for fear of causing environmental damage.

We also agree that no technologically advanced civilization is anywhere near earth.  We'd be getting their electronic signals, right?

This was always one of the huge flaws with Star Trek. According to Gene Roddenberry inhabited star systems are all around us, but we have no contact with them until we get warp. Of course they already have warp but never bother stopping by. That's like the Europeans never setting out west across the Atlantic.

So keep looking guys.

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...