Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 31

Holiday season book sale/fundraiser time

Well, folks, I haven’t yet gotten a new novel contract, nor have I had any success in job-hunting yet, though I’ve got a few prospects I’m waiting to hear about. I’ve done a bit of copyediting work and signed up to work for an online audio transcription service, but nothing that’s paid very much at all. I’ve been looking into loan options, but nothing’s come together yet. One bit of good news: I found out I was owed some overdue royalties for Only Superhuman due to some kind of mail mixup, so I’ll be getting that soon, but it’s not a massive amount. And the print edition of Crimes of the Hub should be out pretty soon, but Arachne’s Crime has been delayed until early next year.

So once again, I need to try to raise some cash to tide me over, so it’s time for another autographed book sale and call for donations. I really hate to keep relying on my fans’ generosity, but I’m taking steps now to seek out new work from various avenues, so hopefully this will be the last time. It’s been a rough year or two, and I’ve been dealing with depression, which has made it hard for me to make an effort to look for work. But I’m making that effort now, trying to get out of my rut, and I just need some help tiding myself over until I can arrange something better. Anyway, it’s the holiday season, so now’s a good time to buy my books as gifts!

As before, I want to offer a reward to donors, but I don’t want to repeat the Tuckerization offer from the last couple of times, since I’ll probably get a lot of the same donors, and depending on what book I do next, it might not make sense to reuse the same names. So let’s try this: Anyone who makes a purchase or donation of $20 or more will get to name a starship, planet, station, or institution that gets mentioned in the next Star Trek novel I write (or a later one if there aren’t enough opportunities in the next one), with the namer getting a nod in the acknowledgments. It needs to be a plausible name in-universe, so no Shippy McShipface or anything rude or inappropriate (though sufficiently subtle in-jokes or allusions could work). Don’t suggest your own name (as discussed above), but feel free to suggest the name of a friend, family member, hometown, school, or something like that (but no brand names or the like). Or just use your imagination. Multicultural or nonhuman-sounding names are a plus.

Here’s the current list of books I have to offer (now with pictures!). It’s getting pretty sparse, but just for the heck of it, I’m throwing in a few copies of the Czech language edition of Titan: Over a Torrent Sea, because I don’t know what else to do with them. (It’s called Přes dravé moře, which translates as “Over a predatory sea.” The translator is Jakub Marek.)

Mass-market paperbacks: $8

Star Trek: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel (1 copy)
ST: ENT — Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic (2 copies)
ST: ENT — Rise of the Federation: Patterns of Interference (5 copies)

Czech MMPB: $12.50 (~20% off by current exchange rate)

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4 available

Star Trek: Titan — Přes dravé moře (Over a Torrent Sea) (4 copies)

Trade paperbacks: $12 (20-25% off!)

Star Trek: The Original Series — The Captain’s Oath (12 copies)
Star Trek: Mirror Universe — Shards and Shadows (5 copies)
ST: The Next Generation — The Sky’s the Limit (1 copy)






Among the Wild Cybers: Tales Beyond the Superhuman (4 copies)
Footprints in the Stars (3 copies)

Hardcovers: $20 (20% off!)

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18 available

Only Superhuman (18 copies)

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You can donate or buy books by clicking on the PayPal “Donate” button on the right-hand side of my blog page. If you’re seeing this on Goodreads, click on the “View more” link below to go to my main blog and you’ll see the button.

If you donate $20 or more, please include a message through the PayPal form with your ship/planet/etc. name suggestion, as well as contact info in case there’s an issue with using your suggestion and we need to work out an alternative. (Or you can offer a backup suggestion or two.) All book buyers, let me know who to make out the autograph to.

As always, I’ll try to keep this list updated with regard to availability, but if you have doubts (particularly with the single copies), query first. For buyers in the US, add $2.50 postage per book for MMPBs, or $4.00 postage for trades/hardcovers.  For buyers outside the US, pay the book price and I’ll bill you for postage separately once I determine the amount.

If you have a PayPal account of your own, please pay through that instead of a credit card.  PayPal charges a fee for credit card use, so if you do use a credit card, I have to ask for an additional $0.25 per US mass-market paperback or an additional $0.50 for everything else.

STAR TREK ADVENTURES: STOLEN LIBERTY is out

Today’s the release date for my fourth standalone Star Trek Adventures PDF campaign and my fifth STA campaign overall: Stolen Liberty.

[image error] Will Your Crew Dare to Break the Prime Directive?

“This is Interlunar Probe Twelve. We are in immediate distress. We are caught in Zafrel’s gravity well. Our orbit is decaying into its outer atmosphere and we are unable to generate sufficient thruster power to break free. We are in full eclipse from Jinidar and unable to contact Master Control. If any other listener is somehow able to receive this message, please respond and advise! Repeat, this is Interlunar Probe Twelve…”

When the crew responds to a call for help, they soon find themselves faced with an ethical dilemma. Does the crew hold to the Federation principles of non-interference, or break regulations to provide assistance?

This standalone 19-page PDF adventure by Christopher L. Bennett is for the Star Trek Adventures Roleplaying Game and is set during The Next Generation era. This adventure also contains advice for adaptation for use in campaigns based in other Star Trek eras.

Stolen Liberty is available as a downloadable PDF at the following links:

Modiphius Entertainment
DriveThruRPG

The tagline is pretty similar to the one they used for The Gravity of the Crime, but rest assured this is a very different Prime Directive story, more global in its stakes. It’s also a story I’ve had in mind for a long, long time, a concept I initially developed for my original fiction decades ago, and then reworked into a Star Trek: Voyager pitch back when I took a couple of stabs at trying to write for that show. (It may have been a TNG pitch before then, but I don’t quite recall.) I’m glad I finally got the chance to dust it off and do something with it.

So as of now, all of my completed STA campaigns have finally been published. But I have some new pitches currently awaiting approval, so I’m not done with STA yet.

Midair holograms! Who knew?

Sometimes it’s cool to be wrong.

One thing that’s been a longtime pet peeve of mine in science fiction film and television is free-floating midair “holograms” — volumetric (3-dimensional) images made of light that just miraculously appear in midair. Star Wars holograms are a familiar example, but they’re a common trope throughout SF media. But they annoy me because they make no sense. Light can’t just appear in midair. It has to be emitted by something or reflected off of something. Actual holograms, things that literally use the phenomenon called holography, are flat sheets of photographic film encoded with laser light that’s polarized in such a way that you see a different angle on the photographed subject depending on the angle at which you view the sheet, so that a 2-dimensional film image contains 3-D information. But the image is “inside” the sheet rather than floating in midair. And the things sometimes used in the entertainment industry or museums that are called “holograms” are really just flat film images reflected off of half-silvered glass positioned in such a way that they look like ghostly images hovering behind the glass, but are still just flat projections, so the label is a total misnomer. So the sci-fi conceit of a 3-D shape made of light hovering in midair has always seemed silly to me.

But just now, I read about a prototype system that comes pretty close. It’s called the Multimodal Acoustic Trap Display, and you can see it in action here:

Pretty impressive, huh? Now, the light in this display is still reflecting off a solid object, but it’s a small white bead that’s levitated and moved through the projection volume by precision sound waves, so fast that it blurs out and creates persistence of vision, and is illuminated by multicolored laser light as it moves. Together, the moving bead and the shifting colors function sort of like an old cathode-ray TV screen with scan lines, except it can actually create 3-D shapes that hover in midair. The abstract published in Nature cites movie/TV-style “holograms” as the inventors’ inspiration, and they’ve actually come pretty close to duplicating them, allowing for the fact that the image still has to be contained inside a sort of C-shaped box so that it isn’t quite floating free. (The scan lines make it seem very Star Wars-y.) But it’s just the prototype, so who knows how it can be refined over time?

Of course, there still is a physical object (or several, since it can levitate multiple beads) that the light is reflecting off of, but because it’s just one or a few tiny beads swooping around really fast, most of the volume actually is empty space, with the perception of a continuous shape resulting from persistence of vision. So this is probably just about as close to the standard intangible, free-floating sci-fi “hologram” as we’re likely to get, allowing for further refinements like maybe a system that uses more and smaller beads. I’ve read before that there are some volumetric displays that project light off of a mist of fine particles, but that doesn’t seem to have the same degree of control as this, though maybe it and the acoustic-trap technology could be merged somehow. Anyway, because the beads are constantly moving around and their positions are controlled by the acoustic waves, someone could wave their hand through such a hologram or walk through it, and as long as they didn’t knock out the beads directly, they could just pass through the image without doing more than briefly disrupting it, as often shown in fiction.

So I now have to rethink my contempt for floaty midair holograms as a sci-fi trope. There would still have to be some physical object there for the light to bounce off, and it would still probably have to be confined within some kind of projector stage rather than moving freely through an area like the holograms in a lot of sci-fi (including Star Trek: Discovery). But to an extent, many of the floaty holos in sci-fi are at least somewhat more credible now. Who knows? Ryuji Hirayama and the other developers of this device have solved a number of the engineering problems that I was skeptical could be solved, so maybe they can solve others. So we may see more realistic and versatile volumetric projections in the future (and I guess we’re stuck with them being called “holograms” even though they’re nothing of the kind).

Which means that maybe I should be more open to incorporating translucent midair holos into my own SF writing, rather than going for alternatives like soligrams (shapeshifting smart-matter gel that morphs into solid lifelike objects) or the anamorphic projections I featured in “Murder on the Cislunar Railroad.” Although I rather like avoiding the standard cliches in my writing. But if science makes those cliches real, then continuing to avoid them would be…

(puts on sunglasses)

…a holo gesture.

The book on STAR TREK: THE ANIMATED SERIES has finally been written — and I helped (slightly)!

I am holding in my hands (or was moments ago, since I’m typing now) my contributor copy of Star Trek: The Official Guide to the Animated Series by Aaron Harvey and Rich Schepis, the first official Star Trek publication devoted exclusively to Filmation Associates’ 1973-5 revival/continuation of the original series.

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https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Star-Trek/Saturday-Morning-Trek/9781681884219

And yes, it was a continuation, as direct as you could get — produced by Gene Roddenberry, story-edited (in season 1) by D.C. Fontana, around 50% written by veteran TOS writers (and one director and one actor), and starring nearly the entire original cast. It wasn’t given a Filmation-y name like The New Adventures of Star Trek or something — it was just called Star Trek because Roddenberry wanted it to feel as much like the original as possible. (The subtitle The Animated Series wasn’t officially added until the 2006 DVD release, I think.)

Yet people have always dismissed it for being animated, and in 1989 Roddenberry and his aide Richard Arnold attempted to declare it non-canonical at a point when they had no actual authority to do that, since Roddenberry had been eased back to a figurehead role by then. They were able to forbid the tie-in books and comics that Arnold approved from referencing TAS, but they had no power over the actual shows or films, as seen when TNG: “Unification” referenced Spock’s “Yesteryear” backstory, ST V & VI confirmed Grayson as Amanda’s surname and Tiberius as Kirk’s middle name, DS9 referenced the Klothos as Kor’s ship, etc. Granted, the restriction was partly because the ownership of the series was uncertain when Filmation went out of business. But that was resolved decades ago, and TAS has been getting gradually rehabilitated ever since.

This book will probably be a major part of that rehab effort, since it’s a really nice look at the series, lavishly illustrated with TAS art that looks just gorgeous on the page. Filmation’s work has a reputation for being crude, and it is by modern standards, but as someone who was a kid in the ’70s, I can attest that its animation was about as good as you’d get on Saturday morning TV in that era, its alien and creature designs were wildly imaginative, and its background paintings were gorgeous. (I love how many of those wide panoramic shots are reproduced in the book at their full width, presumably by stitching different frames of the pan shots together.) There were many pages where I just paused to admire how beautifully detailed the designs and art were.

As for the text, while it doesn’t go into quite as much depth as something like the Deep Space Nine Companion did (since it’s more of a coffee-table book), it’s still informative, with a fair amount of new information even I didn’t know, thanks to interviews with TAS contributors like Fontana, David Gerrold, Howard Weinstein, and layout artist Bob Kline, who was the principal designer for the show. It’s not a perfect book; in some cases it perpetuates the 1990s Star Trek Concordance re-release’s erroneous attribution of many uncredited voice roles to James Doohan even though they clearly aren’t his voice. But overall it’s a really impressive piece of work and a loving tribute.

So how am I a contributor? Well, I’m one of the people that Aaron Harvey interviewed for the book’s “Series Legacy” chapter at the end, and I’m quoted somewhat extensively there (well, three longish paragraphs on two pages). Aaron sought me out because I’ve incorporated a number of TAS characters and story elements into my Trek novels over the years (and not just my novels, as buyers of my latest Star Trek Adventures campaign will know by now), so he wanted to get my perspective. (Dayton Ward, perhaps the one Pocket novelist who’s referenced TAS more than I have, wrote the afterword.) In exchange, I got a free copy of the book, which is a marvelous reward for answering a few questions.

I really hope this book helps restore ST:TAS’s reputation as a legitimate and worthwhile piece of the whole, because that’s what it deserves. For me, it’s always been coequal to everything else. I discovered TOS while TAS was still in first run, so to 5-year-old me, Star Trek was just a show that was sometimes live-action and sometimes a cartoon. My first Trek book was Star Trek Log Three, one of Alan Dean Foster’s books of TAS episode adaptations (and by coincidence that very volume is depicted on the page opposite my first quoted statements in the book). So it was all a unified, equal whole to me. So I’m glad to see it getting more equal treatment at last in this companion book. And I’m proud that I got to be a small part of that effort.

STA: STRANGE NEW WORLDS MISSION COMPENDIUM is out (plus a blog article)!

[image error]Today’s the day! Star Trek Adventures: Strange New Worlds: Mission Compendium Volume 2 is out now, containing nine missions focused on literal “strange new worlds” — exotic environments and settings for STA players to explore. I wrote one of the nine, The Whole of the Law, involving an artificial world with a dual personality.

To quote from the Modiphius press release:

Star Trek Adventures: Strange New Worlds is available in print and PDF on Modiphius.net as part of our Star Trek Adventures Collection

It’s also available in PDF only on DriveThruRPG.com.

Meanwhile, the Modiphius site has just published a blog piece they asked me to write, talking about my creative process in devising game ideas, and the challenge of creating character-driven stories with no idea who the characters will be.

The book looks good in the preview images, and I look forward to getting my print copy.

STAR TREK ADVENTURES: New campaign now out, two more on the way!

UPDATE 10/18: By an unfortunate coincidence, my STA campaign Hard Rock Catastrophe came out just days after a fatal collapse at a Hard Rock Hotel under construction in New Orleans. It’s been decided that we should change the title for the sake of sensitivity, and I apologize that we didn’t catch this sooner. Hopefully we’ll have the new title sorted out within the next few days.

I’m pleased to announce that today is the release date for my third Star Trek Adventures RPG standalone campaign: Hard Rock Catastrophe, my first STA campaign set during the Original Series era. Here’s the official description:

[image error] Unlock the Mystery of the Rock Creatures!

“Captain’s Log, Stardate 8054.1. We have received a distress call from Rikyu, an independent Saurian colony beyond the Federation border. Planetary governor T’Rimushei is requesting assistance with a natural disaster endangering the planet’s cities, although she was vague on the specifics of the threat. The Saurians are famously self-reliant, so it could be that the governor was embarrassed to ask for help – but I got the impression that she didn’t think we would believe her if she told us more.”

This standalone 22-page PDF adventure by Christopher L. Bennett is for the Star Trek Adventures Roleplaying Game and is set during the Original Series era. This adventure also contains advice for adaptation for use in campaigns based in other Star Trek eras.

Can your crew solve the mystery behind the apparent invasion of giant monsters and stop them before the colony is destroyed?

Hard Rock Catastrophe is available as a downloadable PDF at the following links:

Modiphius Entertainment
DriveThruRPG

Yes, that’s right — I found a way to tell a kaiju story in Star Trek. You could say it was a… “Passion” project. After the psychological thriller of Call Back Yesterday and the murder mystery of The Gravity of the Crime, Hard Rock Catastrophe is a full-bore action blockbuster which I hope will be great fun for STA players. After my first few pitches were approved, I actually tried to write this one first because I had so much fun with the idea; but the action and logistics proved too big and difficult for me to tackle first time out, so I needed to do a couple of other campaigns first to get the hang of the game mechanics.

Note that there’s a typo in the early release, though a fix is on the way and will be pushed through to all buyers once it’s made. It’s entirely my own fault; I accidentally duplicated Governor T’Rimushei’s Values in the stats for Doctor K’Manehai. If anyone wants to play the campaign before the fix comes through, substitute the following Values for K’Manehai:

Science Is My Passion
All Creatures Have a Right to Exist

—

[image error]We also have confirmed release dates at last for my remaining two STA campaigns. Star Trek Adventures: Strange New Worlds: Mission Compendium Vol. 2, containing nine missions including one by me, will be released a week from now, on October 24. And my fourth standalone PDF campaign, “Stolen Liberty,” will be released on November 14.

So every STA game campaign I’ve written so far will be out by a month from now. But don’t worry — I’ve already done a bit more writing for STA and submitted a few more game pitches just yesterday. This is starting to look like a steady gig…

STAR TREK ADVENTURES: “Hard Rock Catastrophe” now out, two more on the way!

I’m pleased to announce that today is the release date for my third Star Trek Adventures RPG standalone campaign: Hard Rock Catastrophe, my first STA campaign set during the Original Series era. Here’s the official description:

[image error] Unlock the Mystery of the Rock Creatures!

“Captain’s Log, Stardate 8054.1. We have received a distress call from Rikyu, an independent Saurian colony beyond the Federation border. Planetary governor T’Rimushei is requesting assistance with a natural disaster endangering the planet’s cities, although she was vague on the specifics of the threat. The Saurians are famously self-reliant, so it could be that the governor was embarrassed to ask for help – but I got the impression that she didn’t think we would believe her if she told us more.”

This standalone 22-page PDF adventure by Christopher L. Bennett is for the Star Trek Adventures Roleplaying Game and is set during the Original Series era. This adventure also contains advice for adaptation for use in campaigns based in other Star Trek eras.

Can your crew solve the mystery behind the apparent invasion of giant monsters and stop them before the colony is destroyed?

Hard Rock Catastrophe is available as a downloadable PDF at the following links:

Modiphius Entertainment
DriveThruRPG

Yes, that’s right — I found a way to tell a kaiju story in Star Trek. You could say it was a… “Passion” project. After the psychological thriller of Call Back Yesterday and the murder mystery of The Gravity of the Crime, Hard Rock Catastrophe is a full-bore action blockbuster which I hope will be great fun for STA players. After my first few pitches were approved, I actually tried to write this one first because I had so much fun with the idea; but the action and logistics proved too big and difficult for me to tackle first time out, so I needed to do a couple of other campaigns first to get the hang of the game mechanics.

Note that there’s a typo in the early release, though a fix is on the way and will be pushed through to all buyers once it’s made. It’s entirely my own fault; I accidentally duplicated Governor T’Rimushei’s Values in the stats for Doctor K’Manehai. If anyone wants to play the campaign before the fix comes through, substitute the following Values for K’Manehai:

Science Is My Passion
All Creatures Have a Right to Exist

—

[image error]We also have confirmed release dates at last for my remaining two STA campaigns. Star Trek Adventures: Strange New Worlds: Mission Compendium Vol. 2, containing nine missions including one by me, will be released a week from now, on October 24. And my fourth standalone PDF campaign, “Stolen Liberty,” will be released on November 14.

So every STA game campaign I’ve written so far will be out by a month from now. But don’t worry — I’ve already done a bit more writing for STA and submitted a few more game pitches just yesterday. This is starting to look like a steady gig…

I need a job!

Remember how I recently vagueblogged about getting some bad news in the mail that I assumed was a mistake? Turns out it wasn’t a mistake — or rather, it was my mistake. Because I tried to save money by doing my own taxes this year, I missed a pretty huge step, and it turns out that I owe much more in taxes than I actually paid. And any prior notifications of my tax debt were apparently lost in the mail, so the first I heard of it was a final warning. This was not a scam; I consulted with the people who usually do my taxes, hoping they could confirm it was a mistake of some kind, but they determined that the mistake was mine and the debt is real.

Which is awful timing, since I don’t currently have a book contract or any steady work. Even if a new contract comes my way very soon, which I hope it does, I can’t be sure how long it’ll be before my next advance. I have picked up some new work with Star Trek Adventures, which will help over time, but it’s probably not enough for my short-term needs, especially with this added tax debt.

So I need to find some kind of part-time work that will help tide me over for now. It’s something I should’ve done well before now, but unfortunately I’m very bad at job-hunting, since I’ve been managing as a full-time freelancer for so long. Plus I’ve been going through bouts of depression as a result of my money problems, which just make it harder for me to get up the courage to look for new work and thus worsen my money problems and my depression. It got really bad last week, since I got sick and was stuck inside and didn’t get much sunlight or exercise. Luckily I went for a good long walk yesterday and I’m feeling better now. Still, I need to break out of this rut I’ve been in. I’m really grateful to my fans who’ve helped keep me afloat with donations over the past year or two, but I can’t keep depending on your generosity. (Although of course my book sale is still going on.)

So I’m putting this out to my colleagues and friends in the industry — if anyone has any work for me, something that can earn me a decent amount of money in the short term rather than months from now, please contact me. Or if any of my friends in the Cincinnati area can offer me or point me toward some part-time or seasonal work, let me know. I’m good at writing or copyediting, I have a lot of experience as a reviewer here on my blog, I’d be open to transcription or data entry work (especially if it’s from home), and I have library and bookstore experience. My resume is here.

SPIDER-MAN: DROWNED IN THUNDER re-released!

I’m a bit late in announcing this, but last month, the 2013 GraphicAudio adaptation of my 2008 Marvel novel Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder was re-released by Dreamscape Media. Apparently Dreamscape struck an audiobook distribution deal with Marvel earlier this year, and it seems that includes the right to republish Marvel audiobooks from other publishers like GraphicAudio. So if you want to buy the DiT audiobook now, Dreamscape is the place to get it, though of course it’s still available on Amazon, B&N, and other online stores as before. Also, Dreamscape is affiliated with the Hoopla digital library that lets you borrow audiobooks and e-books online, so DiT and other Marvel audiobooks are now available for borrowing on that service as well.

Here’s the cover for the new release:

[image error]

The cover art is a reuse of Mike Deodato, Jr.’s cover to Amazing Spider-Man #520 from July 2005, modified to add rain and lightning in keeping with the original novel and audiobook covers. It’s an appropriate choice chronologically, since Drowned in Thunder is set shortly before that issue, most likely during the “time passing” montage in ASM #515.

Here are the ordering and borrowing links for the new audiobook:

Dreamscape Media
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Hoopla digital library (borrow)

Unfortunately, I don’t earn any new royalties from the re-release, since I wrote the book on a flat-fee contract. But I’m proud of the story, which didn’t sell very well in its paperback release, so I’m glad of anything that brings it to more readers/listeners. Plus the audiobook adaptation is excellent. So go check it out, true believers!

Q&A with Christopher L. Bennett

Here’s my newest interview with The Astounding Analog Companion, in connection with my new Troubleshooter story “Conventional Powers” in the September/October 2019 ANALOG.

The Astounding Analog Companion

Christopher L. Bennett sold his first original story to Analog in 1998, and two decades later, we still get first-look at his tales before they’re expanded and published in future collections and anthologies. We’re lucky once again to offer you his latest, “Conventional Powers,” in the current issue [on sale now].

Analog Editors: What is the story behind this piece?

Christopher L. Bennet: “Conventional Powers” [on sale now in our current issue] is a loose followup to my first original novel, Only Superhuman (Tor, 2012). In this world, once commercial asteroid mining took off in the 2030s, it drove rapid advancement in space travel and colonization. Space dwellers embraced genetic and bionic modification in order to survive the radiation and harsh conditions, eventually experimenting with more radical “mods” to augment human abilities. The growing community of asteroid belt dwellers known as Striders embraced transhumanism as part…

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