S.F. Chapman's Blog

Floyd 5.136

They were ordinary people: A visual artist, an engineering student, an assistant secretary, an unemployed carpenter, a school teacher, a wealthy restaurateur and a roaming surfer. They had very little in common and likely would never have come upon each other were it not for the novelty of their propagation.

Late in 2034, all were conceived as some of the very few Mildly Altered Clones that would ever be produced.

They appeared to be no different from those around them but, by the time that they matured into early adulthood, each had suffered thorough the harassment and intolerance that is too often heaped upon those of uncommon lineage.

By chance, a Genetics Researcher had come upon the names and particulars of these Mildly Altered Clones and sought them out for an astonishing new project.

Many thousands of years later the engineer, the secretary, the artist, the surfer, the teacher, the restaurateur and the carpenter finally met.

Amongst the first few questions that they asked of each other was this: “Where are we?”


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VDPN1KW

An Introduction to "Torn From On High"

It was quite clear to me as I finished up work on the Science Fiction Action/Adventure novel “The Ripple in Space-Time” that the amusing and often horrific exploits of Inspector Ryo Trop, Lieutenant Zmuda, Jasper, Mixion and especially little Dilma should be continued. All three of my longtime editors also clamored for more tales from Free City and the moldering feudal fiefdoms beyond.
 
Shortly after “The Ripple in Space-Time” was published, I wrote “Dreg’s Scamp” as the first chapter for a possible project with the irresistible title of “Torn From On High.” At the time, I was uncertain as to how Nate Briggs’ most gruesome death would fit into a story or whether it would even include any of the characters from “The Ripple in Space-Time.” But the chapter and the book title just begged to be fleshed out into a story.

If by chance you have not yet read “The Ripple in Space-Time” which is the first book in the Free City Series, may I suggest that doing so will greatly increase your understanding of the characters in the series and the gritty post-apocalyptic world of 2446.
 
It is a dark and gritty Film Noir-like world with danger and scoundrels skulking around every corner. Nearly all humans on Earth and beyond live in subjugation as serfs or slaves under the domination of a few corrupt Warlords.
 
The exception is the small autonomous zone of Free City at the northern end of the Shannon River valley in what was once known as the Republic of Ireland. Free City could easily be mistaken for twenty-first century London, San Francisco or Manhattan. Although it has the typical ills of all metropolitan areas, Free City is the sole bastion of Law, scientific research and progressive thinking. By long standing agreement with the Warlord Syndicate, the Free City High Court tends to all judicial matters. The Registry Bureau regulates motor vehicles, boats and ships, aircraft and spacecraft. The Free City Inquisitor's Office, a future version of Scotland Yard or the FBI, is often called in to investigate difficult crimes wherever they occur.
 
The Free City Series follows many of the cases that Inspector Second Class Ryo Trop, the Inquisitor's Office’s most talented cop, has undertaken.
 
As a counterpoint to the action, I have included several News Items from 2446. These short articles are often written in what would now be called a sensationalized tabloid style with the heavy-handled use of adverbs and adjectives. The News Items sometimes provide subtle clues for readers who like to “solve” the crime before the protagonist does.
 
Please enjoy “Torn From On High.”

JFK -- 50 years on

I’m currently laboring away on a novel entitled “The Missive in the Margins.” With luck, it will be published in about a year or so.

The main character is a bristly old college professor named Edgar Stroud who is writing a tome about his life. This is how he remembers the dreadful events of late November 1963:


“I started my higher studies at Brixham University in that star-crossed year of 1963. Try as I might to disregard the din of the outside world, distressingly little barbs would often found their way into my thick hide.

Civil rights issues mainly in the south and particularly in Birmingham, Alabama simmered with vile rhetoric and finally boiled over into riots and murders. College campuses were generally awash with Folk singers and activists decrying every imaginable injustice. The Cold War continued with nearly everyone expecting to be blown to smithereens should world leaders lose their tenuous grip on sanity.

I recall that it was a year for astonishing speeches: Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, John Kennedy’s “Civil Rights Address” and “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots,” and Alabama Governor George Wallace’s startlingly racist inaugural oration.

But the most traumatic event of the year happened less than a week before Thanksgiving: President John Kennedy was murdered.

If you did not happen to live through that wrenching few weeks, it is very difficult to fully understand the shock and uncertainty that unraveled from of the string of events. The President was gunned down just after noon and pronounced dead at around one. I was just sitting down in my Introduction to English Lit class when the professor was interrupted by a teary colleague. The secretary from the Department of English wired the national news through to the classroom loudspeakers. For hours we listened in stunned shock to the reports.

Vice President Johnson was sworn-in later in the day.

Classes were canceled until the second of December at Brixham University.

The next day was a Saturday and people milled around the campus and the surrounding town in a horrid gray stupor: our President had been assassinated, something that might happen in the Third World but never in the mighty USA.

There was plenty of speculation that others besides the petty punk who’d been arrested were involved in the murder.

The next day Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead while in police custody by a distraught nightclub owner. The messiness and closure of a trial would never occur.

A day later President Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery.

Several days later I spent a particularly somber Thanksgiving with a few acquaintances from the School of Sciences in one of the dining halls.

Normal life did not return for most Americans until perhaps mid-December.



I had largely ignored current events up until then. As a kid, the shenanigans and duplicity of the wider world seemed abstract and unimportant. The assassination of President Kennedy brought into focus the need to keep an eye out for broader problems that might affect me.

Thereafter I found myself glancing nervously around with great regularity. One never knows what disaster will happen next.”


© Copyright 2013, S F Chapman. All Rights Reserved.

A bit of "The Beast"

Here is an excerpt from my new novel "On the Back of the Beast."


The First Officer switched them to Bay Area Air Traffic Control as the huge plane neared the jagged coast of California, “OK Captain Weaver, we’re good to come straight into SFO on Runway 1 Right with our low fuel warning.” After the long monotony of the Pacific crossing, the man yawned. “On the plus side, Burt, we’ll be landing twenty minutes early. You’ll be home with Nancy by noon.”

“Thanks Dick.” The Captain struggled to shake off the heavy sense of portents that had hung over him during most of the flight. He activated the cabin PA system, “Flight crew, prepare for landing.” His fingers toggled several switches and the jet locked into the landing approach.

Just as the silver craft crossed high over the beach at Pillar Point, the belly of the plane splayed open and the landing gears reached down into the turbulent air.

• • •

Captain Weaver watched the little commuter plane in the distance cross over the left side runway markings of the long parallel landing strips. The small aircraft would likely be well out of the way when the behemoth jumbo jet descended upon the opposite runway. The pilot adjusted the trim of the sluggish plane to compensate for gusty northerly winds as he gauged the centerline markings of Runway 1 Right.

Captain Weaver slowly reduced the airspeed and rotated the nose of the 747 up. They were aligned for a perfect landing. Just below, the shops and eating establishments of downtown Millbrae raced by. The jet howled across Highway 101 at one hundred and seventy-five miles per hour and hurtled over the orderly yellow chevrons of the airport Blast Pads.

“LOOK!” the First Officer screamed.

A mile and a half down the slender ribbons of concrete, the commuter plane cartwheeled sideways along the taxiway.

Gravity and declining airspeed continued to tug the gargantuan airliner towards the writhing runway.

The pilot yanked the throttles to FULL and the four giant GEnx engines lazily revved up.

“OH, CRAP!”

Captain Weaver jerked the Control Yoke for an emergency landing abort. “We’re gonna hit the runway before we get back up!”

The descending aircraft shuddered and roared with the titanic battle between gravity and engine thrust.

“Slats and flaps!” the Captain shouted.

The left wing dropped suddenly towards the ground. Debris pelted the undercarriage. The rear left wheels struck the upsurging pavement and the craft stumbled alarmingly.

A fist-sized fragment of rubble collided with the franticly spinning fan blades of the Number Two engine. The finely crafted turbine shattered in a chaotic torrent of hot and frenzied metal.

“Go, Go, GO!” the pilot implored.

The maimed metal albatross floundered skyward.

The Captain wrestled for control of the badly damaged plane. The two men panted with exhaustion. At least for now, all 493 on board the slowly ascending aircraft had been spared.

“Burt!” the First Officer pointed to the twin runways.

The bay waters roiled furiously, driving wave after wave across the lowlands that contained San Francisco International Airport.

As they rose back to the safety of the air, Captain Weaver watched the overturned commuter plane rotate slowly in an eddy before it broke up under a mountain of angry gray water.


"On the Back of the Beast" is now available as a paperback and a Kindle eBook worldwide.

An Introduction to "The Beast"

I have lived my entire life in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a wonderful seven thousand or so square miles of both natural beauty and man-made creations wrapped around a huge bluish-gray estuary that spills into the Pacific at the Golden Gate.

The Bay Area is America’s 5th largest metropolitan area and the Hayward Fault slices from north to south right through the center of it.

Unlike the more famous and jittery San Andreas Fault to the west that destroyed San Francisco in 1906, the lesser-known Hayward Fault has remained ominously dormant for over 140 years. Earthquake faults do not sleep forever.

When the rather moderate Loma Prieta Earthquake struck south of the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, I became fascinated with the sense of communal denial that blinds the residents of Northern California to the omnipresent danger. A huge seismic disaster is inevitable.

Nearly everyone who has survived a major earthquake can tell a tale with razor sharpness of their particular situation when the ground moved. Many people admit to doing exactly the wrong things at that moment: working high up on a ladder, gazing out of a skyscraper window, rummaging around in the basement of a brick building, landing a crowded jumbo jet.

I strove to capture these sorts of survivor’s stories when I wrote "On The Back Of The Beast."

The Literary Newborn

Early in July of 2011 when I was writing the first few chapters of my novel entitled "I’m here to help," I was struck by an amusing analogy: Novels are just like newborns.

I chuckled back then as I scribbled out that phrase on a 3 x 5 card, which for me is a slightly more permanent way of retaining literary bits and pieces than using notepads or post-its.

Novels are like newborns; it is a poetic little gathering of amiable words. Perhaps they will find themselves clustered together in the center of song someday.

Being a father of two kids and one of the oldest of twelve siblings, I have been subjected to an uncommonly large number of newborns.

When I penned "I’m here to help" last year, I had already completed four other novels. I was certainly familiar with the long, slow process of nurturing a narrative along from a wispy notion to a wobbly collection of chapter summaries, then onward to a rough but promising first draft and eventually, after many stern admonishments from my three editors, a refined piece that could be sent out into the uncertainties of the world and stand on its own merits.

Producing a novel, or at least the initial writing of the chapters, is a thankfully brief undertaking that’s often quite similar to having a newborn in the house.

Novels and newborns can be particularly demanding. Both become inexplicably fussy at times. I’ve discovered that sleep seems to cure the crankiness, at least for a while.

Babies and half-done books have a fascinating sparkly effervescence at times; often when you least expect it. Infants will sometimes coo delightfully while you exhaustedly change their diapers at 3 AM. The words of a partially completed novel will occasionally spring off the page and be far more descriptive and compelling than you had imagined earlier when you had scribed them.

One “carries” around newborns and novels in an all-consuming way. If you are not physically lugging an infant, you are certainly thinking about the wee one. When you are not tapping away at the keyboard, you are mentally tussling with plot twists and dialogue.

Manuscripts and munchkins will both rudely awaken you at night and require your undivided but weary attention when you’d really rather be in bed.

Thankfully, for me at least, the all-nighters spent with restless babies and nascent novels have been brief. When it is over and I look back fondly at the effort that went in those early months with my son and daughter or my various literary projects, I rather miss the protracted struggle.

The research workout

I’ve become a bit flabby in the midsection lately. Perhaps the eggnog and chocolate truffles from Christmas are asserting themselves. It could also be an unsightly side effect of being a writer.

It wasn’t always this way.

If you have read my bio, you might recall that I was a construction worker for many years. I was quite svelte and a good twenty pounds lighter then. Lugging lumber and scampering up and down ladders is a fantastic daily workout. But my knees and back weren’t up to the punishment.

I switched to a tamer profession when the economy turned bad in 2008.

A strenuous day as a writer would involve standing at the printer for a half an hour while a manuscript is spit out or hauling an old computer monitor off to the e-waste recycling center, except when it comes to research.

A day or two of research is quite a workout for me. Not the poking around on the Internet type of research but the physical trekking to a place such as a desert canyon or an interesting street corner.

All eight of my novels to date have required some sort of investigation of this type. Usually it involves studying a location that is important to the story or inconspicuously watching people go about their activities.

My upcoming novel "On the Back of the Beast" has three men who deal with some difficult situations on a mountaintop. I realized that it was essential that I should tromp around in just such a place to be able to accurately convey what the characters were experiencing: to smell the smells, to stare across the craggy terrain, to hike over the boulders and avoid rattlesnakes.

Fortunately in Northern California there are plenty of peaks nearby. I packed up a spiral bound notebook, a camera and a light lunch in anticipation of a daylong excursion.

I spent most of a lovely spring day gathering what I needed at Mount Diablo State Park. I was quite tired and sore afterwards. Several days later I wove those impressions into the story.

I’m currently working on a novel about urban homelessness. This has demanded several trips to San Francisco to wander around Civic Center Plaza and stroll 2 or 3 miles down Market Street.

Big cities have an all-encompassing, and at times, oppressive nature. The edginess, the constant activity and noise are what urban dwellers experience regularly. There is a weird randomness in cities: a street musician might be crooning away at a recently discarded piano or a taiko drum group could be practicing in a neighborhood park. Recently I have seen both of these oddities in San Francisco.

My new science fiction novel "The Ripple in Space-Time" has two pivotal chapters that take place in East Africa. I wasn’t able to travel to Kenya and Tanzania to do fresh research for the book but I did spend three weeks there in 1991. I made use of those experiences when I wrote the book, particularly what it is like to be out in the bush of Maasai Mara or in the highlands near the border with Uganda.

Several upcoming novels involve space travel. Floating around in low Earth orbit would be an especially exciting workout for a flabby old author.

I’ll start packing...

Armed and barely dangerous

This appeared originally on January 15th at Great Minds Think Aloud.

I carry a knife around with me.

Folded up in my front left pants pocket is a black jackknife that I bought 5 months ago at the corner hardware store for $14.95. This particular bit of cutlery replaced a scared and tarnished nickel-plated pocketknife/multitool that I’d had for years. I finally gave up on the old contraption when the Phillips-head screwdriver blade wouldn’t stay folded and the tip endlessly jabbed me in the leg.

It’s an odd habit to carry around a potentially deadly weapon in these times.

Fortunately the ritual of slipping the jackknife into my pocket every morning has nothing to do with personal safety, it instead trails back to two other idiosyncrasies: I have a passion for tools, especially those that can be clutched in one hand, and I like to be prepared for any difficulty that might present itself.

The matter of tools has familial roots. I sometimes imagine that a Neanderthal version of myself probably pulled a razor sharp flint blade from under his bearskin grab to clean out the cave gunk from under his fingernails when he got bored. Certainly my more recent Spanish Californio, Canadian Woodsmen and New England Yankee ancestors carried around knives to help them deal with daily difficulties. A sharp steel edge can quickly produce several lengths of acceptable cord from a leather hide to lash together objects or perhaps be used to shave off the moldy parts from a block of goat cheese.

Nearly all of the adult male members of my sizable family share two qualities: pocketknives and mustaches.

At birthday celebrations or Christmas get-togethers when the little nieces and nephews struggle with the nearly impossible to open clear fortresses that protect Barbie dolls and Buzz Lightyears, an uncle or an older cousin sporting facial hair and a knife blade will free the inextricable plastic prisoners and save the day. Beaming munchkins are the reward for this benevolence.

On my twelfth birthday my father gave me my first pocketknife. Nicely wrapped in plain red paper (probably by my mother) was a velvet-lined paperboard box that contained a Boy Scout pocketknife with four shiny folding blades and a fake bone handle.

I entered the Scouts a few months earlier mainly to be allowed the privilege to carry around the tangible symbol of preparedness and imagined manhood. At my grade school in the late 1960’s only Boy Scouts were permitted to possess pocketknives. Dozens of smug Sixth Grade lads joined up and carried around these folded up weapons of minimal destruction. Never was one displayed in anger which, we had been profusely forewarned, would cause the Principal to confiscate the coveted object. Often they were used to tighten the hinge screws on a pair of glasses, adjust the inner workings of a finicky Bell & Howell movie projector or pry open an aluminum Snack Pack Pudding can when the metal pop-top had broken off.

I kept the pocketknife with me long after I’d left the Scouts, carried in my left pocket through Middle School, High School and into college. I used the screwdriver to adjust the ignition points on my first car. I sliced open stacks of cardboard shipping boxes at various jobs. I cleaned the gunk from under my fingernails when I got bored.

When it came to picking various visual elements for the cover of my science fiction novel The Ripple in Space-Time, there wasn’t much doubt that a knife of some sort should be part of the image. I settled on a dagger, an especially impressive one at that, as a symbol of the power and perceived menace presented by some of the important characters in the book.

Now as the book is going to press and I glance at the cover, I find myself grinning, I have a miniature folding version of the tool in my left front pants pocket.

An Introduction

Of all of my eight works to date, I most enjoyed writing The Ripple in Space-Time.

I played around with ideas and put together chapter summaries for the book about a year and a half ago. I visualized a dark and gritty Film Noir-like world with danger and scoundrels skulking around every corner. It would be an archetypically bad world with just a few good guys trying to save the day.

I imagined Humphrey Bogart or perhaps Bruce Willis as the aging male protagonist. Rutger Hauer or Edward G. Robinson would be the sociopathic super villain. The rest of the characters would fall into place as typical of the genre.

I discovered a collection of newspaper clipping from the mid 1800’s that my great great grandfather had pasted into an old ledger book. The articles that he collected were filled with the florid language that was common in newspapers of the day. As I read through dozens of accounts of local scandals, odd natural phenomenon and criminal misdoings I began to appreciate the heavy-handled use of adverbs and adjectives. I scribbled a few gems on a scrap of paper: “rapacious raiders” in a report about the lingering threat of piracy, “citizens brooding over the most retched of all human undertakings” to describe a Civil War commemoration, and, one of my favorites, “With speeds climbing ever higher and a confusing hodgepodge of systems to measure that velocity still persisting from the earlier days...” denoting an attempt to standardize the maritime “Knot.”

I decided to intersperse these often overwritten “official accounts” of what was happening as “News Items” to counterpoint what the reader had already discovered to be untrue.

Enjoy the book as it was intended; I wrote The Ripple in Space-Time as a tongue-in-cheek romp though serious matters.

A Little Taste of "The Ripple"

"The Ripple in Space-Time" by S F Chapman

Chapter 13. Titan Palace


Saturn was slowly rising above the horizon.

Dimitri Verhovnyi stared through one of the many thick plate glass windows of the palace at the shimmering sliver of the monstrous gas giant as it grew ever-larger. Soon the stupendous rings would edge into view and the majestic planet would gradually shift from a glowering red to a more pleasing pinkish-orange as it climbed higher to dominate the hazy sky of Titan.

At around nine and a half times further from the Sun than the Earth, Saturn was a far brighter and more imposing presence on the huge moon than the distant and unremarkable yellow star over 1.4 billion kilometers away at the center of the Solar System.

Somewhere out there in the vastness were the imbeciles that he had engaged to carry out his schemes.

Pirates, Dimitri scornfully noted, were not known for following instructions and his two bands of marauders were no exception.

After weeks of trying, the Kuiper Belt Shipjacks had finally managed to commandeer an unarmed and unmanned space tanker that he intended to use as a base for his secret operations. To avoid detection, it was now creeping slowly towards the Asteroid Belt. Gristle’s Raiders had acquired the materials and skilled laborers that he would need from the Moon but not without using far too much force and explosives for what should have been a stealthy undertaking.

Now the Free City Inquisitor's Office was snooping about for the cause of the blast.

“Idiots!”

The great ringed planet took up most of the eastern sky now. A jagged bluish electrical storm swirled sinisterly around the southern pole.

A knock at the door interrupted his fretting. His eleven-year-old parlormaid peered leerily into the suite.

The girl was one of his many household scrubs; in a year or two, he’d profit nicely by selling her off to the Sex Slavers.

“Excuse me Master,” she bowed nervously, “I have your breakfast, if it pleases you now.”

“Yes,” he growled tersely, “bring it in.”

The little wretch set the tray of food on his dining table and hurried off.

Dimitri watched the girl leave, she was obviously afraid of him, he had a well-deserved reputation that he had cultivated over many years for brawling fits of rage. But he had always treated his servants and slaves with cool detachment, especially the half dozen or so girls that made up the domestic staff.

He sat and consumed the meal.

His long dead mother, after all, had been forced into sex slavery. She’d been one of the many wives of Jonathan Kufuzu until she displeased the third Warlord of EurAfrica and was sold off as carnal fodder to Dimitri’s despicable father, Lord Pavel Verhovnyi. At forty-two years old, she unintentionally produced Pavel’s only child before killing herself on the lethal surface of Titan.

Unwelcome from birth, Dimitri was sent away as a baby to be raised by the subjugated drudges in the barely habitable selenium mines kilometers below the frozen surface of the massive moon of Saturn. As he grew up amongst the despondent and miscreant miners in the cold and dark labyrinths, Dimitri vowed vengeance against his father who had pompously declared himself the first Imperial Warlord of the Outer Reaches.

After years of plotting and planning, he’d snuck into the newly constructed Titan Palace as a teenager and stabbed his father to death.

Two days later, after murdering most of the old man’s advisors, Dimitri enthroned himself as the Supreme Warlord and took over the now vast fiefdom.

His father’s frozen and mutilated corpse still dangled from a tall picket in front of the palace as a grisly reminder of Dimitri’s ruthlessness.

But he had other scores to settle.

Even though he was a reluctant member of the Warlord Syndicate and continued to pay the onerous dues to the trade organization, he felt no sympathy towards the six other squabbling autocrats that made up the group. The Asteroid Belt and Jupiter Colonies Fiefdom was merely a weak and unorganized collection of a few widely spread outposts led by an oblivious figurehead Warlord on Vesta. The Fiefdoms of Mars and the Moon were both pleasant paradises compared to the difficult and isolated hell of the Outer Reaches.

Dimitri had nothing in common with the three pampered sovereigns of Earth; with large and compliant populations, copious resources and an agreeable atmosphere, they had no understanding of the adversities that Off-Worlders constantly faced.

He had an especially strong hatred for his stepbrother, Daniel Kufuzu. The EurAfrican Warlord had taken over for his vile father years ago and had refused to acknowledge Dimitri as a blood relative.

Dimitri sneered with contempt; soon he would inflect a horrible revenge on the Kufuzu family.

His own fiefdom had grown wealthier and more formidable in recent years and would soon surpass the status of Mars and rival that of IndoPacifica on the Earth.

Nearly twenty different mines and the huge new Kuiper Gas Refinement Facility produced vast riches for him. He had an army of “tax” and bribe collectors in his employ but his tireless slavers generated far more profits than his other endeavors. Dimitri’s methodical thugs would “arrest” hapless squatters in the far-flung outposts and drag them off to the Warlord’s forced labor facilities to work off trumped up debits that could seemingly never be satisfied.

Dimitri pushed his nearly empty plate aside; the last scraps would undoubtedly be consumed by his skinny little parlormaid. He chuckled to himself, she would be worth more with some meat on her bones.

He swaggered back to the window and listened to the latest message from the Butin Belle, “This is bluebird calling big boy. We are in sight of the winter house but the lightning has not arrived. Your package is ready to Air Mail but we need the address.”

Excellent, he thought, perhaps Gristle and his brain-dead First Mate could actually get things right.

Dimitri began his reply, “Use the smallest midget to deliver the package to my brother for arrival in one month. Half a klick makes the biggest noise. Have the guests work on the new products when the lightning appears.”

Saturn had nearly reached its zenith in the Titan sky.

He smiled fleetingly at the immense ringed planet before sending off the dispatch; soon his palace would be filled with fawning half-wits.



Preorder a copy now from Barnes & Noble.com


Copyright © S F Chapman, 2012. All Rights Reserved.