Forrest Carr's Blog, page 3
November 6, 2013
KGUN9-TV appearance
The crew for KGUN9's "The Morning Blend" was kind enough to invite me out for a second appearance, this one to discuss my second novel, "A Journal of the Crazy Year." The segment should be available online soon. Below is a transcript. Many thanks to Amanda Guralski and Sally Shamrell for a great segment! Also to Ken Carr and Allison Scheetz.
I also want to extend congratulations to my friend Bobby Rich of 94.9 MIXfm. Bobby is celebrating a bunch of really cool stuff this year, not the least of which is his recent induction into the Arizona Broadcasters Hall of Fame, and he's also observing his 20th anniversary as a Tucson radio icon. Bobby appeared on "The Morning Blend" in a segment before mine this morning along with Greg Curtis and Mrs. G., and learned that the Mayor has proclaimed this coming Friday, November 8, as Bobby Rich Day. It's hard to get the drop on Bobby, but the presentation this morning took him totally by surprise. Congrats, Bobby!
-- Forrest Carr
Amanda: If you love a great read about zombies and you want to support local talent, we have a book for you.
Sally: A new novel called "A Journal of the Crazy Year" has some Tucson connections. And joining us now is author Forrest Carr. Welcome, Forrest.
Forrest: Thanks. Thanks for having me back. I'm glad you didn't learn the first time.
[Laughs]
Sally: They say you're supposed to write what you know. As a former news director, especially here at KGUN9, you wrote your first book – it was sort of fictional, but about a TV news operation. And this one is about zombies.
Forrest: This one is about zombies. And I'm happy to say I don't really know any zombies.
Sally: Thank goodness. I'm happy to hear that.
Forrest: But I do know about science fiction. In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to write this particular book is to try to drag the zombie genre into the realm of science fiction. Zombies, really – it's horror/fantasy in the sense that you can't really have someone rise from the dead and walk around. That makes it supernatural/horror. In science fiction, you have to follow the rules of the universe. So one of the things I wanted to find out is, is there any possibility of a disease that would have zombie-like symptoms. And I did a ton of research for it. In fact, I spent a day in the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center library. And I found one. Now, I won't tell you what it is [you have to read the book!] but it is in the book.] But there was a disease. It reached pandemic proportions about a hundred years ago. And some of the victims had symptoms very similar to the symptoms that are ascribed to modern-day zombies. Essentially, for the purposes of my book, what I needed was for them to go violently insane. And they did. And the disease – what's really mysterious about it is they never came up with the cause, and it mysteriously disappeared after a while. And it also coincides with the advent of a comet. In 1916 there were like three that came through the [inner] solar system, which I also needed for my fictional purposes. Essentially, most of the events that are in the book actually could happen.
Amanda: Okay.
Sally: Okay.
Forrest: Because what if the disease were to come back and be much worse? Which in this case would be much, much, much, much, much worse. So it's within the realm of possibility. Which makes it science fiction. It's one of the things I wanted to accomplish.
Amanda: So is that what you would say is different about your book? I mean, zombies is kind of a huge trend right now. Every movie coming out is about zombies. A lot of books lately are coming out about zombies. So is that what makes yours different?
Forrest: That's one thing that makes it different. There's a device in the book – essentially, it focuses on a guy named John Cruz, who wakes up one day in a mental institution. He doesn't know why he's there, and no one will tell him. And while he's trying to digest that, he finds out something even more bizarre – all the other inmates in the institution have left, because they suddenly got better. He's one of the last ones to recover. So as he's trying to take all this in, he gets out and he finds out that the rest of the world has begun a descent into madness because of this disease. But he got better. So what you find out is that all these people are starting to get afflicted, and yet the people who were seriously ill, mentally ill, are now all better. So now they are the only ones left who have all of their faculties, these people who were previously insane. It's a classic role reversal. I've always wanted to do this particular one. So in that scenario, in comes our hero. And there's a love story buried in the heart of – The heart of this is a love story. He gets out. He rejoins his wife, who is the love of his life. And they'd only been married a couple of years before he became ill. And then his mission from that point forward is to save her and protect her. And so, there's a love story at the heart of it. Something you wouldn't normally expect from a zombie type of story.
Sally: So tell us about the Tucson connection.
Forrest: Well, there are two. The main one is a scene in the book where our hero, John, is watching the news, and he hasn't been released yet from the institution. They have to figure out if they are going to be able to release him, because of legal ramifications. He looks up on the news and they're talking about a plane crash in Tucson. A jetliner crash. And there's a character – one of the people who's watching the crash happens to catch a picture of it on his cell phone [as depicted on the cover of the novel]. And so that makes the national news. And that's how John sees it in the context of the book; he sees this picture on the national news. That's one of the two connections. The other one is, there's a comet in the book – actually, there are two. One of them is non-fictional, the comet ISON. It's on its way here right now. This book is set a year into the future. Then there's another one behind it that is fictional. And it is discovered through data from the Mount Lemmon Observatory.
Amanda: Very exciting. And Forrest, congratulations.
Forrest: Thank you.
Amanda: You were here two months ago with your first book. And now you're here with a second.
Forrest: I appreciate you guys having me on.
Amanda: You are on a roll.
Forrest: I'm trying to be!
Amanda: Congratulations.
Forrest: Thank you so much.
Amanda: You can buy a copy of "A Journal of the Crazy Year" on line at Amazon.com. Search for
"Carr Journal." [Or you can input the full title or my name or both.]
I also want to extend congratulations to my friend Bobby Rich of 94.9 MIXfm. Bobby is celebrating a bunch of really cool stuff this year, not the least of which is his recent induction into the Arizona Broadcasters Hall of Fame, and he's also observing his 20th anniversary as a Tucson radio icon. Bobby appeared on "The Morning Blend" in a segment before mine this morning along with Greg Curtis and Mrs. G., and learned that the Mayor has proclaimed this coming Friday, November 8, as Bobby Rich Day. It's hard to get the drop on Bobby, but the presentation this morning took him totally by surprise. Congrats, Bobby!
-- Forrest Carr
Amanda: If you love a great read about zombies and you want to support local talent, we have a book for you.
Sally: A new novel called "A Journal of the Crazy Year" has some Tucson connections. And joining us now is author Forrest Carr. Welcome, Forrest.
Forrest: Thanks. Thanks for having me back. I'm glad you didn't learn the first time.
[Laughs]
Sally: They say you're supposed to write what you know. As a former news director, especially here at KGUN9, you wrote your first book – it was sort of fictional, but about a TV news operation. And this one is about zombies.
Forrest: This one is about zombies. And I'm happy to say I don't really know any zombies.
Sally: Thank goodness. I'm happy to hear that.
Forrest: But I do know about science fiction. In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to write this particular book is to try to drag the zombie genre into the realm of science fiction. Zombies, really – it's horror/fantasy in the sense that you can't really have someone rise from the dead and walk around. That makes it supernatural/horror. In science fiction, you have to follow the rules of the universe. So one of the things I wanted to find out is, is there any possibility of a disease that would have zombie-like symptoms. And I did a ton of research for it. In fact, I spent a day in the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center library. And I found one. Now, I won't tell you what it is [you have to read the book!] but it is in the book.] But there was a disease. It reached pandemic proportions about a hundred years ago. And some of the victims had symptoms very similar to the symptoms that are ascribed to modern-day zombies. Essentially, for the purposes of my book, what I needed was for them to go violently insane. And they did. And the disease – what's really mysterious about it is they never came up with the cause, and it mysteriously disappeared after a while. And it also coincides with the advent of a comet. In 1916 there were like three that came through the [inner] solar system, which I also needed for my fictional purposes. Essentially, most of the events that are in the book actually could happen.
Amanda: Okay.
Sally: Okay.
Forrest: Because what if the disease were to come back and be much worse? Which in this case would be much, much, much, much, much worse. So it's within the realm of possibility. Which makes it science fiction. It's one of the things I wanted to accomplish.
Amanda: So is that what you would say is different about your book? I mean, zombies is kind of a huge trend right now. Every movie coming out is about zombies. A lot of books lately are coming out about zombies. So is that what makes yours different?
Forrest: That's one thing that makes it different. There's a device in the book – essentially, it focuses on a guy named John Cruz, who wakes up one day in a mental institution. He doesn't know why he's there, and no one will tell him. And while he's trying to digest that, he finds out something even more bizarre – all the other inmates in the institution have left, because they suddenly got better. He's one of the last ones to recover. So as he's trying to take all this in, he gets out and he finds out that the rest of the world has begun a descent into madness because of this disease. But he got better. So what you find out is that all these people are starting to get afflicted, and yet the people who were seriously ill, mentally ill, are now all better. So now they are the only ones left who have all of their faculties, these people who were previously insane. It's a classic role reversal. I've always wanted to do this particular one. So in that scenario, in comes our hero. And there's a love story buried in the heart of – The heart of this is a love story. He gets out. He rejoins his wife, who is the love of his life. And they'd only been married a couple of years before he became ill. And then his mission from that point forward is to save her and protect her. And so, there's a love story at the heart of it. Something you wouldn't normally expect from a zombie type of story.
Sally: So tell us about the Tucson connection.
Forrest: Well, there are two. The main one is a scene in the book where our hero, John, is watching the news, and he hasn't been released yet from the institution. They have to figure out if they are going to be able to release him, because of legal ramifications. He looks up on the news and they're talking about a plane crash in Tucson. A jetliner crash. And there's a character – one of the people who's watching the crash happens to catch a picture of it on his cell phone [as depicted on the cover of the novel]. And so that makes the national news. And that's how John sees it in the context of the book; he sees this picture on the national news. That's one of the two connections. The other one is, there's a comet in the book – actually, there are two. One of them is non-fictional, the comet ISON. It's on its way here right now. This book is set a year into the future. Then there's another one behind it that is fictional. And it is discovered through data from the Mount Lemmon Observatory.
Amanda: Very exciting. And Forrest, congratulations.
Forrest: Thank you.
Amanda: You were here two months ago with your first book. And now you're here with a second.
Forrest: I appreciate you guys having me on.
Amanda: You are on a roll.
Forrest: I'm trying to be!
Amanda: Congratulations.
Forrest: Thank you so much.
Amanda: You can buy a copy of "A Journal of the Crazy Year" on line at Amazon.com. Search for
"Carr Journal." [Or you can input the full title or my name or both.]
October 30, 2013
Lost civilizations: have we been down this road before?
Lost civilizations – have we been down this road before?
Mankind's recorded history goes back about 5,000 years. Before that, there are artifacts, but no records. As most archaeologists see it, mankind didn't become civilized enough to begin leaving a written history until five millennia ago.
Is that really the way it was?
During a televised news conference in the novel "A Journal of the Crazy Year," the fictional archaeologist Dr. Archibald Nelson makes this statement: "Mankind is pretty good at working a problem. When we made the decision to go to the Moon, it took us eight years to do it. Eight years! Yet my fellow archaeologists will tell you that it took us 200,000 years to learn to write our names in the sand. Now, you can believe that if you want. Or you can start to suspect, as I do, that the human race has erected great civilizations with advanced technologies many times before, and each time we get going, something comes along and knocks us down really hard, forcing us to start again."
Does that fictional scientist have a real point?
Actually, he does. The question of whether our current advanced civilization is mankind's first – or only our latest – is a hot one in science and philosophy circles. It's a question most mainstream scientists wish would go away. At the center of it is New Age Philosophy, in which the fabled American psychic Edgar Cayce played a key role (and if you've never read up on Cayce, you should – he was quite remarkable, but that's another story for another day). One of the ideas of New Age Philosophy is that mankind has erected sophisticated civilizations with advanced technologies at least once – and perhaps many times – in the past, and each of these fell or wound up being destroyed, with few surviving artifacts and no surviving records. In these theories, ancient Atlantis was real. And the great Pyramids may have been built with technology left over from its collapse about 5,000 years ago – a date that coincides nicely with the dawn of recorded history and also with The Great Flood.
Could it really be that 5,000 years ago, written human history didn't start, but rather it re-started after some kind of major disaster?
It's all speculation, but here are some hard facts. For one: The Great Flood set forth in the Bible is not unique to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many widely separated cultures have similar traditions. If you think the Flood didn't happen, then you have to believe that each of these cultures just happened to make up the same story at about the same time.
Traditional Egyptologists will tell you that the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx were built about 4,500 years ago – which would put their construction at about 500 years after our putative civilization-ending catastrophe. But the problem with this statement is that it's demonstrably untrue, at least as far as the Sphinx is concerned. In 1989 author John Anthony West noticed that the weathering patterns on the Sphinx just didn't add up with the story Egyptologists were telling. He invited geologist Dr. Robert M. Schoch, an associate professor at Boston University, to come out and take a look. Schoch found that the materials on the Sphinx are eroded in a way that could only be accounted for by rain, and lots of it. But the Sphinx is located in one of the driest deserts in the world. It's the Sahara, for heaven's sake! What the heck? But as it turns out, the Giza Plateau wasn't always dry. Thousands of years in the past, the climate was much different. Using widely accepted, tried and true geological methods, Schoch set the date of the Sphinx to between 7,000 and 5,000 years BC. For reference, that puts it well before the Great Flood that may or may not have destroyed ancient civilizations, and around 2,500 years earlier than the story Egyptologists are telling.
As you might expect, the Egyptologists rejected Schoch's findings out of hand, and they weren't too nice about it, either. These annoyed experts object to Schoch's date on the grounds that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence that any such advanced civilization existed at the time Schoch now says the monument was built. But archaeologists are not geologists. And rather than take the time to understand the hard geological science behind the weathering discovery, most of them simply rejected the facts. They didn't refute Schoch's findings on geological terms, because they couldn't. Geology was not their field of expertise. Instead, Egyptologists simply ignored them.
Conversely, Schoch is not an archaeologist. It's not his job to explain who built the Sphinx, what happened to them, and why they left no records or other artifacts. Those questions were outside the scope of his investigation, which focused on one thing and one thing only: how old is the Sphinx? Schoch answered that question, establishing a reliable range of dates for the construction, and he did it using hard science. Now it's up to the Egyptologists to adjust their ideas accordingly.
The fact that they're not willing to do so points up one of the great problems – not with science, but with the culture of scientists, who have shown time and time again over the centuries their willingness to simply turn their backs on any fact they find inconvenient. Certainly, you can reject theories. But a fact is not a theory. It's a fact that a fact is a fact. It sits there, self-demonstrating, radiant with the warm and certain glow of reality – as the novel points out. It will not be ignored.
And by the way, the very argument that traditional Egyptologists use to reject the weathering findings points up a flaw in their own argument. If no civilization existed at the time Schoch and his colleagues indicate for the building of the Sphinx – then where, precisely, did the Egyptians who built the Pyramids come from? How is it that this incredibly advanced pyramid-building civilization springs to our attention at the dawn of recorded history – rather than much later down the road? Where's the build-up? Where's the earlier part of the learning curve? How is it that this ancient society appears to us – poof! – full-blown and already at the height of its accomplishments? At our very first glimpse of the pyramid-builders, they were working technological marvels – after which, they went into a decline. For 3,800 years, the Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure on the planet! And we could not build it today. Half the bell curve is missing. Where are the records from the earlier, less advanced civilization from which the ancient Egyptians evolved? It's like meeting a man or a woman who never had a childhood. Don't Schoch's findings hint at the early beginning that the ancient Egyptians are now missing?
The Sphinx is not the only ancient object that appears to have come from now-lost advanced civilizations – other mysterious artifacts mentioned in the novel are quite real. But the Sphinx certainly is one of the most compelling. Which, of course, begs the question: what happened to the civilization that built it? And, whatever that calamitous event was, could it happen again – to us?
I make no claims about having the answers to these questions – I'm just a writer with a journalism background, and I hold a PhD in nothing. Nor is the essay you're reading scholarly in nature. Everything I say here is factually based, and you can look it up for yourself, but I have cited no references, so you are entitled to disbelieve it all. Still, asking these questions is what makes science – and science fiction – so compelling and so much fun.
And by the way, it was the great scientist Albert Einstein who said that imagination is more important than knowledge.
Forrest Carr
Novelist and recovering journalist
Mankind's recorded history goes back about 5,000 years. Before that, there are artifacts, but no records. As most archaeologists see it, mankind didn't become civilized enough to begin leaving a written history until five millennia ago.
Is that really the way it was?
During a televised news conference in the novel "A Journal of the Crazy Year," the fictional archaeologist Dr. Archibald Nelson makes this statement: "Mankind is pretty good at working a problem. When we made the decision to go to the Moon, it took us eight years to do it. Eight years! Yet my fellow archaeologists will tell you that it took us 200,000 years to learn to write our names in the sand. Now, you can believe that if you want. Or you can start to suspect, as I do, that the human race has erected great civilizations with advanced technologies many times before, and each time we get going, something comes along and knocks us down really hard, forcing us to start again."
Does that fictional scientist have a real point?
Actually, he does. The question of whether our current advanced civilization is mankind's first – or only our latest – is a hot one in science and philosophy circles. It's a question most mainstream scientists wish would go away. At the center of it is New Age Philosophy, in which the fabled American psychic Edgar Cayce played a key role (and if you've never read up on Cayce, you should – he was quite remarkable, but that's another story for another day). One of the ideas of New Age Philosophy is that mankind has erected sophisticated civilizations with advanced technologies at least once – and perhaps many times – in the past, and each of these fell or wound up being destroyed, with few surviving artifacts and no surviving records. In these theories, ancient Atlantis was real. And the great Pyramids may have been built with technology left over from its collapse about 5,000 years ago – a date that coincides nicely with the dawn of recorded history and also with The Great Flood.
Could it really be that 5,000 years ago, written human history didn't start, but rather it re-started after some kind of major disaster?
It's all speculation, but here are some hard facts. For one: The Great Flood set forth in the Bible is not unique to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many widely separated cultures have similar traditions. If you think the Flood didn't happen, then you have to believe that each of these cultures just happened to make up the same story at about the same time.
Traditional Egyptologists will tell you that the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx were built about 4,500 years ago – which would put their construction at about 500 years after our putative civilization-ending catastrophe. But the problem with this statement is that it's demonstrably untrue, at least as far as the Sphinx is concerned. In 1989 author John Anthony West noticed that the weathering patterns on the Sphinx just didn't add up with the story Egyptologists were telling. He invited geologist Dr. Robert M. Schoch, an associate professor at Boston University, to come out and take a look. Schoch found that the materials on the Sphinx are eroded in a way that could only be accounted for by rain, and lots of it. But the Sphinx is located in one of the driest deserts in the world. It's the Sahara, for heaven's sake! What the heck? But as it turns out, the Giza Plateau wasn't always dry. Thousands of years in the past, the climate was much different. Using widely accepted, tried and true geological methods, Schoch set the date of the Sphinx to between 7,000 and 5,000 years BC. For reference, that puts it well before the Great Flood that may or may not have destroyed ancient civilizations, and around 2,500 years earlier than the story Egyptologists are telling.
As you might expect, the Egyptologists rejected Schoch's findings out of hand, and they weren't too nice about it, either. These annoyed experts object to Schoch's date on the grounds that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence that any such advanced civilization existed at the time Schoch now says the monument was built. But archaeologists are not geologists. And rather than take the time to understand the hard geological science behind the weathering discovery, most of them simply rejected the facts. They didn't refute Schoch's findings on geological terms, because they couldn't. Geology was not their field of expertise. Instead, Egyptologists simply ignored them.
Conversely, Schoch is not an archaeologist. It's not his job to explain who built the Sphinx, what happened to them, and why they left no records or other artifacts. Those questions were outside the scope of his investigation, which focused on one thing and one thing only: how old is the Sphinx? Schoch answered that question, establishing a reliable range of dates for the construction, and he did it using hard science. Now it's up to the Egyptologists to adjust their ideas accordingly.
The fact that they're not willing to do so points up one of the great problems – not with science, but with the culture of scientists, who have shown time and time again over the centuries their willingness to simply turn their backs on any fact they find inconvenient. Certainly, you can reject theories. But a fact is not a theory. It's a fact that a fact is a fact. It sits there, self-demonstrating, radiant with the warm and certain glow of reality – as the novel points out. It will not be ignored.
And by the way, the very argument that traditional Egyptologists use to reject the weathering findings points up a flaw in their own argument. If no civilization existed at the time Schoch and his colleagues indicate for the building of the Sphinx – then where, precisely, did the Egyptians who built the Pyramids come from? How is it that this incredibly advanced pyramid-building civilization springs to our attention at the dawn of recorded history – rather than much later down the road? Where's the build-up? Where's the earlier part of the learning curve? How is it that this ancient society appears to us – poof! – full-blown and already at the height of its accomplishments? At our very first glimpse of the pyramid-builders, they were working technological marvels – after which, they went into a decline. For 3,800 years, the Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure on the planet! And we could not build it today. Half the bell curve is missing. Where are the records from the earlier, less advanced civilization from which the ancient Egyptians evolved? It's like meeting a man or a woman who never had a childhood. Don't Schoch's findings hint at the early beginning that the ancient Egyptians are now missing?
The Sphinx is not the only ancient object that appears to have come from now-lost advanced civilizations – other mysterious artifacts mentioned in the novel are quite real. But the Sphinx certainly is one of the most compelling. Which, of course, begs the question: what happened to the civilization that built it? And, whatever that calamitous event was, could it happen again – to us?
I make no claims about having the answers to these questions – I'm just a writer with a journalism background, and I hold a PhD in nothing. Nor is the essay you're reading scholarly in nature. Everything I say here is factually based, and you can look it up for yourself, but I have cited no references, so you are entitled to disbelieve it all. Still, asking these questions is what makes science – and science fiction – so compelling and so much fun.
And by the way, it was the great scientist Albert Einstein who said that imagination is more important than knowledge.
Forrest Carr
Novelist and recovering journalist
October 29, 2013
Announcing forrestcarr.com
Announcing forrestcarr.com
www.forrestcarr.com
One of the things I've found about being an independent author is that writing a book is easy compared to the task of getting noticed! With thousands of new books published every year, there are a lot of voices clamoring for attention. One of the pieces of advice I found for new indie authors is this: register a web domain in your name while it's still available, and then publish a website.
I helped run an award-winning TV news website in my last job, but I wasn't responsible for the technical side. So I was a little nervous about trying to set up a website from scratch on my own. But GoDaddy.com made it very easy, with drag-and-drop functionality. I found that once I got the hang of it, the task wasn't so daunting. The site is now up and running, and I invite you to pay it a visit.
I kept the site simple. You'll find links to my published works, including the two novels, the textbook and a few web essays I've written over the years that are still out there (some of those might be of particular interest to readers intrigued by the journalism issues presented in "Messages.") You can find a feed of my blog and my tweets. There's a collection of links to media coverage of my writings and work, including the recent fabulous article in the Tucson Weekly. And there's a contact form. I'd love to hear from you!
A reader wrote me privately earlier this week with effusive praise for the latest novel, "A Journal of the Crazy Year" – and, as I noted previously, its first Amazon.com reader review was stellar as well. Now, the day before Halloween, is the perfect time to read the novel (and I've set a very competitive price for it. Think: super cheap good read!) If you do read and enjoy either of the two novels, I would love to hear from you (so far absolutely no one has guessed the ending of "Messages"), and I'd also be very grateful if you would post a review or at least a rating on Goodreads.com or Amazon.com (preferably both). The links are below. With so many authors choosing to self-publish these days (I did it because I didn't want to go through the whole submission/rejection/re-submission/editing process with a traditional publisher, a process that could take years and that may or may not result in a manuscript that pleases both me and the editor) the range of quality varies widely, to say the least, so reader reviews are more important for an author's success than ever before. If you enjoyed my work, you can't do me a greater favor than by helping to spread the word by way of a rating or a review. For your convenience, I've posted the review links below.
Link to "A Journal of the Crazy Year" page on Goodreads.com
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18...
Link to "A Journal of the Crazy Year" page on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FY3GFDE
Link to "Messages" page on Goodreads.com
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18...
Link to "Messages" page on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECK0DBK
Have a fabulous week!
Forrest Carr
Writer and recovering journalist
www.forrestcarr.com
One of the things I've found about being an independent author is that writing a book is easy compared to the task of getting noticed! With thousands of new books published every year, there are a lot of voices clamoring for attention. One of the pieces of advice I found for new indie authors is this: register a web domain in your name while it's still available, and then publish a website.
I helped run an award-winning TV news website in my last job, but I wasn't responsible for the technical side. So I was a little nervous about trying to set up a website from scratch on my own. But GoDaddy.com made it very easy, with drag-and-drop functionality. I found that once I got the hang of it, the task wasn't so daunting. The site is now up and running, and I invite you to pay it a visit.
I kept the site simple. You'll find links to my published works, including the two novels, the textbook and a few web essays I've written over the years that are still out there (some of those might be of particular interest to readers intrigued by the journalism issues presented in "Messages.") You can find a feed of my blog and my tweets. There's a collection of links to media coverage of my writings and work, including the recent fabulous article in the Tucson Weekly. And there's a contact form. I'd love to hear from you!
A reader wrote me privately earlier this week with effusive praise for the latest novel, "A Journal of the Crazy Year" – and, as I noted previously, its first Amazon.com reader review was stellar as well. Now, the day before Halloween, is the perfect time to read the novel (and I've set a very competitive price for it. Think: super cheap good read!) If you do read and enjoy either of the two novels, I would love to hear from you (so far absolutely no one has guessed the ending of "Messages"), and I'd also be very grateful if you would post a review or at least a rating on Goodreads.com or Amazon.com (preferably both). The links are below. With so many authors choosing to self-publish these days (I did it because I didn't want to go through the whole submission/rejection/re-submission/editing process with a traditional publisher, a process that could take years and that may or may not result in a manuscript that pleases both me and the editor) the range of quality varies widely, to say the least, so reader reviews are more important for an author's success than ever before. If you enjoyed my work, you can't do me a greater favor than by helping to spread the word by way of a rating or a review. For your convenience, I've posted the review links below.
Link to "A Journal of the Crazy Year" page on Goodreads.com
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18...
Link to "A Journal of the Crazy Year" page on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FY3GFDE
Link to "Messages" page on Goodreads.com
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18...
Link to "Messages" page on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECK0DBK
Have a fabulous week!
Forrest Carr
Writer and recovering journalist
October 26, 2013
Tucson Weekly explores "Messages"
"Most Americans don't live in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia. They get their local news from media in small-market stations," Carr said. "Those stories have not been told. The processes at the very heart of our democratic process haven't been told."
-- Quote from John Schuster's Tucson Weekly article
I had only been the TV news business a short time before observing that, for some reason, the relationship between station managers and TV critics is usually adversarial – sometimes, intensely so (think: "scorched earth.") It only took me a little while longer in the business to figure out why: like any good reporters, TV critics by nature tend to want to drag facts into the light that powerful stakeholders – in this case, TV news directors – would rather see buried. Even so, after indulging in some nasty battles that I now regret, I finally came to realize that the paranoia about adverse publicity that pervades most TV newsrooms was ill-advised, and that excessive secrecy serves neither the public nor those newsrooms well. After my first year as a news director, I decided to experiment with a philosophy somewhat similar to "glasnost" – meaning as much openness, transparency and public accountability as possible. (That story has been told elsewhere – if you're interested, Google or Bing "The Viewers' Bill of Rights" or follow this link: http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports...). And for the record, my bosses at KGUN over the years were fabulously supportive of these efforts, which were ground-breaking at the time they began.
When I returned to Tucson as a TV news director in 2009, one of the first forces of nature that I encountered was John Schuster, the media cat at The Tucson Weekly. John had a reputation of being pretty tough on us. But I quickly found John to be the consummate professional. The nature of the beast is that I couldn't always answer all of John's questions on the record. But I always did return John's phone calls, and I found that he treated us very well. I won't claim that I always liked what he had to say, mind you. But in our democracy even powerful organizations such as TV newsrooms sometimes have to take their medicine, and it often falls to journalists to administer it. I found John to be likeable, fair and professional.
This week John penned an article about my recent writing efforts that's just amazing. He did a marvelous job. At the risk of looking silly quoting someone who's quoting me, the article zeroes in on one of the main reasons why I wanted to write the novel "Messages," and why I chose to set it in early 80's, which was in the Golden Age of local TV news. Quoting John (quoting me): "'I try really hard to be faithful to the environment back then,' Carr said. 'We fought a lot of ethical and journalistic battles, and some of those battles were lost... It set the stage for everything that was to come. As I was living through it I thought, "This is a story that has to be told. If people only knew." If they read Messages now, they'll know. It's still relevant. You can see the effects in today's news...'"
John also was kind enough to explore the reasons and strategy behind the second novel I just published, a sci-fi yarn entitled A Journal of the Crazy Year, which attempts to bring the traditional zombie tale into the realm of honest science fiction (where there are strict rules about science and nature to follow).
You can find it all here, courtesy of John Schuster and the Tucson Weekly:
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/me...
Thank you, John!
Forrest Carr
Writer and recovering journalist
("Messages" is available for the Kindle and Kindle Apps here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECK0DBK
A Journal of the Crazy Year is available here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FY3GFDE)
-- Quote from John Schuster's Tucson Weekly article
I had only been the TV news business a short time before observing that, for some reason, the relationship between station managers and TV critics is usually adversarial – sometimes, intensely so (think: "scorched earth.") It only took me a little while longer in the business to figure out why: like any good reporters, TV critics by nature tend to want to drag facts into the light that powerful stakeholders – in this case, TV news directors – would rather see buried. Even so, after indulging in some nasty battles that I now regret, I finally came to realize that the paranoia about adverse publicity that pervades most TV newsrooms was ill-advised, and that excessive secrecy serves neither the public nor those newsrooms well. After my first year as a news director, I decided to experiment with a philosophy somewhat similar to "glasnost" – meaning as much openness, transparency and public accountability as possible. (That story has been told elsewhere – if you're interested, Google or Bing "The Viewers' Bill of Rights" or follow this link: http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports...). And for the record, my bosses at KGUN over the years were fabulously supportive of these efforts, which were ground-breaking at the time they began.
When I returned to Tucson as a TV news director in 2009, one of the first forces of nature that I encountered was John Schuster, the media cat at The Tucson Weekly. John had a reputation of being pretty tough on us. But I quickly found John to be the consummate professional. The nature of the beast is that I couldn't always answer all of John's questions on the record. But I always did return John's phone calls, and I found that he treated us very well. I won't claim that I always liked what he had to say, mind you. But in our democracy even powerful organizations such as TV newsrooms sometimes have to take their medicine, and it often falls to journalists to administer it. I found John to be likeable, fair and professional.
This week John penned an article about my recent writing efforts that's just amazing. He did a marvelous job. At the risk of looking silly quoting someone who's quoting me, the article zeroes in on one of the main reasons why I wanted to write the novel "Messages," and why I chose to set it in early 80's, which was in the Golden Age of local TV news. Quoting John (quoting me): "'I try really hard to be faithful to the environment back then,' Carr said. 'We fought a lot of ethical and journalistic battles, and some of those battles were lost... It set the stage for everything that was to come. As I was living through it I thought, "This is a story that has to be told. If people only knew." If they read Messages now, they'll know. It's still relevant. You can see the effects in today's news...'"
John also was kind enough to explore the reasons and strategy behind the second novel I just published, a sci-fi yarn entitled A Journal of the Crazy Year, which attempts to bring the traditional zombie tale into the realm of honest science fiction (where there are strict rules about science and nature to follow).
You can find it all here, courtesy of John Schuster and the Tucson Weekly:
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/me...
Thank you, John!
Forrest Carr
Writer and recovering journalist
("Messages" is available for the Kindle and Kindle Apps here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECK0DBK
A Journal of the Crazy Year is available here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FY3GFDE)
October 23, 2013
Comets & disaster
"The Comet Is Real" – A Journal of the Crazy Year Tidbit #2
Can comets cause worldwide disaster – without crashing into the planet? Throughout human history, people certainly have thought so, and some think so now. A new comet soon to be on final approach to the Earth is giving fresh food for thought.
In the doomsday novel A Journal of the Crazy Year, the outbreak of a global pandemic coincides with the arrival of two comets. One of them is fictional – the comet Filipov, with an orbital period of 5,000 years. The other – Comet ISON – is not fictional. It's on its way here now. ISON is a "sun grazer" – it will brush by the sun in just a few weeks. If it survives the encounter, ISON will appear in the skies above the Earth in late December. The early buzz about ISON was that it could be the "comet of the century." That probably was overhyped, and journalists are being a bit more cautious now. But ISON will make a close approach to the Earth, and therefore does have the potential to be quite a sight.
ISON will be a one-time visitor to the Solar System. It's on an "ejection trajectory" – meaning that it will eventually leave the sun's gravitational field, never to return. In the novel, some scientists point out that a similar comet coincided with the advent of encephalitis lethargica in 1916, a disease that grew to pandemic proportions and caused widespread death and insanity. This is historic fact. The scientists go on to postulate that the two new comets may have something to do with the new plague that's at the heart of the novel. Is that possible?
For such an effect to occur, the comets would have to have properties and forces not currently known to science. So let's pull that thread – is there such a thing as a force unknown to science? The answer to that question is a resounding "yes." All of the examples referenced in the novel – including dark matter, dark energy, and the recent discovery of polar nebulae mysteriously aligned in the same direction despite being widely separated by distances spanning hundreds or even thousands of light years – are real.
Two of the scientists cited in the novel as believing in a cometary connection to disasters also are real. Edmond Halley was the legendary 17th century astronomer who first discovered the periodic nature of comets and famously predicted the return of the body that now bears his name; despite his stature, the Royal Society public censured him for suggesting that a comet may have caused The Great Flood (an idea that has refused to go away despite the Royal Society's hissy fit). Immanuel Velikovsky also was real; mainstream scientists regarded him as a crackpot, but he had a wide public following.
It's also true that throughout recorded human history, people have associated comets with disasters – many of which have been either biological or man-made in origin (wars and civil disturbances) – and after all, any man-made disaster is also biological, since we are part of the biosphere. One of the most recent such historical references is contained in Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year – from which A Journal of the Crazy Year takes its name. A spectacular comet appeared in 1665. The Great Plague of London followed. This, also, is historic fact.
Most large comets get the doomsday crowd cranked up, and Comet ISON is no exception. To see for yourself, Google or Bing "Comet ISON disaster" and "Comet ISON Black Death."
Forrest Carr
Novelist and recovering journalist
Tucson, Arizona
Please "like" my author page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/forrestcarrau...
Can comets cause worldwide disaster – without crashing into the planet? Throughout human history, people certainly have thought so, and some think so now. A new comet soon to be on final approach to the Earth is giving fresh food for thought.
In the doomsday novel A Journal of the Crazy Year, the outbreak of a global pandemic coincides with the arrival of two comets. One of them is fictional – the comet Filipov, with an orbital period of 5,000 years. The other – Comet ISON – is not fictional. It's on its way here now. ISON is a "sun grazer" – it will brush by the sun in just a few weeks. If it survives the encounter, ISON will appear in the skies above the Earth in late December. The early buzz about ISON was that it could be the "comet of the century." That probably was overhyped, and journalists are being a bit more cautious now. But ISON will make a close approach to the Earth, and therefore does have the potential to be quite a sight.
ISON will be a one-time visitor to the Solar System. It's on an "ejection trajectory" – meaning that it will eventually leave the sun's gravitational field, never to return. In the novel, some scientists point out that a similar comet coincided with the advent of encephalitis lethargica in 1916, a disease that grew to pandemic proportions and caused widespread death and insanity. This is historic fact. The scientists go on to postulate that the two new comets may have something to do with the new plague that's at the heart of the novel. Is that possible?
For such an effect to occur, the comets would have to have properties and forces not currently known to science. So let's pull that thread – is there such a thing as a force unknown to science? The answer to that question is a resounding "yes." All of the examples referenced in the novel – including dark matter, dark energy, and the recent discovery of polar nebulae mysteriously aligned in the same direction despite being widely separated by distances spanning hundreds or even thousands of light years – are real.
Two of the scientists cited in the novel as believing in a cometary connection to disasters also are real. Edmond Halley was the legendary 17th century astronomer who first discovered the periodic nature of comets and famously predicted the return of the body that now bears his name; despite his stature, the Royal Society public censured him for suggesting that a comet may have caused The Great Flood (an idea that has refused to go away despite the Royal Society's hissy fit). Immanuel Velikovsky also was real; mainstream scientists regarded him as a crackpot, but he had a wide public following.
It's also true that throughout recorded human history, people have associated comets with disasters – many of which have been either biological or man-made in origin (wars and civil disturbances) – and after all, any man-made disaster is also biological, since we are part of the biosphere. One of the most recent such historical references is contained in Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year – from which A Journal of the Crazy Year takes its name. A spectacular comet appeared in 1665. The Great Plague of London followed. This, also, is historic fact.
Most large comets get the doomsday crowd cranked up, and Comet ISON is no exception. To see for yourself, Google or Bing "Comet ISON disaster" and "Comet ISON Black Death."
Forrest Carr
Novelist and recovering journalist
Tucson, Arizona
Please "like" my author page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/forrestcarrau...
October 22, 2013
"Messages" tidbit #1
"Messages" tidbit #1
Latest user review for "Messages," just posted on Amazon.com:
--
"Loved it! A very frank and honest portrayal of the quirky side of the news business. The character development is great and the story moves fast. It's hard to put the book down once you've started." (Five stars). -- posted by "wasu"
--
I've said that many of the anecdotes in "Messages" were inspired by actual events. I get asked from time to time what's "real" and what's not. Basically, it's all "real" in that the characters and events paint an accurate portrait of life in a TV newsroom, especially during that era.
The crime thread at the heart of the novel was inspired by the case of a homicidal vigilante in one of the markets where I once worked. The version in the novel is highly fictionalized. But vigilante crimes can and do happen, and they sometimes involve surprising people.
Like the example above, many other incidents in the book were loosely inspired by real events. Here's another. There is a scene in the book involving a law enforcement official who demonstrates the effectiveness of a bullet proof vest on a reporter. Although the incident in the book is fictionalized in terms of the characters, location, etc., the shooting itself happened exactly as described in the book -- expletive included (which made it hard for the reporter to use the demonstration).
FC
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECK0DBK
Latest user review for "Messages," just posted on Amazon.com:
--
"Loved it! A very frank and honest portrayal of the quirky side of the news business. The character development is great and the story moves fast. It's hard to put the book down once you've started." (Five stars). -- posted by "wasu"
--
I've said that many of the anecdotes in "Messages" were inspired by actual events. I get asked from time to time what's "real" and what's not. Basically, it's all "real" in that the characters and events paint an accurate portrait of life in a TV newsroom, especially during that era.
The crime thread at the heart of the novel was inspired by the case of a homicidal vigilante in one of the markets where I once worked. The version in the novel is highly fictionalized. But vigilante crimes can and do happen, and they sometimes involve surprising people.
Like the example above, many other incidents in the book were loosely inspired by real events. Here's another. There is a scene in the book involving a law enforcement official who demonstrates the effectiveness of a bullet proof vest on a reporter. Although the incident in the book is fictionalized in terms of the characters, location, etc., the shooting itself happened exactly as described in the book -- expletive included (which made it hard for the reporter to use the demonstration).
FC
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECK0DBK
October 21, 2013
"Journal of the Crazy Year"
"The Disease Is Real" – A Journal of the Crazy Year Tidbit #1
Over the next few days – or until I run out of things to say – I'm going to offer daily tidbits about my two novels, A Journal of the Crazy Year and Messages. These will provide insight into the books and also hopefully provide reasons for you to download a copy, if you haven't already, or at least to "like" my author page on Facebook (the link is presented below), where you will be able to get more tidbits like this one in the days ahead.
One of the things I wanted to accomplish in writing A Journal of the Crazy Year was to drag the Zombie genre into the realm of science fiction. As the name might suggest, for a story to be science fiction, it has to respect science. The story can postulate wild scientific breakthroughs that haven't happened yet (or that may never happen), create new and mysterious forces of nature that haven't been discovered, and even construct wildly improbable worlds of the future. But one thing it can't do is to ignore established laws of physics. It can write around them, mind you – such as by creating a "hyperdrive" to duck through hypothetical alternate dimensions for the purposes of traveling faster than light, which would not otherwise be possible – but it can't ignore them. TV and movie producers violate this principle all the time. A famous example was the grand old TV series Space: 1999, which had Earth's moon visiting a new star system once a week – at which point, without explanation, the moon would slow down from its faster-than-light velocity (doing so without giving anyone whiplash) long enough to interact with the locals, before zipping off into space again – all this after having been blasted out of Earth's orbit at merely cometary speeds. By contrast, one of the things that makes the Star Trek universe so great is that it almost always respects science.
The essential problem with the Zombie genre, as it pertains to science fiction, is that it requires you to believe in an impossibility – that so called "dead" people can walk, interact with humans (primarily by eating them) and vote in zombie elections. Okay, I made that last bit up. That makes the Zombie genre horror or horror fantasy (fantasy is a sub-genre that gets to violate all the rules of science it wants, as long as the physical laws of its fictional world are internally consistent) – and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not science fiction. However, some people (and I've heard from them) have a real problem with the supernatural aspect of zombies. I have one friend who refuses to watch zombie movies or read zombie books for that reason alone. So, for a writer who wants to drag zombies into the realm of science fiction, the question becomes: is there a real disease that might have much the same effect, and thereby lay the foundation for a story that would appeal to zombie fans and also to science fiction enthusiasts?
After doing a ton of research, I found that the answer is "yes" – and that disease is encephalitis lethargica. EL, which has been largely forgotten today, struck in 1916 and eventually reached pandemic proportions, claiming about a million victims. Many of them simply fell asleep and never woke up. Most of the survivors wound up suffering from various psychoses. And – significantly for our fictional purposes – a small number went violently, homicidally insane. The cause was never found. There was never any treatment or even a successful test to identify the disease, forcing doctors to diagnose it by its symptoms alone. And what's even more bizarre is that after doing its damage, EL simply disappeared, without any human intervention whatsoever. This, of course, raised numerous questions, not the least of which was: would the disease, or something like it, ever return? And would its symptoms continue to evolve in severity? Making the disease even more perfect for our fictional zombie purposes is the fact that at one point in its history, EL was popularly known as – well, keep reading (the answer is below).
In the fictional world of A Journal of the Crazy Year, the disease – or one similar to it – reappears with exponentially worse symptoms, leading to catastrophic consequences. Is this likely to happen? No. But is such a scenario plausible? Arguably, yes – and that qualifies the story as science fiction.
And as icing on the cake, I also found out that a mysterious comet passed through the inner solar system in 1916, on an ejection trajectory similar to this year's Comet ISON, which is already making the news and which will be visible – possibly even spectacular – in late December, assuming it survives its close brush with the sun in late November. I'll have more on the comet connection later this week.
To whet your appetite for the book, presented below in its entirety – free of charge :-) – is the prologue for A Journal of the Crazy Year, which explains the EL connection in detail.
-- Forrest Carr
PROLOGUE
The temperature rose, to be sure. The ice melted, and the snow turned to sleet and then to rain. But in 1916, springtime never arrived for Verdun, France. It was not the sweet fragrances of the season, but rather the smell of cordite, mustard gas, and rotting flesh that drifted over the fields. The hammer of God fell on Verdun, in the form of ten million artillery shells. At times the explosive projectiles rained down continually in a solid curtain of metal, like rocks and boulders from a cataclysmic and never ending Krakatoa. The hellish barrage shattered earth, embattlements, and men alike, pulverizing the soil, stone, and wood, and blending it with shredded human tissue, teeth, and bone to form a ghastly ooze that covered everything. As the apocalyptic pounding transformed front-line soldiers into gory heaps, bloody lumps, and grisly chunks not recognizable as human, the battlefield commanders in the rear shoved more hapless victims forward to take their places. The mission of this uniformed fodder was simply to soak up the shells, in a race to see which warring side would run out of men and ammunition first. Not thousands, not even tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of men were conveyored forward and thrust into the red, ravenous maw of a war machine gone completely berserk, a howling monster whose appetite for human flesh could not be satisfied. Warfare was nothing new to the human race, but this form of it was. To this day, historians consider the months-long siege of Verdun, with its estimated one million casualties, to be the deadliest single battle in the long, weary history of human affairs.
The precise mechanism of what happened next is not known to science. But as the battle dragged on and spring turned into summer and then into fall, something entirely new appears to have emerged from the roiling reek, the sickening spew, and the ghoulish goulash of this man-made hell on Earth.
The first scientist to notice was a bald, bearded pathologist in Paris named Jean René Cruchet. Like most physicians asked to treat soldiers evacuated from the front, Cruchet had become inured to living horrors of war. But then he encountered something he'd never seen before, something that shook him more than the daily ghastly parade of human wreckage to which he'd grown accustomed. He came across an infantryman whose case had little in common with the soldier's mangled, mutilated, and burned comrades-in-arms now filling the hospital's beds. Missing limbs and eyeballs, scorched lungs, and perforated organs were not this man's complaint. Instead, he simply sat in a stupor, staring blankly ahead with a masklike expression. And he slept long hours. Very long hours. Soon, other soldiers like him began to appear. Physical complaints varied – some had headaches, some did not. Some had fevers. Others didn't. Many experienced nausea. But above all, they slept. And slept. Soon Cruchet found himself staring at a ward filled with row after row of sleeping soldiers who could not be awakened.
Within months, the same symptoms began to appear on the other side of the lines, in Vienna – and this time, the victims were civilians. A handsome young neurologist with swept-back hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a piercing gaze named Constantin von Economo encountered a patient whose chief complaint was that he could not stay awake. Even when on his feet, the man was limp, his head lolled, and his tongue hung out like a dog's. His loved ones found him impossible to fully arouse. More patients like him began filing in. People were failing to wake up from a night's sleep. Or they were falling asleep at odd times and in odd places. Some lapsed into a deep slumber at the workplace. Others nodded off at the dinner table, their cheeks stuffed with unchewed food. A few even fell asleep standing up. When first stricken, most such patients could be reawakened. But as the condition progressed, they became harder to rouse. Von Economo's clinic began filling up with patients who couldn't stay awake – and finally, who couldn't be awakened at all. Many died, having never regained consciousness.
And then new and even more frightening symptoms began to emerge. Patients came in who were awake, but suffering from strange tics, jerky movements, and hiccoughs that would not stop. An attack of the latter killed one patient. But it didn't end there. As the disorder continued to evolve, new victims became acutely psychotic, displaying symptoms most often associated with schizophrenia or catatonia. Many were completely demented. The bodies of some froze in strange, twisted positions. The common denominator for all of them was an initial bout of unusual and pervasive sleepiness.
Von Economo cracked open his scientific texts and went searching for clues to the malady. None were to be had. The disorder was new to medical science. The academic literature contained no trace of it, no mention of anything remotely like it. But Von Economo recalled that a type of sleeping sickness had struck northern Italy and parts of Europe during his childhood. He was able to find old newspaper accounts of the disease. The strange affliction had appeared in 1890 and quickly claimed scores of victims, many of whom never regained consciousness and subsequently died. Now, apparently, the disease was back, and with a vengeance.
In 1918, the disorder crossed the channel and made its first appearance in England. The symptoms had continued to evolve. Half of those who fell asleep died. Of those who did awaken, a handful recovered fully. But most did not. These survivors began to exhibit physical and psychotic symptoms worse than what von Economo had documented. Much worse. As before, many patients exhibited strange Parkinson's-like tremors and tics, and the bodies of some froze for long periods of time into bizarre, contorted shapes. In a new and particularly cruel twist of fate, some of those who finally did wake up couldn't get back to sleep again. For them, a pervasive lack of sleep led to insanity. Patients rolled incessantly from side to side in bed. Others couldn't stop talking, going on and on, stringing seemingly random phrases together into run-on sentences that made no sense. These victims entered a dark realm of deep psychosis from which they would never emerge.
But even that wasn't the worst of it. As the disease continued to morph, it moved in an even more sinister direction. A small minority of patients became a mortal danger to themselves and others. They jumped off buildings, ran in front of cars and buses, and hurled themselves into bodies of water. They mutilated themselves in strange and utterly horrifying ways. They ran amok, savagely attacking or trying to rape loved ones or even strangers on the street in broad daylight. Most troubling of all is that those who were most likely to turn into such homicidal or sex-crazed maniacs were children.
Later in 1918, the disorder appeared in New York City. Within months, it had spread to every country on every continent.
Scientists drew blood, stained slides, and peered into their microscopes. They ran their lab tests, conducted filtration studies, and carried out vector analyses. And they found – nothing. No bacteria. No brain-eating amoebas. No viruses. No fungi. No parasites. No toxins. No tumors. Nothing. Nor could epidemiologists determine how the affliction was transmitted. Logically, it had to be communicated in some fashion. But by what means? By water? By air? By food? By blood? Why were relatives of the victims, and their doctors, not affected? Scientists were stumped.
And then came another surprise, presenting a new mystery equal to the first. The disease simply vanished. The influx of new cases peaked, then slowed, and then stopped. With no human intervention whatsoever, the malady disappeared from the face of the planet. If it weren't for the wrecked and wasted human beings left in its wake, many of whom would continue to populate psychiatric wards for decades to come, there would have been nothing to show the disease had ever existed at all.
The affliction's enigmatic exodus left puzzled physicians, perplexed epidemiologists, and baffled scientists to wonder what awesome and mysterious force of nature had wrought such wanton destruction on the human species. Stymied in their efforts to look forward, researchers delved into the historical records. They discovered that the sickness had made its mark on the human race many times before, with recorded appearances on smaller scales dating as far back as the 16th century. Each time, the disease would disappear, only to return decades later in a more virulent form. The 1890 occurrence, which had been the most virulent to that date, ultimately claimed hundreds of victims. The 1916 recurrence claimed hundreds of thousands. Obvious and pressing questions remained. Would the pandemic return yet again? When? And perhaps most importantly: would the reach and severity of the disease continue the same exponential progression it had demonstrated thus far? What new and even more nightmarish symptoms might lie ahead?
Among those asking these questions was Constantin von Economo. He found no answers, but he built a reputation for himself trying. Because the disease was new to the medical literature, it needed a scientific name, and it was von Economo who gave it one: encephalitis lethargica – which, roughly translated, means an inflammation of the brain causing drowsiness. But years before von Economo thought to pull his Latin dictionary down from the shelf and dust it off, villagers in northern Italy had given the malady a different name. They called the horrifying affliction la nona, and referred to its victims as The Living Dead.
Get the novel here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FY3GFDE
Please "like" my author page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/forrestcarrau...
Over the next few days – or until I run out of things to say – I'm going to offer daily tidbits about my two novels, A Journal of the Crazy Year and Messages. These will provide insight into the books and also hopefully provide reasons for you to download a copy, if you haven't already, or at least to "like" my author page on Facebook (the link is presented below), where you will be able to get more tidbits like this one in the days ahead.
One of the things I wanted to accomplish in writing A Journal of the Crazy Year was to drag the Zombie genre into the realm of science fiction. As the name might suggest, for a story to be science fiction, it has to respect science. The story can postulate wild scientific breakthroughs that haven't happened yet (or that may never happen), create new and mysterious forces of nature that haven't been discovered, and even construct wildly improbable worlds of the future. But one thing it can't do is to ignore established laws of physics. It can write around them, mind you – such as by creating a "hyperdrive" to duck through hypothetical alternate dimensions for the purposes of traveling faster than light, which would not otherwise be possible – but it can't ignore them. TV and movie producers violate this principle all the time. A famous example was the grand old TV series Space: 1999, which had Earth's moon visiting a new star system once a week – at which point, without explanation, the moon would slow down from its faster-than-light velocity (doing so without giving anyone whiplash) long enough to interact with the locals, before zipping off into space again – all this after having been blasted out of Earth's orbit at merely cometary speeds. By contrast, one of the things that makes the Star Trek universe so great is that it almost always respects science.
The essential problem with the Zombie genre, as it pertains to science fiction, is that it requires you to believe in an impossibility – that so called "dead" people can walk, interact with humans (primarily by eating them) and vote in zombie elections. Okay, I made that last bit up. That makes the Zombie genre horror or horror fantasy (fantasy is a sub-genre that gets to violate all the rules of science it wants, as long as the physical laws of its fictional world are internally consistent) – and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not science fiction. However, some people (and I've heard from them) have a real problem with the supernatural aspect of zombies. I have one friend who refuses to watch zombie movies or read zombie books for that reason alone. So, for a writer who wants to drag zombies into the realm of science fiction, the question becomes: is there a real disease that might have much the same effect, and thereby lay the foundation for a story that would appeal to zombie fans and also to science fiction enthusiasts?
After doing a ton of research, I found that the answer is "yes" – and that disease is encephalitis lethargica. EL, which has been largely forgotten today, struck in 1916 and eventually reached pandemic proportions, claiming about a million victims. Many of them simply fell asleep and never woke up. Most of the survivors wound up suffering from various psychoses. And – significantly for our fictional purposes – a small number went violently, homicidally insane. The cause was never found. There was never any treatment or even a successful test to identify the disease, forcing doctors to diagnose it by its symptoms alone. And what's even more bizarre is that after doing its damage, EL simply disappeared, without any human intervention whatsoever. This, of course, raised numerous questions, not the least of which was: would the disease, or something like it, ever return? And would its symptoms continue to evolve in severity? Making the disease even more perfect for our fictional zombie purposes is the fact that at one point in its history, EL was popularly known as – well, keep reading (the answer is below).
In the fictional world of A Journal of the Crazy Year, the disease – or one similar to it – reappears with exponentially worse symptoms, leading to catastrophic consequences. Is this likely to happen? No. But is such a scenario plausible? Arguably, yes – and that qualifies the story as science fiction.
And as icing on the cake, I also found out that a mysterious comet passed through the inner solar system in 1916, on an ejection trajectory similar to this year's Comet ISON, which is already making the news and which will be visible – possibly even spectacular – in late December, assuming it survives its close brush with the sun in late November. I'll have more on the comet connection later this week.
To whet your appetite for the book, presented below in its entirety – free of charge :-) – is the prologue for A Journal of the Crazy Year, which explains the EL connection in detail.
-- Forrest Carr
PROLOGUE
The temperature rose, to be sure. The ice melted, and the snow turned to sleet and then to rain. But in 1916, springtime never arrived for Verdun, France. It was not the sweet fragrances of the season, but rather the smell of cordite, mustard gas, and rotting flesh that drifted over the fields. The hammer of God fell on Verdun, in the form of ten million artillery shells. At times the explosive projectiles rained down continually in a solid curtain of metal, like rocks and boulders from a cataclysmic and never ending Krakatoa. The hellish barrage shattered earth, embattlements, and men alike, pulverizing the soil, stone, and wood, and blending it with shredded human tissue, teeth, and bone to form a ghastly ooze that covered everything. As the apocalyptic pounding transformed front-line soldiers into gory heaps, bloody lumps, and grisly chunks not recognizable as human, the battlefield commanders in the rear shoved more hapless victims forward to take their places. The mission of this uniformed fodder was simply to soak up the shells, in a race to see which warring side would run out of men and ammunition first. Not thousands, not even tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of men were conveyored forward and thrust into the red, ravenous maw of a war machine gone completely berserk, a howling monster whose appetite for human flesh could not be satisfied. Warfare was nothing new to the human race, but this form of it was. To this day, historians consider the months-long siege of Verdun, with its estimated one million casualties, to be the deadliest single battle in the long, weary history of human affairs.
The precise mechanism of what happened next is not known to science. But as the battle dragged on and spring turned into summer and then into fall, something entirely new appears to have emerged from the roiling reek, the sickening spew, and the ghoulish goulash of this man-made hell on Earth.
The first scientist to notice was a bald, bearded pathologist in Paris named Jean René Cruchet. Like most physicians asked to treat soldiers evacuated from the front, Cruchet had become inured to living horrors of war. But then he encountered something he'd never seen before, something that shook him more than the daily ghastly parade of human wreckage to which he'd grown accustomed. He came across an infantryman whose case had little in common with the soldier's mangled, mutilated, and burned comrades-in-arms now filling the hospital's beds. Missing limbs and eyeballs, scorched lungs, and perforated organs were not this man's complaint. Instead, he simply sat in a stupor, staring blankly ahead with a masklike expression. And he slept long hours. Very long hours. Soon, other soldiers like him began to appear. Physical complaints varied – some had headaches, some did not. Some had fevers. Others didn't. Many experienced nausea. But above all, they slept. And slept. Soon Cruchet found himself staring at a ward filled with row after row of sleeping soldiers who could not be awakened.
Within months, the same symptoms began to appear on the other side of the lines, in Vienna – and this time, the victims were civilians. A handsome young neurologist with swept-back hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a piercing gaze named Constantin von Economo encountered a patient whose chief complaint was that he could not stay awake. Even when on his feet, the man was limp, his head lolled, and his tongue hung out like a dog's. His loved ones found him impossible to fully arouse. More patients like him began filing in. People were failing to wake up from a night's sleep. Or they were falling asleep at odd times and in odd places. Some lapsed into a deep slumber at the workplace. Others nodded off at the dinner table, their cheeks stuffed with unchewed food. A few even fell asleep standing up. When first stricken, most such patients could be reawakened. But as the condition progressed, they became harder to rouse. Von Economo's clinic began filling up with patients who couldn't stay awake – and finally, who couldn't be awakened at all. Many died, having never regained consciousness.
And then new and even more frightening symptoms began to emerge. Patients came in who were awake, but suffering from strange tics, jerky movements, and hiccoughs that would not stop. An attack of the latter killed one patient. But it didn't end there. As the disorder continued to evolve, new victims became acutely psychotic, displaying symptoms most often associated with schizophrenia or catatonia. Many were completely demented. The bodies of some froze in strange, twisted positions. The common denominator for all of them was an initial bout of unusual and pervasive sleepiness.
Von Economo cracked open his scientific texts and went searching for clues to the malady. None were to be had. The disorder was new to medical science. The academic literature contained no trace of it, no mention of anything remotely like it. But Von Economo recalled that a type of sleeping sickness had struck northern Italy and parts of Europe during his childhood. He was able to find old newspaper accounts of the disease. The strange affliction had appeared in 1890 and quickly claimed scores of victims, many of whom never regained consciousness and subsequently died. Now, apparently, the disease was back, and with a vengeance.
In 1918, the disorder crossed the channel and made its first appearance in England. The symptoms had continued to evolve. Half of those who fell asleep died. Of those who did awaken, a handful recovered fully. But most did not. These survivors began to exhibit physical and psychotic symptoms worse than what von Economo had documented. Much worse. As before, many patients exhibited strange Parkinson's-like tremors and tics, and the bodies of some froze for long periods of time into bizarre, contorted shapes. In a new and particularly cruel twist of fate, some of those who finally did wake up couldn't get back to sleep again. For them, a pervasive lack of sleep led to insanity. Patients rolled incessantly from side to side in bed. Others couldn't stop talking, going on and on, stringing seemingly random phrases together into run-on sentences that made no sense. These victims entered a dark realm of deep psychosis from which they would never emerge.
But even that wasn't the worst of it. As the disease continued to morph, it moved in an even more sinister direction. A small minority of patients became a mortal danger to themselves and others. They jumped off buildings, ran in front of cars and buses, and hurled themselves into bodies of water. They mutilated themselves in strange and utterly horrifying ways. They ran amok, savagely attacking or trying to rape loved ones or even strangers on the street in broad daylight. Most troubling of all is that those who were most likely to turn into such homicidal or sex-crazed maniacs were children.
Later in 1918, the disorder appeared in New York City. Within months, it had spread to every country on every continent.
Scientists drew blood, stained slides, and peered into their microscopes. They ran their lab tests, conducted filtration studies, and carried out vector analyses. And they found – nothing. No bacteria. No brain-eating amoebas. No viruses. No fungi. No parasites. No toxins. No tumors. Nothing. Nor could epidemiologists determine how the affliction was transmitted. Logically, it had to be communicated in some fashion. But by what means? By water? By air? By food? By blood? Why were relatives of the victims, and their doctors, not affected? Scientists were stumped.
And then came another surprise, presenting a new mystery equal to the first. The disease simply vanished. The influx of new cases peaked, then slowed, and then stopped. With no human intervention whatsoever, the malady disappeared from the face of the planet. If it weren't for the wrecked and wasted human beings left in its wake, many of whom would continue to populate psychiatric wards for decades to come, there would have been nothing to show the disease had ever existed at all.
The affliction's enigmatic exodus left puzzled physicians, perplexed epidemiologists, and baffled scientists to wonder what awesome and mysterious force of nature had wrought such wanton destruction on the human species. Stymied in their efforts to look forward, researchers delved into the historical records. They discovered that the sickness had made its mark on the human race many times before, with recorded appearances on smaller scales dating as far back as the 16th century. Each time, the disease would disappear, only to return decades later in a more virulent form. The 1890 occurrence, which had been the most virulent to that date, ultimately claimed hundreds of victims. The 1916 recurrence claimed hundreds of thousands. Obvious and pressing questions remained. Would the pandemic return yet again? When? And perhaps most importantly: would the reach and severity of the disease continue the same exponential progression it had demonstrated thus far? What new and even more nightmarish symptoms might lie ahead?
Among those asking these questions was Constantin von Economo. He found no answers, but he built a reputation for himself trying. Because the disease was new to the medical literature, it needed a scientific name, and it was von Economo who gave it one: encephalitis lethargica – which, roughly translated, means an inflammation of the brain causing drowsiness. But years before von Economo thought to pull his Latin dictionary down from the shelf and dust it off, villagers in northern Italy had given the malady a different name. They called the horrifying affliction la nona, and referred to its victims as The Living Dead.
Get the novel here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FY3GFDE
Please "like" my author page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/forrestcarrau...
October 15, 2013
"A masterful expose of TV news"
I just had my first professional review of "Messages." Literary critic Tim Schwartz had this to say about the novel:
"... [a] masterful expose of television news.... Carr’s novel is engrossing, fun to read and a joy to see play out to its inevitable, tragic, hilarious and scandalous conclusion. Take this book home, curl up with it on a weekend and enjoy the guilty pleasures of the 80s from the viewpoint of people who witnessed history and thought they were more important than the news they covered. You won’t be disappointed."
Find the full review here:
http://www.mocovox.com/index.php/ente...
"... [a] masterful expose of television news.... Carr’s novel is engrossing, fun to read and a joy to see play out to its inevitable, tragic, hilarious and scandalous conclusion. Take this book home, curl up with it on a weekend and enjoy the guilty pleasures of the 80s from the viewpoint of people who witnessed history and thought they were more important than the news they covered. You won’t be disappointed."
Find the full review here:
http://www.mocovox.com/index.php/ente...
September 6, 2013
More reader praise
Here are some excerpts of what readers have had to say via postings on Amazon.com so far:
Reader praise for "Messages":
"A page-turning ride that will keep you guessing and leave you stunned..."
"A must-read that will leave you entertained, amused and even enlightened."
"Forrest Carr has absolutely nailed it!"
"The insane characters and off-the-wall quirky personalities make you feel like you are reading M*A*S*H, only set in a newsoom."
"A no-holds-barred look inside the often shocking business of televison news."
"Boldy written and a fun read!"
"Great read! Twist and turn plot and many laugh out loud moments. Total enjoyment...."
See the full Amazon.com reviews and get the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECK0DBK
Reader praise for "Messages":
"A page-turning ride that will keep you guessing and leave you stunned..."
"A must-read that will leave you entertained, amused and even enlightened."
"Forrest Carr has absolutely nailed it!"
"The insane characters and off-the-wall quirky personalities make you feel like you are reading M*A*S*H, only set in a newsoom."
"A no-holds-barred look inside the often shocking business of televison news."
"Boldy written and a fun read!"
"Great read! Twist and turn plot and many laugh out loud moments. Total enjoyment...."
See the full Amazon.com reviews and get the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECK0DBK
September 5, 2013
Messages Review
Review for the novel "Messages": "Forrest Carr has absolutely nailed it. The author is a television newsroom veteran and it shows. The insane characters and off the wall quirky personalities make you feel like you are reading M*A*S*H, only set in a newsroom. I look forward to seeing Arrow and a few of his friends in a sequel and I certainly will never be able to look at a chicken in the same way ever again. A great read!" -- J. Smith
The above review just appeared on my Amazon.com page. This is the kind of feedback an author hopes to hear! Thanks!! There are now three reviews posted. Check them out here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECK0DBK
The above review just appeared on my Amazon.com page. This is the kind of feedback an author hopes to hear! Thanks!! There are now three reviews posted. Check them out here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECK0DBK
