David Allan Hamilton's Blog, page 12

Beneath The Surface: a short short story

Claudia plunged deeper underwater, staring up at the flickering starlight and the moon shadows blinking under a veil of the cleansing water. She held her breath, her heart beating the only sound, moving her arms and legs in slow motion. The burn in her lungs began as a memory of her father, when she was four and he pushed her on the backyard swing, his tie loose at the collar, gray flannel pants billowing in the breeze she made as she flew past him. Then, when she closed her eyes, the sensation of movement made her feel like she was flying like Wendy through the clouds to Neverland.
 
The burn continued, more strenuous now, vying for attention. It grew into a dull, penetrating ache. She released some air and watched the bubbles float above her face, drifting toward the surface, merging with the dappled light like a Monet seascape. Deeper, and a little deeper yet. More bubbles rushed to the surface. The ache became an urgent scream in her brain, and just when she thought she would black out, in that thin space between consciousness and some other realm, she kicked hard and torpedoed up, breaching the surface in a midnight explosion of splashes and sloshes and eerie echoes and great inhalations.
 
Crickets still chirped in the background and there, across the bay, fireflies danced in the darkness of the marshes. As she swam quietly, calmly back to the shore, feeling the water caress her naked body, the decision that haunted her for the past week solidified in her mind. It  was time.
 
Cold sand pinched between her toes. Claudia gathered her clothes and climbed the stone steps to the cabin. Everything made sense now. Everything so clear. On the porch surrounding the wooden structure, she stopped to gaze across the mirrored water. The moon’s reflection and winking stars rippled across time, across the lives of all her generations. She shivered as droplets of water fell from her skin. She touched her belly softly, dead fingers trembling. Then, swallowing a deep breath, she turned and stepped inside.

- from a writing exercise in one of the Ottawa Writing Workshop sessions.

Echoes In The Grey now available

March 1st, and this is the official release date of my new book, "Echoes in the Grey". It's the second book in the Ross 128 trilogy... the first trilogy I've tackled. As I write this, I'm sitting in my writing chair. The temperature is below zero in Ottawa where I live, and the sun is brilliant. I'm going outside for a bike ride later this afternoon despite the two feet of snow on the ground.

And here's the thing. I made this story available to beta readers in advance with a view of getting some feedback, some reviews, and so on. And today, I got the very first 1 star rating I've ever received (which probably tells you, I haven't written a ton of stories!), which is fine. My belief is that if I get a bad review or rating, it has more to do with a mis-match of that reader with this story. Hey, if King and Atwood can get 1 stars, then anyone can.

First Contact
I don't want to spoil the plot for those of you who have read the first book "The Crying of Ross 128", but I can tell you that in this story, we actually meet an alien life form, and that meeting takes place on Luna. The regular cast of characters: Kate, Jim and Esther are here, and there are new ones too, like Clayton Carter, the ambitious CEO of Titanius Space Resources, and Mary Atteberry who has grown up a bit from the first book.

If You Like Star Trek...
One question my readers pose is: will I like this story? Short answer is: who knows? But I can tell you that my stories tend to focus on the human side of SF. I'm more interested in exploring aspects of the human condition rather than the technology. Sure, there's some real science in here to keep the science types happy, but this story is really about our own relationships, our curiosity, our sense of value and work and ethical behaviour. 

I can also say that if you like commercial fiction like the Star Trek novel series, you will enjoy this trilogy. I have been influenced by Robert J. Sawyer, Neal Asher, Greg Cox, Jeff Mariotte, Ursula Le Guin, and Ted Dekker. I'm not saying these are all my favourite writers, but I like the way they construct scenes, characters, conflict and tension, and SF speculation. So I'm confident when I say that if you like any of those authors, you will probably find my stories likeable too.
Anyway, as always, if you do enjoy my stories, I would appreciate your rating/review on goodreads or amazon. 

Free Kindle Download This Weekend Only

Until midnight Sunday, December 23, you can download your free kindle copy of The Crying of Ross 128, the first book in the Ross 128 first contact trilogy. If you enjoy your science fiction novels with a strong human element, you'll enjoy this sci fi thriller about a teacher who hears a cry for help from space... an event that sets in motion a race to prepare for an alien encounter.
Please download your free kindle book today and, if you enjoy the book, I'd really appreciate if you could leave a review on Amazon.
Happy Holidays, and all the best for 2019!
David

Top 6 Crazy Aliens From Star Trek The Original Series

So back in the day, actually in the late 1960s, when Star Trek The Original Series struggled with non-existent budgets, grief from the studio, and a plethora of other obstacles, Gene Roddenberry et al did come up with some pretty cool aliens for the time. Sure, most of them were guys dressed up in costumes, but never mind, they were still okay. Well, some were more okay than others.
Here's a collection of aliens from Star Trek The ORiginal Series that I love... my top 6 collection, in no particular order. Oh, and I'll be adding more once I have some more time, because there's lots of 'em! The Gorn.
episode: The Arena
Okay, this really is nothing more than a guy dressed up in a lizard suit, but I remember watching this episode as a youngster and being totally creeped out by Lizard Boy. And who among us could ever forget that epic battle between Kirk and the Gorn when the Metrons first place them on the planet. Kirk's two-handed judo chop... the Gorn in super slo-mo, taking a swipe at the good captain. And so on and so forth. The Horta
episode: Devil in the Dark
Oh, those crazy horta, burrowing through rock, depositing their silicon eggs everywhere... these were an interesting life-form because they survived by extracting minerals from rock itself. Turns out, this became a boon to the miners, but not until they'd blasted a bunch, injured the Queen Horta that McCoy had to fix with concrete (I'm a doctor, not a brick layer!), and the famous Spockian mind-meld. Still, for me this was one of the more interesting creatures because it didn't look like a guy dressed up in a suit or have some weird eyebrows or something. Set me on a course to become a geologist!
Salt Creature
episode: The Man Trap
Oh my goodness, Nancy, what happened to YOU?
I recall hearing somewhere that Roddenberry didn't want to have a hideous alien on the show because it fed the stereotype of bug-eyed monsters. But the studio insisted that Nancy had to turn into some beast that used its suction cup fingers to suck the blood out of unsuspecting federation crew. The last one of its kind, it turns out, and the point of this show was to determine how far we might go to protect ourselves. Either that or how cool a salt monster could be if we gave it suction cups!
Balok's alter ego (a Dasik)
episode: The Corbomite Maneuver
So this was pretty creepy back in the day too, except even with the visual effects, it still looked stiff like a... wait for it... puppet! Anyway, this did convince Lt. Bailey to freak out more than once, and for Captain Kirk to meet wee Balok and enjoy some tranya. In Christoper L.  Bennet's ST novel "The Face of the Unknown", the puppet is actually a representation of a real race of beings called the Dasik. It was an interesting read, and fun to see Lt. Bailey back in business. Neural parasites
episode: Operation: Annihilate!
Okay, these things looked like giant perogies hanging off the ceiling, and when they flew across the room you could make out the string and wires, but nevertheless, they freaked me out especially when Spock took one in the back. Not sure how anyone ever thought these things up, maybe looking at pictures of amoebas and wondering "what if they were giant sized...?"
The BEta XII-A magical swirling thing
episode: DAy of the Dove
Okay, I loved this creature. Remember, this is the one that fed on anger and violence, so it was right at home when Klingons boarded the Enterprise and all hell broke loose. What I found pretty awesome about this thing was it never really interacted with the crew... no dialogue, no touching or anything like that. Just this swirling light, and for me that made it freaking boss.

Giveaway!

​Top 10 Opening Lines to Science Fiction Books

It’s ridiculously difficult to limit this list to only ten books, and to limit the quotes to opening lines only, and for sure this is about as subjective a topic as you can get, but still, let’s have some fun with it and be sure to add your favourite lines in the comments section below.
 
Here, in no particular order are my top 10 opening lines to science fiction books.
 
“If the stars should appear one time in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?” - Issac Asimov, Nightfall
This is actually from the short story by Asimov, featuring the planet Lagash and its configuration of six suns such that the people there never experience night time except for once every 2000 years or so. Rumours abound about these “stars” that appear and make you go crazy and, indeed, like Yeats’ historical gyres, the lagashian civilization destroys itself when the overwhelming night eventually arrives. By far, this is one of my favourite Asimov tales.
 
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” —William Gibson, Neuromancer
What can you say about Canadian author William Gibson’s famous cyberpunk opening line that hasn’t already been said? This sums up the mood of the story perfectly. As Stan Lee would say ‘Nuff said!
 
“I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.” — Christopher Priest, Inverted World.
For me, it’s the kind of opening line that is at once intriguing and mysterious and non-sensical, perhaps a bit like 1984 that way. The use of distance to measure age suggests time manipulation of some kind, but let’s read the story and find out. Oh, and not to be confused with Han Solo’s use of “parsec” – a measure of distance – as a measure of time in A New Hope.
 
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.” 
George Orwell, 1984
For the longest time, the writers in my workshops and I focused on the contrast between the normal world (first part of the line) and the dystopian, I mean, how on Earth could clocks be striking 13? Yet, in military time, 13 hundred hours is one o’clock and this gives us a hint as to what’s happening in the story. At the same time, clocks don’t normally strike 13, do they, even if it is in a military context. So this opening line has so much going on, it almost forces the reader to keep going.
 
 “It was a pleasure to burn.” Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451
I love Bradbury’s stories, especially his short stories, and this opening line is another one of those odd, intriguing set ups. How could burning something be a pleasure, unless you’re a pyromaniac? In this case, it’s about a man whose job it is to destroy books, and like any hard-working man, he takes pride in it. But there’s also a hint of something more here. It’s the burn of passion, not just for the man who torches books, but for all of us and all of our passions for life.
 
“There was a wall. It did not look important.” – Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
This was the first Le Guin novel I read and I found it fascinating, especially the degree of world building in it. But never mind that: it’s the opening two lines that hooked me. Simple, matter of fact. A wall. But after considering the wall, the narrator determines that the wall did not look important, and that’s what I found so interesting. It speaks to a certain aloofness, perhaps, but that wall, even though it did not look important, carried with it a powerful message.
 
“Avalon outlink station lay on the border of the Polity, that expanding political dominion ruled by artificial intelligences and, to those who resented unhuman rule, the supreme autocrat: Earth Central.”
Neal Asher, Prador Moon
Chronologically, this is the first story in Asher’s Polity world and the opening line sets it up perfectly showing the contrast between the two bodies, the sheer size of it in space, and the fact that humans are a nuisance in a world of AIs.
 
“It had been a bad night, and when he tried to drive home, he had a terrible argument with his car.”
Philip K. Dick, The Game Players of Titan
Who among us has not talked to our cars, especially when they don’t start in the morning. In this case, the car talks back and sets up the kind of futuristic story where man and machine are interconnected.
 
“All this happened, more or less. 
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughter-house Five
Not everyone considers S-5 to be science fiction. In my own local bookstore, it’s in the fiction section, but if I look at it from a SF lens, it ticks off a lot of the genre points. Time travel? Check. Aliens? Check. So let us consider this one of those stories that is so good, it’s considered classic fiction as well as science fiction. No matter, the opening line sets the stage for a story that the reader could begin at any chapter and understand it (if you haven’t tried reading S-5 starting at any random chapter and reading around, try it!). The ambiguity of the first line is what draws us and creates a fog around all of the “war bits” and meetings with Tralfamadorians.
 
“I was staring out the classroom window and daydreaming of adventure when I spotted the flying saucer.” -Ernest Cline, Armada
Cline’s opening line here is simple and yet intriguing because of the (wait, what?!?) flying saucer. One cannot help but keep reading here to find out how, when, where, what, who and why.

What are your favourite opening lines? Comment below!

How To Survive Alien First Contact

One of the questions I ask in The Crying of Ross 128 is: will we be ready if and when an alien life form contacts us?
 
Different books and films have imagined what first contact looks like. Close Encounters of the Third Kind showed us friendly alien abductions. Carl Sagan’s Contact was about building a special ship to meet them. Alien Nation showed us struggling to co-exist with lizard-type creatures, and Independence Day can be summed up in that one famous line, “Let’s nuke ‘em . . . let’s nuke the bastards.”
 
Taking Hollywood out of the discussion for a moment, is there any kind of formal terran code to follow if one day we hear a distant alien signal? Well, in the 1980s, the UN actually came up with a set of protocols. These were guidelines only and developed to help the US and the Soviet Union share information. For example, if you hear a weird signal from space, this is how you should share it so others can help figure it out.
 
Then, the International Academy of Astronautics developed protocols in the 1990s again focusing on post-detection protocols. The UN took another run at these in the 2010s. The problem, though, is these alien post-detection protocols are guidelines only and are not enforceable. So if and when an extra-terrestrial contacts us or is detected, anyone anywhere could essentially do whatever they want to connect with them, irrespective of whether they should.
 
Two Sides of the Alien Post-Detection Argument
 
One group of scientists believes that whenever we do hear an alien signal, we should share it with everyone immediately. The idea being that more people working on figuring out what the signal means, the better. This would naturally increase the likelihood that we’d learn about the signal’s origin sooner rather than later, and can then take whatever next steps are appropriate.
 
But another group is more like Hold The Phone! Why would we want to telegraph where we are to some potentially evil-minded bug-eyed monster? The thinking here is: let’s keep this signal quiet, work on it in isolation until we figure out what it means, and then determine whether we should respond or not. The last thing we should be doing, so the argument goes, is to advertise where we are.
 
The bottom line, though, is no consistent, enforceable protocols exist for how to deal with alien first contact. The truth is, there may be millions of signals coming our way right now and we’re just not capable of detecting them either because we don’t understand the full breadth and depth of propagation physics behind them, or we simply can’t recognize their patterns in any discernible way.
 
This much is true, though: for me, it’s not a question of if we’ll make contact one day . . . it’s a question of when. And if we’re smart, we’ll figure out how to handle that day now.

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Serpents In The Garden Book Review: Star Trek TOS

Of all the Star Trek: The Original Series books I've known.... this was the most.... human.

Actually, I really enjoyed this read even though the focus is on Kirk and not the entire Enterprise crew. Kirk returns to Neural, the planet where he previously supplied the Hill People with flintlock rifles so as to keep up with the Klingon-backed Villagers. This is a darker time, though, and author Jeff Mariotte picks on themes of slavery, loyalty, honour, and finally hope. Natch, there's an epic battle at the end, well-written I thought, if not predictable. Then again, that's what we like in our hero's journey stories.

​For the TOS fan looking for Spock, McCoy and the others, you won't find it here. Instead, you'll see another side of Kirk that you may not have noticed before.

4/5 Stars

What Scares Me The Most...

I run several writing workshops during the year in Ottawa, and one of the questions I always ask new writers is what obstacles they have to finding time to write. Lots of writers say things like job, school, family responsibilities and so on. Those are the easy ones.
 
But what inevitably comes up during the discussion is the word “fear”. We are fundamentally frightened creatures, don’t you think? So putting ourselves out there in the public where others can mock us, make fun of our writing or otherwise ridicule us requires a lot of courage.
 
I’ve learned over the years that being frightened of some things is good. The part of our brain called the amygdala is a remnant to the days of the cave when fear kept us from being eaten by saber tooth tigers and such. Today, we don’t need it nearly as much, but the amygdala—the prehistoric lizard brain—is still there, still telling us to be afraid of things.
 
Overcoming this fear of putting ourselves and our writing out there in the public is not easy, and I don’t pretend it is for anyone, including experienced writers and authors. I’m certainly no exception.
 
So with that in mind, here are my top 5 fears of being an author. Let me know if you can relate to any of these:
 
1. Being laughed at
 
Yes, it sounds crazy and silly when I wrote this out, but it is a real fear. It takes me right back to the schoolyard when I’d do something strange and others would giggle. Except this time, they’re laughing at my writing and by extension, at me all over again.
 
2. Being successful
 
What if my novel actually takes off? What if some Hollywood producer wants to turn it into a movie or TV series? What if it sells a million copies? The chances of any of these things happening are remote for all of us except the handful of celebrity authors who write full-time. But I have a natural proclivity to self-sabotage, so if I found even a sniff of this kind of success, I don’t know how I’d act. It scares the hell out of me.
 
3. Being a complete failure
 
In some ways, if my novel became a complete bust, it would be easier to handle than if it became a success. How’s that for being screwed up! Still, none of us wants to fail. None of us wants to put all that effort into writing, not to mention the real costs, only to have our story not selling at all. That would be a real boot to the berries, metaphorical or otherwise.
 
4. Being judged
 
Well this is an old fear that many of us have. Being ridiculed is part of being judged isn’t it? But I find this kind of judgment is not simply about someone finding us or our stories silly; this is more about them finding us personally incompetent, blind, stupid, moronic... pick your word. So, yeah, with fragile egos and low self-esteem, some of us really dread this aspect of publishing our work.
 
5. Following up
 
You’re only as good as your last book, so the pressure is always on to not only keep writing, but to keep writing better stories. I fear that I may not have another decent story in me. What happens if the next thing I write is completely rejected by my readers? Then what? This fear can become so powerful that it even threatens to stop me from writing altogether.
 
Can you relate to any of these, or do you have other huge fears of writing and publishing? I’d love to hear from you.

Science Fiction Review:​Star Trek Legacies Book 1 - Captain to Captain

Star Trek: Legacies Book 1: Captain to Captain
by Greg Cox

The last 500 words were cool. The rest, not so much. Although this is the second Star Trek Original Series I've read where the Illyrian, Number One, is a major character. I like her. The giant slugs were nasty aliens too. I just found there wasn't quite enough tension in the story to get me excited about the read.

​3/5 stars