#20 Jon Frater
“Dad, I want to go to the moon.”
“Go ahead.”
“Dad, I’m serious.”
“Well so am I, Clifford…”
So begins Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, by Robert Heinlein, a story of a young man and his dream to go to the moon, written in 1955 as a proper YA science fiction novel. I picked this book out of the sci-fi section to read for a book report in the 2nd grade. The year was 1973. I was seven. And I desperately wanted to go to the moon. I’m still willing to go; Heinlein’s words made such an impression on me that thirty years later I’d paraphrase them in the opening of my own novel about the Moon, Article 9.
It’s not easy to describe now but in the 1970s space science was huge. The nightly news held NASA press coverage on a regular basis, and space was being through of as the next phase of human development. Engineers were gods among men in those days…so much so that when I learned my grandfather was a member of this club he became the man who was by definition the smartest man in the family; I couldn’t have loved him any more. (Eventually I learned he wasn’t that kind of engineer, that he’d spent his career putting up buildings in Manhattan, rather than designing spacecraft, but still…)
Times were different then. We weren’t going to space merely for profit. Billionaires were unknown. Multi-millionaires were few and far between and national governments did the hard expensive work of developing spacecraft, drawing up plans, and doing the simulations that humanity needed to imagine how space might be arrived at, lived in, and worked in. The Apollo-Soyuz project was held up to the world as a golden moment in American-Soviet cooperation. The reams of data we took from those efforts pushed us to develop the tech we’d invented for it: integrated circuits, microchips, battery technology, food science, environmental maintenance, material science, fuel cells, air scrubbers, every kind of environment-sensing instrument…was there any field of tech that we hadn’t been able to apply that experience to?
In 1973 Apollo ended. No more moon shots. It wasn’t over…we still had the STS program, the so-called space shuttle and it had its own promise and challenges but it wasn’t the same. Then in 2011, the STS program ended. No more space shuttle. In less than five decades we’d gone from a society that was willing to do anything to achieve greatness, to do the impossible, to one that couldn’t be bothered. Space was yesterday. Boring. Banal. Or something that could be left to business to pursue for money if they could figure out how. It felt like our collective nerve had failed us even as foreign countries maintained their space programs.
And yet, NASA is still going strong. They pivoted from human missions to robotic ones and sent probes and rovers to every one of the planets in the solar system and many of their moons. We’ve improved our knowledge base by orders of magnitude. And telescopes: we have images of hundreds of galaxies. We’ve mapped 1.7 billion stars with stunning 3-D accuracy with ESA’s Gaia satellite. As of February 1, 2021, there are 4,144 confirmed exoplanets in 3,257 star systems, with 722 of those systems having more than one planet. We’ve even photographed one bona fide black hole, using the Event Horizon Telescope Collaborative. Maybe we’re still homebodies but we see everything.
ARTICLE 9
My problem was always math. It terrified me as a kid; as an adult it represented a challenge, a mountain I could strengthen my brain against. I found a copy of the 1973 Stanford-Ames Study, a roundtable discussion hosted by NASA that gave instructions on how to design an orbital habitat and offered reasonable rationales for building one. Suddenly the math wasn’t the problem; it was already there! Now I just needed the physics to match it. That meant looking for a source I could work with. Science textbooks were dreary and convoluted, even Asimov’s book Understanding Physics had a way of racing from one concept to the next too quickly for me to absorb. Enter the world of RPGs and gaming. There’s a game from the 1980s called Traveller written by Marc Miller and one thing it covers wonderfully is the concept of acceleration curves. The rules laid out the concepts of time, distance, and acceleration, and formulae to figure out any of them if you had the other two. It worked. I created a spreadsheet to automate the calculations and I was set. A more thorough resource was the Project Rocket website, a collection of web pages that took all the aspects of hard science fiction, related them to real world problems and laid out the math behind everything. I relied on it heavily for the research I did into Article 9. Another resource: Gerard O’Neill’s The High Frontiers, which I’d read in high school but never really absorbed as a set of principles.
In 1998 I wrote the first three chapters to Article 9, loved where it went…I started where Heinlein did, with a young teen asking her uncle how she could go to the moon. I figured what would my three-year old niece be like in the year 2020 when she’d be old enough to think about space as a career? I wrote everything down, and I liked it.
Then the pressures of real life took over my time and I didn’t start again for 13 years. I finally spent a year cranking out one draft after another, not knowing much about writing a novel except that I had to finish it and writing more was how one did that. It was one thing to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in English with a writing concentration but actually writing a novel with real science was a very different project. I showed parts to my wife, who liked it, then I showed the complete project to a friend, Jeff Gomez who I’d fallen out of touch with but who’d built himself a proper media empire of his own. Jeff took it and read it and showed it to one of his editors, Caitlin Burns who loved it. It needed work…but maybe we could get this thing published.
We tried. There were meetings. Lots of meetings. After two years I realized that there would always be more meetings. Traditional publishing was something I had experience with. I’d written work for the gaming market but much earlier at a time when Palladium Books needed writers and had a much smaller market. The opposite dynamic was in play now; tons of writers creating work for a much larger market. Individual writers were publishing their own work on Amazon’s Create Space program. Why shouldn’t I? What did I have to lose?
I bought a kick-ass cover for the book and uploaded my files. Twenty-four hours later I was a published novel author. Hooray! I check back on my sales records and it turns out that Article 9 is still my best-selling work. Who knew?
DIGITAL IDOLS
I was there when William Gibson created cyberpunk. Neuromancer dropped in 1984 and I immediately hated it. But it became popular quickly. Gibson’s work stood out because it flipped the world of science fiction on its head. The seventies vision of sci fi had more to do with galactic empires built from brilliant shining cities and the people who populated them. Gibson offered us images of a noisy, crowded, high-tech and hopeless future…a vision that was utterly different. The truth is that different works. Soon enough other writers began to copy his style and direction, arguably creating Cyberpunk. Then others followed them creating Splatterpunk, a sub-genre that wallowed in the gore and violence.
I wanted to try my hand at it. I wanted to play with the big kids. So in college I started writing a cyberpunk novel, called it The Electric Gods. This was long before I knew what I was doing…I had the time and energy, but not the skill, but I got nearly 200 pages of work done about a cyber-enhanced teen girl named Norma who raged against the machine of her life only to find that the machine had teeth and had a way of raging right back at her. I got as far as I could, then I shelved the project. It couldn’t finish it. I didn’t know how.
After finishing Article 9 I at least had the confidence of knowing I could crank out half a million words and get people to read it. I made friends with other authors. I started to figure out who I wanted to work with. It took years but I finally re-wrote the book with better characters. Better ideas. An actual plot. A cool cover. Digital Idols dropped in 2016, and its cast of characters have bled out to other projects. I can see a body of work emanating from Norma’s struggles and adventures after Digital Idols ends…where she helps found a cyber-city which then has its own problems attracting people and protecting them from the creatures who dwell in that realm. But that’s for the future. One thing at a time.
NYC EXPOCALYPSE
In 2016 I became involved in a multi-author project called Apocalypse Weird: The concept was a multi-tiered shared fictional world where authors would tell stories with some common characters. I’d seen this before in the 199s, when Palladium Books created Rifts under its Megaverse imprint. It was the same idea: multiple stories and environments all traced back to a common origin. Cool! I joined the project as a New York City author, and while AW ultimately was not sustainable and ended, I had written a decent urban fantasy story that called back my experience working with Wall Street and its denizens. The story was about Julie Meyers, a salesperson stuck in a thankless telephone sales job, who unknowingly helps engineer the destruction of the world by means of cursed sales knives. Faced with horrors she can’t understand and never imagined she must come to terms with her role in creating the crisis and help save what she can. Which comes about in the gradually growing circle of refugees she adopts in the hopes of saving what’s left of her soul and her city.
There are two books in this series as I write this: The Taste Makers (a play on Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, his tell-all book on the marketing industry) and Greenstreets. Book 1 takes the reader through a guided tour of lower Manhattan while the sequel shows the reader the waterways of New York City’s various counties. Despite the obvious genre-related bits, these are books about my home, and now a piece of home can travel to the moon. Because why not.
HAZARD TO NAVIGATION
My only published short-short story, coming in at 998 words. It tells the story of the destruction of the moon by aliens who accidently crashed there, as witnessed by a couple from their back yard.
SALVAGE OPS
In 2016, Amazon introduced Kindle Worlds to its readers. The idea behind this program was that established Amazon authors could now open their worlds to new authors who would write new stories set in the established universes. Nick Webb used this to solid effect when he opened up his Legacy Fleet space opera series to Future Chronicles creator Sam Peralta who then invited authors to submit short stories for a Legacy Fleet anthology to be published under the Kindle Worlds imprint. Most of the other authors were telling standard space opera tales with battles between humans and aliens in far off reaches of space. I needed to do different, so I stayed close to home with the story Flight of the Vulture, the tale of a salvage operation in a supposedly forgotten battleground gone horribly wrong.
The anthology dropped and did well enough that we started thinking about cranking out full length novels for the imprint. I took my short story to the next level, writing Colossus, a story about the salvage vessel Vulture interacting with the Colossus, a giant planetoid turned-solar system defender, and left to patrol the solar system while the main fleet is off battling Swarm fleets far from Earth. The problem arises when a damaged Swarm carrier is discovered on Ceres and manages to deploy its fighters before being destroyed. How does a ten-mile long asteroid manage to combat three thousand fighters? Can the crew of the Vulture help? (Hint: they can. They do.) The second book in the series, Orca, follows the Vulture’s crew as they leave Earth to pursue profit and adventure (mostly profit) with the mining consortium which tried to have the Colossus destroyed in the previous book. Our heroes ask themselves, when is a job not just a job? When doing it requires you to abandon your principles.
I have plans to re-publish Colossus and publish Orca as a two-book in the near future.
BATTLE RING EARTH
Which brings us to 2020, the year I sold a three-book series to sci-fi publisher Aethon Books (another first for me).
For years, decades, really, I‘d wanted to write a story set aboard an orbital ring, which is a hollow tube hovering in orbit over the world, completely circling it. It wouldn’t be the first ring in space story but I couldn’t quite figure out how to do something that I hadn’t read before. Along the way I wondered, what if humans weren’t the ones building this megastructure? What if its construction had been imposed on humanity the way advanced culture tend to impose themselves on less advanced ones? What if we were unaware of just how hopelessly, helplessly outclassed we were?
The problem with a story this epic was knowing where to start so I looked to the stories I’ve enjoyed in the past. The Macross universe’s storyline begins with an alien battleship that crashes to Earth on a remote pacific island, and the aliens’ attempt to recover their ship which leads to chaos and destruction. Book 1: Megastructure follows Specialist Simon Brooks a bright but odd commo guy in Hornet Squadron in the Unified Earth Fleet. Everything the UEF has grew out of the salvage of an alien shup that crashed on a pacific island a decade before. Simon’s connection was that he saw the ship coming down through the sky half a world away and saw the end of the world. Strangely the military was his flight officer uncle’s attempt to keep the boy safe.
Book 1 follows Simon and his squadron through a grand tour of the solar system as they fight a full alien fleet and tend to attribute their success to human cleverness and perseverance instead of the alien’s unwillingness to damage their prize. As they are drawn into the battle ring and learn of its controlling computer’s history and priorities, they come to realize their only hope of survival is to learn how their Sleer opponents think…and that’s no small task.
In Book 2: Colony, the Sleer are in firm control of Earth’s battle ring and Hornet squadron is tasked with gaining access to the alien structure. They do…and are forced to abandon it…but not before they steal a Sleer scout ship and use it to hide on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. Book 3 shows the bulk of the Sleer race emigrating to Earth to inhabit the battle ring, and Hornet Squadron’s mission to discover why. Their adventure shows us a predatory race called the Skreesh which has been wiping out Sleer worlds for years. In fact the Skreesh onslaught threw the balance between a dozen competing interstellar powers into chaos. But are the Hornets up to salvaging the situation to Earth’s advantage? They’d better be…I have more books planned in this series, and want to see how far I can carry the story.
MY CREW
There it is. I’ve been craving a trip to space my entire life and now I’m going for real…but I’m taking a bunch of people with me. In addition to my own work, I invited my wife, Lara and my brother-in-law Chris to submit their own for inclusion for the same reasons. Chris in particular has a spiritual connection with the moon, so asking him to contribute seemed like a no-brainer. As for my wife, I can’t imagine going to the moon without her, and she’s always wanted to travel into space. Here we are, metaphorically, perhaps (these are concrete samples of all our work) but we’re still going.
How cool is that?
Find Jon Frater’s stories here.