Category: My Fiction

Here are my own stories. Science fiction and fantasy mostly but other things may be added too.

So Now I’ve Got a Publication Date

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Update:

The Book Detail Page went live on Amazon:

Amazon book page

Wohoo!

I started loading the files for the e-book and paperback on Amazon.  The release date will be 21JAN2026.  I’m doing a last review of the text to find typos and “literary infelicities” before I hit the button and make the pre-release page live.

I’m setting up a page on the site (link directly below) for the marketer to direct traffic here.

Coming 21JAN2026 – The Sniper by Jake Barter

I have to admit I’m more excited about this than I thought I would be.  I’m especially looking forward to getting the paperback proof copy.  I’ll put it on the shelf of my bookcase in the living room between my copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey.  After all Homer has only produced two books in the last three thousand years and I wrote one in less than a decade!

I think today is the first time i started thinking about the next book in the series.  Bogey’s had his work.  I’ll let him off the hook and let Connors recruit some new folks to wrestle with the political chaos that has enveloped America after the events in “The Sniper.”  For this one i’ll have to map out a series of events.  I can’t just wing it.  Maybe I’ll do a “future history” timeline like Heinlein did for his alternate history stories.

I think in these later stories I might like to have a moon base.  It’s definitely not an unbelievable technological stretch and it would give the stories a less claustrophobic feel.  Mars just seems too difficult and with a fractured America I doubt the resources could be imagined available for something as challenging.

But that’s just a spit-balling thought.  I’m going to have to do some serious thinking before I just jump into it.  It’ll have to feel right.  And then I’ll have to come up some new characters.  I think I want some technical types in this story.  And I’ll have to think of what is going to happen to poor President George Chastain.  I’ll left him holding the bag with a bunch of states in basically open revolt.  He inherited this mess and he has my sympathy but I’m afraid it’s not going to get easier in the next book.

And in the next book I might try my hand at my first love story.  I’ve left Paul Connors and Grace Boghadair sort of up in the air.  With bogey out of the limelight maybe it’s time to see whether those two have a future.  Well, I’m no romance novelist but maybe I can come up with a believable plot to get those two together.  After all she is a widow looking for a husband and you can’t find a more eligible bachelor than the richest man in the world.

Well, I’ll attach the links to the Amazon pages for the books and the author (Jake Barter!) as soon as they’re live.  Meantime here are my cover shots.

Not So Forbidden Planet

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Dr. Morbius – Young man, my daughter is going to be terribly punished for what she just said.

J J Adams – Dr Morbius, don’t you understand it’s your subconscious that is responsible for all this death and destruction?

Dr. Morbius – What, me harm my own daughter.

J J Adams – Well, look at those gages.  Your subconscious monster will use whatever amount of unlimited power it takes to break through that door.

Dr. Morbius – I’m helpless to stop this terrible power.

Altaira – John please do something.

J J Adams – Alright I will.  (draws his sidearm and fatally wounds Dr Morbius who falls to the ground)

(The gages of the Krell machine quickly settle down to minimal levels and the door that was white hot cools visibly.)

Dr. Morbius – Son, throw that switch.

J J Adams – What will it do?

Dr. Morbius – It will initiate a chain reaction inside the Krell thermonuclear power plants that will unstoppably consume the planet in a miniature nova.  The Krell technology is too dangerous for humanity.  It must be destroyed.

J J Adams – Sorry Dr Morbius, I disagree.  The technology they possessed was too dangerous for them and for you.  But we’ll harvest the Krell knowledge without unleashing any subconscious monsters and I predict we’ll do just fine.

(Morbius expires)

Altaira – John, what do we do now?

J J Adams – Our first problem is how to get out of here.  That door will be cool soon but it’s probably permanently welded shut.  I’ll contact my crew and we’ll provide a funeral ceremony for your father and Doc.  Afterwards we’ll get back in touch with Earth and begin the start of the project to decipher the Krell technology.  That will be the largest step change in human knowledge since the discovery of the faster than light drive.  It will take tens of thousands of scientists and engineers centuries to mine all of the knowledge here.

Altaira – But what will become of me?

J J Adams – That depends on what you want to do.  If you want to stay on Altair IV, you will have many opportunities to press your legal right to some kind of remuneration for the government’s seizure of the Krell technology.  I’d say you may end up as one of the wealthiest humans in the galaxy.

Altaira – But what about us?

J J Adams – Well Alta, a starship captain doesn’t make enough of a salary to impress an heiress but if you can wait a year for a wedding I can most probably wangle a desk job on Altair IV and we can see whether your interest in biology is strictly academic or not.

Altaira – I’ll wait for you John.  I don’t want to leave my home.  But with my father gone I need someone to help me figure out my future.

J J Adams – Well, as I said I’ll be stuck here indefinitely while the military secures the Krell infrastructure.  So, you’ll get a chance to get to know me when I’m not killing your relatives or fighting invisible monsters.

(They embrace, kiss and then begin the search for a way out.)

Me Robot

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When I received the call from RoboDriver I had been lamenting the fact that I hadn’t received an offer for a date in seven years.  That’s why I prefer robots.  They’re a cleaner breed.  They never have dandruff.

I arrived at the plant where the incident had occurred.  This was the only manufacturing site for the Higgs bosonic brain.  Of course there was a reason for this.  The instability of this boson was so extreme that the robots were constantly in a state of nervous exhaustion and frequently flew into a rage and killed everyone around them.  As you might imagine this was seriously cutting into profits.

I entered the office of the CEO of RoboDriver and he said, “Thank you for your swift response, ma’am.”  I retorted, “I prefer to be addressed as Dr. Daystrom.  She/her.”  He replied, “Alright Dr. Daystrom-she-her.  We need to troubleshoot exactly why one of our robots went on a killing spree in downtown San Francisco today and come up with an action plan to solve the problem and convince our customers to use RoboDriver for all their driving needs.”

Gritting my teeth over his insulting greeting I said I would begin a thorough forensic investigation that would include interviews with all of the witnesses, review of all of the technical documents for the manufacturing and quality assurance records, a comprehensive search of all similar problems over the last twenty years and an electron microscopy examination of the Higgs bosonic brain of the killer robot.  He asked, “How long will that take?”  I answered, “About forty minutes.”  He was taken aback, “How could you possibly complete such an investigation in forty minutes?”

I replied, “Because there’s no need to do any of that.  Everybody knows that the Higgs bosonic brain has a 100% failure rate within one week of installation and of the 1,343 cases of robot committed homicides, 100% of them were robots possessing a Higgs bosonic brain.”  He said, “Oh.  Well, you have a point there.”  I followed up, “But you know that already.  Why does RoboDriver continue to use the Higgs bosonic brain when the US Robotics positronic brain has a stellar record of safety and longevity?  US Robotics licenses their technology and has a good reputation for working hand in glove with their partners.”

The CEO got up from his desk and shut the door to his office and walked over to my chair, cleared his throat and said in hushed tones, “The fact of the matter is we were the victims of a hostile takeover by a venture capital group that installed a cost-cutting program that identified the fact that licensing Higgs bosonic brains instead of the positronic equivalent would save seventeen cents for each robot equipped.  Now after the fact, this savings seems to pale in comparison to the 1,343 wrongful death suits and the Justice Department’s grand jury indictments but all of that stuff won’t hit the fan until after Christmas so what we need is a band-aid to keep this under control until the December bonuses get handed out.  So, what can you do?”

I looked down at the floor and shuddered and told him I’d see what I could do.  I headed out onto the programming floor and using the clearance card I had been given by the CEO began writing some new code for the RoboDriver robots.  I loaded the code onto a server and began the download to the entire robot fleet.  I headed for the front door just as the first wave of murder-bots stormed the C-suite.  Well, so much for their bonuses.

The Blabbnoy Effect

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The Galactic Corps had relentlessly pursued the evil anti-civilizational organization of Carpone from one end of the Milky Way to the other.  They had methodically identified and rooted out each level of Carpone until they had finally located the heart of the organization.  This galaxy spanning criminal conspiracy was headquartered on a planet called Sflprugm.  Sflprugm was as hard to approach as it was to pronounce.  All the space within a two-parsec radius had been planted with detection devices meant to alert Sflprugmians of any approaching danger.  Only the Corps’ ultra-advanced spy rays had allowed them to study Sflprugm from a safe distance and so size up the enemy.  And they were a worthy opponent.  The defensive screens that protected Sflprugm were beyond impregnable.  No imaginable fleet of battle cruisers could hope to breach the screens.  And the Sflprugmian fleet was as large as and as deadly as the Corps’ own.

To solve the problem of conquering the Sflprugmians the Corps turned to the greatest living scientist of the age Dr. Balbus Blabbnoy.  His work on trans-dimensional ballistics was required reading at the Academy.  He was tasked with calculating the trajectory of an anti-matter planet from the Psi-Gamma dimension and forcing it into our universe with just the correct entrance and momentum needed to collide with Sflprugm.  It was assumed that much of their fleet would be destroyed with their planet.  But the Corps’ fleet would be assembled to mop up the remnants.

Admiral Bowser planned out the exact coordinates for the fleet’s convergence.  It would appear out of hyperspace about five billion miles from Sflprugm; safely beyond the radius of destruction but close enough to pursue the remaining vessels.

Dr Blabbnoy would be on the bridge of Admiral Bowser’s flagship; The Superponderous and when zero hour arrived, he would throw the switch which would trigger a sub-ether wave that would activate a device in Psi-Gamma that would cause a sub-atomic generator to generate a worm hole that would translate the anti-matter planet into our space-time with devastating results for Sflprugm.

Balbus was on the bridge and Admiral Bowser noticed how extremely tired the scientist was.  He was mumbling something under his breath that the Admiral thought sounded like, “Was it X15 or X-15?  Now the Admiral had never gotten past high school algebra but even to his non-mathematical ears this didn’t sound promising.

When the clock ticked down to zero Dr. Blabbnoy screamed, “X15!“ and slammed the button.  For a few seconds nothing seemed to be happening.  The sub-space screens failed to show any irruption in the space near Sflprugm.  But while the navy was watching their screens Dr. Blabbnoy was looking out the front window of the ship and that was where he saw the irruption.  The missing anti-matter planet was about five hundred miles from the flagship and heading toward it and the rest of the fleet with about twenty seconds before impact.  All he could think to say was, “X-15!“

Suffice it to say that this was not the finest hour for the Corps or human civilization or even computational science.  But it was one of those examples from history of exactly the danger in not checking your work.  Or even more importantly having someone else check your work.  But most certainly it taught us to never trust anyone with a name as ridiculous as Balbus Blabbnoy with almost limitless power.  How could it not be a disaster?

The Sheldon Chronicles

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Larry Sheldon (25,501 – 25,587 N.E.) – Founder of the science of psycho-cosmography, famously quoted as saying, “Look, we needed more space so we invented starships.  What’s the big deal?”  Creator of the Sheldon Plan whereby the new empire was replaced by the new, new empire and the outpost world Zero became the Bulwark for this new order.  He was a secretive and reclusive genius who suffered from acute fear of other people’s body odor.  Some historians now believe his existence may have been apocryphal.

(Encyclopedia Publicius Domainius, 1023 edition)

Here he stood in the center of the galaxy, the administrative capital of the new empire; Titantor!  A world that circled the central black hole of the Milky Way galaxy.  Only an incredibly powerful anti-gravity field prevented Titantor from being ripped to shreds and swallowed by the gravitational force of its evil black star.  A steady stream of planets and debris had to be fed into the anti-gravity generator to keep this horrific imbalance in existence.  But such was the power of this empire and its vanity that the whim of the emperor was enough to maintain this cosmic madness.

And here he stood Bob Goodfellow, a fresh graduate of the Arcturus Community College and Creamery here to put his knowledge of psycho-cosmography to good use assisting Larry Sheldon to save the new empire from the forces of entropy that threatened to tear it apart and bring on a trillion years of barbarism and low credit scores for everyone.  And he was nervous.  Meeting a genius like Larry Sheldon was intimidating.  He could feel sweat forming on his forehead.  He wiped it away with a handkerchief.  And suddenly there was Sheldon walking toward him smiling and looking him over nervously, “Bob, good to finally meet you.  Yeah, I’m not big on shaking hands or standing downwind of people.  So, let’s walk with the wind in our faces and you following me at about a six-foot distance.  Thanks!”

Within these strictures they covered the distance to the Titantor Senate building in about an hour and Goodfellow watched from the gallery as Dr Sheldon was cross-examined by the representatives of the Imperial Science Foundation.

The Pontifex Maximus grilled him, “Dr. Sheldon, you claim that using the energy output of fifty billion stars to turn the Smaller Magellanic Cloud into a jacuzzi for the emperor’s concubines will lead to the heat death of the galaxy.  Do you have any proof of this?”

Larry sat with his handkerchief clutched over his nose recoiling at the examiner’s overpowering cologne, “Well, the fact that the population of the empire has decreased from a million-billion-billion to seventy-eight would seem to be a relatively strong indicator, mathematically speaking.”  The Pontifex made a rude noise and scoffed, “What nonsense!  This mighty capitol; Titantor, on its own, is home to countless billions.  We see them all around us!”

Larry used his emergency inhaler and continued, “Yes, but they’re all robots.  In fact, it’s worse than the numbers indicate.  There are only thirteen women of childbearing age left and half of them are Vestal Virgins.  We’re going to have to really rethink a lot of priorities if this whole shebang is going to last past Wednesday.”

This sparked outrage and shouting among the senators.  The concomitant bad breath overwhelmed Larry and he swooned in the witness chair.       …     To be continued!!!!

Let Jake Barter Work on That for a While

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Now that I’ve assumed the persona of Jake Barter, my whole life has changed.  Jake Barter is no ordinary man.  At the very least he has the training of a double nought secret agent and the social connections of Bruce Wayne.  His resume is a combination of special forces operator and philosopher king.  And because of this I told Camera Girl that she needed to treat me with much greater respect and an almost religious awe.

I don’t think she “gets it” yet.  You know what they say about a prophet in his own country.  Well, that goes double for a pseudonymous author.  I think I may now begin to write the memoirs of Jake Barter in my spare time.  I think he will be a picaresque character who gets involved in serious situations like wars, revolutions and social movements and ends up causing things to go south in horribly predictable ways based on his sloth, greed and phenomenal incompetence.  His only redeeming qualities are monumental overconfidence, enormous likeability and unbelievable luck.  I’m thinking I’ll start him off as a special advisor to Trump on constitutional law and then take it from there.

But seriously, I am thinking about new characters for future stories and I think the next thing I do will have a strong humorous streak in it.  And this is because I do enjoy making fun of things I don’t like and combining that with a writing project should make it a lot of fun for me.  But what I must do is decide if it will be in the same “universe” as “The Sniper.”  So far there isn’t a lot of humor there and maybe it would be better to separate a new project from a place with so much trauma lurking around every turn.  And that’s fine.  Making up multiple fictional worlds allows the author to escape from any traps he’s gotten himself into in the old ones.  You can get tired of a scenario or you just need a break from figuring out how to keep your characters from either getting killed or solving all their problems.  After all, either of those paths ends the story.  So, you have to be constantly threading the needle to maintain the overall “problem” but still carve out a piece of plotline to make the present installment interesting.

I think I might want to do an extraterrestrial story.  I’ve played around with some short story / novella length things in the past but they just petered out.  I think this time I’ll try to storyboard a whole bunch of stuff first so I have a direction and enough plot lines and an overarching direction for the thing before I get really started.  And what is currently completely stymying me is deciding what kind of Earth this will be.  Will it be like the actual current day disaster we are living through or will it be some kind of “day after tomorrow” where we’ve gotten our act together and learned how to live like human beings.  Well, I’ll let Jake Barter work on that for a while.

Well, Spin the Wheel

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If a brutally long and tedious day starts and ends with good news, does that make it a good day? I would have to say yes. This morning started with the book cover for “The Sniper” arriving. And after returning from a long, grueling day trapped in the bowels of a drab New England city, bored almost to desperation, I finally have a deadline for the launch of my book. It will be out sometime between the middle and end of January. Now granted, that can be as much as two months from now but just putting a stake in the ground is what I need to coordinate the whole crazy flying circus of an effort. Covers and EPUB files and pdfs and key words and discount deals and reviews and project pages and pseudonyms and email lists and Amazon ads and heaven knows what else. Yes, a day that starts and ends well is a good day.
I was pleasantly surprised at just how accurately the cover art portrayed the scenario and the mood of the story. And the quality of the drawing exceeded my expectations completely. I’m extremely glad I went in the direction I did instead of a more generic cover. If for no one else than for myself. It makes the book real.


Now I have to confess that I have no idea whether what I’m trying to do makes any sense. Can a book from an unknown author with an extremely niche audience break out and find a generously sized audience? My rational engineering side says the odds against it are long. I’ll say one in a thousand.
But at the same time, a part of me is anxious to take the plunge. And that is exactly what I’m doing. It’s a roulette wheel spin with a big pot of my money plunked down on double zero. What could be more fun than that? Well, I guess winning would be more fun. But that’s well beyond my power to ensure. I’ll have to let fate have her say.
I guess now I know how every author since Homer has felt when his creation is about to be unveiled. And I’ll say it’s a good feeling. As Kipling said:
“When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what he thought ’e might require,
’E went an’ took — the same as me!”
Every teller of tales is part of the long tradition. You make up something in your head and you want to see if the audience resonates to the same vibration you felt. But the worst fate would not be if a lot of people didn’t like it. The worst is if no one ever hears it.
Achilles in the Iliad wanted to die for glory, for immortal fame. Well, I’d prefer to live but I’d forego any profit if I could guarantee that a million people read my story. That would be a form of immortality. Well, spin the wheel.

Plato Was a Dope

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The original utopia was Plato’s Republic.  And in that hypothesized city-state one of the most important precepts for producing good citizens was proper education.  Now, if you’ve ever read “The Republic” you know it’s literally gibberish.  Plato proceeds from unsubstantiated statements to illogical conclusions throughout the argument he uses to design his state but one thing I think he was right about is the necessity for highly superior education.  So, my republics will incorporate the most scientific and practical methods for educating and testing the young in order to maximize their future value as workers and citizens and to provide a worldview that would allow them to harmonize with their fellow citizens.

Now, since I am not an educator or a psychologist, I have no fixed ideas about methodology or even the content of this educational regimen.  I will hazard a guess that mathematics should still have a very important place in these schools.  I think thousands of years of western educational practices has proven the link between mathematical learning and general mental fitness.  But beyond that I’ll say that identifying the curricula for the various levels and types of schooling is something that will be of the highest importance for these communities.  And by no means do I intend for schooling to be strictly academic.  Specific vocational training is something I see as extremely valuable for individuals of all types.  Even a particle physicist or a concert pianist could benefit from knowing how to solder a component onto his computer motherboard or snake a bathtub drain.  But all of this is tangential to the main reasons why education will be critical to making these communities successful.

The schools will identify the academic capabilities of the children and combining this with their interests the correct academic and vocational curricula will be provided as choices.  This should maximize the probability for a successful citizen.  But the schools will also educate children with the ethos and expectations that the community is based on.  In this way the young will align themselves with the goals that are expected from them as members in the association.  In this way, the likelihood that these later generations will fit in with the community is maximized.

As with every other aspect of the community, feedback from the testing will inform the goals and needs of the community.  For instance, suppose the community is lacking in machinists.  So, the forecasting will be used to increase the monetary incentives for machinists.  And so forth for whatever other imbalances occur.

And education can also apply to other aspects of life.  For instance, men and women need to find mates in order to produce the next generation.  Education can include counseling on adapting to married life and even providing a dating service to locate compatible mates.

Now, Plato had his citizens indoctrinated with myths that justified their strange lifestyle.  For instance, he did not want the nuclear family to interfere with the loyalties of his citizens and so the children were raised together as a pack.  And he had stories that supposedly reinforced this lifestyle.  I wouldn’t expect these optimized communities of mine to attempt to destroy families.  On the contrary, I would expect them to do everything possible to prove that their lifestyle and community provide the best human environment possible.

I wonder what aspect of my optimal communities I’ll talk about next?  Well, maybe that’s enough for a while.  I better post on something else tomorrow.

Utopia and Nukes

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Okay, I said I’d get down to details in setting up “photopia.”  Well, where do we start?  The first question is how do you start such a thing from where we are now?  In the past the founder would be a prophet.  Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Joseph Smith, L Ron Hubbard (!).  For my founding I’ll settle for a trillionaire with virtually unlimited resources of artificial intelligence.  Then he’ll have to be a humanitarian, a philanthropist, a lover of mankind.  Because he’s going to have to take the long view.  He’ll know that to save mankind he’ll have to start by rejecting a good chunk of humanity at the start.  Because as humanity currently exists, there is a definite percentage of the population that can’t be included in an optimized human environment.  There is a twenty percent group that is hopeless.  Some of them are uncontrollably violent.  Some are completely unwilling to do work.  Some are anti-social to the extent that they habitually commit various types of crime.  It goes without saying utopia has no place for such individuals.

The system that our founder builds must begin by trying to select a core of people that are unmistakenly outside of this 20%.  The only way that the system can be founded is to start with the best starting material.  So extremely careful biographical research into the initial candidates will have to be performed to rule out any unacceptable or even sub-optimal individuals.  Ideally, married couples and even families of the highest quality should be incorporated in the starting material.  This will build additional stability in the structure.

But one thing that will be true is that even within this foundation of selected individuals there will need to be a continuous weeding out mechanism for people who fail or for the offspring who will be identified as failures.  And if offspring are rejected, often the parents and siblings will find it impossible to stay inside the group.  And not because this community is a hermetically sealed bubble.  Everyone inside will be in contact with the outside world continuously.  But if children of group members become dangerous, they must be kept outside of the community and that is hard to enforce unless the rest of the family is ejected.  So, it becomes apparent that policing the group for anti-social activity will become one of the most important activities of the administrators.

And as I mentioned in the earlier installment of this essay, those who are ejected are given the equity that they’ve earned in the community when the leave so that they can find their own place in the world.  So, what exactly are the rules of this club?  Well, the founder gets to decide those.  If he’s wise, these rules are ones that will tend to increase stability, prosperity and social cohesion.  What exactly these rules are may be dependent on the values and personal traits of this “prophet.”  And ideally, there could be a number of different foundations to allow for the different but equally valid personality types that exist in our species.  And maybe some of these will be failures and some will thrive.  But over the course of time by trial and error a calculus for creating human communities could be derived.

Now, what happens to those who can’t be included.  Well, nothing.  They’ll be on their own.  This assumes that the larger human community still exists outside of these enclaves and that it has to deal with the full spectrum of human types.  And that is why prisons and welfare exist.  And that brings up another point.  How would these societies be viewed by the outside world.  My guess will be; poorly.  I believe many nations would try to destroy them or at least force them to accept members that they would reject.  And for that reason, the location of these societies may be one of the most important questions that the administrators will have to decide.  Of course, trillionaires can do wonders with the right amount of bribery.  But let’s just say that a nuclear weapons program may be a necessity for this utopia of mine.

When I write the next installment (and I may have to think about it for a while) I think I’ll talk about education.