For some reason I thought my ROCK STARS story would fit in a single book. I also wanted it to be a mass-market paperback with visual appeal to young readers and Gen-X space opera veterans like myself, which limited the word count to about 80,000. As I reached the middle of that word count, however, it became obvious that not all the story I wanted to tell would fit in Astrojuggernaut.
The problem is I have this inherent need to justify my own imagination. Star Wars can have noisy fireball explosions in interplanetary vacuum, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has its Babel fish and improbability drive, even Project Hail Mary has its Xenonite, and the creators never spend any time explaining how those magical inventions came to be. I love stories like that, but I’m especially drawn to authors like Michael Crichton and Robert J. Sawyer, who offer outlandish ideas but reinforce them with quasi-scientific rationalizations. Those Jurassic Park dinosaurs shouldn’t be able to function in our relatively oxygen-poor, Anthropocene atmosphere, but hey, their genes were laced with frog DNA so pretty much anything goes. The Enterprise couldn’t travel interstellar distances in the course of one episode if not for dilithium crystals and all the rest of Star Trek’s signature brand of technobabble. You get the idea. Big magic; lots of scientific-sounding handwavium.
By the time I was ready to take a real leap into my wildest imagination, I was already nearing the end of Book I. I suddenly found myself writing a trilogy. So on Astrojuggernaut‘s final page, our heroes find themselves in a new universe where the rules are now whatever I tell you they are. That freed me to do something I’ve never done before and found deeply enjoyable, which is create a purely space fantasy playground. In fact Magicaleidoscope might be the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book. I’m hoping that carries over into your reading experience.
In this second volume I didn’t feel any special need to make my settings gibe with the physics of our actual universe, so in this book you’ll find a space mall that folds on itself like a tangle of Möbius strips. Inside that mall are enough diverse aliens to pack a dozen Mos Eisley cantinas. I got to play with alien languages and attitudes and musical history and all the elements I’ve found fascinating in recent travels to Europe and Asia, but all from the chaotic wellspring of my own imagination. Sometimes, as a certain space pirate once put it, I even surprise myself. And that felt good.
I gave away electronic copies of Astrojuggernaut in the hopes you’d pay a fair amount to read this one. If you read Magicaleidoscope, I’m confident you’ll be back for Volume III: Technosis when it’s released on June 6. (I just received an update from the publisher, which decided the original publication date of May 23 would be a poor choice for a space novel release, given the debut of The Mandalorian & Grogu that weekend.) Technosis concludes what might be The Force’s final, most consequential tour, but will it bring them back home to the Big Blue Marble? Stay tuned, faithful reader, and don’t touch that FTL radio dial.
If I ever write anything this long again, you probably won’t see it for years to come. I have a big idea, a gigantic one actually, but that book project won’t come together overnight. ROCK STARS took me six and a half years to create. Stephen King I am not. I am, however, looking forward to including my wife, Amanda Stevens, in the creative mix this time around. I also have concepts for a huge video project with input from another old friend. So if you’ve stuck with me this far, enjoy the ongoing ride! I can’t wait to see what readers made of Magicaleidoscope. There’s a preorder link at the top of this site, which I’ll replace tomorrow with a direct order link to the publisher. You can also grab the novel in softcopy for most electronic readers; I believe that’ll be available for download at midnight tonight.
But enough of my yakkin’. Less talk, fellow Force fans, more rock!
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