When you get right down to it, publishing a novel, let alone three in rapid succession, is a narcissistic thing to do. I’m basically tugging the world’s sleeve and yelling, “Give me some money and I’ll tell you my daydreams!” But you already have daydreams of your own, right? So what makes mine worth your hard-earned dinero? Because I’ll be honest, when I saw the email from my publisher about what my upcoming novel would cost, which was more than I expected or wanted, my self-confidence faltered for a minute. I found myself asking, not what I could say to persuade you to buy it – I’d already been thinking about advertising, some of which you’ve seen on my various media – but what’s really in these books for you? With all the entertainment options at your fingertips, let alone the stories puttering around your own head, what makes mine so dang special?
My search for that answer returned me instantly to why I wrote the ROCK STARS trilogy in the first place, and I do think it provided a compelling answer to all those good questions.
Return with me now to the mid-1980s. I was a teenager, on my way out of high school with no career skills and no way of paying for college, and I was broke as a joke. I mean, my family was broke by McAlester, Oklahoma standards, and that’s really saying something. McAlester was a dismal little burg back then, a prison town equidistant from anywhere enjoyable, and my family and I were trapped in a fundamentalist religion with only the promise of Armageddon to end our sorry penury. I was so depressed I slept 14 hours a night-and-day to make as much of my life as possible vanish away.
Yet we still found room in our budget for entertainment. Movie rentals were dirt cheap. We’d bring home VHS tapes and invite our friends to impromptu film festivals. I still miss those! The Okla cinema downtown showed second-run movies, sometimes double features, for a dollar a ticket. My mom and I would smuggle in candy and broasted chicken from a nearby truck stop that accepted loose-dollar food stamps. We made constant use of library cards; and sometimes, the people who owned the houses and offices we cleaned for utility money gave us shopping bags full of old paperbacks. I had no interest in the Harlequin romances that filled most of them, but occasionally we’d score troves of mass market fantasy or science fiction classics. My mom and I were especially grateful for the homeowner who introduced us to Piers Anthony’s silly-but-fun Xanth novels with their punny titles and lighthearted dialogue. Those gifts did more than almost anything to keep me sane until I finally made it to college in ’88. Once I got there, I had a whole new library to explore, which meant I got to catch up on Larry Niven and Stephen King. I also had ready access to a word-processing computer for the first time in my life, which made it more fun to type and print little stories of my own. If you’ve read my book C Is for Collection, you’ve read several of those.
Back then mass market paperbacks were everywhere. Every shopping mall had a B. Dalton’s or Waldenbooks, maybe both, and every supermarket had aisles loaded eight levels high with seven-dollar novels. I could afford one if I scrimped for several weeks, which was how I came into possession of the likes of Ender’s Game and Startide Rising, two sci-fi books I still highly recommend.
A spate of recent articles advised me that mass market paperbacks, those glossily cover-illustrated 4.25”x7” beauties, are all but extinct now. I don’t want to hear that. I don’t know if I can handle a world where impoverished teenagers with interstellar dreams (dreams they see no path toward fulfilling) are further deprived of professionally narrated daydreams. I don’t know how I’d ever have found my way out of McAlester misery if it hadn’t been for those keyholes into something more exciting.
Now, I may not know you personally, but I’m gonna take a wild, swinging guess and suggest you may not be having the best possible year.
It may even be that you could use some cheering up. Maybe an adventure in outer space, a story filled with robots and aliens and funny languages and arena-rocking anthems, would serve as excellent therapy. But hey, no grimdark material, please! Not this year! Not with all that on the news! Imagine a story in which people get ahead, not by shooting or insulting anyone, but by striving to be clever and charming and get along with people who aren’t altogether like them. How does that sound? Pretty good? I thought so.
As I’ve mentioned before, the idea for this book bloomed in my brain in a moment of absolute bliss. A few months later, I started work on it as a way of coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, I still wanted to write about politics, but not the politics of the 2020s so much as what it means to be an American in the 21st century, period. I didn’t want to write THAT PRESIDENT’s name even once. I wanted to imagine a world where nothing went the way we all hoped it would but we still searched for reasons to hope. Most of all, I wanted to find those reasons for hope and share a bunch of them with you.
Plus I wanted to write dialogue for chick drummers who were sassy-pants androids and neurodivergent aliens who were incredible synth players. I wanted to pretend I was friends with the solar system’s most popular arena rock band. Maybe they’d even let me write some of their song lyrics. Dream big, am I right?
Since 2020 I’ve fallen for those lovable weirdos a hundred times over. I think they were born in some of the very best parts of my id. With more years behind me than ahead of me, I find myself longing to send characters like them out into your world. I hope they live longer than I do. In order for that to happen, though, I need you to find your way into their universe. You can do that for free right now just by clicking the link at top center. You can sign up for news of Volume II there as well, but Volume I will still be free as an EPUB if you don’t. I get paid at my day job. Mostly I want this endeavor to get me read.
So what’re you waiting for? I mean, I guess your neighbor might hand you a copy in an old shopping bag someday, but those days are probably over and besides, you need a pick-me-up pronto. It’s possible you’ve read all this and thought, “OK, Carv, that’s all well and good, but I’m really just not into space stories.” If so, these novels probably won’t be your jam, and I can live with that. I hope you find an adventure that makes you happy on days when you need that. Maybe Xanth! Maybe old Westerns! All I can tell you is Astrojuggernaut and its sequels are the kinds of stories that do it for me. And I might be unusual, maybe even proudly so, but not for one minute have I ever thought that made me unique. I think there are other starry-eyed daydreamers out there, folks who saw Luke Skywalker gazing at a binary sunset and GOT IT, totally GOT IT, and I’ve written these amusing little books so I can hug them all close.
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