Anyway.

ROCK STARS, Volume III: Technosis is out!! You can purchase it right now!! Just go to the Technosis cover image at the top of the page, which is actually a purchase link to the publisher for just $16 U.S.!! Complete your collection today!! Also, watch this space for further encouragement to do, and a continuing series of compelling explanations why you should!!

My wife Amanda and I love to take a long, usually international, trip in the fall and a shorter, usually domestic, vacation in the spring. After our hectic trip to Japan in October, I wanted this San Diego sojourn to be somewhat more relaxing. I don’t know if I achieved that in full, but we did spend some quality down time.

Lord knows I try to be globally savvy, but sometimes my ignorance catches up with me in public. Our first stop was lunch at Shan Xi Magic Kitchen, which offers delicious Chinese food with a twist: namely, it includes such unexpected ingredients as cumin and okra. I asked our servers from which Chinese district this particular cuisine hailed. After several failed attempts at communication, one server finally pointed at the “Shan Xi” on her T-shirt. Did you know there’s a Shanxi province in China? I didn’t. It’s a little ways inland (i.e., west) of the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean peninsula. There’s also a Shaanxi province with two As, which is probably best known for its trove of terra cotta warrior statues. Shanxi with one A isn’t a region I knew about for any reason though, clearly, and that’s just a case of yours truly being stupid. The shame of it!

We were booked for a tour of the Gaslamp Quarter that evening, but our guide company ran into a scheduling issue and asked if we’d join its food tour of Little Italy instead. I was fine with that so long as we finished with gelato at Pappalecco, which we did. Super tasty. In fact I’d say Pappalecco can hold its own with the gelato we ate a few years ago in Actual Italy. We finished our Thursday in the hotel hot tub and crashed to get ready for an early morning.

After breakfast at Swami’s Cafe (yum), we hopped in our rental car and headed for the world-renowned, hundred-acre San Diego Zoo. Experts disagree which zoo is the world’s best, but San Diego is always in the running and for excellent reasons. It boasts any number of exotic species including giant pandas like the lazybones pictured below.

We also enjoyed the zoo’s numerous aviaries and African elephant and gorilla exhibits. We’ve never been to the global south, but it’s on our radar and we would very much like to try a photo safari on the African savannah someday soon.

The highlight of our Friday was probably the zoo’s “Animals in Action” tour, which (for a hefty upcharge) takes you behind the scenes for closer views, and sometimes direct interactions, with whichever animals are relaxed enough to handle it that day. Among other treats, we got to pet a gentle, drooly zebra and to feed both a rhino and a jostling flamboyance of flamingos. Yep, I looked it up. That’s what it’s called, a flamboyance of flamingos, and now we both know something fun.

Our animal adventures continued that evening with a sunset cruise around San Diego Bay. It had long been on my bucket list to see a dolphin on the open water, and Friday I got my wish. In fact we saw two! Our captain explained these were military dolphins who are associated with the naval base but spend much of their time swimming around on their own recognizance. John Oliver had just done a segment about military dolphins the weekend before. Apparently the U.S. Navy uses cetaceans for defensive purposes only, allegedly, but other countries train dolphins as kamikazes, which I hate. Is there any creature so majestic and wonderful we humans can’t just leave it well enough alone?

San Diego has not one but two amazing wildlife parks, so on Saturday we headed to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. This park is 18 times bigger than its mother park, so everything is quite a bit farther apart. We found both parks tough to navigate, even with the app and Google Maps, so we probably did a lot more backtracking than we should have. In any case we were beat by 3 p.m., but did we let that slow us down? Of course not! Naps won’t get anyone to La Jolla Cove! That’s a magical place where you can wade through frigid seawater mere meters from a colony (or herd, or rookery, depending on whom you ask) of seals and sea lions that cavort around like teens at a water park. It’s freaking adorable, not to mention the thousands of nesting pelicans adorning the cliffs. We sipped piña coladas and watched the golden sun set over the azure horizon.

We were off to La Jolla Playhouse for an excellent production of the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play Purpose. Were we dragging after that lengthy but entertaining dramedy? Yes. Was Amanda out past her bedtime? Very much so. Did that stop me from hauling her to Tacos El Gordo? It did not! It’s a credit to the tacos that my long-suffering wife grudgingly conceded they were worth the midnight excursion, especially once the Zantac kicked in. Trust me, friends, no trip to San Diego would be complete without incredible tacos, at which it excels.

We slept in, enjoyed another leisurely Jacuzzi hour, then dropped our rental car off and flew home. On Monday I completed final design edits on ROCK STARS, Volume III: Technosis before a screening of The Mandalorian and Grogu, at which we had a blast on the 49th anniversary of Star Wars‘ 1977 debut.

So that was our lovely spring vacay. Now I’m back and mostly rejuvenated, so it’s time to lean hard into the June 6 release of my climactic new novel, Technosis. I’m about to wear you plumb out with marketing about it, so brace yourself. I love my giddy space opera trilogy, and not enough of you seem to be reading it! If you’d like to get started, you can do so for free by clicking the Astrojuggernaut link above at top center. It’ll cost you nothing, nada, zippo, the big fat goose egg to download ROCK STARS, Volume I in softcopy. From there you can follow the other link to two different (not-free) versions of Volume II: Magicaleidoscope. Read fast, though, because June 6 is only 10 short days away! Remember, I’d be incredibly appreciative if you’d please review these books, whatever you happen to think of them, on Amazon and Goodreads and all the other booky places. Positive or not, your reviews really help me get the word out. In the meantime, have you been to San Diego? If so, what were your favorite sites and sights? Did its namesake whale also work for the U.S. Navy? Inquiring minds do want to know.

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!

First, you can still download it as an EPUB (electronic softcopy) file by clicking the “Astrojuggernaut EPUB — still FREE!” link above. All I ask in return is that you review the book on Amazon when you’ve finished it. Be as honest as you like; the review helps my stats no matter how positive it is.

Or …

You can order the paperback edition (not free, unfortunately) from the publisher via Amazon. I’ll update my links here as other vendors post it. In the meantime, simply hit the “ROCK STARS in Paperback!” link above.

This is awesome, you guys! It’s ’80s space opera fun all over again, with two fresh new sequels soon to come!

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.

Melokuhle Ndelu (stage name Mellow Cool) was a South African guitarist and vocalist who joined the English rock band The Force during the production of its fourth album and has toured and recorded with the group ever since. Widely regarded as among the most gifted soloists in rock history, he was a child star in Cape Town and worked as a guest soloist for the South African razz band The Horn Dogs prior to his audition for The Force. Amy Love once described him as “sex on a six-string.” He’s also enjoyed moderate success as a solo artist in Cape Town, despite an ongoing dispute with the South African government over his imports of a prescription antinausea drug (and mild narcotic) called Iremia. He sometimes wears an opal ring through the bridge of his nose to symbolize his “third eye.” His stage name is a pun on his given name, which is Xhosa for “uphold what is right.”

Huvalu Svith is a Hrue (Centauri) keyboardist and vocalist. He designed and played keyboards for a number of successful bands and orchestras among the reef cities of Proxima Centauri b before a cultural exchange program between Lulaila (a Hrue name for Prox b) and Amazon Pacifica brought him to earth. Already famous on earth and Prox b alike before his arrival, he was recruited into English rock band The Force after the death by drug overdose of its previous keyboardist, Keenan Nguyen. An aquatic cephalopod, he wears an atmospheric cowl of Hrue design to sustain him in terrestrial environments.

Kit (first designated Rina B-0014) is a Japanese-English drummer and singer. She applied for and received emancipated, non-citizen status in England five years after her activation at Apaachaa Saiensu in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture) is the drummer and a backup singer for the rock band The Force, which she joined during production of its sixth studio album, Earthbound. Her initial designation was a tribute to Rina (Suzuki), the drummer and lyricist for the popular Japanese rock band Scandal; Kit’s nickname, which she later adopted officially, was given to her by the band’s lead singer, Optimus Hercules. Her enthusiastic fan base includes both humans and AIs. Her drum fill on “Warnado” has been called the third-greatest of all time, behind only “Tom Sawyer” and “In the Air Tonight.”

Optimus Hercules (born Oliver Ellsworth) was a British singer and songwriter who gained worldwide celebrity as the lead vocalist and pianist of the rock band The Force (formerly Prime). Regarded as one of the most entertaining singers in the history of rock music, he’s known for his flamboyant stage persona and exceptional vocal range and dynamism. Hercules, who grew up in Manchester, England and once performed under the stage name Hannibal Mantooth, has been called “the sexiest rock singer since Elvis” and “the love child of Chris Cornell and Ziggy Stardust.” He was the owner of an interplanetary spacecraft, the Midnight Special, and once insured his own abdominal muscles for a million pounds via Lloyd’s of London.

I do think I’m a pretty good actor, with at least a hundred stage and movie credits over the decades to support that conclusion, but even so, the first time I spoke to a big-time movie director my knees were literally knocking. I thought that was something that only happened in Stephen King novels, but suddenly I was perched on two maracas. I was anxious my first time on a movie set, and I was only there as an unpaid extra. In live-theater contexts, I usually don’t feel stage fright, but if I have to sing or, God help us, dance, that goes right out the window.

I’m not an extremely attractive person, but I’m aware of that so I’ve learned how to tell a joke and narrate a story instead. I guess that’s the only reason I’ve been fortunate enough to date some pretty good-looking people over the years. When I asked them out, did I do so casually like it was a foregone conclusion they’d say yes? No, of course not. I broached the topic like I was defusing a bomb, because I did not consider a positive response an inevitability and I always felt as if I were leaping off a cliff in Acapulco, probably a few hundred yards from the coastline, possibly into a grocery store parking lot.

Over the course of my life I’ve met people who seemed to feel no such self-doubt. My father-in-law had a sometimes disarming, sometimes annoying habit of declaring something to be true he had only just made up. It sounded good to him, though, so how could it not be true? I have a friend who used to (and for all I know, still does) throw house parties at which, an hour or two in, she’d doff all her clothes and work the room naked. To my knowledge no one ever complained. I suppose it goes without saying she had an exemplary physique, but maybe you do too and if so, could you pull that off with such charismatic aplomb? I was reminded of that friend when I watched a documentary about Lady Gaga, who went tanning with her friends and immediately stripped down to nothing. Her friends did not. It should go without saying Lady Gaga knew damn well she was being recorded on video for all the world to see. I’m not judging either Gaga or my friend; it’s their bodies and they can do what they want with them. I’m just wondering what convinced them that was something they should do.

My point is some people have what I’ve started calling irrational self-confidence. It’s the unquestioning belief in oneself, often in public, sometimes even in front of a multitude of people, in the absence of verifiable reasons for certainty. And if you’re going to be an international singing sensation, or an actor with an agent from CAA, or a clearly unqualified U.S. president, or for that matter the hostess of a college-town house party, it’s worth millions. And I for one have never had that form of magnetic narcissism for even one second.

Look, I have no outstanding reason to feel confident in my abilities as an author of fiction, either. I’ve had plenty of creative jobs and make a decent living writing and editing for the state of Washington now, but a novel is a whole other bucket of chicken. My previous novels were far from international bestsellers. On those rare occasions when I go back and read something I penned and published years ago, I’m seldom displeased, but I also compare myself to authors I’ve followed over the years and wonder where Jennifer Egan gets her way with a sentence or how Stephen King conceives of a thousand-page novel every time he goes in for a haircut. They’re better writers than I am and I’m all too aware of that. But that attitude doesn’t sell any books, now, does it? And maybe that’s been part of my problem all along.

So I’m trying something new this time around: I’m faking it till I make it. I’m going to promote these books until some of you are sick of it. If you’re a right-thinking American who plans to download Astrojuggernaut this Saturday and then buy all three paperback volumes of ROCK STARS this spring, I have two things to say to you. First, a blessing upon you and all your household. May your favorite rock band tour through an arena convenient to you, may your edibles kick in at exactly the right moment, and may all your Star Trek movies be even-numbered ones. Second, feel free to ignore all this shameless self-promotion and just enjoy the damn books already. But as for the rest of you, I’m about to wear you the H-E-double-hockey-sticks out.

Because y’know what? Even with my actual, innate humility bordering on self-directed hostility, I still think these books are a whole lot of fun. No, they won’t be for everyone, but I can’t think of anything that is. I wrote them for the 12-year-old version of myself, who, if he’d seen a mass market paperback with a spaceship shaped like an electric guitar on its cover, would’ve immediately picked that novel up, read the blurb on the back and started saving his pennies. And whatever age you are, maybe you’re that precocious goofball on some level, too. If so, welcome aboard, friend. I look forward to jamming with you for the next million light-years as we cruise future spaceways at Warp Factor Eleven. The secret of your interpersonal bravado will always be safe with me.