The book(s) I’m working on: “Faraway Star” and “Wild Among the Moons.”
Here's a brief introduction to the book(s) I'm working on, a very old science fiction concept whose time may finally have come.
I am not just a historian and YouTuber. I’m also an author. Some of you may have read one or more of my fiction books; I write mainly and usually as an escape from the various other things I do, and as a balm for my mental health which is probably a little more precarious than it may outwardly seem. Every so often on this blog I’ll do an article about my current work-in-progress. (Here’s the one on Daniel Vanished, from way back in early 2023; here’s the one on The Gangster Crown from late last year). I’m now working quickly and diligently on a science fiction project. It’s not just one novel, but two, and possibly eventually three in a unified series. The working title of the first book is Faraway Star, and the second, Wild Among the Moons. This has proven to be a very important project for me, as it’s a culmination of a series of ideas that germinated more than 30 years ago, and which have taken various inchoate forms in the many years I’ve been trying to work them out.
Faraway Star takes place in some other part of our galaxy which is torn by a destructive and large-scale war between three powerful civilizations, each jockeying for dominance in space. A young man, Raljebi, a Caprionese—a humanoid civilization—is cooling his heels at university on the distant planet of Algeron, mainly so he can avoid being drafted. A staunch opponent of the war, Raljebi’s best friend, Quilq, is a citizen of the Menkarian Empire, the race of reptilian beings with whom his planet is at war. Each estranged from their families and planets, the unlikely friends decide to drop out of school and take refuge on another planet where there’s rumored to be a groovy colony of peace protesters from every inhabited world. Raljebi’s search for peace and meaning in a war-torn universe ultimately becomes a quest for himself, as he finds tragedy, heartbreak, love and meaning in a host of unexpected and often dangerous situations. The title comes from the promise of a distant uninhabited planet, a deed to which Raljebi inherits virtually by chance, and which he may never reach in his increasingly desperate circumstances.
What became Faraway Star, and the second projected book in the series, Wild Among the Moons, is one of my very oldest stories. What is ultimately becoming this series of novels began as a short story, entitled “Goodbye, Algeron,” which I turned in as an assignment for a creative writing class at the University of New Mexico in April 1993. The seed of the “Goodbye, Algeron” idea, which focused on the characters of Raljebi and Quilq and their decision to drop out of college to join an interstellar hippie commune, ultimately ripened into a novel, then called The Farthest Forever, which I finished five years later in the spring of 1998. Although I did quite a bit of tinkering with the manuscript in the early 2000s to try to get it published, I was always unsatisfied with the subsequent versions. This spring, just before I began working on the current drafts, I went back through the previous versions that still exist, on half-destroyed old external hard drives and cloud files, and saw a lot of wreckage of what I’ve been trying to write for more than 30 years, but little that was compelling.
