Author's Blog

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE GREATEST MAN IN BOXING HISTORY

2012-01-17T16:24:00.000-08:00

He was not the greatest boxer of all-time, though he was arguably the greatest heavyweight.

He gave up the heavyweight title three times, but only once in the ring.

Before they started cheering for him, most people wanted to see him get hurt.

Today he is recognized as an icon of integrity because of the rules he ignored.

Happy 70th Birthday, Muhammad Ali.

LIKE BEING PUNKED

2011-12-27T23:35:00.000-08:00

So it's my penultimate night at Barnes & Noble and I'm working at the registers and a man comes up with a copy of Rogue Clone. I looked at it and said, "Would you like me to sign that?"

He, having absolutely no idea what in the world I could mean, said, "No."

I said, "I wrote that book." Since the first few books don't have my picture, I whipped out my drivers license and showed him.

He was a nice guy. He laughed and said he'd read The Clone Republic and said, "Sure. Please sign it." I offered to write "To..." or something else, but he was fine with a simple signature.

What a rush that was!

AUDIO BOOKS!

2011-12-15T13:55:00.001-08:00

My agent called me on Tuesday to let me know that the audio book rights to ALL THINGS Wayson Harris have sold. The publisher asked for the rights to books one-through-seven; and upon learning that an eighth book was in the works, bought those rights as well.

I will give you the when and who details as I am allowed; but for now, let me say that the work will be involve performance as well as narration with multiple readers and some sound effects.

As the Sad Sam's crowd knows, I adore audio books!

Hard at work

2011-12-12T11:31:00.000-08:00

Well, the last book I wrote has nothing to do with Wayson Harris and may never see the light of day. I am proud as can be of the story but my agent wants nothing to do with it. My point, I have created a book solely for me... and authors who wish to eat cannot afford to do that.

So, I am working at Barnes and Noble's for the holidays, reintroducing myself to the reading world from the other side. You know I see outselling everything--Diary of a Wimpy Kid. No joke. I've seen ten of those go for every Stephen King.

I've gotten to speak readers and to hear what they look for and what they like. It's exciting. It's exhausting. The goal is to write 2,000 to 3,000 words/day on The Clone Sedition, then go to the book store at night.

Anyway, I love the people I work with--the finest managers I have ever known--and the customers are fabulous.

Best wishes for the holidays!

Steven L. Kent

(Steve)

Okay, so no one else would get this excited, but come on....

2011-11-21T12:04:00.000-08:00

I've moved up a notch on the Science Fiction Book Club's top ten from the fifth slot the to fourth, and I could not be more thrilled. (Well, okay, if I moved up to third, second, or first I would probably be even more excited.)

THANK YOU

2011-11-17T08:21:00.001-08:00

Several of you have posted reviews on Amazon.com. Thank you for doing that. I don't know if the reviews help my sales or not, but I am always glad to see them there... well, at least the positive ones.

Thanks.

THANK YOU SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB

2011-11-07T09:01:00.000-08:00

The Science Fiction Book Club has printed a hardback version of The Clone Redemption. It was exciting enough to hear that the SCFB knew I existed; but this morning, I visited their site and located my book--it is number five on their best sellers list!

Umm, I hope it is not inappropriate for me to mention that I am completely thrilled by this!

By Popular Request: Clone Redemption Spoiler Town--DO NOT ENTER UNLESS YOU HAVE READ THE BOOK OR WISH IT SPOILED

2011-10-27T14:29:00.000-07:00

So those of you who have read it... let's hear from you.

THE CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG...

2011-10-20T16:21:00.001-07:00

Well, okay, the book is out on some shelves. Glenn and Nick Forrester have found the book at Book's a Million.

WITH A MONTH TO GO, IT'S TIME FOR A PEEK

2011-09-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER 1

Location: Terraneau

The spy ship sneaked out of the anomaly the way mice sneak out of their holes—quickly, carefully, silently. Anomaly are like electrical tears in the fabric of space. They occur when ships travel using broadcast technology. In this case, the Unified Authority spy ship had a built-in broadcast engine the enabled it to make the hundred-thousand-light year jump from Earth to Terraneau instantaneously. She arrived in Scutum-Crux space approximately fourteen million miles from Terraneau, far enough out of casual surveillance range that we would not have noticed the disturbance had we not been waiting for it. With her stealth generator, the spy ship was invisible to our equipment. Only the anomaly showed on the readouts.

The spy ship was small and unarmed, the naval equivalent of a humming bird. She had the ability to slip in behind enemy lines and listen to our communications, track our movements, and watch our production without threat of detection.

But this ship had been detected. We saw where she broadcasted into our space and we knew her final destination. It didn’t matter that we lost track of the ship as she travelled fourteen million miles from the anomaly to the satellite because we knew precisely where she would end her journey.

She was the mouse in the night, we were the cat. When she materialized beside the satellite, we would pounce. Even if we never saw the ship, our equipment would detect a momentary energy fluctuation when she lowered her shields to retrieve the satellite. She would be vulnerable when she lowered her shields.

I had no sympathy for the crew of the spy ship, they had come to the Scutum-Crux Arm to watch people die. Instead of offering assistance, the bastards placed a satellite so that scientists could study the death of an entire planet.

The satellite was smaller than a golf ball and armed with a camera so powerful that could pick out a single grain of sand in an open desert. The satellite’s unblinking eye undoubtedly recorded us as we pulled our shuttle out of the tunnel and launched into space. It must have spotted us setting our trap as well; but the crew of the spy ship would have no access to that data until they retrieved the satellite.

“Anything?” I asked Cutter. Under normal circumstances, I would have used ship-to-ship communications; but the spy ship might have overheard us. Instead, we used the short-range interLink, a network designed for battlefield communications.

Cutter spoke to a tech officer, then said, “Nothing yet, sir.”

We kept our communications short in case the Unifieds tried to listen in.

Freeman and I watched the scene on a small video screen as we waited inside the kettle of a transport. The screen showed a panoramic view of open space. Terraneau spun in a corner of the screen, its oceans still blue but hidden behind a global cloud of smoke and ash. The alien attack had erased the green from the continents. Gone, too, were the ice caps that once marked the poles at the top and bottom of the planet. Soot from the attack had turned the atmosphere a rusty gray.

“You’re still on our side, right?” I asked.

Ray Freeman, one of the deadliest man who ever lived, said nothing as he watched the screen. The man was huge, seven feet tall. He was wide and thick and covered with muscle. He was also the last of his kind. In a galaxy that had outlawed ethnicities a century ago, Ray Freeman was proudly African-American. A lot of men saw him as someone to fear. I admired him.

Freeman was a human sphinx. He answered questions only when felt like answering. Generally he ignored them. He was a mercenary, but money did not determine his loyalty.

“Why help us?” I asked. “Why not the Unifieds?”

“I’m not taking sides,” said Freeman.

“The hell you’re not,” I said. “We’re about to attack a Unified Authority boat. If you don’t care who wins, you don’t belong on this ride.”

I trusted Freeman, though he had been vague about his loyalties. In my experience, Freeman was not the type who starts the mission as your friend and then shoots you in the back. He made his alliances public and sniped his targets from a mile away. In my experience, Freeman’s loyalty was never in question.

“I don’t care about sides, just saving lives,” Freeman said. “That’s it. It’s not about loyalty. The only planet the Unifieds care about is Earth, you’re out to save what’s left of the galaxy.”

‘What was left of the galaxy…’ Before the first alien invasion, the Unified Authority had one hundred eighty colonized planets scattered around the Milky Way. The aliens “sleeved” one hundred seventy-eight of them. The Enlisted Man’s Empire, a nation composed of the cloned military that the Unified Authority had ejected, re-established contact with twenty-three of those planets before the aliens began incinerating rescued planets.

Freeman’s entire family had been on the first planet the Avatari, the aliens, had incinerated. Having lost everyone he may ever have loved, the galaxy’s best professional killer became a self-appointed savior.

When dealing with people like Ray Freeman, as if there were anyone else like Freeman, there is no room for ambiguity. I decided to reconfirm his motivation. “As long as we’re saving more lives than the Unifieds, you’re on our side?”

He nodded.

“Good enough for me,” I said, though inwardly I still had doubts. The clones of the Enlisted Man’s Empire had been bred to save the lives of natural-borns, and the Unified Authority had thanked us it with one betrayal after another. I felt a need to save the natural-born residents of our planets, but I could not come up with any logical reason to do it.

Satisfied that I could trust Freeman for now, I turned my attention to the mission at hand. “Cutter, are the traps in position?” I asked over the commandLink.

Asking that question was my form of fidgeting. Captain Don Cutter was a good officer, not the kind of man who leaves things undone. Still, we were dealing with an invisible foe and we would only get one shot at the bastards. It was one of those pivotal moments on which the future hangs. If we failed to bag that spy ship, the war would end before it began.

“Yes, sir,” said Cutter. He spoke in a whisper.

Five transports floated within a few a hundred yards of the satellite. They were not debris from the graveyard of ships, Cutter had placed those birds himself. One of the transports carried a team of engineers. Freeman and I sat in the kettle of the second. The others sat facing away from the satellite, their rear hatches open, their kettles carefully packed with explosives. When the spy ship lowered her shields, we would use these transports like old fashioned cannons.

The bombs were not especially powerful. We need to cripple the spy ship, not decapitate her. I didn’t care if the crew lived or died, I didn’t owe the bastards. The ship’s computers, on the other hand, they mattered.

Five million people had just died on Terraneau and millions more had their necks on the chopping block on other planets. The key to saving those was on those computers. We could not win the war with the aliens; but armed with the right information, we might survive it.

“How long has it been since you detected the anomaly?” I asked Cutter.

“Fifty-two minutes, sir,” he said.

Fifty-two minutes, I thought. Fifty-two minutes to travel fourteen million miles, either the bastards are taking their time or they figured us out. In conventional travel, U.A. cruisers topped out at speed of thirty-eight million miles per hour. Travelling the fourteen million miles from the anomaly should have taken less than half an hour.

“Maybe they know we’re here.” I said the words out loud but meant them for myself.

“Not likely,” said Cutter.

Listening over the interLink, Freeman heard every word we said but did not comment. He lived in a world of absolutes. Either the spy ship was coming or she was not. He saw no value in second guessing the situation.

I looked back at the video screen and saw nothing but empty space. The satellite was so small that it did not even appear on my screen. A little bubble of light represented the area around it.

“Mars, are your men ready?” I asked on a different frequency. Mars, Lieutenant Scott Mars, ran my corps of Navy engineers. I would have preferred using a demolitions team on this mission, but Mars’s men were handy with explosives.

“Yes, sir. You stop the ship, sir, and we’ll kick her doors in,” he said.

“Minimal damage,” I reminded him for what might have been the hundredth time.

“You said you wanted a hole,” he reminded me.

“Right,” I said.

“If you know a way to put a hole in a ship without doing damage…”

“I take your point.”

“We’ll keep the damage to a minimum, sir,” said Mars.

Cutter interrupted us. “It’s a go!”

Nothing had changed on my screen. The ash-choked atmosphere of of Terraneau still showed in one corner of the screen. Our transports still hid at the edge of the debris.

I did not see the spy ship. Of course I didn’t see her, not yet at least. But the spy ship must have been in place beside the satellite and her crew must have lowered her shields or Cutter would not have sent that message. His sensors detected energy fluctuations.

Cutter detonated the bombs in the three open transports, firing a barrage of bearings and shrapnel at the invisible target. In the silence of space, the detonation made no noise; but the explosions flashed and vanished on my video screen.

Had it been a civilian ship caught in that storm, the debris would have broken it to pieces. The spy ship took the beating, and survived. Her stealth generators failed and she came into view. Air and flames leaked from small holes in her hull and a large outer panel had been ripped from her bow, all cosmetic damage that would prove fatal for her crew.

The ship was shaped like the head of a gigantic spear, fifty feet wide at her stern and two hundred feet long. Tiny electrical eruptions burst across her cylindrical hull. This bird would need repairs before she flew again. No problem. Mars's engineers could repair her.

Our ambush nearly sheered off one of her three aft engines. It hung limp at an odd angle like an arm in a cast. Liquid fuel escaped from the back of the engine, flying into space in bubbles. If the pilot of the spy ship tried to light the other engines, he’d ignite a fire that would consume the entire ship; but judging by the damage to the bridge, I did not worry about survivors among the flight crew. The bridge had gone dark and the spy ship wasn’t going anywhere.

MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF 2011 (SO FAR)

2011-09-17T15:52:00.001-07:00

Okay, Aaron and Nick, I can hear you guys groaning from here, but give Warrior a chance.

Yeah, yeah, It's Rocky for the turn-of-the-century generation, I admit it. But Rocky was great in its day. That's why people still talk about the movie.

Warrior is a movie filled with great violence and sympathetic characters. It is a movie filled with a million cliche's, all unveiled with so much energetic vitality that it sweeps you in.

And here is a shock for those of you who have seen it--those two Pennsylvania brothers with their Rocky Balboa accents--one is from England and the other is from Australia.

The action in this movie takes a while to get going, but when it arrives, it takes your breath away.

TRANSITIONS

2011-09-05T08:29:00.001-07:00

BILL KUNKEL

(1950-2011)

He was known as "The Game Doctor," and he had a sense of style. His real name was Bill Kunkel; and he, along with Arnie Katz and Joyce Worle-Katz, invented video game journalism. The team of Katz, Kunkel, and Worley came up with such classic terms as "side-scrolling." They launched the first widely-recognized video game magazine, Electronic Games. They ran the game awards for the Consumer Electronics Show before E3 was created.

Anybody..., everybody who covers video games now is standing on their shoulders.

Bill was the colorful writer in the pack, the brash, sometimes arrogant, more confrontational reporter who took shots when needed. If Arnie Katz was the Tim Russert in the group, Bill was the Howard Cosell. The man had style. He called it like he saw it. Joyce was the Brokaw.

In 1999, the Classic Gaming Expo gave Bill its Lifetime Achievement Award. Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario and Zelda) and Toru Iwatani (creator of Pac-Man) would not have been any more deserving of the award than the pioneering Game Doctor.

The video games world has lost a legend.

THE CLONE ALLIANCE GOES JAPANESE

2011-09-01T19:49:00.000-07:00

This one sneaked up on me! Next week the Japanese version of The Clone Alliance hits the stands and I could not be more excited about it.

Here's the cover. I think it's beautiful, but I get excited about the Kanji. I wouldn't trade a Christian McGrath cover in a million years, but the Japanese covers and McGrath's covers complement each other perfectly.

NEXT SUMMER'S BIGGEST BLOCKBUSTER

2011-08-23T22:16:00.001-07:00

I just came home from watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It's a good movie. A bit slow for the first two-thirds or so, but engaging. I wouldn't have minded it having a dose of Ricardo Montalban as a kindly circus owner. He most certainly brightened up Battle for the Planet of the Apes, back in 1972.

Not that I am complaining. James Franco and Frieda Pinto were fine in their roles in the new movie; and I must say, the sciences of special effects and script writing have greatly evolved over the last 39 years.

The problem is, once the apes have risen, nothing can possibly withstand them.

Well, one force may stand a chance--the Avengers. Look, Thor's a god and downright undefeatable; but he's held back by Captain America who's really just a beefy guy with a shield that was ahead of its time. Iron Man's not a bad guy to have on your side; but with a 2,000-pound gorilla on his back--I mean a gorilla other than his drinking--Iron Man would be in trouble. The Hulk could take on a herd of apes, but with that short attention span, he'll lose focus.

In the spirit of fair competition, we may need to help the Avengers out by loaning them Spider-Man and the X-Men. I'd offer up the Fantastic Four; but they're more trouble than their worth, if the last two movies are any indication.

Announcing The Clone Sedition

2011-08-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

I have just signed a contract with Ace Book to write an eighth Wayson Harris novel. I can't go into the plot at all, not without giving away twists from The Clone Redemption, which comes out in October.

I KNOW MOST OF YOU SAD SAMMERS DISAGREE WITH ME

2011-08-15T07:09:00.001-07:00

I know most of you Sad Sammers disagree with me when it comes to audio books. (Oh you purists who insist on actually reading your books, rather than have them read to you, how can you ever hope to read and drive at the same time?) Anyway, I have started a new blog called "Audio Book Jungle."

(Here is the link: http://audiojungle.blogspot.com/)

Yes, I have been beefing it up with daily posts, but do not feel slighted my Sad Sam's friends. I am mostly transferring and updating The Jungle to build up a library of reviews.

SUMMER 2011 IN MOVIES

2011-08-11T18:01:00.000-07:00

The movie Green Lantern served a very important role this summer--it reminded me that perhaps I had been way too tough on the movie Thor.

See now,after I saw Thor, I left saying it was a crummy movie. Maybe it was, but Chris Hemsworth, who played George Kirk in Star Trek, has a good sense of humor about himself. For me, Thor worked more as a comedy than it did as a superhero movie.

Green Lantern, on the other hand, just plain did not work. I mean, here is a guy with GOD-like powers. He can create anything he can think of.

So what happens, he's being chased by a gigantic planet-chewing dust/gas monster and he lures it into space. Why not create a super-sized Hoover vacuum cleaner and suck the dust bunny up?

Okay, on my summer loser list, I must also include Cowboys and Aliens. It wasn't that it was especially bad, but Come On! This is Jon Favreau movie. Favreau created Iron Man. In my book, Favreau walked on water without getting wet.

It appears Daniel Craig, yes the immortal iconic new James Bond, can't do an American accent. In case you were wondering, for the last few years I have considered Daniel Craig among my favorite actors. In this movie, because he could not maintain an American accent, they had to feed him all of his dialog in one-liners. Frankly, he sounded like Duke Nukem, and that's bad.

The problems with Cowboys and Aliens cannot all be blamed on Daniel Craig. The script was a meandering mess, the aliens were dull, and I am still wracking my brains to come up with the western movie cliche that did not appear in this movie.

My favorite movie of the summer was Harry potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which should come as no shock. The first half of the novel seemed unfocused as did the first have of the Deathly Hallows du-ology; but the second half made up for past sins in both cases. (My favorite scene in any Harry Potter book, a vision Harry has in which he finds himself in the Valhalla version of London's King's Cross Station, was brilliantly translated to the screen.)

This final Harry Potter flick was not without faults. Let me tell you, there is a flashy little scene in which Harry and Voldemort fly around Hogwarts while trying to scratch each other's face that was a waste of celluloid. There were smaller peccadilloes, too; but on the most part, this was a fine movie and a perfect conclusion.

I guess I consider Harry Potter a superhero on some level. I mean, what's the difference between his power and the Green Lanterns. So, after Green Hornet, X-Men, Green Lantern, and Thor, I had just about finished watching superheroes for the year... and then came Captain America.

I like Chris Evans. Even when he's playing Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four movies, there is something likable about him. In Captain America, which may be the most predictable superhero movie of 'em all, Evans is more likable than ever. First we see him photoshopped as a ninety-pound weakling, then we see him photoshopped as a pro-wrestler with an Army helmet and a shield. Either way, the man comes across as perfectly believable.

So, having survived yet another superhero movie, I went with my wife to see Crazy Stupid Love and loved almost all of it. I had forgotten what it felt like to see a nice, simple, non-special effects fest movie with good acting and an original storyline.

Crazy Stupid Love did not replace Deathly Hallows in the top slot. It might have made it there but the critical climax of this movie as as hackneyed as you can get. Still, in a summer of big-budget action flicks, Crazy Stupid Love comes in as a significant second placer for me.

So that's it for me and movies for now. I may go see Rise of the Planet of the Apes next week, but I don't know. After Daniel Craig, Ryan Gosling, Chris Hemsworth, and Ryan Reynolds, can my dying self-esteem really stand a screenful of gorillas?

Maybe I'll just stay home next week and watch Anne of Green Gables with my wife.

THE NEW ME!!!

2011-07-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

If any of you have ever seen Aaron Spuler's blog, you know that he sports a serious beard. I, on the other hand, am generally of the clean-shaven variety... until this week. I went out on a four-day pioneer TREK with the youth from the church I attend. Four days and look what I became!

We were late finishing up last night. On the way home, sometime after 10:00, a friend and I stopped at a Fred Meyer's (a department store) on the way home. I looked worse than him, but we both looked a little... I don't know, like we played banjos in the movie Deliverance . I had not actually seen myself very closely until I went in the bathroom to wash my hands. My cloths were covered with dust and grease stains. I ended up throwing my shirts away, they could not be savaged. My hair was a ratted mess and then there were the whiskers. Everyone kind of ignored us. When I saw myself in the mirror, I understood and laughed hysterically--which probably made me look hysterical as well as homeless and possibly a recent release from prison. I think I would have ignored me, too.

I went through three Bik razors shaving this off. The dirt and grime were another matter entirely.

But the kids were great and the wilderness was beautiful and I have to admit, I could get into this camping thing given enough time.

No news on books at the moment. I have contracts for five books hanging in the balance right now. Trek was great, it distracted me and helped me forget that I am sitting on pins and needles.

How is everyone else's summer coming along?

A Quick Note To Amer

2011-06-15T15:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, you will definitely see more of the Avatari in Book Seven. They still maintain some mystery, but the Japanese and the Seals are right there.

SORRY I'VE BEEN GONE SO LONG

2011-06-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

I was hard at work teaching creative writing in Laie, Hawaii, where it very often looked like the beach scene in the lower photo. (This is not an original photograph, it was taken from a Laie rental ad on alwayssonvacation.com--it is in fact the beach at Laie.)

It did not always look like that however because we got more rain and lightning than you can shake a divining rod at. In fact, one stormy evening my sister and brother-in-law came to visit--in Kailua, not Laie. I walked them out to their car and watched them get in,, then went back in the house. In the time I was outside, I counted twenty-three lightning strikes.

Parts of Laie are below sea level. When it gets too much rain, it looks like the first picture. (I found this photo from LoisColton.com.)

So I was busy at BYU-Hawaii teaching two classes and negotiating my next books and enjoying Hawaii, my home state and a place that I dearly love, and seeing my family. All good things.

Now I am back, and I am writing again, and I will start paying more attention to my blog.

I promise.... kind of. (I Love Hawaii and my family, but I am not a big fan of blogging.)

THE LATEST FROM WAYSON HARRIS LAND

2011-04-14T09:45:00.001-07:00

Mr. McGrath has struck again!

This time he has conjured up an Avatari attack for a background and I can't say enough great things about his work.

There is more news from Harris land. I am putting the final touches on a proposal for two more books from the U.A. universe. We'll see how that goes.

Johnny, here are two more enemies for writers to avoid

2011-03-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

Avoid the words EVEN and JUST.

When I was in school, a feminist-minded student once turned in a story in which she wrote,

"Even stupid men know this is a bad idea."

My teacher, a brilliant practitioner of minimalist language named Darrell Spencer, pointed out that the sentence became stronger when you removed the word "stupid." Suddenly you were not calling out stupid men, you were pointing out that all men are somewhat stupid.

It was GREAT.

Now let's look at the last sentence I wrote and weaken it by adding the word, "EVEN":

My teacher, a brilliant practitioner of minimalist language named Darrell Spencer, pointed out that the sentence became EVEN stronger when you removed the word "stupid." Suddenly you were not calling out stupid men, you were pointing out that all men are somewhat stupid.

My first drafts are piled high with EVENs, JUSTs, ACTUALLYs, and other needless words. I try to strip them out of my final products, but there are always so damn many of them to begin with.

BEST WISHES TO A GREAT NATION

2011-03-11T13:33:00.000-08:00

As a journalist, I had the privileged of visiting Japan several times a year for many years. I developed a deep respect for the people of that nation.

I was in Japan on September 11, 2001. While I heard European guests in a hotel lobby making jokes about the destruction of the World Trade Center, the Japanese went out of their way to show respect for me and my country after that disaster. I remember an elderly man approaching me on the street and asking if I was American. When I said I was, he placed his hand on his chest and said, "I am so sorry about what has happened to your great nation."

For what it is worth, I wish to do the same. Japan is a nation filled with kind and industrious people. A terrible disaster has befallen this great people. I wish them a fast and full recovery.

Steven L. Kent

IN CASE ANY OF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN FOLLOWING ALONG

2011-03-03T12:12:00.001-08:00

Here are the books my students will read this year:

If any of you are interested, you can certainly read along and post your thoughts and questions on the blog. I'd love to hear what you guys think of these novels. (Bird By Bird is not a novel. It is a book about the writing life.)

THREE SMALL STEPS TOWARD THE END... for now at least

2011-02-28T08:58:00.001-08:00

Well, friends, I have some news.

My editor, the beautiful and glorious Anne of Ace, has now read The Clone Redemption. She seems pleased. Soon she will send me a list of questions and revisions. One step closer.

She has also determined an official release date for the book--October 25. The good folks at Ace were talking about November, so that seems in order. Also, Ace Book has created a page for the book on Amazon .Com. That has generally seemed like a final step to me, the one they wait for until they are certain they have something to sell.

I have revisions ahead, of course; but things are looking up. I really think you will like this one. Those of you who are waiting for Wayson to show a little more spine when dealing with authority should be happy. Those of you who like the SEAL Clones (a.k.a. the ABCs or Adam Boyd Clones) should be very happy indeed.

MY FIRST MOVIE!

2011-02-18T12:23:00.000-08:00

Okay, so it's not a big Hollywood production and it's not Wayson Harris. I posted a short story called The Last Days of White Magic on the blog a couple years ago. A good friend of mine named Ben Chiu, who runs an indy studio in San Luis Obispo, decided to make the short story into a movie. I have not seen the movie yet, but here is the DVD jacket.

Horror Both Subtle and Beautiful

2011-02-15T14:41:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting phenomenon in horror writing, one that carries from movies to books. When done right, key scenes in horror stories have a gentle let-down effect that readers and audiences experience without ever knowing it happened.

You have these scenes in which there is a werewolf or a zombie or maybe mad man with a butcher knife hiding in a house. You know it /he/she/they are there, but the hero/victim walking into the house has no idea. Something awful is going to happen; but all the audience/reader can do is wait.

Take, for or example, The Silence of the Lambs. Clarice Starling enters the serial killer's house. We know he is in the basement, but she does not. We know he has night vision goggles. All she knows is that the lights will not turn on. When handled properly, these scenes cause so much tension we find it hard to breathe. Then the killer makes his move, we jump, and the battle for survival begins.

What viewers and readers do not realize is that the battle comes as a relief. Even when the bad guy wins, the battle is a relief.

Behind the scenes, the story takes a major shift once evil makes its move. It goes from horror to action. The fear factor becomes accomplished. We don't just think the shark is in the water, we now know where it is and that it is about to bite.

I am not talking about the cheap Hollywood trick where movie makers simply want to make audiences jump. Most movie makers spend so much time trying to figure out ways to say "BOOO!" when they should be working on intelligent storylines instead.

If you would like to see this shift executed perfectly, I suggest you watch a little movie from 1980 called The Changeling, with George C. Scott. Time and time again, this brilliantly crafted classic builds up tension by luring victims and viewers into dangerous knolls, then it pays them with a thrill that is neither tried nor cheap.

I am not saying that The Changeling is perfect. Lord knows this movies unravels itself for absolutely no good reason at the very end; but it still stands out as one of the better horror movies I have seen.

ICHI BAN! ICHI BAN! ICHI BAN!

2011-02-10T12:59:00.000-08:00

Ichi Ban translates to, "Number 1." In this case, the number one in question is a novel known as Warrior of the Republic (Book 2): War Broke Out Among the Stars. (a.k.a. Rogue Clone)

Okay, well, it's not exactly the best-selling book in Japan; but it is number one under Literary criticism>Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror/Foreign Authors.

No, that will not launch me into another tax bracket; but I take whatever victories I can find!

Wayson Harris Returns to Japan

2011-02-09T07:40:00.000-08:00

And, for the first time, Ray Freeman gets a face as well.

Here it is! The cover of the Japanese version of Rogue Clone. I have to admit, I am excited about this one.

On to other discussions

2011-02-05T11:21:00.001-08:00

Well, I hope you all enjoyed the sneak preview!

GO GREEN BAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's a question... "Where have I been?"

2011-02-04T11:06:00.000-08:00

I have been neglecting the blog and I apologize. Here is the deal, I have ten weeks until I start teaching college again, and I want to finish my next book in that time. I have already written 89,000 words, and I want to have as many as 300,000 written before I start my classes. (For those of you who are wondering, the average Wayson Harris novel is 115,000 words).

So here is the deal. Tomorrow night, for just a few hours, I will give you guys the shortest sneak peek at what I am working on. I am talking a limited window of time and only a glance at the introduction.

We'll see what you think.

The Green Hornet Gets A Really, Really Solid C-

2011-01-19T22:05:00.000-08:00

Here's a unique concept among superhero movies, make the sidekick the serious one and play the main hero for laughs. This is the high concept behind Seth Rogen's version of the Green Hornet. (As Rogen co-wrote and co-produced the movie, I think it is safe to call it his movie.)

Here's the story: Millionaire newspaper magnet James Reid dies and his no good bum of a son, played by Rogen, takes over. He botches everything he touches until he meets Kato, his dead dad's manservant. Kato and Britt Reid become friends, and then they co-corrupt everything they touch while exploring an exciting career in crime fighting.

Kato, an understated man, is a superb cook, master martial artists, NASCAR-quality driver, and supreme mechanic. Reid, by comparison, is a loud-mouth lout who doesn't seem bright enough to breathe and tie his shoes simultaneously.

Almost all of the laughs go to Rogen and Christopher Waltz (the villain), in roles that are normally played straight, while Jay Chou (Kato), Cameron Diaz (Lenore Case, the quasi-love interest) and play their roles straight.

The jokes get tired quickly but the story does not take over quickly enough.

The Green Hornet has excellent special- and visual effects. Some of the acting is good. Diaz and Chou are especially game, but Rogen is watchable as usual. Christopher Waltz gets double points for nursing every last insecure chuckle out of a part that might otherwise have been nothing more than maudlin.

ONE WORD ABOUT "THE CLONE IDENTITY"

2011-01-16T21:05:00.000-08:00

Hardback!

http://www.sfbc.com/pages/nm/product/productDetail.jsp?skuId=1068832890

I Accidentally Deleted This Post From Josh

2010-12-26T08:04:00.000-08:00

Well, on a 3rd party site they take care of all the server and software maintenance just like Blogger does your blogging package.

The only real maintenance would be monitoring posts to censor or remove unacceptable material- assuming you would want to keep things at a similar PG level to the blog. Even that could be made a good deal easier if you named one or two people moderators and allowed them to also check over the material.

Tell you what, I'll set something up (won't take long and I'm bored) and send you the login info so that you can look it over and see if you think it would be too much hassle.

I am giving this message it's own post because I think a forum is a capital idea!

Merry Christmas All!

2010-12-24T22:31:00.000-08:00

TIME TO SHARE YOUR SECRETS!

2010-12-21T10:49:00.000-08:00

Okay, Sad Sam's regulars, here's your opportunity to share your most closely-held secret--What guilty-pleasure songs do you have on you iPod? (If it's Puppy Love by Donny and Marie, keep it to yourself. That's too guilty.)

Here are just a few of my embarrassing favorites:

She Bop Cyndi Lauper

Never Surrender Corey Hart

Days Go By Dirty Vegas

Walk Don't Run The Ventures

Tired of To'in the Line Rocky Burnette (may soon be placed on hiatus)

WHICH NBA TEAM IS YOUR FAVORITE

2010-12-10T18:22:00.000-08:00

My favorite team is whichever team is playing the Lakers. Sadly, my team is on another losing streak.

I think they need a new coach!

The Turkey Fryer That Restored My Faith in Humanity

2010-12-10T05:55:00.000-08:00

Well, okay, nothing will ever restore my faith in humanity, but it makes a great turkey.

In the past I always slow-roasted my turkeys--a seven-hour ordeal with some pretty satisfying results but mired by really pathetic skin. It may be unhealthy; but for me, the skin is the best part.

Anyway, I bought this fryer and used Tony Chachere's Style Butter Marinade (bought it at my local grocery store) and followed the directions to the letter. I heated the oil, made sure the turkey was dry, dry, dry, ( I heard about the big KABOOM the guys on Myth Busters created with a turkey fryer) and cooked the bird for forty minutes.

The marinade gets some of the credit for the flavor;but the skin, the texture, everything was great! Frying turkeys and bragging about it on the Internet! What does that say about me? Maybe I should hike out to the rusted shell of a car on blocks in my front yard and think that one out.

Any other fried turkey eaters out there?

(I stole the base for this from a review from one I wrote on Amazon.com and added a few embellishments. My apologies to anyone who endured this review twice.)

Unsal reminded me of something I wanted to ask

2010-12-02T05:36:00.001-08:00

So who owns a Kindle, Nook, iPad (that they use to read books), Sony eReader, or some other device? How do you all like them?

Do you use it?

Do you prefer it to print?

Hard Working and Overlooked

2010-11-28T21:30:00.000-08:00

Here it is, folks, my pick for the most UNDERRATED game ever.

First, let me beat you Halo/Call of Duty/Half-Life fans to the punch. Yes, I am deeply biased in favor of cute and kid-friendly games. I admit it. I love Mario and early Crash Bandicoot and Bonk. I draw the line at Punky Skunk, Knuckles, and Zool; but Mario Bros. and Mario World games will always find a place in my home. (There is an exception. I hated Mario Sunshine. Okay, "hate" is too strong a word. "Detested" is more accurate. )

Luigi's Mansion, though, that was a good game that got greased because people wanted something Mario and were taken aback when instead of the great plumber, they were presented with Mario's little bro.

I am reminded of the time Brittany Speares told the world about her on-going email relationship with Prince William only to learn from through a Buckingham Palace press release that William had turned her over to Henry, his younger brother.

In Japan, gamers complained to high heaven. Some people believe that launching with Luigi's Mansion gave Gamecube such a bad sendoff that it helped seal the system's fate--Gamecube garnered less than 20 percent of the worldwide market coming in far behind PlayStation 2 and Xbox worldwide.

Luigi's Mansion did not play like a Mario game; but it was a great puzzle-based adventure with cool mechanics and great effects. The graphics were beautiful and I loved the way the music pinged off Luigi's emotions.

So here it is, my pick for the most underrated game of all-time. Let's hear from you guys. Do we have any other nominations?

(Also, is there anyone out there who thinks Luigi got what he deserved?)

Wayson has moved to New York

2010-11-13T10:17:00.000-08:00

Well, at least his manuscript has. The Clone Redemption now resides with those kind and patient people at Ace Book. For my next project, I'm looking at writing something with a little bit of horror.

Here is the first video

2010-11-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

A little more video--The Approach through the Spider

2010-10-31T23:47:00.000-07:00

The zombie and ninja are not props, they

are the son of the photographer--Andrew. A good friend and a much better photographer than me.

If I could lighten the video and edit out all the dead black, this would be a lot more entertaining. Sorry.

HALLOWEEN AT THE KENT'S

2010-10-31T23:23:00.000-07:00

Sadly, my camera skills are not as good as my Halloween layout skills, so please bear with me. I should also point out that two of my fog machines died before I got a chance to start filming. That said, I still think this year's display came out pretty well.

So, without further whining and excuses, here is Halloween 2010 at the Kent household.

More to come, by the way; including photos by a friend who actually knows how to use his camera.

SPOILER ZONE!! IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED THE CLONE EMPIRE, DO NOT ENTER

2010-10-28T10:43:00.000-07:00

One last warning: THIS IS A FORUM FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE READ THE CLONE EMPIRE.

If you are currently reading the book or plan to read the book, please turn back. From here on out, there are no holds barred. You can ask, explain, or discuss any Clone Empire-related topic, within reason.

The floor is yours:

IT'S OUT!!!!!!!!!

2010-10-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

I hope you guys like it. In another day I will open a post for people who have read the novel--a SPOILERS Page in which we can discuss the story at length.

To Hardback or Not to Hardback

2010-10-21T13:41:00.001-07:00

I needed permission from the lovely and talented Anne at Ace before I made this announcement... The Science Fiction Book Club is publishing two omnibus collections early next year. One will be titled The Clone Identity and the other The Clone Supremacy.

The Clone Identity, scheduled for release in February, will include The Clone Republic, Rogue Clone, and The Clone Alliance.

The Clone Supremacy, which should be released in April, will include The Clone Elite, The Clone Betrayal, and The Clone Empire. I am not privy to the details, but I suspect these will be in hardback. I've got my fingers crossed.

JUST A LITTLE TEASER

2010-10-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

I thought I might share something that was cut from The Clone Empire.

You guys know how I like to include quotes at the front of the book. This was the original quote:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.

Everybody knows the war is over.

Everybody knows that the good guys lost.

It's from the song, Everybody Knows, by Leonard Cohen, whose lyrics are often quite brilliant. In this case, I thought it really caught the mood I wanted to create for my novel. Sadly, when I tried to get permission to run the lyrics in my book, I could even get anyone to take my phone calls.

The Other Guys Is Momentous... in a bad way

2010-09-23T06:08:00.000-07:00

I hated Did You Hear About the Morgans. I truly despised Clash of the Titans. But those were low-grade bad movies. They were not of the kind of movie that makes your "All-Time Worst" ist.

The Other Guys, starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, on the other hand, joins that rarefied pantheon of the horrific with such movies as The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, and anything made by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer--the Not Another Date Movie/Epic Movie/Scary Movie guys.

(In truth, none of these are actually the worst movie ever made. The worst, the real title holder, is now and probably always will be Plan 9 From Outer Space--the movie that put Ed Wood on the map. The movies I have just listed are nowhere near as bad as Plan 9, but these bad movies were made with real budgets and big stars.)

So, the Other Guys starts out with Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson playing to bigger-than-life cops, sort of Starsky and Hutch on steroids. They are the heart-and-soul of the NYPD; but they die in the first few minutes of the movie; and, sadly, the movie dies with them.

Jackson and the Rock lit up the screen. They were energetic, fun to watch, and full of attitude. Once they are gone, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg try to fill their shoes both as the central focus of the police department and as the central focus of the film.

I have never felt such a deep appreciation for Johnson and Jackson as I did after watching Ferrell and Wahlberg slosh through the first fifteen minutes of this stinker. I don't think Johnson and Jackson made their ill-advised fatal leap from a building (easily the most entertaining moment of the movie) to catch bad guys. I think they did it because it was the only way they could think of to get away from this bad, bad movie.

As far as Will Ferrell is concerned, all I can say is that The Other Guys did the impossible, it made me miss The Land of the Lost. If Mark Wahlberg may be looking for movies to expand his repertoire, he might want to consider quality over variety.

Watching Michael Keaton on screen, it was hard to remember that he was once one of America's most favored funny men. Eva Mendes was nice to look at and did absolutely everything she could to squeeze anything out of a role filled with nothing. Give her credit, she was game, but there ain't no Coup de Ville hiding in the bottom of this Cracker Jacks box.

After watching this movie, I had a suggestion for 78 percent of the film critics followed by Rotten Tomatoes who liked THe Other Guys--get a job parking cars. Your taste in movies stinks.

I HIT A GIRL AND I LIKED IT!

2010-09-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

Misquoting Katy Perry on my blog? I've sunk to a new low. And then, of course, there is this issue that I am writing this post to boast about belting a member of the female persuasion.

But do not flog me just yet.

Molly O' Donnell, the woman in question, works for Microsoft. Her working at Microsoft does not justify violent behavior on my part; but hear me out. Molly works for the Xbox team; and, NO, this is not one of those red ring of death rants.

This is a rave.

I visited Microsoft yesterday to have a look at Kinect. I have to admit, I felt pretty put out about going to Microsoft. I've got three books due before the end of the year, and I did not feel like stepping away from the computer to have a fling with Microsoft's new $150-debacle. Well, I would have called it a debacle until yesterday, when I got my hands on it... er, um, in front of it. It is a hands-free control device.

So I showed up playing the part of the cynical veteran gamer. They brought me in, and Molly began the demo. She showed me the Kinect interface, and I thought, "They think people are going to pay $150 for this?" Then she showed me the packed-in party game, Kinect Adventures; and I thought to myself, "Not bad. Not bad. What else have you got?"

Molly and Regan O'Leary, another Microsoft PR-er next demonstrated Dance Central. (Molly O'Donnell... Regan O'Leary... Is it just me or is the old Xbox team sounding a bit Irish? Next time I'm at Microsoft Gaming Studios, I'll ask John O'Rourke about that.) Dance Central looked and worked fine; but I have to admit, I found the move version of Sing Star more stylish.

Then Molly brought up Kinect Sports and asked me if I wanted to play.

You know that quote from Benjamin Franklin, the one about keeping your mouth shut when people think you are a fool to avoid proving them right... That is how I normally approach playing games in public; but Molly was so sweet and so enthusiastic, that I thought I would give it a try. The game that came up was boxing.

Now, I have to admit, I have laced on boxing gloves a time or two. So get up. Kinect, which is a digital camera/microphone/motion sensor adds me in the game and the next thing you know, I'm controlling an avatar on a split screen fighting Molly's avatar... and she knocks me down.

This was the problem--since Kinect watches both your hands and your face, holding my guard up in a traditional boxing stance confused it. It did not matter that my guard was up, Molly, the quintessential hunter landed punches right through my guard.

So I switched to a modified George Foreman/Archie Moore stance--arms horizontal across my face and gut instead of vertical. I'm still not doing a beautiful job of blocking, but it's an improvement. It took a minute, but I knocked Molly down once in the first round.

The second round began with a slug fest--me hitting her, her hitting me. I did a little better than she did, and down she went. When she got up, I went to work. I threw jabs, hooks, uppercuts. I was sweating. I was panting like a fifty-year-old man, which is exactly the club that I recently joined; but Molly went down hard and stayed down. It wasn't a TKO, it was a knockout.

Molly looked at me and said, "I've never been knocked out before."

I know, this is a teeny weeny accomplishment; but hey, I'm fifty now, I take my victories where I can find them.

In the meantime; I have to admit, I had a blast. From what I saw, Kinect Sports is terrific. Molly avenged her boxing loss on a game called Joy Ride, and that was fine. I must say, though, I had a blast with Kinect.

Okay you big readers, you... Here's a book one you may have missed.

2010-08-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

Having picked up the Wheel of Time torch for Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson has recently become big new, but fantasy readers should already him. His Mistborn series is highly regarded and Jordan's widow didn't just pull Sanderson's name out of a hat.

As frequent visitors to this site may know, I am not especially interested in fantasy novels. I love Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden novels, adore the Harry Potter books, and have a soft spot for works of urban fantasy; but men in tights books just send me running.

Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians is urban fantasy for middle-graders. Sanderson has endowed this book with a genius sense of humor. You adults, give it a look. Even if you don't like it as a story book, you will probably love it for its jokes. It is the story of a foster child who is something of a demented Harry Potter. He's got a gift--he breaks everything he touches. In this book, that turns out to be a good thing, as do being late, tripping, and splashing water while cleaning dishes.

Trust me on this one, friends, this book is special.

DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?

2010-07-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, you do, at least you Sad Sam regulars know him. It's Wayson Harris, gone international.

Until now, Wayson Harris novels have only come out in English; but a Japanese publisher has decided to give the Clone books a chance.

Am I excited? HELL YES!

A Wayson Harris Update

2010-07-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

Well, folks, for those of you who want an update... As of Friday, the final galley changes to The Clone Empire have been submitted.

For those of you who have not read the last posts, this is the novel that begins with Harris and 2,000 Marines stranded on Terraneau after the Unified Authority used their fleet and their ground forces for target practice.

Continuing on. Wayson Harris #7, The Clone Redemption, is due to Ace Book ASAP. I have not finished the first draft as of yet... and I have become a bit of a multiple drafts fanatic, but things are coming together on this project.

WELCOME HOME, HUNTER!!!

2010-07-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

THE CLONE EMPIRE

By Steven L. Kent

PROLOGUE

Earthdate: July 16, 2517 A.D.

Location: Terraneau

Galactic Position: Scutum-Crux Arm

“You can’t possibly be serious about attacking Earth.”

“Why not?” I asked.

The rising sun might have been a molten copper penny and the sky around it made of gold. The financial district of Norristown no longer bristled with business. War had turned the city into a wasteland. Only three skyscrapers remained in what once had been the most significant financial district on this side of the galaxy. Surrounded by debris and desolation, the buildings looked like gigantic gravestones.

Colonel Philo Hollingsworth and I stood on a hill overlooking the ruins of what once had been the government center for an entire galactic arm… the Scutum-Crux Arm. His laugh was bitter and derisive. Hate resonated in that laugh.

“You are eighty thousand light years from Earth, you only have twenty-two hundred Marines under your command, and every last specking one of them hates you. Hell, you don’t even have any ships left in your fleet. Face it Harris, the war is over. You lost.”

I saw no reason to argue the facts: the distance to Earth; the number of men I had under my command; how much they despised me.

“I might have some ships left,” I said.

Hollingsworth rolled his eyes and said nothing. In the two months since the Earth Fleet attacked Terraneau, there had been no word from our fleet. Dozens of broken ships floating in the space outside our atmosphere, but they only accounted for a portion of the missing 400 ships that once made up the Scutum-Crux Fleet.

Morning light spread slowly over the city as the cranes moved into place. Today they would excavate the misshapen mound that had once been the Treasury building.

Three cranes struggled as they pulled slabs and columns from of the wreckage, the ground below them visibly shifting under the stress. The arm of one of the cranes bent and shook like a fishing rod bringing in a big fish.

Keeping an eye on that crane, I walked over to Lieutenant Scott Mars, my chief engineer, and asked, “Are you sure your cranes can handle that much weight?” I had to shout for him to hear me above the din of his equipment.

Lieutenant Mars shrugged and answered, “It’s fine, sir.”

“That column isn’t too heavy?” I asked.

He gave me a sardonic smile and said, “Look, General, you worry about the tanks and I’ll take care of the cranes and bulldozers.”

He did not come across as hostile, but that did not mean he respected me. Since landing on Terraneau, Scott Mars had adopted an evangelical lifestyle. He testified about being “born again,” a claim that the rest of us did not take seriously. He was a clone, just like the rest of us. He could not be born again because he wasn’t really born the first time. Mars was universally perky and ready to please. We got used to his “praise this” and “praise that.” Everybody liked Mars. The hallelujah chorus was just part of having him around.

I was glad to have a friend, even if he wasn’t so much a friend as a non-hostile acquaintance. In his version of the gospel, smiling at people drew him closer to God. What was the harm in that?

One of the cranes struggled to pull a thirty-foot section of wall out of the ground. The wreckage looked heavier than the crane, but that did not seem to make a difference. After a short fight, the wall broke free and the crane pulled it out like a fisherman reeling in a trophy bass.

Seeing that Lieutenant Mars had everything under control, I returned to Hollingsworth to restart our conversation. “There are fifteen fighter carriers floating up there. What happened to the other twenty-one?” The Scutum-Crux Fleet had thirty-six fighter carriers when the day Earth Fleet attacked. Searching with telescopes and radars, we had located twelve of our carriers. We located three more when we started searching the area with transports.

“Even if they got away, they wouldn’t have gotten very far,” Hollingsworth said. “Not with those new U.A. ships chasing after them.”

He was right. The ships that the Unified Authority sent were stronger, faster, and better shielded than our ships.

Hollingsworth continued his assault. “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say you have twenty-one carriers waiting for you. What are you going to do with them? The Unifieds smashed us when we had thirty-six carriers. They’ll just smash us again.”

“They didn’t smash us down here,” I said. It was a weak argument, but it was true. “We beat their Marines.”

As far as the Unified Authority was concerned, the battle had been nothing more than a war game, but not all of the game went as expected. They sent three thousand Marines in shielded armor to attack my five thousand men in old fashion unshielded armor. We had the numbers, they had the impenetrable armor that rendered our bullets and particle beams useless. We won by way of a battlefield miracle.

Of course, what one side labels a miracle, the other sees as murder.

“You dropped a building on them,” Hollingsworth said. “You buried them. Next time they won’t be so quick to chase you into an underground garage.”

Below us, two of the cranes worked in tandem to hoist a long stretch of outer wall from the ruins of the underground garage. With cables pulling at it from two different directions, the concrete crumbled like a giant cracker and the cranes fished out nothing but shreds.

“It doesn’t look stable,” Hollingsworth said.

“You better be grateful for that. We buried three thousand Unified Authority Marines down there; if it was stable they might have dug themselves out,” I said.

Lieutenant Mars jogged over to join us. “We’ve dug an entrance, sir,” he said, his fingers covering the microphone on his headset. “I’m going to send some men down. Is there anything you want to tell them before I send them in?”

I shook my head.

Down along the wreckage, five men in soft-shelled armor ventured into the gap that the cranes had opened.

“If you don’t mind my asking, sir, do we really need to do this?” Mars asked, his new born-again values leaving him uncomfortable about excavating graves.

“I want a better look at their armor,” I said.

“We’re pulling them out to look at their armor?”

“You worry about the engineering, I’ll worry about the ethics,” I said.

“The general wants to examine their armor for weaknesses,” Hollingsworth volunteered.

“Why does he care about that?” asked Mars.

“He wants to know how to get through their armor before his return engagement.” Hollingsworth answered. He and Mars carried on their conversation around me as if I weren’t there.

“Are they coming back?” Mars asked.

“Nope, Harris wants to invade Earth,” Hollingsworth said.

For a moment Mars looked stunned, then he laughed. “You’re joking, right?”

I started to say something, but Lieutenant Mars’s expression suddenly shifted. Something he’d heard over his headset caught his attention. He took a step toward the wreckage, then turned to me and said, “They’ve got one, sir.”

“Are they certain it’s one of theirs?” I asked. We lost nearly as many men as the Unified Authority in that battle. Most of ours were killed on the top level of the underground garage. Most of theirs were killed on the lower levels. They found this stiff so quickly I thought it might be one of ours.

“It’s a U.A. Marine,” Mars confirmed.

“Are his shields still up?” I asked. Six weeks had passed since we brought the garage down on the bastards; the power in their suits should have gone out long ago.

“No, sir. The suit’s gone dark.”

“Is the armor in one piece?” I asked.

Mars relayed the question, then told me, “Good as new.”

Of course it was good as new. What’s a little thing like a twenty-thousand ton avalanche to a suit of shielded armor? I asked myself. “Let’s have a look at it.”

A few minutes later, two engineers came out of the ground carrying the dead Marine.

The engineers brought the body over so I could examine it. Without the glowing skin of its shields, the dead man’s armor looked very much like the combat armor my men wore. It was made of the same dark green alloy. Quarter-inch ridges traced a seam along the shoulders, sleeves, legs, and sides of the helmet. The shielding must have been transmitted from those ridges.

Looking down at the body, I felt no regret for killing this man. The war was of their making, not mine. I was only 28 years old, but I’d spent the last ten years of my life running from one battlefield to the next. Any compassion I had ever felt for the dead had long since burned out of me.

“The visor’s cracked,” I told Mars.

A hairline break ran vertically across the glass face of the visor. The crack was thin and shallow, so minor you might not even be able to trace it with a sharpened pencil.

“Where?” Mars asked as he bent down for a closer look. “That? That’s not a crack, it’s a scratch.”

“I told you, perfect condition,” I said.

“As long as the visor works…”

“You have your orders,” I said.

“We’re getting four more sets,” he argued.

“Five more suits.” I corrected him. If I’d left it at four, he might have taken it as tacit permission to keep this suit. “And those five suits had better be perfect or I’ll send them back.”

“Five suits in perfect condition, aye,” Lieutenant Mars said, making no effort to hide his frustration. He relayed my orders down to his men, whispering something extra into his microphone so I would not hear.

Finding armor in working condition might take time. Once the shielding turned off, the armor would crush under the weight of rocks and concrete; but the garage was big and cavernous; with three thousand Unified Authority Marines buried in its depths, there had to be five undestroyed suits down there.

Nearly an hour passed before the engineers returned with their next specimen. I examined the armor. There was no dust on the seals around the shoulder plates. One of Mars’s engineers had taken a helmet from one cadaver and added it to the body armor of another. Clever. I pretended not to notice the switch.

“Send it to the labs,” I told Mars.

“Aye, aye, sir,” he said, trying to hide a smile. He must have known about the switch and thought he had pulled one over on me.

As his commanding officer, I could not allow him to think he was smarter than me, so I added, “And Lieutenant, tell your men to stop with the mix-and-match armor. Next time I’ll send it back.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Mars called down my orders as his men took the body and loaded it onto a jeep and left for Fort Sebastian. As I watched the jeep bounce head away, Colonel Hollingsworth said, “Looks like we’ve got us an audience.”

“Damn,” I sighed.

A small crowd of locals had gathered around the chain link fence that we’d built around the area as a perimeter. Leaning on the fence and watching us, they reminded me of inmates staring out of a prison yard.

“Maybe you should have a word with them,” Hollingsworth suggested.

“Don’t tell them about invading Earth,” Mars added. “You wouldn’t want to upset them.”

“Just get me the specking armor,” I muttered to Mars as I headed for the gate hating what would come next. The locals had caught me with my hand in the cookie jar. By mutual agreement, the underground garage had become a designated no-man’s land forbidden to both us and the civilian government. Along with Unified Authority Marines, we had buried an armory filled with guns, grenades, mines, vehicles, and bombs when we blew up the garage. The locals didn’t want us visiting the armory and we didn’t want them raiding it, either.

Throughout the morning, low clouds had floated in from the east, blocking out the sun and threatening to rain. Now the first drops of rain fell, splattering on shards of concrete, turning their gray surface to taupe.

I walked to the fence where the locals waited. Rain fell on them, but they did not seem to care.

“This is a flagrant violation,” the right reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow said as I approached. He stood a few inches from the chain link, his arms folded across his chest, an angry scowl on his face.

“I’m not here for weapons,” I explained.

“I don’t care why you are here,” Doctorow said. “Pull your men out and leave immediately.”

Doctorow was at least halfway through his sixties. The highest-ranking chaplain in the Unified Authority Army in his former life, he came to Terraneau five years ago as the Army prepared to fight off an alien invasion. After the aliens massacred the fighting men, Doctorow shrugged off both his uniform and his cassock and became a civilian leader. He hated the military and he viewed God as some kind of cosmic voyeur instead of a supreme being.

“We’re exhuming bodies, not weapons,” I explained. “You can hang around and observe if you like. You won’t see any weapons come out of that hole, just bodies and armor.”

Lieutenant Mars trotted over to tell me that his men had located a suitable stiff.

“How’s his armor?” I asked.

Mars repeated my question into his microphone, pressed his finger against his earpiece, then said, “The legs were crushed. The helmet is perfect.”

Under different circumstances I would have given the order to throw it back, but I did not know how long I could hold Doctorow and his civilian posse at bay.

“Take the legs from the first guy you found, the one with the cracked visor,” I said.

“Praise Jesus, God is good,” Mars told the men in the hole. “He says we can keep it.”

“Why are you digging up dead Marines?” Doctorow asked.

I started to answer but Lieutenant Mars spoke first. “He’s preparing for the invasion.”

“Is the Earth Fleet coming back?” asked Doctorow.

“It’s the other way around. He’s planning on invading them,” Mars said, the glimmer in his eyes revealing the lightness with which he regarded my ambition.

“That’s not funny,” Doctorow said.

“He’s not joking,” I said.

“You’re planning to invade Earth?” Doctorow asked.

When I nodded, he smiled and said, “Well if that’s the case, Harris, dig away. If it gets you off my planet, I’m all for it.”

Well, this is lovely

2010-07-06T13:28:00.000-07:00

Hunter is coming home on leave from Iraq tomorrow and I promised I would run the intro from The Clone Empire in celebration... only, Blogger is not cooperating. I can not get it to paste .

Sorry guys. I will try to find a way around this technical difficulty.

SITUATION FIXED

If you can believe it, I could not cut and paste using Internet Explorer but I could using Google Chrome. Google owning Chrome and Blogger, I wonder how good old MS likes having its tactics used against it.

So What Have You Done This Summer?

2010-06-14T08:20:00.000-07:00

Sorry Sad Sam's Palace has been so quiet of late, I've been away. I was hired to teach creative writing and comparative composition at Brigham Young University's Hawaii campus this Spring.

I spent the last eight weeks in Laie, a small town on the north shore of Oahu. I admit, I fell in love with Laie. Well, maybe I fell back in love with Laie. I attended school there on and off from 1978 through 1985, when I finally moved to BYU's Provo, Utah, campus and got serious. about finishing my degree

So what did I do in Laie that kept me so busy? Well, mostly I taught. I had no idea how much work goes into preparing lessons and grading papers and all of the behind the scenes jhobs that go into classes. I did proof read a novel which I still cannot announce, a young adult novel that I think many of you younger readers will enjoy.

I also got to attend one of the coolest events I have ever seen, the Samoan Fire Knife Dancing World Championships. A good friend told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to attend the championships, and she was right. This wasn't your dad's dancing competition. Here come these huge guys carrying huge machetes with huge hooks on the ends, and huge flames blazing off the blades. They twirl these blazing knives twirl it like a baton. Hey, if the blade cuts their fingers off or slices through their arms, at least they have the fire to cauterize the wound... right?

I do not think you can do fire knife dancing unless you are absolutely fearless.

By the way, the winner of the young men's competition was not Polynesian, he was a white kid from Florida who learned the skill by watching Youtube! No joke.

I also went swimming with sea turtles, toured historical sites, and ate an awful lot of Chinese food at a restaurant called Pah Ke's. For those of you who are not from Hawaii, in the term Pah Ke is generally a derisive term for people of Chinese decent. When I mentioned to many friends that I went to a Chinese restaurant called Pah Ke's they thought I was making a bad joke.

I wasn't. Pah Ke's had some the best Chinese food I have ever eaten.

Since coming home I have give done the final read-through of The Clone Empire; and starting today, I will dedicate my every conscious moment to completing The Clone Redemption, which will certainly be the final book on this particular story arc for Harris.

I am already about 33 percent of the way through the book. This book is an interesting one. It's kind of two parts in one book. I can't explain that now, but you will undoubtedly see where I am going when you finish reading The Clone Empire ... if you read The Clone Empire. And, I get the feeling that most of you Sad Sammers keep up with Harris.

Anyway, sorry I was gone so long.

Steven L. Kent

Thanks to the Great Christian McGrath, The Clone Empire Now has a Face!

2010-04-02T09:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this is my favorite cover in the series. What do you think?

NEWS UPDATE: AMAZON POSTS CLONE EMPIRE

2010-03-13T21:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a big day around here. The lovely and talented Anne of Ace Book has returned The Clone Empire for revisions; and, for a change, the requests are few. The manuscript came back with several kind words, so the prospects look good.

I have until April 14 to make my changes. Judging by the few I have made so far, that deadline may be unnecessarily generous.

In the meantime, Amazon.com has posted a Clone Empire page. No word on cover art yet. Rest assured that I will put the art up on this site as soon as Christian McGrath or Anne send it to me.

THE MOST EARTH-SHAKING NEWS!

2010-02-19T13:22:00.000-08:00

You know, I have been waiting all week, all month, maybe all my damn life to hear Tiger Woods apologize for the horrible things he did to you, me, and all of the golf-loving public. I mean, this is a big event! This is the next moonshot, global warming, and Danica Patrick all rolled up into one and I hope Congress back in Washington D.C. put the nation's business on hold so each and every senator and representative could watch Tiger Woods's heart-felt confession.

I hope we beamed it to the Space Station. I hope somebody paused any Olympic events that were in progress because I am sure those athletes realized that Tiger Woods's confession that he really did cheat on his wife was far more important than any puny medal.

Actually, I found this to be the lamest most stupid topic I could possibly bring up, but if it steers our conversation away from my last post, I'm all for it.

SILVER MEDAL FOR JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS

2010-02-12T21:18:00.000-08:00

When I read The Lightning Thief, I did not love it but I certainly admired it. I still do. I always admire authors who know their audience, address their audience, and give them exactly what they want.

When Rick Roirdan wrote The Lightning Thief, he selected one of the toughest, least reading audiences in existence and gave them a book they could love.

And so, I give Mr. Roirdan his due. It must have been very exciting to see his name on the big screen. He earned it.

And now to the movie itself. The Lightning Thief is a movie with a lot of CG and a very good cast. It is not a blockbuster. If you are looking for a movie with an Avatar type budget, you are looking during the wrong time of year. As a summer blockbuster, The Lightning Thief would not even rate as a contender. As a February release, it's absolutely top notch.

The storyline, like the storyline in the books, is stripped down and simple, something written for ten- and eleven-year-old minds that older readers and watchers can still enjoy. Some of the mystery in the books is revealed very early. In the book, as I recall, readers wade through several chapters before learning that the protagonist is the son of Poseidon, Greek god of the sea. In the movie, we see a lighthouse-sized Poseidon strutting out of the ocean in the opening scene.

Not everything in the book made it into the movie and not everything in the movie came from the book, but the additions and changes were in keeping with the spirit of the novel.

Chris Columbus, whom you may recall as the director of the first two Harry Potter movies, did a good job with the material.

The cast of this movie did a great job. Logan Lerman, looking supremely Zach Efron-esque, was likable as Percy Jackson. Brandon T. Jackson, his centaur-sidekick stole the show with his comic timing. Alexandra Daddario was fine as Annabeth, the tough-but-fair daughter of Athena. Sean Bean made a great Zeus. Rosario Dawson was the most stunning sight in the movie... but I digress.

Look, this movie was never meant to compete with the Harry Potter series. Roirdan wrote his books for the next-youngest demographic so that when readers finished his books they could graduate to Potter. Most of the criticism you will hear about this movie will come from people unwilling to accept this movie in terms of its audience.

As for me, well, chronologically I left this demographic decades ago. Psychographically, I may still be growing into it. I won't give this movie 10 out of 10, but it rates a solid 8 for what it was meant to be. We're not dealing with Shakespeare or Arthur Miller here, we're just looking for something that gets boys back to reading.

Okay You Rednecks Out There, Here's a Question for You

2010-01-28T13:55:00.000-08:00

So which would you rather eat at, a Forbes four-star/AAA four-diamond restaurant or a place with only three-stars?

That may sound like my asking you, "Which would you rather get in the mail, a check for $300 or a check for $400?" It's not, though.

Four-star/diamond restaurants typically have linen table cloths, enough silverware to set a surgical table, and a wine list so long it looks like a Stephen King novel. They serve fine beef, salads with vegetables I have never learned about in school, and deserts with names like liqueurs.

I just received a press release about the Ocean Room of the Kiawah Golf Resort in South Carolina. Apparently it's the only four-star/four-diamond steakhouse in the United States. While that sounds very impressive, I think I might be happier eating with a few less stars. Hell, last time I went to Morton's of Chicago--and that was a few years ago, I asked the waitress to put the lobster she was using back in its fish tank because I got tired of seeing her suffocate it.

During my reviewer days, I wrote about a couple of restaurants for Delta Sky and United Hemispheres. One of the restaurants I reviewed was Hoku, a very impressive eatery in the Kahala Mandarin Hotel. Another restaurant I wrote about was Stan's BBQ, a sports bar that smokes a damn fine brisket.

Guess which restaurant I go to more often.

MORAL KOMBAT: The Movie is out of the Bag

2010-01-27T20:26:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, as I was approaching the end of my life as a journalist, an aspiring film maker named Spencer Halpin asked me if I could help him create a documentary about video game violence.

I did not know Spencer at the time; but I considered his brother, Hal, a good friend. Hal was the president of the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association. I had interviewed Hal on many occasions and always found him to be smart and outspoken; so when Spencer asked me to help on this project, I said, "Yes, so long as the documentary is going to be balanced."

Balance seemed like a concern given that Hal's association represented video game retailers. As it turned out though, balance was also one of Spencer's top priorities. One of the things he wanted me to do was to help him achieve that balance by contacting the best and most important spokesmen for both sides of the argument.

As a journalist, I had interviewed most of the right voices. I put Spencer in touch with such anti-violence activists as Lt. Col. (retired) Dave Grossman, author of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, Senator Joseph Lieberman, and Jack Thompson, an attorney who has risen to national prominence criticizing the video game industry. I also put Spencer in touch with Andrew MacNamara, editor in chief of Game Informer, Lorne Lanning, creator of the Oddworld games, and Professor Henry Jenkins of M.I.T.

By the time he was finished, Spencer had interviewed most of the best and the brightest representatives of both sides of the equation. He'd put them all on the spot, too. Spencer never held back. I know, I wrote the questions for the interviews.

In a world populated by the likes of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock--masters of manipulation who try to disguise propaganda as information, Spencer Halpin stands out as very possibly being too even-handed.

I say "too" even-handed because his movie, Moral Kombat, is, if anything, not controversial enough. To date, he has had trouble finding a home for Moral Kombat because cable channels and distribution houses want fireworks and minor world wars, not balanced documentaries. Guys poisoning themselves by glutting on fast food, sure. Films in which educators and game makers both have an equal say, not a chance.

My point, right now the movie is available online. No kidding, you can watch it free. Here is the link:

http://www.babelgum.com/4022951/moral-kombat.html

If you give it a view, let me know how you like it. I'm curious what you all think of it. And please, no jokes about my nerdy appearance. I hear enough of those from my friends and neighbors.

So, who likes dogs?

2010-01-25T09:32:00.000-08:00

Here is my little blond beauty. She's half Chow and half Golden Retriever, at least that was what the shelter told us when adopted her. She certainly has the black tongue of a Chow. Fortunately for everyone involved, her personality is a bit more on the Golden side.

When E mentioned those books for dog lovers, it reminded me that I have never posted anything about my little dog. No one else thinks of her as little. She weighs about 60 pounds, but I was raised with Great Danes that weighed in at over 100 pounds.

So let's hear the crowd. How many dog lovers do we have out there? How many cat lovers? How many of you are ambidextrous and can happily live with both? How many think it would be a miracle of all non-edible animals vanished from the face of the earth?

On to Harris news. The lovely and talented Anne at Ace sent me the back copy for Wayson Harris #6, now named The Clone Empire, thanks largely to the vote we had on this very site. No cover art yet, but I promise to post it the moment the art arrives... assuming they give me permission to do so.

So have any of you read Under the Dome by Stephen King?

2010-01-14T14:29:00.000-08:00

I'm curious if anyone has read it and what you all thought.

Thanks.

LET SOMEONE ELSE TELL YOU ABOUT THE MORGANS...

2009-12-30T09:48:00.000-08:00

Don't bother with Did You Hear About the Morgans?, it's dreadful.

Hugh Grant is a bit too old to be playing the boyish charm card and the once-cute way he struggles to deliver his lines has lost its appeal. Sarah Jessica Parker may never be too old for her Sex and the City following, but she looks a bit long in the tooth be talking about her biological clock and adopting babies in this film.

Grant and Parker were called upon to play a couple of glamorous thirty-somethings who had fallen out of love, but they came across as a pair of forty-somethings who have forgotten their own age.

If that were the only problem with Did You Hear About the Morgans?, I might still recommend the film. It isn't.

First the good news, the studio made some solid choices when it came to the supporting cast in this film. Along with Grant and Parker, the cast includes Sam Elliott, whom I always like, and Mary Steenburgen.

Grant and Parker play the Morgans, the most upwardly mobile couple in New York City who are separated but prospering. She, apparently New York's most successful realtor, hates him because he cheated on her. He, unbelievably playing a big-time attorney considering his speech patterns, wants desperately to get back in her good graces. When they finally go out for dinner and a heart-to-heart, the witness a murder and are placed in the witness protection program because the killer is going to come after them next.

Enter Sam Elliott and Mayry Steenburgen, a married couple--a happily married couple who also happen to be the Wyoming U.S. Marshals/small town sheriffs assigned to protect the Morgans. Elliott was an obvious choice for the role, he embodies the West. Steenburgen, though, must have been picked for the Annie Oakley role because she speaks slowly and a sounds a bit like a hillbilly. Her style of speech is because she was born in Arkansas. I can assure you, few of the women of Wyoming sound as if they came from Arkansas.

The movie does a nice job of creating a Northern Exposure-style small town feel. Wilford Brimley, who owns the only restaurant in town, is an angry, ultra-conservative hick--a nice piece of casting. Kim Shaw is fun to watch as the pretty-but-dim witted town waitress/doctor's assistant/volunteer fire chief.

But in the center of things is the Morgans, and they suck the charm out of everything they see. Grant is dim and stuttering and dull, and unable to deliver a funny line. As a romantic comedy, this movie was supposedly written for women, so I expected a certain amount of male-bashing. What I did not expect was for Parker to be staged as conniving and unlikable. In the end, the killer may have been more likable than the folks he was trying to kill.

Aside from the bad casting, I felt that the movie also lacked in the writing department. The funniest moment in the movie comes when Parker, a vegetarian, opens Steenbeurgen's refrigerator and sees nothing but meat.

That moment was cute. There were a few other cute moments. My problem was with everything in between.

AVATAR: "THIS IS GREAT"

2009-12-18T12:44:00.000-08:00

There's no point burying the punchline, Avatar, James Cameron's first movie since Titanic, is superb. It may well be the most visually stunning motion picture I have ever seen. It has a storyline that is as simplistic and as predictable as a fairytale. In other words, Avatar transports you.

For anyone wondering about the plot of the movie, the previews pretty much give the entire story away. Oh, there is a surprise or two, but they're minor. It is a story of a human soldier who is sent to infiltrate a primitive society and discovers he prefers the enemy way of life and ends up leading the battle against the people that sent him.

In this case, the simplistic and familiar storyline works well because it is the visuals and CG art that audience will want to see and the story never gets in the way. There's never any doubt who is good and who is bad, so you can simply switch off your brain and concentrate on the lush jungles, the glowing trees, the hammer-headed plant eaters, and the armor-plated horses.

Visually, Avatar seems to take its cues from the work of Roger Dean, the artist who did great cover art for seventies and eighties rock bands--most notably, Yes. If you have any doubt of this, have a look at the covers of Yessongs and Relayer and your doubts should vanish quickly. (The airbrushed picture of the misty floating island is by Roger Dean.)

As I was leaving theater, a friend mentioned that Avatar was a lot like Dances with Wolves. He was right. Take out the nature-loving blue natives of Pandora and replace them with nature-loving native Americans, replace Kevin Costner's horse with Sam Worthington's monster, replace the wild west with fantastic jungles, and you have Dances with Avatars.

There is even a cast holdover from Dances with Wolves, Wes Studi, who played an evil Pawnee in the Kevin Costner classic, lends his voice to one of the Nobi rustics in Avatar.

Sam Worthington, playing a paraplegic Marine, was wonderful. Sigourney Weaver was, as always, magnificent. Steven Lang, the leader of evil Marines, was especially good. And Zoe Saldana, whom you all will know from Star Trek, did a great job doing the voice work for a Nobi princess.

Joel Moore, whom I only remember in his roll as a nerd in Dodgeball, added to the movie as well.

That said, I have two complaints... small complaints. First, I am a sick of movies in which capitalism and the military are made to be monsters. It's a hackneyed cliche and a professional like James Cameron should know that. This movie could not have been any more flagrantly anti-Marine had Michael Moore been the director.

Next, an even lesser complaint: This movie is long. I mean really long. It starts somewhat slow and gets tighter and faster and faster with each turn. If you think you are going to need to go to the bathroom, hit it early guys, you won't want to tear yourselves away when things get going. Better yet, skip the large soda all together, that way you won't miss a moment of the climactic battles.

I saw Avatar in IMAX 3D. As is often the case, the combination IMAX and 3D a bit too much. I wouldn't have minded IMAX or 3D on a lesser screen, but it became hard to keep up with everything happening on the screen. I found myself watching one part of the screen or another, and missing the bigger picture at times.

YOUR ONE-DAY ONLY SNEAK PEEK

2009-12-17T07:43:00.000-08:00

I hope you enjoyed the sneak peek. To those of you who responded so positively, Thank You!

JUST A REMINDER

2009-12-15T10:47:00.000-08:00

Tune in Thursday for a one-day only, totally unauthorized sneak peek at Wayson Harris #6, The Clone Empire.

AND THERE WAS MUCH REJOICING

2009-12-08T17:25:00.000-08:00

Well, fellow residents of Sad Sam's Palace, I am pleased to announce that Book 6, The Clone Empire, has officially been submitted to the lovely and oft-praised Anne of Ace. (If you are peeking, Anne, thanks again for your patience.)

Thank you, all of you, for all of the good words and encouragement as I finished the book; and remember, next Thursday is the big celebration--and the one-day sneak peek.

AQuick Note

2009-11-30T11:17:00.000-08:00

JenMo, and Sniper, and MafiaMaster and the rest of the gang, I am sorry I have been so out of pocket of late. I promise more posts soon; but for now, I need to put the last touches on book six and send it in.

Book six will not run until next October, but if I can get an early handle on book seven, perhaps Ace will release it the following March.

SPOILER TOWN--POST YOUR SPOILERS HERE

2009-10-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

Glenn, Josh, Bryan, and others have expressed a deeply appreciated desire not to spoil The Clone Betrayal for those of you who have not read the book. I , however, am not worried about them spoiluing the book for those of you who have read it.

My point, this post are strictly for those of you HAVE READ THE CLONE BETRAYAL. If you have not read the book, STOP! GO NO FURTHER! The discussion below will be filled with spoilers and suggestions from folks who have read the book.

I Stepped Away For A Moment

2009-10-28T11:53:00.000-07:00

Hey, all. Sorry I have been out of pocket. I took a week off on Oahu to rest. Now I am back at my desk, polishing the third draft of The Clone Empire.

I got to have lunch with a couple of Sad Sam's regulars while in Hawaii. (Sean, it was great getting to meet you.)

Oh, and allow me to announce that I will be teaching a couple of courses at BYU-Hawaii next spring and summer.

So, I am back. Thank you, all of you, for your posts about hunting for copies of the latest book. Next, please let me know what you think of the book. I will welcome and post constructive criticiques along with any praise. As you may have picked up from the author's notes, I do care what you have to say.

(Sorry gang, I am going to filter out any posts that are nothing but nasty.)

HAVE ANY OF YOU GOTTEN YOUR BOOKS YET?

2009-10-19T16:23:00.001-07:00

THe Barnes and Noble down the hill has not gotten the books in yet.

A LITTLE QUESTION ABOUT PS3

2009-10-10T10:03:00.001-07:00

JenMo, who by the way makes a short but very memorable appearance in The Clone Empire, sent in the following question:

"So my friend is considering getting a PS3 her son and husband for Xmas, but is worried that her many, many PS2 games won't work with it. Is that the case?"

Sadly, JenMo, that is absolutely the case. Only the original configurations of PS3 even attempted PS2 compatibility, and they did not do a very good job of. The new, less expensive PS3s, still offer Blu-Ray; but they are NOT backwards compatible.

I have not been a fan of Sony's thid effort at console gaming hardware, but that is beginning to change. On Monday I attended an event for Uncharted 2, and was very impressed by the game. I do not think the PlayStation 3 library is competitive with the Wii or Xbox 360 libraries, but we have reached the point in this generation where that no longer matters so much. There are now a wealth of impressive games for all threes systems, and Sony has enough exclusives to keep late-adopting gamers happy.

It's still not my favorite console in the group. If I had to choose one, it would probably be the Xbox 360, despite the fact that I would KNOW that I would need to fix it or send it in to be fixed sooner or later so I would add $100 to the price in my head. The damn things break, it's that simple.

That said, Xbox 360 still has the best online offerings. It's got the biggest and I think the best library. It's also the best-supported system for sports games.

A caviat--of the three consoles, Wii is the only one that is truly and fully backward compatible with the last generation. You know what? I really liked GameCube. Maybe I was the only man in America who did, but I think that adding the GameCube library to Wii really takes it up a notch.

After Xbox 360, if I had to choose a console... I would probably buy Wii and then go home and kick my dog. Wii sucks at sports. Wii's online offerings are mostly just another method for Nintendo squeeze a few more dollars out of games we've allready purchased for NES, Game Boy, and the Game Boy card reader. Still, Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros. were significantly impressive games.

Just Making Sure

2009-09-20T08:27:00.000-07:00

So Hunter, Sean, David, Smurph0311... are you the only Sad Sam's residents currently in the military?

Sneak Preview Time: Wayson Harris # 5, The Clone Betrayal

2009-09-19T08:34:00.000-07:00

The Clone Betrayal officially hits the shelves on Tuesday, October 27; but if past experience proves correct, I think it will probably start floating into stores around this time next month. That means it's high time I put a preview on Sad Sam's Palace and left it up for everyone to see.

And so, my friends, here is Chapter 1 of The Clone Betrayal.

Chapter 1

Earthdate: December 31, a.d. 2515

Location: Washington, D.C., Earth

Galactic Position: Orion Arm

“Ava, this is Lieutenant Wayson Harris. I told you about Harris.”

“The big hero,” Ava said, her voice betraying a distinct lack of interest. “Didn’t you say he was a Liberator clone?”

I had been talking with three of the men from my color guard detail, and now found myself speechless.

Colonel Theodore Mooreland stood before us with his date, Ava Gardner—Hollywood’s brightest star and the subject of more debates and fantasies than any woman of her time. Mooreland casually threw his arm around her tiny waist. Maybe it was my imagination, but his expression reminded me of a dog marking its territory. Most of the men in the room would have died happy if they could have placed one of their hands where Mooreland now had his.

“He’s the one,” he said. “Lieutenant Wayson Harris, the toughest man in the Marines.”

Ava threw back her head as if about to laugh. Her lips spread in an inviting smile. Trying to keep from staring at the neckline of her dress, I studied the gentle cleft in her chin.

“How’s it hanging, Lieutenant?” Mooreland asked.

It wasn’t hanging at the moment, but I answered, “Fine, sir,” just the same.

I had never paid much attention to Ava Gardner; but now, seeing her up close, I understood the Ava obsession. She exuded sensuality the way officers exude arrogance and politicians exude snobbishness. She inspected me with her olivine eyes, her gaze both appraising and dismissive. I got the feeling she found me inadequate; but coming from her, even feelings of inadequacy were strangely erotic.

Her hair, a deep and lustrous brown with just a hint of red that only showed in the light, hung over her shoulders in a wave of curls and tresses that somehow managed to look both wild and organized at the same moment. The hair, the eyes, and the body all did their job, but I think it was her indifference that got my blood pumping. The aloof way in which she viewed the world around her came across as a challenge, like the slap of the gauntlet before the duel.

“Where do they have you stationed?” Mooreland more or less grunted his question, wrestling my attention away from the girl in his arms.

“I’m running errands for Glade,” I said. That was General James Ptolemeus Glade, commandant of the Marines.

“An officer like you in the Pentagon, what a specking waste of talent,” Mooreland said. “They should have you out in the field somewhere. Maybe they should send you to the outer planets . . . see if we can reclaim lost territory.”

“Teddy, I’m ready for a drink,” Ava said.

“Yeah, let’s head over to the bar,” Mooreland said.

“Nice meeting you, Harris,” Ava said in a voice so sweet and soft it sounded like she’d sung the words.

It was like I was in a trance. I extended my arm as if I wanted to shake hands with her. She giggled, took my hand, and gave it a soft squeeze, then she turned away. Mooreland remained another second and gave me a smirk that said it all.

“Better check for frostbite, Lieutenant; I bet that bitch has icebergs flowing in her veins,” one of my Marines said.

“What a ball-buster,” another said.

“I’d kill to put my arm around her like that,” said the third man on my detail. Watching Ava and Mooreland disappear into the crowd, we all agreed with him.

We were at a party that few Marines thought would take place—a New Year’s Eve celebration ushering in the year 2516. I began the year battening down the hatches on a planet called New Copenhagen, making a last stand for mankind against an alien onslaught. Other than Earth, New Copenhagen was the only Unified Authority planet that had not been conquered by the aliens which the top brass now knew as the “Avatari.”

At the time, all we knew was that wherever the Avatari appeared, our planets fell in a matter of minutes. We’d gone from 180 planets spread across the galaxy to two in a couple of years. Even after winning the battle on New Copenhagen, we were still down to two planets.

Across the floor, a handful of silver-haired couples danced to moldy songs performed by a live orchestra. A buffet of desserts and finger foods stood mostly ignored, but a large crowd of men in tuxedos and military uniforms milled around the bar. On the far side of the ballroom, women in sparkling gowns sat and gossiped. Waiters in white uniforms walked the floor carrying trays with champagne and hors d’oeuvres, offering food and drinks to everyone except me and my Marines.

But we only had eyes for Mooreland and his date. We watched Mooreland in astonishment as he guided Ava around the floor, introducing her to officers and politicians.

An air of scandal surrounded the “glamorous” Ms. Gardner. Gossip columnists and Hollywood reporters spread dark rumors about her being cloned from an actress who died five hundred years ago. Despite the fact that the nearly all-clone military had just saved mankind, the natural-born crowd still looked down their un-engineered noses on us clones. If the rumors proved accurate, her career would be ruined; but the hint of scandalous dirty secrets surrounding her only made Ava more intriguing so long as they remained unproven. There is a mystique about a starlet who is rumored to have worked her way into Hollywood as a call girl, but an actress known to have worked as a prostitute is nothing but a whore.

Since I was a lowly lieutenant, I came to this party as the hired help. That was one of the differences between me and Ted Mooreland; he came as a guest, and I came as part of the color guard. He and I were both officers, we both put our asses on the line on New Copenhagen; but I was a clone and he was a natural-born.

The ballroom hummed with the sounds of music, muffled voices, and the clink of ice cubes in glass. The only light in the room came from dimmed chandeliers and candles on tables. When they had the chance, the Washington elite preferred to lurk in shadows.

“I never paid much attention to her movies,” I told the Marine beside me.

“You made up for it just now,” the Marine said. “I thought your eyes were going to fall out.”

“Go speck yourself,” I whispered. A Marine could end his career using that word at an occasion like this.

“I’d rather speck her,” the Marine answered. We both laughed.

“Speck” was the obscenity of choice among the Marines. It referred to the fluid being transferred rather than the act of transferring it.

For the rest of the night, I tried to forget about Ava Gardener. I went about my duty, occasionally catching glimpses of her here and there. As the evening went on, Tobias Andropov, the newest rising star in the Unified Authority Senate, made glowing remarks about the recovery of our Earth-based economy. Generals and admirals gave three-minute speeches about the readiness of the U.A. military. The presentations ended with William Grace, the retiring head of the Linear Committee, presenting plans to rebuild the Republic.

Hiding in the back, I listened to these optimistic speeches and wondered what galaxy these people lived in. From what I could tell, we had barely survived the attack and had no real means of defending ourselves if the aliens returned.

The speeches ended at 2300. With an hour to go before the climax of the evening, the orchestra returned, and the night became festive. Some of the politicians put on party hats and played with noisemakers. The pace of the drinking picked up, and a steady herd remained on the dance floor. I caught a brief glimpse of Colonel Mooreland and Ava on the floor. They cut a striking couple. He was about my height, six-three, but more muscled, with a broad face, a dark crew cut, and a square jaw. She was petite, and her head rested in the hollow between his chest and shoulder.

I had an inexplicable desire to shoot Mooreland as I watched them dance. She was scrub, nothing more, just another girl, prettier than most to be sure; but just a skirt all the same.

At midnight the guests drank, shouted, and shot off party favors. Mooreland and Ava stood in an exclusive knot of revelers that included “Wild Bill” Grace and two of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mooreland was their boy, a man with a thoroughbred bloodline and a good combat record. His father, a former commandant of the Marines, had died fighting the Avatari. Now Ted stood shoulder to shoulder with generals and politicians, a man with a future and Ava Gardner in his arms. Whatever angels looked after him, I hated the speckers.

As I presented the color guard to end the evening, I spotted Ava and Mooreland in the front row of tables. I performed my duties, staring past them into space. The revelers stood at attention as we marched the flags out of the room, and the party came to a close.

For the next few weeks, I fantasized about Ava calling me; but, of course, she never did. All that came of Ava was a string of cold showers. When I went out with other women, I sometimes thought of her; but those daydreams faded away.

It was an exciting time. As the politicians had predicted, the Unified Authority began to rebuild. For the first time that I could remember, no one questioned the military. The Senate enacted a new holiday celebrating the victory on New Copenhagen. In past times, the House of Representatives had been a viper’s pit of sedition. Since the war, it had becomes the soldier’s best friend, calling for improved G.I. benefits, increased military spending, and the erection of a New Copenhagen Memorial in Washington, D.C.

In January 2516, the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Military History opened a wing dedicated to the history of cloned soldiers. Clones in the Smithsonian—I never thought I would see the day, but there it was.

I visited the exhibit and learned things about clone history that I had never known. One display showed the first cloned soldiers—big, brainless, and brawny; a force of brutes that lived and died like robots. The evolution of synthetic humanity quickly selected those first Neanderthals for extinction, and a new class of smaller, smarter synthetic soldiers replaced them.

One display showed wax figures of the twelve generations of clone evolution. In that lineup was a man with my exact face and physique, a Liberator. Another display depicted Liberators invading the Mogat home world. The display included twenty-five figures that looked exactly like me—six feet three inches tall, wiry frame, and the same brown hair and brown eyes found on every other clone.

The plaque read:

Liberator Clones

The product of a top secret collaboration between the U.A. Navy and the Linear Committee, Liberator clones were designed as a weapon in the war against aliens believed to inhabit the Galactic Eye. When the Liberators advanced on the enemy stronghold, they discovered a planet populated by humans.

I appreciated the whitewash. What the plaque did not mention was that we Liberator clones were the missing link of synthetic evolution. The Pentagon had its scientists strip our genes from the DNA of all future generations.

The problem with the Liberators was their fundamental addiction to violence. The Liberator physique included a gland that secreted a combination of testosterone and adrenaline into our bloodstreams during combat. The hormone made us faster and fiercer. It kept our thoughts clear during combat; but it was also addictive. Once the fighting was over, most Liberators would happily sell their souls to keep the hormone pumping through their veins. The only way to keep it flowing was to continue fighting. That led to battles like New Prague and Albatross Island, where Liberators slaughtered allies and civilians once they ran out of enemies.

After a few massacres, Liberator clones were banned from the Orion Arm, the galactic arm in which Earth was located, and the Pentagon began manufacturing a new generation of clones.

We did leave our mark on future generations, however. Instead of building a gland with testosterone and adrenaline in later models, Congress opted to build a fail-safe into later generations of clones—a gland that caused their brains to shut down if they discovered their origins. They called it the “Death Reflex.” It was a stopgap designed to prevent clones from rebelling against their natural-born creators.

Along with their deadly new gland, the latest clones received some impressive neural programming. They were raised in special all-clone orphanages by mentors who convinced each clone that he was the only natural-born child in the facility. Neural programming filled in the blanks. When they saw themselves in the mirror, the new clones saw themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes even though they saw perfectly well that the clones around them had brown hair and brown eyes. That same programming made them docile in the face of authority, fearless in combat, and unable to call each other out as clones.

As a Liberator, I did not need to worry about the Death Reflex. I was the last of the Liberators, a one-of-a-kind clone. Twenty-six years ago, someone decided to run one last batch of Liberator juice through the old clone factory, and out I came.

The clone wing in the Museum of Military History had displays and holographic movies offering in-depth explanations of the evolution of clones in the same cheery light that the Air and Space Museum showed the evolution of jet fighters and broadcast technology.

Seeing my kind displayed without a warning that we were all mass murderers brought an ironic smile to my face.

The New Year’s Eve party, the monument, and the new wing all happened in the months before the Joint Hearings. Those hearings changed everything.

WHAT I THINK OF AMERICAN POLITICS

2009-09-15T22:51:00.000-07:00

We have two parties. One is the party of the emasculated, and the other is the emasculated party.

Okay, Now that I have officially looked into it

2009-08-31T12:45:00.001-07:00

Jonathan wrote in asking about the release of Super Mario Bros. I answered off the cuff but have now had a chance to look into it.

According Howard Lincoln, Minoru Arakawa, and Howard Philips, the game was not available during the limited trial launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the winter of 1985. It was available the following year as Nintendo took the product nationwide.

Also, for the record, an arcade version of the game predates the NES version and the well-known VS version. The original arcade version shipped in 1984.

I wish to thank Jonathan and Wgungfu for bringing up the question and making me check my records.

Weighing in at 115,191 words

2009-08-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

So I've finished the first draft of Wayson Harris #6 but I'm not sure what to call it. Here are some of the titles I've considered:

The Clone Redeption;

The Clone Empire;

The Clone Rebellion;

and

The Eponymous Clone.

From here I will rewrite the book several times over the next month or so. I'm guessing I will submit version 6.0, no joke. The previous Harris adventures went in after two or three drafts, but Harris #5 needed so much work that I gave it six coats of polish.

So, any votes on which title sounds best?

OKAY, SO MAYBE THIS IS A FORM OF COERCION

2009-07-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

You really should start your children reading your favorite

books while they are young.

Here is an excellent example of forward thinking. Young Kaleb

Spuler is clearly taking a moment to savor the deeper context

of the story. I imagine he has reached one of the

Plato passages, and he is applying Platonic logic to his

own life.

Well done, Kaleb.

So remember, members of the Sad Sam's Palace community,

even if you cannot start your children on the very best books,

you should certainly start them on mine!

LET'S TALK POTTER

2009-07-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

Considering the other openings this summer, I am betting Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has the biggest opening weekend of all-time.

I know, I contributed to it.

At the Lincoln Cinemas near my home, they showed the movie on 12 screens for the midnight showing and sold out on all of them. That's big. That's huge.

So bye-bye records set by Transformers 2 and The Fast and the Furious, good old Harry is going to make them disappear.

Now to the movie itself. It begins with Harry returning to Hogwarts. The world now acknowledges that Voldemort is back, security is everywhere.

Draco Malfoy, now dressed in Versachi instead of Slytherin robes, plays a larger role in this movie. He's up to something, something big, and the "Dark Lord" has put him up to it. Tom Felton, the kid who plays Malfoy is tall and gaunt, making him interesting to watch. He does a good job of looking pained and conflicted.

The movie hinges on twin storylines that can stand alone but often are connected: 1) Dumbledore teaching Harry about Voldemort by showing him a string of old memories; 2) Growing tensions between Harry and Malfoy as Harry tries to nail down Malfoy's polt. Voldemort does not make an appearance in this movie. Other familiar deatheaters do as do favorites from past movies; but gone are the Dursleys. The only sight we get of Little Winging is an absolutely gorgeous waitress flurting with Harry in a train station cafe.

So here's the deal, this movie is long and very well made. I think it is the best made Potter movie. This si the first one I have seen in which they struck the right balance between making Hogwarts a magical place and making it too much like Disneyland.

The acting is better. The new fellow who plays Professor Slugworth is particularly good, maybe the finest actor we've seen in the series. The special effects are downright spectacular.

The movie is also long. Really long. It is so long, in fact, that I think the end lost some of its dramatic punch.

Overall, I think Harry Potter may just edge-out Star Trek as this year's best summer blockbuster. That is a "may just." A little time and perspective is need. Both movies are excellent.

Since Hunter Brings it Up: Let's Talk Politics

2009-07-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

My guess is that a lot of us on this blog slant somewhat to the right when it comes to politics. I know that I do--not enough for my highly-conservative friends, but too much for my far more liberal family.

Because my publisher would prefer for me to keep my politics out of my writing, I am going to limit my participation in this discussion; but I do want to explain myself. After all, Hunter started this discussion when he brought up Sotomayor.

Let me start by saying a little something about cars.

When I was a kid, I thought the coolest cars on the road were the muscle cars. I really liked the Chevrolet Camero. For me, nothing topped the look of a hot Camero driving down the street. The 1968 Camero looked like the picture to the top right.

The enemy of all things Camero was the Firebird, which was a Pontiac. The 1968 Pontiac Firebird looked like the car in the top left hand picture.

Notice any similarities? Except for a few cosmetic changes and slightly different engines, these were the exact same car; but if you went to a Chevy dealer, he could speak for hours about the Camero's superiority over the Firebird and if you went to a Pontiac dealer, he could tell you exactly why Firebird was so much better than Camero.

For you Mustang fans, have a close look at the Mustangs and Cougars of the late 1960s.

Even when GM went to the "Corporate Motor" which put the exact same engines under Chevy and Pontiac hoods, the dealers still had persuasive-sounding reasons why their car was better. Finally, of course, Burt Reynolds settled the argument by starring in the Smokey and the Bandit movies and making Firebird the coolest car in America.

My point?

It didn't matter to GM whether you bought a Camero or a Firebird. As long as you bought one or the other, they took the money to the bank.

I see Republicans and Democrats as being in the same position. Yes, there are differences between Republican beliefs and Democrat beliefs. Some are as fundamental as the differences between the old Chevy and Pontiac engines, some are as cosmetic as the different bumpers.

But it doesn't matter. So long as you vote Republican or Democrat, they keep their monopoly on power.

I believe America needs a third party. During the last election, I voted for Bob Barr, whom I considered a decent candidate. I did not vote for him because I loved his views, though they weren't bad. I voted for him because I could not vote for Obama or McCain in good conscience, and I think both parties will continue playing the same dirty ball game until they are forced to play a cleaner game by losing votes.

Right now America is on a teeter totter. During the Clinton years, Americans lost confidence in the White House and voted Republicans into the House and Senate. During the Bush years, Americans were disappointed by Republicans, so now we have an all-Democrat nightmare.

We're going to keep running back and forth on this teeter-totter until we bring in a credible third option. And why should the existing parties want to change? Why should the Democrats or Republicans clean up their act when we're just running back and forth along the exact same track? Today the Republicans are fighting for their lives. Ten years ago, they said the same thing about the Democrats.

One more belief--Burt Reynolds gave Pontiac a decisive but temporary victory in the late 1970s by driving a Firebird in the Smokey and the Bandit movies. I don't mind Hollywood throwing its weight around in the car market, but I am sick of Hollywood and the news media trying to influence today's politics in the same manner.

Your Votes on Transformers 2

2009-07-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

I have not seen the movie, so let's hear your votes.

Josh was not impressed. Hunter enjoyed seeing the U.S. military take control.

Any other opinions?

COULD SONY PULL A SEGA?

2009-06-21T08:59:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of this generation of game consoles, I said that Sony was acting SEGA-esque by launching with a high-priced system that was notably difficult to program, much as SEGA did with the Saturn in 1995/1996. Like SEGA, Sony has dipped its toe in the handheld business and come out in second. Just as SEGA followed Game Gear with the limited release of Nomad, Sony wants seconds.

With Microsoft and Nintendo pulling away in overall console sales, rumors abound that Sony could pull the plug on its console business. Not a chance, folks. Sony has hit a rough spot after two colossal consoles. Even with its PS3 problems, Sony has still sold more hardware and more games over the last decade than anyone else.

Besides, where would Sony turn to to replace its game business? Back to televisions? PC computers? Cellular telephones? Stereo equipment? MP3 players? Sony's been there. Sony's done that.

A more likely scenario is that Sony will pull yet another trick out of the SEGA playbook. In 1998, SEGA abandoned the Saturn--a wise idea since Saturn sales had ground to a halt. In 1999, SEGA released the Dreamcast, a real gamer's game system bolstered by masses of incredible games created on the most part by SEGA. (Midway, Capcom, Namco and a few other companies jumped on board. We all remember when Namco released Soul Calibur on Dreamcast.)

With PlayStation 2 still 12 months away and Xbox and GameCube two years off, SEGA launched Dreamcast to try and jumpstart a new generation of hardware. Dreamcast had a tepid launch in Japan and then hit genuine paydirt with its U.S. launch. And then it fizzled to a halt as the world closed its pocketbook and decided to wait for PlayStation 2.

What went wrong? People had not yet tired of the PlayStations... and to some extent, their N64s. Many of the best games in any generation come out toward the end. SEGA launching its 16-bit Genesis had to compete with Super Mario Bros. 3. 3DO and Saturn had to compete with Donkey Kong Country.

Another problem was that SEGA did not have the money to launch and support a new system. SEGA was a company that always ran in the red. Even when Genesis/Mega Drive ruled in the United States and Europe, SEGA hemorrhaged money. Had it not been owned by the forgiving Hisao Okawa, the richest man in Japan, SEGA would not have survived into this century.

Nintendo is still selling lots of Wii systems and the Kyoto giant does not need to worry about the hardware becoming obsolete because it was obsolete at launch. (Keeping up with technology is not what Wii is about.) Microsoft is in distant but solid second place, just as Nintendo was a distant second against the original PlayStation. Both companies are talking about staying pat and giving off signals about staying with their current hardware into 2012.

Sony, losing at least $50/PS3, on the other hand, may well try to jump ahead. The problem is, that just as SEGA ran into satisfied Sony and Nintendo customers in 1999, Sony may well find the same thing in 2010.

Amazon Reviewer MJG if you are out there...

2009-05-28T16:16:00.000-07:00

Did you buy a print book or was that on Kindle? I would like to get that straightened out?

Punch-Out!! More Fun than Satisfying

2009-05-22T10:26:00.000-07:00

Punch-Out!! is back with all of its wacky, ethno-stereotypical fighters and goofy puzzles. Punch-Out!! was never so much a boxing simulation, not like Ring King or Fight Night. It's a puzzle game. Each opponent has a pattern. Once you figure out which punches to duck and when you can attack, victory follows.

Punch-Out!! for Wii is faithful to the spirit of the series. It is slightly less puzzle-centric than its predecessors, but it's still about facing wacky fighters who can only be hit in one or two ways during one or two moments of vulnerability.

So here's the deal. You are Mac, a tiny "up-and-coming boxer" fighting his way through three virtual circuits--the minors, majors, and world circuit. Along the way you will encounter a host of politically incorrect opponents such as Von Kaiser, the goose-stepping German; Glass Joe, the croissant-packing Frenchman; King Hippo, the enormous Polynesian, Great Tiger, the mystic Indian; Bald Bull, the angry Turk; and more. (Fortunately Heike Kagero, the angry Japanese metro-sexual is gone.)

The shock value of the racial humor wears thin pretty quickly. Fortunately, once the humor is gone the play value continues. Punch-Out!! is the kind of game that keeps you on your toes even after you have figured out all of its secrets. This is not to say that the replay value is incredibly high, but you probably will replay the game a time or two.

For an old timer like me, anyone who played games on the old NES really, Punch-Out!! is packed with nostalgia. The game looks and plays like an updated version of that masterful old game--it even features classic game controls for those who don't want to play using the nun chuck.

I am not suggesting that this is a great game, though I think it is a pretty good one. On the Wii scale, it does not come close to scoring on the Mario Galaxy/Mario Kart level--though it beats the heck out of all the party games that have come for the system. It's more on a production par with Metroid.

WAIT, THIS IS TERMINATOR?

2009-05-22T07:57:00.000-07:00

It was one of those weird dementia moments in which you become disoriented and forget where you are. I'm watching this move, right, and there's this 10-story-tall robot chasing two guys and a little girl that are driving in a tow truck. And then these motorcycle robots come speeding out of the giant evil robot's legs, and I'm thinking, "Oh boy, I hope Optimus gets here soon!"

But wait, the guys in the tow truck took care of the problem themselves. They did this amazing fishing trick with the truck's hook and chain, and all of a sudden I realized, "Yeah, this isn't a Transformers movie, it's Terminator Salvation."

I figured that out about one-third of the way through the movie. I think it took the script writers a little longer. For some of the movie, they seemed to have thought they were writing War of the Worlds II. And for some of the movie they went Transformers. Some of the movie even reminded me of Logan's Run.

That said, Terminator Salvation is worth seeing. Count me among the 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes who gives this movie a grudging thumbs up. The special effects are good, the characters are good enough, and the surprise at the end is too cool.

This is the story of what takes place after Judgement Day... The machines are finally on top, and humans are living like rodents in the wild. John Conner is not the big chief of the resistance, but his star is rising quickly. He's sort of the Che Guevara to Michael Ironside's Fidel Castro.

Then along come a big, mean, brooding survivor who is not really a survivor and we never mistake him for anything but a machine with skin--this is not a spoiler, they show that in the trailers. The machine-man seems trustworthy. Since Conner is played by Christian Bale, we even like the machine-guy more than Conner.

As the movie goes on, it gets more and more on track. By the end, it's pretty good. And then it loses a little momentum at the very end. Terminator Salvation is guilty of the all-time most flagrant misuse of the macho nod in film history.

When we left the movie, my friend Kevin and I tried to stack the movies of Summer 2009 in order of enjoyment. We both put Star Trek at the top--I wasn't kidding when I said that I went back and realized how much I had missed. Kevin liked Wolverine more than Terminator Salvation. It certainly had better characters and the dumb moments were not as dumb. I preferred Terminator for one simple reason, the climax. With Wolverine, right at the moment when you want to the movie to be at its best, it lets you down. With Terminator, the movie rose to the occasion.

STAR TREK REDUX!!!

2009-05-14T22:47:00.000-07:00

I LOVE THIS MOVIE!

I just got back from seeing Star Trek a second time. Am I ever glad I went a second time. I saw so many great things that I overlooked on my first time out.

I still don't like the young Kirk scene and have little use for the bar scene, either. Other than that, I take back everything I said.

My first time out I gave this movie a B verging on B+. This time I give it an A.

I have not gone out and bought a movie in a long time, but when this one comes out--legally--I will undoubtedly buy a copy.

STAR TREK...Trampled Space

2009-05-10T21:27:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to bury the lead on this one... I did not love the new Star Trek movie. I liked it, but I did not love it.

Star Trek starts out with a bang! Man, the opening scene in this movie may well be the best scene in any Star Trek movie ever. Faran Tahir (the head terrorist from Iron Man) makes a haunting showing in that opening sequence. Is it just me or does this guy radiate intelligence.

He may be the smartest man alive in real life or he may be too slow to spell his own name, I don't know; but on screen, he comes across as an understated genius. If I had to guess, I'd place him on the genius side.

What follows after that first scen, however, quickly settles into just above average story telling. There's a bunch of meaningless stuff about the young and rebellious James Kirk, the Iowa roughneck, etc. etc. We see him enter the Starfleet Academy. Predictably, they show the Kobiyashi Maru incident. All of this is entertaining, but not great.

Finally we get into the guts of the story. Here's a new territory for Star Trek, the show is about aliens in a really big spaceship that destroys entire Starfleet fleets in a single whack. No one can possibly stand up to it, until the Enterprise..

So Kirk, and Spock, and Chekov, and Uhura, and McCoy, and Scotty, and Sulu fly a dangerous mission as they learn to work together and earn each other's respect. And just when things are bleakest, well, you know.

The cast of this movie does an excellent job. John Cho makes no attempt to play Sulu like George Takei. He makes the character all new. Chris Pine paints some new wrinkles on James T. Kirk, but the character of Kirk has long been evolving. Zachary Quinto looks the part of a young Spock, but he's a tad too soft-spoken. Zoe Saldana has modernized Uhura brilliantly.

In truth, they all earned their keep and played well together.

As Nero, the evil bad guy, Eric Bana is also good but understated. He plays a man made evil by outrage who might otherwise have been a pretty good fellow. Bana has experience in these kinds of roles and plays them well.

So why didn't I love the movie? What's to love? Spock spends most of the movie as an irritating simp, the special effects were uneven-ranging from great to good, the dialog was peppy but sometimes weak, the actors did the best they could with story twists that felt dated in the 60s, everything was good... few things were great.

I give this movie a B and look forward to an A+ sequel. It is well known through out the SF community, the even-numbered Star Trek movies are always better than their odd-numbered counterparts.

Hey, has anybody here War Machine by Andy Remic?

2009-05-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

I've heard good things.

X-MEN Origins: Wolverine--Why you SHOULD care

2009-05-02T00:35:00.000-07:00

Okay, look, some parts of this movie are patently stupid and others are blatantly predictable. What do you expect, it is a superhero movie... and not a literary one like The Watchmen.

Here's the score: Back in the 1800s, two young boys named Jimmy and Victor have a quite an epiphany when they discover they are half-brothers over the body of their recently killed father. Not only are they brothers, they are mutants to boot. Sadly, they discover this only after they are wanted for murder for killing daddy. So together, they escape the law and join the Army. Together, they fight in the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Vietnam... all before the end of the opening credits.

After that, our two lovable outcasts join a very special branch of special forces which eventually leads to an argument and they go their separates ways. Six years later, destiny throws them together again when cruel, evil Victor ruins sweet Jimmy's life incognito.

All very predictable, yes. What I had not expected was the charismatic performances. Note, I am saying charismatic, not necessarily good. Liev Schreiber is really, really fun to watch as Victor Creed, the evil half brother with the cat-like claws and the pointy teeth. Taylor Kitsch is more than adequate as Gambit--the card-throwing mutant. And Hugh Jackman? Well, Hugh Jackman may not be Laurence Olvier or even Bruce Willis; but he's dependable, likable, and believable. After three earlier outings, he's certainly comfortable playing Wolverine.

Now for the bad news. There are times when the dialog in this movie is painfully bad.

"How bad?" you ask. The dialog is so bad that one of the final bad guys had to be recreated with no mouth. I'm not joking. They sealed the guy's mouth off with skin, like what Agent Smith did to Neo in The Matrix. (Well, okay, I don't really know if that was why the guy's mouth was sealed, but it's the best explanation I could come up with.)

Okay, now that I have picked on some of the bad parts (I have left out the redundant scenes of Wolverine being thrown through the air by enemy after enemy only to come back and win the fight, the lame love story, the bad guy who looks and acts like Braka from Mortal Kombat, the silly cameo at the end, and did I mention the bad dialog?), let's talk about why I would give this movie a C+ and very possibly a B-.

Fist of all, the Wolverine did a great job of answering questions and tying loose ends. Paid critics and die hard X-Men fans will disagree, of course; but paid critics earn their livings by sounding superior and the die hard comics community is seldom pleased. Me, I'm not paid and haven't read an X-Men comic in decades. I'm blissfully ignorant and more than anxious to share my opinion.

What I liked best about this movie is how almost all of the mutants seemed less developed than the main X-Men mutants. As you watch the main mutants in X-Men Origins, you get the feeling they are inferior to Phoenix, Cyclops, Magneto... You get the feeling that they are from an earlier evolution.

So, in the end, while I may have lost a few brain cells watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I walked away well-entertained. If you see the movie, let me know what you think.

THE CLONE BETRAYAL NOW HAS A FACE!

2009-05-01T11:12:00.001-07:00

Christian McGrath, my favorite artist in the science fiction community, has struck again.

This morning the lovely and talented Anne, my editor at Ace Book, sent me this little present. I am overjoyed, to say the least.

Thank you Mr. McGrath!

BRING OUT YOUR BOOK! BRING OUT YOUR BOOKS!

2009-04-21T08:35:00.000-07:00

Well, guys, one of our members is looking for new books to read. Every last one of you is better read than I am. So here is the challenge. The first five of you who can recommend 10 unique science fixtion novels (and wants to participate), can be a "Crew Member X" in Wayson Harris # Six," which is due at my publishers by the end of August.

Submit your list of books and the name you would like to see. No submitting other people's names. No submitting stage names. Your books, your name, and your written permission.

Oh, and I know of at least one of you who does not want to be victimized in book form, but is especially well-read. Those of you with no ambition of being a Crew Member X may also submit. In fact, please do.

A WORD ABOUT VAVATRON

2009-04-13T10:11:00.001-07:00

It is a hoax. I wrote it as an April Fools gag, which I had actually wanted to publish on March 31. As Japan is 18 hours ahead of us, 6:00 a.m. March 31 in Seattle would be April Fools day in Japan.

The idea for this little prank, along with the game, came from Chris Charla and Mike Mika.

To those of you who were confused as to what to believe, I apologize for the delay in tipping my hand. With the debate over the story's validity still raging, my editor wanted to give readers a few extra days to decide for themselves.

And for those of you who were wondering, those were quotes from Will Wright, Eddie Adlum, David Rosen, Eugene Jarvis, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Owen Rubin, Al Alcorn, et. al.

Chris Taylor played along on a different level, allowing me to use his name.

Casey Staubach, on the other hand, never existed.

CONGRATULATIONS AARON, JENNIFER, & KALEB

2009-04-02T14:42:00.000-07:00

Well, Sad Sammers, there is a new Spuler in the world--Kaleb, born to Aaron and Jennifer yesterday at 2:00 p.m.

Congratulations, Aaron, a long and happy life for your first-born!

IT'S UP! My biggest historical piece since The Ultimate History of Video Games

2009-04-01T17:32:00.000-07:00

http://retro.ign.com/articles/968/968266p1.html

So here it is--THE VAVATRON STORY.

I interviewed Will Wright, Chris Taylor, David Rosen, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Eddie Adlum, Eugene Jarvis, Owen Rubin, Al Alcorn and more just putting this baby together. What do you think?

Senia, this one should be of special interest to you.

Just a quick heads up

2009-03-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

I have an important story coming out this week on IGN.com. This may be the coolest piece of game history I have ever, ever covered... so keep your eyes on IGN this week.

And let me know what you think!

OKAY, AARON, LET'S TALK WATCHMEN

2009-03-26T12:51:00.000-07:00

I have not seen the movie. In fact, I do not attend R-rated movies at all.

There seems to be no middle ground when it comes to The Watchmen, people either love it or hate it. I have heard it called both "vivid" and "dull." I have heard people praise the movie for bing just like the graphic novel and panned for being too much like the graphic novel.

So denizens of Sad Sam's Palace, which is it? On this blog, you guys get the last word on the subject.

IN DEFENSE OF VERNON DURSLEY

2009-03-06T10:25:00.000-08:00

Too much has been written about Harry Potter, so today let's take a look at his unpleasant uncle, drill salesman Vernon Dursley.

Thanks to the books and movies, Dursley has become an icon of modern society, a brutish, nasty, closed-minded bigot who bullies his nephew and spoils his son. Have I missed any charges?

In truth, Dursley is guilty of one crime and one minor offense. His minor offense is that he is an intensely dislikable fellow. The real strike against him is that he is a common man; and these days, few things are so deplorable as the common man.

Seriously, read the Potter books and you quickly realize that while Voldemort, Lucius Malfoy, and Delores Umbridge are portrayed as bad people, Vernon Dursley and his family receive even worse treatment. They are held in derision.

So what exactly is wrong with the Dursleys? Well, they are mean to Harry, the freeloader who has moved into their home and thus endangered their lives. He didn't even come with any inheritance, at least not that he is willing to share. Vernon and Petunia accepted Harry into their home with no dowry, knowing full-well that evil wizards would like to kill him.

Beyond the crime of living in a normal home on a normal block in a normal suburb, the only law-breaking Vernon seems to do is overwater his lawn during a time of rationing. Really, folks, we are talking about a man who is faithful to his wife and adores his hulking son. Sure, Dursley seems oblivious to his son's room temperature IQ. So what? We're talking about a tax-paying, law-abiding, home owner.

But here is where Vernon Dursley goes from bigot to good man... Have you ever heard Harry apologize? The last time we see Dursley and his family in the books, they need to be evacuated from their home because Harry will shortly turn 17 and then his enemies will come and kill everyone in the house. Harry never apologizes to the Dursleys for causing them to abandon their home. He doesn't even say thank you.

Harry's lack of gratitude is not highlighted in the book, however. What is harped about in the book is that Vernon gives Harry little more than a nod and a quick goodbye. Personally, I'd have something a bit stronger for the boy who cost me my home.

So were any of you guys cool in high school

2009-02-26T19:11:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I just got back from Hawaii where, among other things, I attended my 30th high school reunion. Well, I sort of attended it. I meant to stay for 30 minutes, but left after only 10 minutes.

Have any of you read Room 1408 by Stephen King. That's 'read,' not seen the stupid movie. If you happened to have read the book, well that was kind of how my reunion went. I entered with plans of hanging around for a while, saw that the room was possessed by evil demons, and fled for my life.

Now these were not ordinary evil demons, these were evil demons with a good excuse. From 1974-1978, these evil demons had the misfortune of knowing me as a fellow student. They had a four-year-long first impression of nerdiness, social ineptitude, and utter disgrace. My senior year, someone nominated me for "Most likely to be Gonged." (If you have never heard the term, look up The Gong Show on Youtube.) I didn't even win that.

So I get to the reunion, do one lap around the nearly empty room, and only see one familiar face. It belonged to a girl who was on the same swim team as me for a year--only she was good. She, her husband, and someone I did not know were sitting around a table. I stood and spoke with them for a minute or two and could tell that they did NOT want me to join them. When I asked them what kind of work they were in, Stephanie said that she and her husband were both working for a hospital. When they asked me what I did, I said, "Loafing, mostly," and excused myself.

I was already starting to leave when I ran into two more familiar faces and a stranger with a good memory. The stranger with the good memory looks at me and says, "Steve Kent! Why don't you do another hamburger eating demonstration?"

(Gulp, here we go... For Spirit Week, my senior year, I agreed to try and set a hamburger eating record. A small audience came to watch as I wolfed burgers, only McDonalds did not agree with me on that particular day and I spewed like Vesuvius into a trash can.)

That was the grand total of my 30-year high school reunion. I was on my way out when I ran into Mr. Congeniality, so I excused myself and and went to autograph books at the Kahala B&N.

My 40th reunion will be in Las Vegas. Believe it or not, I may actually go. A friend from my high school days asked if my wife and I would attend with her and her husband on a double date.