Science Fiction (plus)
by
Carl Bussjaeger
 Tales with a common theme: What if space were not a government monopoly? |
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Tales with a common theme: What if space were not a government monopoly? |
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Net Assets | The Anarchists
Novels
Net Assets What would the government do to stop it? In the early 21st century, someone has finally had it with the lost dreams and broken promises of government-sponsored space access. It begins quietly on the Internet, then grows into a small company determined to do what many believed impossible: Private, affordable, regular orbital launches. For anyone. And everyone. NASA hates the competition. The FAA wants to regulate the ground vehicle. The FCC wants to know what they're talking about. And the DoD remembrs that the United States' first launchers were intercontinental ballistic missile boosters for nuclear weapons. Clearly, space access needs to be a government monopoly.
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Bargaining Position (working title) When governments failed to live up to their own hype, and in fact refused to get out of the way, dedicated people set out on their own. They were immediately followed by the damned, the desperate, the hopeful, and the curious;each have their own motivations and methods, but generally speaking, they are out to make a living. They have largely left earth to muddle its way out of its own centuries' worth of troubles. But there are a couple of catches. Beyond an environment near-instantly lethal to the careless; beyond back-breakingly hard work; beyond distances that can be computed but are more difficult to imagine; beyond all that is catch number one: Unscrupulous operators were among those motivated to head out. Catch number two? Someone else got there first. What begins as a purely speculative prospecting venture quickly escalates into a multi-sided battle for the ultimate prize for people still learning to live in space. Oddly enough, Bargaining Position (working title) came before Net Assets, which was written to establish background for the "first" novel. BP is in near-final draft. I'm doing some proofreading and fixing continuity errors before submitting it to my publisher. Hopefully, you'll see it soon. BP is less overtly political than NA (which was a plot necessity to explain things people might otherwise find outrageous); it's hard SF action/adventure and (I'd like to think) humor. And for the record, that thumbnail graphic is not the actual cover art; just something I came up with as a placeholder for this page.
Caveat Emptor (working title) An opportunistic interstellar exploration outfit takes advantage of a ditzy client to fund an operation to survey a new rogue planet, and test the limits of interspecies compatibility. But they didn't figure on fuzzy alien predators, hard-wired soldiers, and a mysterious predecessor species (yeah, it's been done; but I have a new twist...). This one is just starting first rough draft, and several new characters and plot elements have insisted on squeezing their way into what I thought was going to be a simple tale. It's better this way, but unless someone waves a deadline-setting advance on royalties in my face, I'm not sure when it will be finished. Stay tuned. Again, the thumbnail is just my own placeholder, not actual cover art.
Short Stories
The Anarchists
DJ | Bounty Hunter | Postage Due
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Copyright © 2003 - 2010 by Carl Bussjaeger. All rights reserved.
Deep space manned flight is a long-established reality.
If you paid close attention to Net Assets and The Anarchists, you may realize that sometimes I have trouble letting a character go. Or – more accurately – sometimes my characters insist on 