THE ASTRAL IMPERATIVE

2010-04-12T09:17:00.000-07:00

I announced my arrival on this blog several months ago and was easily sidetracked by other interests, like finishing the Astral Imperative trilogy and two other books. The truth is that I'd rather be writing books than selling them, but I have no choice. If my work is to reach a wider audience, I have to make the effort to market them and learn to love it.
I began to write the trilogy when I ran out of good sci-fi books to read. They were too dry and not very creative, so I endeavored to write something new, combining cutting edge science with with high concept philosophy, religious mysticism and unrelenting emotional intensity. To date, I've published the first two volumes of the Astral Imperative series to remarkable reviews (I refer you to my website: robertdresner.com), and I have managed to sell nearly 400 books out one book store in Boulder where I live. Though Vols I &II are for sale on Amazon, I have made no effort to market them. I wanted to wait until the trilogy was completed, so I could benifit from the feedback and iron out the kinks--which turned out to be a really good idea. I am grateful for all the support and encouragement, and surprised at the wide range of people who have read these books: from teenagers to NASA scientists. I suppose I am most gratified by how well these books have been recieved by women, who tell me it is the first sci-fi they have ever read that has truky and deeply engaged them . . . because I put realistic people in realistic situations in the note too distant future. I put the planet at risk and asked my characters to act out our own fears, and rise to the occasion of our heroic potential.
The publishing history of these books goes like this: The Senior Sales Rep for St. Martins/TOR has read over a thousand manuscripts in his carreer and told his editors that The Astral Imperative was the best he's ever read, the next wave in the genre becauce of the unusual mix of religion, science and emtional intensity.
His editors didn't see it, didn't think it was sci-fi enough for their sci-fi imprint. It wasn' the usual plot-driven, one dimensional crap they've bee passing off as literature these past few years.
Then I publish these books myself and Harper/Collins gets interseted. An editor there reads Vol I and says he loves it, and tells me how well written it is, but he's also afraid it's not sci-fi enough for his market, but he asks to read Vol II--which he does--and says it's even better written, but it's just too "earthy" for his readers.
I got the message: I didn't write sci-fi; I wrote Visionary Fiction. In fact, I believe that I have, inadvertently, defined this new category. And to get a better idea of aho I am and what I've written, intend to share excerpts of my books on this blogsite beginning now with Vol I The Dream:

1) It began in the year 2037, when destiny met with the Starship Aelita. The vessel was a marvel of technology, able to sustain nine astronauts for three and a half months on the first manned mission to Mars.
Earth, having recently emerged from a decade of vicious regional conflict and wanton terrorist activity, faced a widespread shortage of energy and an ominous surge in global warming. Super storms and rising tides ravaged the continents with increasing frequency.
Nearing the brink of self-destruction, the planet sought confirmation, something to anoint the peace, sanctify the massive communal effort, and lend faith to the future. But some people were not so well intentioned, and other people were not prepared to meet their destiny.

* * *

The red planet turned slowly in his mind. It was on fire, burning in the space between thoughts. His flight suit was well ventilated; the cockpit was air-conditioned to twenty-one degrees centigrade. It was the pressure to succeed that was cooking his brains. He was Captain Adam Sietzer, Officer In Command.
He was sitting on the edge of the launch pad, at the helm of an E-4 scramjet, weighing his blessings against his fears: thrilled to be first among men, terrified by the prospect of failure. But the captain was not inclined to betray a fault. He lived inside. No one knew what he really thought and felt—not even his wife—yet everyone thought that Adam was the best suited for command. The sum total of all Earth’s hopes and dreams, the point man for human evolution, Captain Adam Sietzer was a stranger to the world that he represented. . .

2) Rounder opened the press briefing with a simple statement citing two problems with the launch: a glitch in the docking mechanism on Star One, and a violent storm system moving in from the Gulf.
“The idea is to fix the glitch before we contend with the storm. The launch is a race against time, nothing more,” Rounder explained.
He took several technical questions before a reporter, representing conservative interests, confronted him with a philosophical challenge.
“If I’m not mistaken, you have often equated the mission to Mars as a race for survival, as a necessity to fulfill our evolutionary destiny. Can you elaborate?”
“In the past we find the seeds of our future. From the very beginning of creation, it has been the primordial urge of life to survive, to expand the search for energies into unknown territories, to seek out others and unite with them in the quest for sustenance, to become self aware in the process of discovery and feed on the wonders of the imagination. This is the fuel that will take us to Mars.”
“In other words, you are equating the instinct to survive with the drive to explore?” the reporter pressed.
“Of course. The urge to survive implies the necessity of discovery. The search for food is an act of discovery. And the quest for knowledge is the evolutionary extension of the quest for sustenance. We must go to Mars and beyond if we are to survive.”
“Even at the expense of feeding ourselves?” a second reporter challenged. “Even if it means that some people might starve while others are well fed in the process of acquiring this knowledge?”
The question of priorities was nothing new. While the majority of the people on Earth did support the mission to Mars, a sizable opposition—comprised of an odd lot of wealthy globalists, environmental activists, far left liberals and religious conservatives—was against the mission. And Rounder never failed to meet their challenge. “As far as I can see, we have come to a point in evolution that the act of feeding ourselves does not guarantee our survival—when our penchant to survive may be directly dependent on fulfilling the dream of our own becoming, on the acquisition of knowledge.”

3) In the meantime, Makoto Okano, the Japanese team member, explained his new computer game to the crew. “I was waiting until we were on the Star One station to introduce this to all of you. It is an interactive, community game that can be played together or alone with our imaginations. But I think that it is just as well to begin now. The point of this game is to build a working model of Mars based upon our collective contributions to the project.”
Makoto Okano was the team computer whiz. Now forty-nine years old, he would be celebrating his fiftieth birthday on Mars. An ardent Zen Buddhist, he had been trained in the martial arts since childhood. He was also a source of great wisdom and equanimity—the kind of guy Captain Adam Sietzer needed to talk to.
The computer that Makoto was working on at the dining table was specially constructed by him for the expedition. The size of a 30-year-old laptop, it had the ability to project an incredibly detailed, thirty-six inch, symmetrical, three-dimensional holographic image in space. The resolution was so high, the imaging so sharp, that Mars seemed to be floating in real space over the dining table as Makoto continued to explain.
“The first part of our game starts now at the beginning of our journey by looking at the planet and inputting our thoughts and feelings about the mission onto the software: how we feel about our mission, what we think about Mars, what we hope for, what we fear might happen, and so on. The computer will do the rest. It will collect all of this information and synthesize it, creating a projected model of Mars that is the sum total of all our hopes and dreams and fears. In fact, I expect our communal mind projection will actually alter the physical appearance of the virtual planet in three-dimensional space. As our feelings and thoughts change during the journey, so will the appearance of the planet.”
Hakim asked, “What will happen if we attempt to input information that has nothing to do with Mars or our mission? Will that have an effect on the projected image?”
Okano flashed a mysterious smile and said, “You’ll see.”
The fascinated crew watched in reverent silence as Makoto made the first entry into their collective diary game. He used a combination of voice commands and subtle hand gestures to communicate with the computer, the data bracelets on his wrists serving as neural-muscular transducers driving an adaptive virtual keyboard in three-dimensional space.
The computer responded verbally. “What color is this planet?” it began.
Makoto said, “This planet is red.”
“How does red make you feel?”
Makoto said, “The color red feels hot.”
Continuing its queries, the computer asked, “What do you think about the color red?”
After finishing his entries, Makoto resumed his instruction to the crew.
“This computer is capable of sophisticated linguistic and psychological analysis. It has been programmed to key in on certain words and phrases that are common to all of our languages. It can draw upon all the great literature in our various cultures to create an image of what we are thinking and feeling in relation to Mars. For instance, if you associate the color red with anger, anger may have the quality of hardness.
“Accordingly, the planet Mars will turn very red and will appear ever more solid. If we think of it mostly as cold, the image will conform accordingly and may appear less red. And so on. The program is actually far more complex than this, but I will leave that for you to discover.”
Beyond changing the image of the planet, the game could serve as a historical record of their mission and project a detailed, communal vision of a distant future. The polar caps could be tapped for water, cities could be built, population profiles could be drawn. In effect, the communal mind of the Aelita crew could use Makoto’s program to project the evolution of the entire human race in space, including the settling of other planets and contact with alien species, to the end of this third millennium!
Essentially, the Imagining Mars program would serve as the quintessential diary of human potential as represented by the first people to set foot on another planet. The computer would serve as a basis for future innovation, its memory composed of liquid DNA, its speed and complexity exceeding the functions of the human brain. By Makoto’s own estimation, it was very nearly conscious.
The crew was captivated, already thinking about their game entries, when Okano snapped his fingers and exclaimed, “Behold the universe!”
The image of Mars dispersed on command and another holograph sprang to life in its place. The room filled with gasps of awe and wonder as Okano explained. “It is a region somewhere in the far reaches of space that has been amalgamated by the machine with some input from myself, including photographs and astronomical charts.”
This deep space projection was very nearly alien, like nothing the crew had ever seen before, comprised of countless luminous spheres, roiling in layers of multi-colored clouds; growing ever-brighter until the whole cosmorama became translucent and evaporated into nothingness.
“Lastly and most importantly, in order to preserve the integrity of the game and enhance the mystery, all contributions to the game should be submitted anonymously, and all will be amalgamated instantaneously by the program. No one, regardless their expertise, will be privy to another crew member’s input.”By unanimous agreement, the crew elected to keep their three-dimensional diary secret, pending the outcome of the expedition.

4) Game Entry:

The planet Mars does not look so red to me. And I am not angry when I think of the color red. I think Okano made a mistake when he used the color red to describe the planet because he assumed that we all see the planet through the same eyes as the ass-backward Greeks. He should have known better and used an unrelated subject, or maybe another planet, to illustrate the function of this rather remarkable game. As a scientist, he should have known the value of an untainted program. The issue is already clouded so our future will be clouded unless we can disregard Okano’s impression. I hope the others will recognize the problem and try to do the same as myself.

When I was a child and I looked up into the night sky I could not distinguish Mars from the other heavenly bodies. They all looked very much the same to me. They all looked like stars. I didn’t know about Mars until my parents showed me one night. My mother said it was red, but it didn’t look red to me. My father said that I needed glasses.

I was already in college when I took a really long look at Mars and saw the red. But it didn’t look angry. It looked beautiful, like a ruby. And we are stuck with the first impression of the ass-backward Greeks. Okano should have known better, really.

So I will call Mars my ruby in the sky. And I will say that it makes me feel warm all over when I look up to it. And when I have looked at the pictures of Mars from the surface cameras, I still think that it is quite beautiful—especially the pink sky. It does look a little like New Mexico.

I know that there is evidence of great bodies of water that once existed on Mars. But it is so hard for me to fathom, because the planet looks so dead in the surface pictures. I am most intrigued by the theory that postulates that life on Earth originated on Mars, that a meteorite of some kind from there landed here and began the process of evolution. If this is so, we may yet find evidence of life on Mars despite the appearance of things.

Talking about life makes me feel good because I am beginning to fear my own death—because I had a dream that I would die on Mars. I saw myself in a cave looking into a mirror. It was a smooth sheet of ice that cracked. The air rushed out of my lungs and my body crumbled into many pieces and I knew that my life was over. And I heard a voice, a woman’s voice calling out to me, telling me to go somewhere with her, to the other side of life, I think. It was all very disturbing and I cannot shake the memory. And I now am thinking that the ass-backward Greeks were not so simpleminded after all: they equated Mars with war, which is a precursor to death.

I hate feeling like this, having all these bad thoughts—especially now when I am trying to do good things, but I will not try and deceive myself. I will accept what comes despite my fears. I will embrace the future even if it will not include me. In the end, no matter what we find on Mars, we will find out much more about ourselves. As along as we give more than we take, we will stay ahead of the game—no matter who is setting the rules—and I am forced to wonder what kind of games are being played in other people’s minds. Are they having bad dreams? Are they suspicious of the forces that are moving them? Do they see Mars through the eyes of the Greeks? Are they predisposed to believe that the color red means war?

1/4/10

2010-01-04T15:52:00.000-08:00

I have arrived--finally!

The Astral Imperative

2009-12-29T14:52:00.001-08:00

What's the next book you need to read? The Astral Imperative, of course!

Robert Dresner

THE ASTRAL IMPERATIVE

1/4/10

The Astral Imperative