Dark Lotus Books entry from Substack
Back in the day, IOW when I was a raw kid of 20, I took a short break from college and decided to attempt to write a novel. In six weeks through a mist of cigarette smoke and a concoction of caffeine and canned chili, I cranked out a science fiction story of 80,000 words.
The first few pages were not bad, I thought and I still think, which was good news since I had never written any fiction before that in my short life. I called it Maalstrom, deliberately misspelling maelstrom while imparting the same meaning of that word. I think I stumbled on a Dutch spelling. Whatever. And as I wrote, my love of words began to spill onto the ancient manual typewriter faster and faster and with ever more of a sense of musicality as I discovered that words do not just have meaning but are mellifluous and ring like musical bells.
Since then I have lived my life floating on a sea of script with insane perorations emerging as from a dark forest in various tongues: twisted English, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and French as I rampaged my way through college seizing upon each of these masterful means of expression.
Much of these manifold means seeped into my next work, the sequel to Maalstrom, which I wrote ten years later between other degrees, entitled The Selk King, 120,000 words.
Both of these books centered on the life of one Flores of the Turlicum, a warrior on an alien planet circling twin suns, engaged in life or death struggles in a harsh medieval world, much like a certain Greek warrior before the walls of Troy. And like Odysseus, in the sequel, Flores sets out across a turbulent ocean with bizarre aberrant life forms passing overhead, guiding as it were his ship and crew to a pyramid near the pole of the strange planet, a pyramid built around a solid black pillar in air, its hard stone carved with intricate ebony sculptures informing, or warning, penitents or assailants, of what the city in the clouds atop the pyramid of carbon holds in wait for those who would penetrate the mysteries of Heaven.
Readers of Maalstrom and The Selk King encountered a number of relics of an advanced civilization and were left wondering How could these exist in a purely medieval society that has no knowledge of firearms or motors?
My latest novel answers this question. I recently completed ‘Temple of the Double Sun’, my 10th novel, which is the Prequel (now Book 1 of the Maalstrom Series) to Maalstrom (now Book 2) and The Selk King ( now Book 3). Published by TWB Press, ‘Temple’ tells the story of one Milo-Psi 2, a shy ecologist who is one of 200 colonists from Earth who have been sent on a one-way voyage by the infallible Chaldeans to the newly discovered planet Maalstrom.
‘OUR NEW HOME’… For readers of Maalstrom and The Selk King who were wondering how it all started and why there are occasional remnants of a prior technical society, the novel Temple of the Double Sun answers those questions.
MORE NEWS. Book 4 is now out: SWORDS OF THE DOUBLE SUN. Perhaps the most masculine book ever written. You won’t understand that until you read it.
Free Equus Newsletter
More news on Substack
