Swords of the Double Sun

AVAILABLE NOW! The most masculine book ever written!

Ambushed in a wilderness on the alien planet Maalstrom, Flores of the Turlicum is forced to go to war against the Guildmaster and his acolytes to save his love, Crestal. Fighting draks and other strange creations of ‘Vensor’s Mother’, Flores follows Yezd the Omega back to the Island of the Sun-god, the Black Pillar, and the glass city above the pyramid. The final secrets of the Mok-sa colonizers from Earth and Yezd’s true motives are revealed in this fourth and final novel of the Maalstrom Series. Looking for hyper-masculine action with lots of gore? You found it.

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NOTE: it is recommended to read the Maalstrom Series in proper order:

TEMPLE OF THE DOUBLE SUN (Book 1)

MAALSTROM (Book 2)

THE SELK KING (Book 3)

SWORDS OF THE DOUBLE SUN (Book 4)

For readers of Maalstrom and The Selk King who were wondering how it all started and why there were occasional remnants of a prior technical civilization in a medieval society of those two novels, the story Temple of the Double Sun laid the groundwork by relating what happened to the original Earth colonists after they landed on the alien planet Maalstrom, and Swords of the Double Sun answers all remaining questions as to what became of them and why.

How the Maalstrom Series came to be: In 1975 at the age of 20, I wrote the book MAALSTROM in a few weeks while on a brief break from college while I was exploring many different avenues of personal expression including jazz, guitar, poetry, Russian composers, literature, etc. 10 years later I began work on its sequel, THE SELK KING. This second book took about 4 years to finish. Many readers of these two self-published novels were puzzled as to how this Conan-style story could be called sci-fi when it was set in a medieval background. After many personal adventures of my own as an international attorney and anthropologist, I finally managed to find the time to complete TEMPLE OF THE DOUBLE SUN, which served as a prequel and was soon published as Book 1 of the Series. Written in about 3 months at the age of 70, TEMPLE spelled out how Earth colonists landed on the alien planet Maalstrom, and how their plans went drastically awry. This was soon followed by SWORDS, which I wrote rapidly in only 14 weeks, also at the age of 70. TEMPLE and SWORDS, both published by TWB Press, serve as frames for MAALSTROM and SELK KING, spelling out in detail why this Conan-style series of 4 novels is in fact a science-fiction tale, a cohesive story that percolated for 50 years before I finally put it on paper in my declining years. For readers of MAALSTROM, the spacecraft on the cover of the book foreshadowed TEMPLE which relates the landing of the Earth colonists. All it took for that to become clear was a little patience.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE MAALSTROM SERIES.

Maalstrom was begun in the autumn of 1975 on a manual typewriter “in a smoke-filled haze” as a twenty-year old college sophomore. This was the first fiction I ever wrote. Most was completed in two months. The Selk King came later and took four years to write.

The story: long ago, colonists from Earth landed on Maalstrom, a newly discovered planet circling a double-sun. The colonists were exposed to a species of native wasp and their DNA merged with the wasp DNA. Abandoning the other colonists, some of the ‘infected’ women secluded themselves in shelters which they built around water springs and began giving birth insect-fashion, their male offspring living outside the shelters while their female offspring remained confined inside.

These ‘wasp-queens’ found their lifespans greatly extended. Vensa was one of the original colonists, already over a thousand years old when she gave birth to Flores and Amina, and her original shelter, which Flores stumbled across in the cavern beneath Ven’s Temple, then crumbling, long since surmounted by the imposing cloistered Temple.

In the way of all mortals, Flores will die, but Amina may live for millennia, and if adequately protected by the unruly men exiled to the ‘outer slums’ of Vensa’s City, will give birth to many generations. Amina’s manipulative and selfish behavior is essential to the survival of her quasi-insect species, to which Flores belongs.

The changes in DNA were not confined to the colonist-queens, however, but also created the malkops, or ‘selks,’ resulting in a complex biological interdependence between the queens in their temples, the men in their cities, the malkops flying above, the plant-men, and Atasan.
That is the background—a swashbuckling Conan-style tale of bloody encounters on an alien planet that can be read merely for fun.
The symbolism goes further.

Maalstrom is the product of researches in anthropology, archaeology, and the psychology and sociology of religion. Religious myth—or, as that is a redundant phrase, just myth—organizes all human societies. It is social glue, the common values and thought patterns that hold a people together and enable them to communicate and cooperate. Myth is not only for ‘those primitive people over there’—it is everything that you know, and what you think you know. A human without myth is the ultimate contradiction; there never has been, and never can be, humans without myth.

Every person with unique values and insights knows well the consequences of straying outside the boundaries of a society’s myths. They become heretics. Flores is such a heretic. Or rather becomes one through the process of discovering the biological realities of his insect species, and the supra-factual nature of its myths. These myths are enforced by an interplay of custom, religion, economics, ideology, and ultimately raw force. No society for long allows heretics to publicly undermine the social glue that allows its society to function. Thus the City of Ven rejects Flores.

But Flores, by his Will to Power, will not be stopped by convention and searches for a way to transcend his society’s myths and acquire Ultimate Knowledge. The crystal bracelets symbolize the mystical insight that grant this Knowledge. Yezd is the shaman who transmits the technique. The selks are the semi-divine messengers who guard access to Heaven, and if properly addressed, via the bracelets, will transmit the hero’s questions to the Divine.

Atasan is an anagram for Satan, the Ruler of the physical world. In Maalstrom, I provide an insight into the role of this Ruler, and I like to think, a unique and provocative explanation of the existence of evil (see Macius’ rendition to Flores of Maalstrom’s dominant creation myth while in Yezd’s castle). Few readers, if any, seem to have understood the significance of what Macius said.

Maalstrom and its sequel The Selk King are a single story. In The Selk King, in the Chapter titled ‘Revelations’, the reader will find solutions to many of the puzzles underlying Maalstrom’s plot—just before Flores, having acquired mystical insight using his new-found shaman’s technique, storms the ramparts of Heaven. Few also have understood the mythical and philosophical significance of Flores’ invasion of the selks’ city in the clouds.

But don’t expect me to be your Shaman. Whatever you know, or think you know, myth lies heavy not only upon Flores’ perception, but on the reader’s as well. Behind the Veil, Secrets lurk. Such is the nature of reality, on alien planets like Maalstrom as much as on Earth.

Maalstrom and The Selk King I hope remain as relevant to the Seeker-of-Knowledge’s efforts to break free of society’s conventions and penetrate the Veil as when written. Dark, insightful and Just Plain Weird.

—Glenn Lazar Roberts
updated
August 22, 2025