The Real Science Behind Louis Shalako's Tactics of Delay.

Louis Shalako

The real science behind my new novel and online serial, Tactics of Delay, is interesting, and yet I can only put so much info-dump into a military science fiction novel, which is a genre already tending in that direction. Quite frankly, it happens or it’s just too vague, with nothing scientific at all on which to hang the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

(This is why they always show an engine room, even though it’s just a bunch of lights on a panel and a dull hum in the background, with people standing around talking technical mumbo-jumbo. It gives readers or viewers something to relate to which has some familiarity in their everyday life.)

There’s a great deal of information to be put across, only so much of which can be conveyed by action, or exposition in dialogue. In a novel, I can’t just show them a picture or two and move on.

Even in this little blog post, I can only scratch the surface.

Explaining things in a military briefing, or working it in, bit by bit, paragraph by paragraph, as the story goes along, has its limitations.

You can only put so much in a ‘bit’, right? It is, by definition, just a tiny little bit of information mentioned in passing.

One of the technologies involves ‘tight-beam’ communications. This involves data encoded in a very short, relatively high-powered laser pulse. You don’t want the enemy to catch that, even if they can’t decode it. It is a piece of ‘predictive’ information. It can be analyzed, compared to other such bits of data, and, extrapolated into the future, it can give you away to predictive technologies. It’s fired at a receiver which for the sake of discussion is very much like a McDonald’s drinking straw with a sensor or pickup at the bottom of the tube. The transmitter is equally directional. You don’t want that signal going anywhere else but at your target. Assuming ship-to-ship or planet-to-planet communications, the signal is sent from one moving target to another moving target at vast distances. As an example, at billions of miles, a signal sent at noon from one location would be intercepted by another moving target at six o’clock that evening. This is ‘transit time’ at high-planetary/low-stellar distances. This requires predictive mathematics of the highest order. It requires perfect synchronization of the chronometers aboard both ships or on both planets. You have to know when and where the other guy is going to be. It also requires some scheduled interval for communications, in other words such long-distance communications would be planned ahead of time.

Considering the small size of the receiver tube, the shortness of the burst and the coding of the signal, such communication would be fairly secure from outside interception. This is simply unnecessary, even undesirable for civilian ships operating in peacetime, but utterly vital for war-craft, whose movements would be confidential, perhaps even in peacetime.

That depends on the current diplomatic situation. More on ‘soft science’ below.

If two ships were in close proximity, other methods of communication would be used minute by minute, including good old fashioned low-powered radio, or even flashing lights using something very much like Morse code. It doesn’t have to be in the visible spectrum, and the systems would be electronic. If you’re close enough, you can look out the window and wave at the other guy.

One of the things that sets space opera apart from ‘proper’ science-fiction is of course Faster than Light Travel, (FTL).

The general consensus among scientists is that FTL is, and always will be impossible.

This makes life a little more interesting for writers of science-fiction and space opera.

Readers love FTL, and that’s a consideration too. However, Chinese scientists have recently ‘transported’ a particle from Earth into Low Earth Orbit, and quantum science is advancing. 

What we once thought to be an immutable truth may turn out to be mistaken after all.

So that’s all I got to say on that subject.

Okay, somewhere in the story, I mention that Denebola-Seven has an orbit that is a bit egg-shaped. This is by no means impossible if one imagines a massive planet in an outer orbit, one that is going at such a speed that the two planets are in conjunction for long periods. 

Massive Planet-B will always be pulling Deneb-Seven outwards, even as both free-fall around the star. This only takes two bodies into consideration, and there may be others, including a couple of small moons of the planet itself. As they go around the planet, they will exert a force. This alone makes an orbit wobble. In this particular case, the narrow end of the orbit lies closest to the star Deneb. I also think this sort of orbit would be periodic. This is certainly true in geologic or systemic time-scales. That other planet would be unlikely to match speeds for all of eternity, for other bodies are also acting on it. Simply put, all orbits decay over time.

This is what we call 'entropy', the tendency for disorder to accumulate.

The fact is that all orbits wobble to some extent, with every single body in the system affecting every other body in the system to some degree, however great or small, depending on mass, velocity and orbital distance. Once the outer, more massive body had caught up to and passed Deneb-Seven, the orbit would revert to what would be considered a more ‘normal’ orbit.

Not unexpectedly, the troops are using Virtual Reality headsets and goggs, the Confederation has a surveillance satellite and both sides have battlefield drone aircraft. They have armoured vehicles, but it’s not steel armour anymore—it’s a tungsten-ceramic of the author’s own invention…(snork). And of course it’s sloped at the proper 60-degrees.

There are the softer sciences. While the latest in technology would undoubtedly be used in any conflict involving the wealthy, Home Worlds, with tens of billions in population in some cases, out on the fringes of human expansion, the planet Denebola-Seven has barely a million inhabitants. That’s not much of a tax base, and so they have contracted with The Organization, a private mercenary outfit, also associated with the Confederation, (a member planet in their own right). The Confederation is a political entity. But on such a planet, robotic soldiers, tanks, large numbers of ships and aircraft, massive space-based actions are insupportable because it all has to be paid for.

(I’ve been wracking my brains for a name, for the planet or group of planets where the Organization stems from, but really haven’t come up with anything good. Call it an intra-stellar commercial entity of mysterious origin, one with offices on fifty planets, and we'll leave it at that.)

If war is always a gamble, the gambler with the biggest wallet has a distinct advantage.

This is true because they can afford to take losses, for longer than their opponent. With their ten-to-one advantage in manpower and equipment, the Unfriendlies fit into this category. This is because the stakes in any game are only so big, this is, oddly enough, by mutual agreement  between warring parties. 

There is much soft science here.

They call it gambling because there is nothing guaranteed and you can always play so badly as to lose…the real skill lies in starting off with a smaller wallet, playing very well for as long as it takes, and then going home with some of that other guy’s money.

What’s interesting about this story is that the participants only have so much information.

They don’t always know everything that’s going on, and yet they’re facing, and coping with, information overload.

There will always be the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. This is one battle the Unfriendlies probably can’t win and they know it—more soft science.

As far as genetically-engineered super troops, humanity is expanding into the stars, money is hard enough to come by at the best of times, and resources are spread thin enough that it really isn’t necessary. A book is only so long and chemical, biological and nuclear warfare are mentioned only in passing, but then, they are hardly necessary considering the small size of the forces involved.

The Organization relies on training, and Confederation troops are some of the best-educated in the Galaxy.

END

Oh, look, I’ve got all these books on Kobo. (Sorry. Almost forgot the plug.) Some are science-fiction, then there’s mystery, fantasy, horror, a WW I memoir, all kinds of crazy stuff.

Thanks for reading.

On Submitting That Novel.

Louis Shalako

This is not criticism. I’m not complaining. I’m not bitching, or whining, neither am I pissing and moaning, or grousing or griping or any of those sorts of things.

Basically, I’m kind of doing my research, which is vital as an aid to thinking.

That’s all—just thinking.

I've been reading all these literary agent’s websites. The ones that might represent mystery or crime fiction are looking for 'upscale' works. I’m not too sure what that means. It has been said that authors rarely know what genre their own book fits into. My new book is a literary/crime/romance/suspense/satire/smack in James Patterson’s face kind of a book.

Hey, fuck, what am I supposed to say.

But that’s why I wrote it.

One agency wants a list of works that might be in competition and an explanation of why a book might be different, etc, etc.

The old, “Please read a few of our books and please tell us how your book fits into our catalogue,” sort of thing.

Regarding some publisher's submission guidelines, I saw at least one or two that are asking for the author's marketing plan. If I had a marketing plan, I would probably follow it.

What, you don’t have no fucking plan for my book?

Years ago, I went to the library and used something called the Media Market Guide and copied out, longhand, a bunch of addresses. There were dozens of Canadian publishers in there. 

Some of them are still around. 

It seems to be a shit-load of work to put together a simple query. It's not something that can be done in five minutes, that's for sure. As for the literary agents, this list is strictly Canadian and there aren’t very many of them. Not all of the listings have clickable links.

Quite a few of the names ring a bell. I would have been submitting to these agencies, somewhere around 2006, perhaps earlier or later.

When I looked at the list of Canadian publishers, I found quite a few dead links. Quite a few of the imprints belong to a couple of publishers who dominate the landscape in this country.

They’re not accepting un-agented submissions.

Ralan has a list of book markets. Quite a number do not accept un-agented submissions. 

Quite a number will be closed to submissions at any given time. One listing that has always bugged me is Poisoned Pen Press.

When they say, “Self-published and POD authors need not submit,” I’m inclined to take them at their word. Please understand, I’m already published under some pen-names. But I’m not going to lie to them and say I’ve never been published. We’ll let somebody else take the moral low ground. They’re currently closed to submissions anyways.

It can take the most excellent writer years to get an agent or place even one single book with a major publisher.

I’ve only spent a few hours at this, maybe three or four hours today, and I started off by looking at Canadian publishers. (Duotrope costs money, so I don’t use it. They have a free trial. If you don’t opt out by the end date, the odds are your credit card account will be charged until you terminate.)

It’s not that I can’t write the query. I would think that each and every query would be individually tailored to the agency in question, although the building blocks, i.e. the first three chapters, the author bio, might be common to other submissions. Some markets probably do accept simultaneous submissions. My expectation is that a 60,000-word ‘literary mystery novel’ is going to be a bit of a hard sell. I’ve never seen myself as anything other than a pulp-fiction writer. It is, in fact, what I set out to do all those long years ago.

My first six manuscripts netted me about a hundred and twenty-five rejection slips. I’ve had a few books rejected since then. On the more positive side, I got three contracts from what I can only describe as an aggregator, back in about 2006, before anyone really knew what that meant. That publisher at least had a two-year contract, (ostensibly). One well-regarded Canadian publisher of sf/f asked for a partial of Shape-Shifters, but declined after reading chapters four to seven. They were sort of considering Time Storm, (as an ebook, which I hadn’t even heard of at that time) but I screwed that up. I think I was petrified with fear or something—that was a long time ago, and basically, I just screwed it up. I’ve never blamed them for that fuck-up, for I clearly wasn’t ready for that big a change in my life…

It’s not a big surprise that when I did learn more about digital self-publishing, I gave it a try.

When the money doesn’t roll in like the surf, when it seems almost impossible, (using any sort of rational and recognizable means) to build sales and build what is (theoretically) a business, it’s pretty easy to get discouraged.

Is that why I’m submitting?

Of course not.

I wrote my nineteenth novel to be submitted. It might be a good thing that I wrote the book before taking any kind of look at possible markets. But I wrote this book, for better or for worse, to be submitted and that’s what I’m going to do.

I will submit the thing somewhere, and then write a few short stories. The odds are I will start my twentieth novel by about the middle of December. I never quite know what I’m going to do next until it just happens one day—a short story going a bit long or something.

Other than that, it really is a bit of a game. The more you learn about it, and the more you study it, and the more experience that you gain, the better the chances of winning. Fuck, at least once in a while.

I’m not going to turn this into sheer drudgery.

(If I wanted a fucking job, I’d go out and get one. – ed.)

Oh—and if all you want is money, there are a million better ways to earn it.

We play games to amuse ourselves. Anything else is just bullshit.

Let’s just say that I have my price and I have my concerns. I don’t know how much I’m willing to do for you.

If we’re not making a lot of money, at least we’re doing what we want and having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

Wish me luck, that is, if you believe in that sort of thing.

END