by CD Moulton
opinion. There are a very few who are among the worst.
I did a little bit of commercial fishing and research on growing orchids from seed plus a few other pure research projects with two other people (we opened the research company, Chadam, but not much came of it because one partner moved to New Zealand and the other went through a nasty divorce and lost interest) and managed an auto salvage business for a friend until 1985. I began writing in 1984 and had been published in a number of magazines, mostly comic/horror things, but also in orchid journals. I lived in Hudson, Florida, until 1989 when I moved here to Bonita Springs, Florida, and began writing in earnest.
I did a number of other things at times from a high steelworker to a longshoreman and even worked with a homicide detective after meeting him when ... but that is in the book, A Coincidence Too Many. The meeting was because of an experience with a ghost (I still don't know if any of that really happened and I still don't believe in ghosts). The detective I call "Moose" met me when a reader for a publishing house read the original MS of The von Artle Legacy and had an editor contact me because a ghost was supposedly trying to kill her brother. (It was no ghost, it was her boyfriend.) I changed the names and places in The von Artle Legacy and A Coincidence Too Many to protect the innocent and guilty alike. (Not to mention to avoid lawsuits.)
My only personal experience with aliens were a couple of things that were probably something else, such as a Polaroid shot with a bright saucer-shaped light against a mountain in Honduras that I hadn't noticed when I took the picture and a friend and I chasing a strange light for about two miles on Abaco. Bahamas, while going from Marsh Harbor to Treasure Cay.
A lot of the people I knew in SF were spaced out, but that doesn't count.
I started writing the Flight of the Maita series in late 1984. It was my first attempt at writing book-length works under my own name and I wanted to do it right.
Looking back at that book I see how so much of it was juvenile.
I know the market for "bigger than life" heroes was depressed (I'm being kind) at the time, but I did not and do not like the incoherent plot and sleazeball-crud hero crap. Special effects in the movies could work, but you can't take up forty pages in a book describing how a bomb explodes throwing body parts around the landscape. There is no space left for a story or plot (which is what happens in too many movies anymore).
I decided all my heroes were going to be decent and honorable and would mean well, but they would be normal – meaning they were neither good nor bad and had some flaws. They had to be believable.
I immediately ran into a huge problem. My main hero was to be a spaceship. An intelligent spaceship.
I overcame that by reasoning that even an intelligent machine would take the good or bad characteristics of the original programmer in much the manner we take the good or bad characteristics of our parents and teachers. I had the out that a truly intelligent machine would be able to change its behavior pattern when it saw it was heading in the wrong direction.
That started me thinking and I came up with the Tlessonian Robots or berserkers (thanks Poul Anderson, Ike Asimov, Arthur Clarke for the influence toward basic ideas), who would figure into later books.
About ten pages into the book I decided it was going to be a series because there was so much I could invent with a super-intelligent machine with organic partners. I stopped and wrote down the basic plot lines for ten books right then.
I don't write an outline. That, I find, restricts one too much. My list went something like:
Book 1 – introduce everybody. Z abducted, defeats abductors, meets others and Maita becomes emperor for a short time.
Book 2 – various stories to introduce other continuing characters.
Book 3 – establish the empire and some rules.
Book 4 – insane machine. Telekinetic race. Empire Center.
Book 5 – change of pace. Something funny. Maybe magic/swords and sorcery (?) Z would like the wizard/ sorcerer bit.
Book 6 – robot detective, but NOT R. Daneel Olivaw. Stress strongly that independent intelligence doesn't mean a mechanical slave to the builder's stupid laws.
Book 7 – etc. etc.
The next project was to establish the science behind the science fiction, so a long hard look at old ideas and understandings started a thought process about a paper from high school that suggested a lot of things that weren't accepted at the time, but most of which are commonplace in astrophysics today. There was also the point of "where did it all come from?" – which brought out evolution.
Everything suggested by one thing leads to other ideas. Each new idea leads to another storyline. Each new storyline will in turn bring in new storylines, but one has to remember that most of it is crap and be willing to throw out a lot. If an idea has a chance at development write it down and move on.
I have notes all over the place. I seldom look at them, but occasionally do when my ideas seem to be getting tired. It takes very little to get me off on a tangent. (Oh? You noticed?)
Maita had medical machines that could keep beings alive and in good health for any period of time. The first partnership was enjoined with the understanding that should anyone find he didn't care to continue he had the right to end the life extension..
I'm a very weird person if my lady friend can be believed. She said I would run into writer's block before I finished that book and definitely before book three.
I've written forty four books in the series and am halfway through book forty five and have no shortage of ideas whatever. (Being able to also write thirty some-odd murder mysteries in two series and a bit of technical stuff plus a lot of shorts and non-serial things during the same period of time.) I could sit here and write general plot lines for any number of books in all of the series. Reading a newspaper, watching TV, scanning the forums or walking down the street give me ideas. The restricting factor is having something new to say. I have about covered what needs saying with the Maita series, I think. 45 books is enough for a series. I have also developed the characters and so forth in a couple of the mystery series to the point more would make them seem too repetitive.
Be that as it may, this is about the Maita series.
I decided to try to start a system that didn't use quotes for Maita and Thing (a weird experimental idea of a type so commonplace with me) so put asterisks before and after anything Maita says. This indicates a bell tone before and after anything Maita says that the fastcom will carry only on the emperor's circuits. Thing is given a tuning fork sound as it is an empath without the power of speech so Maita carries its thoughts on the speakers it uses. Thing's speech uses brackets before and after. The fastcom will carry that tone for only Thing in a few decades. Both Thing and Maita speak without the general "paragraphing" of thoughts.
I also use this device later with the golems, No being a minus sign and Yes being a plus sign. My author friends like the idea and I think I do, too. It eliminates so many of those "said" and "replied" and such speaker designations. Yes and no speak in a "normal" form with paragraphs and such.
I made up a chart of how Maita had been built and how it had evolved. I would work each step into the books as I progressed.
Writing the books from the perspective of the human partner, Z, would be the easiest part – so I immediately considered writing part of them from the perspectives of the other main characters – then expanded my list of plot lines to twenty.
This, of course, meant that each "author" must have traits that would identify his own "style" of writing. It would become important that each have a distinctive personality. I wanted those identifying traits to develop slowly – which led to a writer friend suggesting that I wasn't defining my characters enough. (He later recanted, saying the idea of the series gave me time because it was really one work that was never finished and allowed me to alter personalities according to the changing situation of each. That wasn't my plan, but I forgot to tell him that!)
The original crew could use a bit of change. A l
ittle thought told me it would work for a very short time, then would fall apart because it was simply too limited.
Z, Thing and Maita were obviously going to be the thrust of the work and other characters would come and go. That was going to be permanent (but, as is natural with me, wasn't). Those three were the core, the foundation.
There was now a human hero, a machine hero and an unclassifiable race hero. Each had it’s own very distinctive personality and they would work well together.
I felt I should branch into other types of characters, reasoning that an empire that was going to become very large among the stars would necessarily have more than those three types of beings involved.
The Jurassic period was a focus of attention at that time and it became apparent there was no reason whatever that reptiles or other types couldn't develop as much (or more) intelligence as mammals, so I brought the Kheth into book two and eased Ape out as he was too limited. He was too much like Chewbaca in Star Wars in some ways. People would tend to picture the Wookie. That would take too much away from Ape.
So Sisstuh and Fesch were added and the adventure began to expand. Some of the races the crew, as I was calling them by now, met were to become continuing characters. The Parf, the Cheeth, the Vendans, etc.
The rest started growing. The basis for the Maitan Empire was laid in
