ANGEL MARTINEZ - Part One...

  Okay, listen up everyone - I want to introduce to you another of  one of my all time favourite Authors and lets just say are you in for a treat as Angel has sent me a couple of postings so I will be pimping her again next Wednesday as well... I can guarantee that you will enjoy everything that comes from this fabulous author.

Science Fiction – It’s What’s For Breakfast

I know, I know. The stereotype persists after all these years. SF reader = adenoidal-ly challenged adolescent male. After all, when you see footage of SF conventions, what do they show you? Socially challenged young males who’ve taught themselves to speak Klingon. Oh, and the occasional hot babe in leather. They spout off models of fictional spaceships with greater accuracy than most sports nuts can spew baseball stats and discuss with pompous erudition the relative merits of one game’s weapons system over another. Lovely.

But the real world of Science Fiction (yes, a contradiction, I know) is the novel, which deals with, at its heart, human issues. SF often uses alien or futuristic settings to discuss cultural and social issues because by removing us from our familiar surroundings, by showing us something new, we may be able to view these issues in a new way.

In order to do this, or any of the other hundred things SF novels can do well, the novel must (MUST!) be a vehicle for character. (As Virginia Woolf wrote, “The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poets, historians, or pamphleteers.”) This is true of garden-variety romance, of literary novels and must be the basis of SF novels of any type, or the author risks having the story come across as meaningless, self-serving, symbolic bombast.

Thanks for the lecture, Angel – mind telling us where you’re going? Patience, grasshopper, I’m getting there. When I began Gravitational Attraction, it started out as the germ of an idea, a kernel of SF tech built around gravity wells, but these were just notes and sketches. There was no novel, no story to share with anyone, until the characters began to sprout. Quite a cast of them. Wanna meet some? Sure you do. ;)

Isaac Ozawa: Once a candidate for a fighter pilot slot at the prestigious Altairian Academy, Isaac was given a medical discharge when his neural implant turned out to be glitchy. Kicked out of the service, deserted by his lover, Isaac settles for a comm. officer’s slot on a commercial courier and tries not to dream of flight.

Turk: Found on a drifting, deserted ship, Turk keeps his secrets close. Uncertain whom he can trust, unsure of reality itself at times, he clings to duty and to promises made to his host commanders and his own people. He knows he carries something dangerous in his brain and suspects he may have done something terrible. And Isaac? Beautiful, bitter Isaac disturbs him profoundly.

Travis Humboldt: Pilot of the Hermes, retired Marine, Travis uses his gruff, good-natured exterior to cover old hurts and new confusions.

Nidar: Turk’s cocky, irreverent cousin, potentially his greatest rival. Turk’s been away from home too long, so does he return to find his cousin an ally or an adversary?

For the rest? You’ll just have to read the book. Character-driven SF – the most important meal of the day.

Gravitational Attraction – M/M Science Fiction

By Angel Martinez

At Silver Publishing – launching 2/25/12

Blurb:

A mysterious distress call draws the crew of the Hermes to what appears to be an empty, drifting ship. Empty that is, except for the blood and gore spattered corridors and one lone survivor locked in a holding cell. Drawn to the handsome, traumatized man, the crew’s comm officer, Isaac Ozawa, makes Turk his personal responsibility, offering him the kindness and warmth he needs after the horror he experienced. Turk longs for Isaac, a desperate, hopeless ache he knows he’ll always carry with him.

But Turk harbors dangerous secrets, his brain a military experiment gone wrong. When an amoral, power-hungry admiral kidnaps Isaac and uses him to convince Turk to become the cataclysmic weapon he’s hungered for, it will take Turk’s strength, the ingenuity of the Hermes crew, the help of the enigmatic Drak’tar, and Isaac’s own stubborn will to save them.