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From our deepest prehistory, storytellers worked in immediate contact with their audience. The bard or singer developed his tale as a chain of easily remembered rhymes and then picked up a lyre if he was Greek, or a harp if he was Irish, and chanted them in the great hall after dinner. If you, the audience, liked what you heard, you gave him table scraps and a cup of wine. If not, you pelted him with bones.
Then in the 1400s Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type and spoiled all the fun by giving rise to the mass market. Suddenly, telling a story became an investment in typesetting, press time, paper, and binding. An industry of agents, editors, and accountants rose up to determine whether there was enough of a market to support this investment in the story. The chanted poem became the “novel” (from the Latin root meaning “new,” or a passing “novelty” for jaded readers). Homer dined out for years on just two long poems. Today’s author has to produce three books a year to stay afloat—and most of us don’t have three good books in a lifetime.
Over the years the economics of publishing have tightened, especially after a change in inventory tax laws, until in the current market for fiction, even established authors may not be able to find a publisher for their most recent work. An author without the tail wind of a bestseller must struggle doubly hard to reach new readers. And it’s even harder if that author is trying to break out of a genre like science fiction or romance into the general fiction category.
And just when book publishing looked bleakest, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency invented the worldwide web, or WWW, and Adobe invented the Acrobat™ portable document format, or PDF. No printing press, no paper (except what you provide), no investment (except what I provide in putting the words together), and no editors and publicists to tell you what books are worth reading. I’ve been offering these books free of charge in PDF format for some years now, and my only request is that you respect copyrights and only make copies of them for your own use.
The publishing world is finally catching up with the internet, and at least three viable markets for self-published works in a portable reader format have emerged: iBooks, Kindle, and Nook. Some of these may disappear, and others may arise. It’s an open question yet as to who will dominate the market. Right now, I’m working on updating and reformatting these books for the new market. When I have them launched, you’ll see links here. But you’ll still have to decide for yourself if these books are any good.
Note: The chapter files are still in Adobe Acrobat™ PDF format, designed for an 8½x11-inch page. You should have the Acrobat Reader installed on your system before clicking on the link. If you don’t have Reader, please visit Adobe Systems Incorporated to download this free software.
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Photo © Photodisc/Getty Images, Inc. |
Before the frenzied modern era of superhighways, television, and the internet, American life was lived in small towns, in places where families knew every neighbor; where the bonds of love and hatred, friendship and feud, were tightly woven across generations. In such a town lived Robert Wheelock. He was soft-spoken, intelligent, Harvard-educated, and seemingly destined from birth for great things. His father, the county judge and owner of the local railroad and electric company, is wealthy and respected. So Robert’s own success appears assured… until the judge’s sudden death deals a blow to his expectations. In this kaleidoscopic book spanning three decades of American life, Robert Wheelock falls in love with his beautiful cousin and takes on his first clients as a lawyer with his own practice. He fights a series of bitter skirmishes with his stepmother, suffers personal tragedy and loss, and starts down the path of public life and civic duty first blazed by the judge. And then Robert commits an indiscretion that will haunt him for twenty years—an indiscretion that will jeopardize his marriage and his place in the community. The Judge’s Daughter is the story of a man’s conscience and his capacity for love, set in a time and place that will never exist again, but that will live forever in the American imagination.
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Photo © Steve Cole/Getty Images, Inc. |
Amid a growing national energy crisis, a radical environmental group destroys the generating capacity of Hoover Dam, the engineering masterpiece of the 20th century. A new President responds by vowing to build the engineering marvel of the 21st century: clean solar power from an orbital platform. The politician doesn’t understand the huge challenges his project involves. And no one plans on the determined, ultimately violent, opposition of the world oil cartel. The project tests the ingenuity and stamina of five people: Harley Waters, the presidential assistant who must bring the satellite project to fruition through the maze of Washington politics; Nikolas Starik, the construction engineer who must solve the project’s various puzzles and make it viable; Raven Howell, the clever publicist who creates a climate of acceptance for the solar power satellite; Willem Cerkes, the Butcher of Mostar, who is hired by international oil interests to make sure it never flies; and Janey Pulaski, who single-handedly poses the greatest threat to the satellite’s future. This novel is an inside look at the high-stakes world of engineering project management: part inspiration, part politics, always risky. It will appeal to readers who treasure the aha! moment of creative insight, who enjoy the interplay of politics and personality, and who relish the adrenalin rush of looming catastrophe and the triumph of winning a fight to the finish.
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Check out Go Solar Power for more about photovoltaic power plants and solar energy in all its forms.
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Photo © Chad Baker/Getty Images, Inc. |
Searching for biotech solutions to environmental problems, a senior researcher at Cumulus Biologicals creates a microbe that doesn't just break down oil spills but turns sweet crude into a tar-like solid. Applied to an oil-laden beach, it would cake the sand into asphalt and make removal impossible. The bacterial culture is a wrong turn for the company and is marked for disposal. However, a beautiful industrial spy and a ruthless arms dealer plot to divert the sample to an Arab buyer, who is under orders to discourage competition in the oil patch and raise the volume of petrodollars flowing into his country. He sees immediately that the bacterial byproduct would freeze oil fields, block wellheads, and clog pipelines—if it ever got near them. Only one thing stands in the way of their deal: a determined young economist named William Clive. He recently joined a consulting firm that covers for a national agency battling foreign theft of American industrial secrets, and he takes his job very seriously.
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