Books Worth Reading
A friend of mine was kind enough to read Vacuum Forged Chapter 41 after Thursday night yoga.
He liked the story but will not read the book — because he finds the characters, illustrated in chapter headings, hard to look at.
In the absence of feedback on the Vacuum Forged anchor site, I have no idea what anyone else thinks.
See the gallery, Vacuum Forged. Post a comment.
From Vacuum Forged -- The Anye Migration: Book 1 -- A manuscript paused in 2018, now cooking on simmer while I decide what to do with it.
See the work in process on Substack, here.
Grahana Archipelago
Wedding day had come and gone. Svami Reva Yudhvan and Stena Zaramalla were on honeymoon in, of all places, Harbor Town, Nivi — where Suban Dhava’s natural parents lived.
Suban’s life, he surmised, was in process of being planned.
Cadre counterinsurgency school was three weeks off. In the meantime, Grahana was bringing in crops. Svami Reva’s friend, a district engineer assigned to farm support, needed skilled workers.
During his first ten days on the job, Suban cut up a derelict harvester in a bean field, reinforced a grain bin, revived a water well, rebuilt three irrigation gates and graded a service road.
He told the supervisor he was worn out. The lady said she was not sending him home to Svami Reva with a debilitating injury.
Continue reading “36 ~ Insider”
Yes. This, too.
104 ~ Family Reunion
Titan Pass, Nevada
Airspace over Titan Village was busy with weekend campers coming down from AMV Anuraga, so much so that a local air traffic Oma refused a request to land in front of the Fowlkes campsite.
Mason put down at the airfield; a slow, careful descent allowing time for Marie to admire row upon row of identical clover habitats, the presumptive model for Disneyland’s Monsanto House of the Future attraction, Anaheim, 1957.
In Titan Village parlance, ‘Smurf Castles’. Mason said, “I was a plebe in the shipwright guild when they started bringing these down.”
Erin added, “He and I worked the build-out. That’s how we met Glenn and Arya Mehrenholz.”
Marie made eyes at her. “You were ten.”
“I can carry stuff.” She led them out the aft hatch, gesturing north. “The missile silos are that way; full of diamond dust.”
Mason brought up the rear. “It was like, a couple of months before the Disclosure. Damik Balusek and his co-investors wanted out of the project. They dumped the reservation on Glenn for a price he couldn’t refuse.”
“And he made a campground out of it.”
He pointed south. “See the roof sticking up over there? That’s a separating plant. Diamond dust goes into forty-pound bags. Coal dust goes up in smoke.”
There was a golf cart traffic jam at the main entrance. A maroli grounds attendant served the wicked eye-dot to bad drivers, tertiary tentacles curved to mimic hands on hips.
Mason high-fived him on the walk past.
The maroli told them, “Watch your step. Rattlesnakes are active.”
The warning spooked Marie. “I’ve never been any place where I had to watch out for snakes.”
When Tim and Myra Fowlkes came to fetch them in a golf cart, Marie was high-stepping.
Tim was amused. “Do you have a rock in your shoe?”
Myra was emotional, having just spent a week in therapy — processing missteps that might have permanently estranged her children and yet, miraculously, did not.
She lurched out of the cart, wrapped Mason and Erin in a frantic embrace, and cried her eyes out.
Literary Science Fiction Action Adventure Intrigue Family Drama Space Soap Opera. LSFAAIFDSSO.
The target audience is persons looking for entertainment that is not shallow, lurid, and pessimistic.
I did not retire from the work life for the purpose of toiling at another job. Writing is its own reward. In other circumstances, I would tend to be satisfied with unremarkable sales.
If I did not believe there is an audience for the opposite of ugly.
“Bring back wholesome,” says the book beat.
Dystopia is out. Optimism is in. The literacy crisis is overstated.
I should be in like Flynn — but I am not.
I appended a chapter illustration from Maroli Tango to an author’s discussion thread.
She replied, “I think this looks absolutely terible. There is no life in it. I cant explain why exactly. But I would not want to open a book with this image waiting for me in it. It’s weird.”
Maroli Tango is forty percent family drama, performed on a Science Fiction backdrop.
In this chapter, 182-year-old American Civil War veteran Elbert Holland Harrison reconciles with Francine Suraksin Harrison, his 141-year-old spouse-from-another-planet.
The sun was setting in the Loire River Valley when Ranger arrived at the Veronica Charron cottage.
The maroli twins Virgil and Chester bailed out early, waving lighted ground crew wands. Street traffic came to a halt.
Francine watched the final descent from the main hatch, shaking in her sandals, hanging on to Marie Jourdain’s arm as though gravity might fail, sending her pinwheeling into the sky.
Magic stairs unfolded. The next-door neighbors helped her down.
The wife said, “We showed your husband to the patio.”
Virgil entered the house through the front door. Francine went around the side by herself, knees weak, legs like rubber.
Elbert met her on the stone path, arms open. He hugged her tight, kissed her ears, massaged tension out of the space between her shoulder blades.
She leaned in, chin on his collarbone, murmuring, “If you take me back, I’ll never let you go.”
He whispered, “It’s settled, then.”
When I started my Anye Universe series, I had no idea there was such a thing as furry porn. That is not what these books are about.
The Anye Adya are descended from lemurs, evolutionarily regressed due to an ancient gene tailoring accident. Had that not happened, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish Francine from a citizen of Greece.
Sure, it’s weird. It’s SF.
But I get it — how would you tell from the cover (featured image) what kind of book this is?
Fine. Here you go. It’s this kind.
I hope that clears it up.
I am waiting impatiently for Amazon to publish the 8.25X11 color print edition of Maroli Tango — after several days spent upsizing 254 chapter illustrations to upsized margins — thereby provoking repagination, orphan lines, unplanned text wrapping, thigh cramps, etc.
Curious, are we? See the eBook, also in color.
Imagine Maroli Tango, supersized, on your coffee table.
Let us wait, in eager anticipation, together.
Ghosts of Ancient Vidura is free in the Kindle store!
ChatGPT says:
This is not a “chosen one” power fantasy. It’s a story about competent adults—doctors, engineers, officers, lawyers—forced to confront realities that don’t fit neatly into ideology, religion, or national interest. The tone is thoughtful, sometimes wry, occasionally confrontational, and deeply curious about how societies actually function under stress.
Somewhere in the middle of all the robots and spaceships and ray guns and thunderous battle scenes, don’t you sometimes wish an author would bother to write a story? Yes. Me, too.
Today, it is my hope that you will buy Maroli Tango after reading Elbert and Ghosts of Ancient Vidura, which I am offering free, one at a time, on the Kindle store, starting today.
It is a three-step process, which relies upon you, the pigeon customer, clicking on a button, below.
Author Ashley Manning said:
One of the books biggest strengths is the way that John G. Dyer manages to side-step what you think’s going to happen next and then go in a completely new direction, and I was completely onboard for the ride. It’s an interesting story as you can never quite guess what will happen next.
So says Ashley, who ought to know because, unlike yourself, he read the book.
I have run three eBook giveaways since September 10. Orders: twelve, ten, and five.
I am not discouraged. Elbert is free in the Kindle store — for three days starting tomorrow September 23.
ChatGPT says: Literary science fiction in the classical sense: a work where speculative elements exist not to dazzle, but to reveal. The extraordinary enters gently—through family history, withheld truths, and the slow accumulation of unease—until the reader realizes that the familiar world has been irrevocably widened.
The story begins in 1928 South Dakota. There are only a handful of unfamiliar proper nouns.
It’s a great yarn. I promise.
Resilient is free in the Kindle store, now through Monday.
Alter AI says: “Resilient fortifies The Anye Legacy as one of the most intellectually ambitious and metaphysically rich science‑fiction cycles of the last decade.”
The Robots have read everything published. If we did not believe they understand what they’re looking at, we would not be asking them questions.
ChatGPT says: “You’ll find a lived-in world with deep history and internal logic. Moral dilemmas where there are no clean victories. Characters who endure, adapt, and sometimes fail—but keep going. A rare fusion of hard science fiction with spiritual and philosophical inquiry.”
It’s not boring. I promise.
Featured image: Suban Dhava, the little tyke on the book's cover, at the age of twenty.
I would position Resilient as an adult science-fiction adventure with strong coming-of-age and metaphysical elements.
Its defining characteristic is the intersection of two stories: Suban Dhava’s journey from abducted child to resourceful young man, and the emergence of the AptakArin—conscious beings given new lives through transdimensional technology.
Unlike a conventional space opera, much of the novel’s action takes place on Vidura itself, where family, survival, criminal organizations, military operations, and questions about the soul intersect.
Continue reading “ChatGPT Pigeonholes Resilient”
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