2023 - 04/2023 Meeting

Ice Nine discussion included movie subtitles, Bedazzled (original), Battlestar Galactica, Quantum Leap, Shazam, Lost Boys, D & D Honor Among Thieves, Fast & Furions, Purple Rain, and NASA's Artemis Project.

Newsletter Account:

The month General Meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County was held at the Bergen Highlands United Methodist Church on Saturday, April 8, 2023. Science fiction writer Brian Trent was our speaker.

Mr Trent is the offspring of two science fiction fans and was a sf junkie from a young age. He accumulated an impressive collection of rejection slips before selling his first stories (to COSMOS and to APEX MAGAZINE) and winning the 2013 Writers of the Future Contest.

He is the author of two science fiction novels and numerous shorter works. The novels, REDSPACE RISING and TEN THOUSAND THUNDERS, and some of his shorter pieces are set 1000 years in the future with 60 billion people settled on a number of planets, moons, asteroids, and other habitats in the solar system. The books blend elements of military science fiction, cyberpunk, and space thriller.

Brian is currently shopping an alternate history in which the Roman Empire and Native American allies are at war in the New World with the Aztec Empire. Refugees from the fall of Carthage had traveled across the ocean and settled, bringing Old World diseases with them. The native populationo plummented, then rebounded, and was thriving when Rome crossed the waves centuries later. (Continued on club website.)

Meeting Talk Notes:

TEN THOUSAND THUNDERS

Set 1000 years in the future

60 billion people in solar system

Man has colonies on multiple worlds / moons / asteroids in solar system

Earth-dominated Planetary Federation runs things

Mars had a civil war in attempting to break away

Nanotec-Enhanced hero Gethin Bryce has been hypnotised and deep undercover

Has now been woken and original personality reactivated

Inspired by Grandfather's tales of WW2

Tributes to Mars of Bradbury, Burroughs, & others

Two classes of people, those in the Enclaves & those in the Wastelands

Classism is a theme in SF going back to The Time Machine's Eloi / Morlocks

Enclavers have virtual immortality through nanotech

Has some cyberpunk tropes

Major company in books is Prometheus Company

EARLY DAYS

Spawn of two science fiction fans

SF Junkie

Wanted to be a writer since he was a kid

MISCELLANEOUS

Forbidden Planet is favorite movie

Loved Illustrated Man growing up

Day jobs when starting out: Teacher, tutor, call center, martial arts instructor

Fan of Westerns

Reads lots of military science fiction

WORK

Reads lots of nonfiction

Wants books to seem real

Learned from Tolkien & Gibson

Fiction tends to dark, more Wells than Verne

Invisible man goes bad when he thinks he can get away with anything

Human nature does not change

Does creative imagination exercises

PROCESS

Starts with setting

Lots of world building

Panster once he has his world set up

Discovery writer

Writes disconnected scenes, not sequentially

5 - 6 drafts of novel, including Hemingway Draft to strip out metaphors

Has Murder Board on wall about Redspace universe

STARTING OUT

Lots of rejections

Then better, personalized rejections

Then sales to Apex and Cosmos

2013 Winner of Writers of the Future

Placed stories in theme anthologies by Flame Tree Press

Successfully submitted novel when they announced they would start publishing novels

MEETING

Read abridged Chapter 1 Red Space Rising

CURRENTLY SHOPPING

Alternate history where Rome never fell

Fleeing Carthegians made it to America

Infections laid waste to New World

Survivors had immunity and had rebuilt & were thriving when Romans finally arrived

Romans & native american allies vs Aztecs