Notes from Venus-Press Release

So here are some out-takes from a press release from a book I started 51 years ago and which you can now buy on Amazon.
I decided with all of the Mars craziness that perhaps I could find an agent who was looking the other way.  I really need to make a living as a writer because I'm not sure its possible as a physicist.
Anyway, I did this and now you can read it.

Summary of the book

In the near distant future, a powerful female dictator, Catherine the Great, sets out to leave a legacy matching her ego. Spanning thousands of years, she determines to turn Venus into a garden planet. But not all gardens are safe for people. Along with her loyal, ruthless robot, she embarks on the multi-generational quest. She knows she will never see the completion of the project. She must entrust its completion to her robot legate, but even the robot will not survive to oversee the end of the project. A bioengineered shield can cool the planet, but only for long enough for the first settlers on Venus to finish the job of firing the triad, mountain sized rockets which must move the planet to a stable orbit before the shield fails. The first settlers make it to the surface, but then everything starts to go wrong. Several generations later, the stories of earth seem like a fantasy. The society of Venus has split into three incompatible, but interdependent groups. On earth people have almost forgotten the effort to settle Venus. And then something unexpected happens to bring the two groups together. But the surface of the partially terraformed planet is too hot for the humans of earth and their life on the planet will be measured in days, but without them all life on Venus will be lost. On Venus, a strange object appears in the sky and the adventure begins. You are looking in the wrong direction to settle a planet. Don’t look at Mars, look to Venus.

           

SHORT BIO:

Gregory Friedlander is an author and theoretical physicist.  His landmark work, Algorithm Universe Theory is read all over the world.  Among other things it sets out a workable theory for the creation of space time, explains the big bang, force, and other quantum phenomena.  His fiction writing covers everything from political fiction, historical fiction, romance to science fiction.

Ok, the romance novels are essentially porn, but you can get those on Amazon too.

Author contact info (top right text box)  Why is it down here with a parenthetical that says where it's supposed to be?  I don't know.

The author has two avenues to lecture.  One is his exciting, diverse fiction.  The other is his technology which is already read all over the world and provides a supersymmetry underpinning to all other mathematical and physical inquiries.  I have actually lectured on my non-fiction, a very early version, I've yet to present one of my novels even though there are several of them.

FICTION

NON-FICTION

Notes from Venus This book, written in three part format for ready script adaption is actually 3 books in one. Book 1 covers the decision of Catherine, a powerful, ruthless ruler who decides to create a new planet as her legacy. Book 2 covers the adventures of Kemper, a child covered with feathers who discovers he has been bred to be one of the first settlers of Venus. Book 3 is a space western covering Brd’an; a sheriff on Venus, an incredibly hostile planet with a very small population separated from an almost forgotten earth by clouds and a thousand years.  When strangers from Earth, he has to decide whether to help them destroy everything he has ever known. Target Audience: Anyone who likes science fiction.

Algorithm Universe Theory Books 1 and 2 of Algorithm Universe are groundbreaking quantum mechanical theory read all over the world. Book 3 is in its initial edits.  It took 10 years for Einstein to write his revolutionary work in full time. Algorithm Universe Theory. was not begun in earnest until 2014 and hence is a mere 2 years old. The Einstein Hologram Universe, the predecessors was not written until September 2013, so even assuming that date it has been less than 4 years.  However this text already defines the universe we experience in quantum moments and by way of a well-defined algorithm rendered complicated by the inherent infinite converging series embodied within the algorithm.  There are few of the mysteries of other theories that have survived as mysteries of Algorithm Universe Theory. Target Adience: Schools, Colleges, Anyone interested in Science.

I'm thinking these sample chapters come from the published book.  I'd be interested to hear what you think.  Or better still you could download the book and read it.

SAMPLE CHAPTERS (3): Notes From Venus

Forward-The Great killer of Men            I am the great killer of men. I was dead long before the last three books in this story begin, but I am there if you look for me.  The results of me, the greatest killing machine of all time, are not easily buried even in the history of thousands of years.            This story takes 10,000 years to tell, but if you stay with me I will take you to Venus.            You can call me Prototype 1 or P-1 or the great killer of men.            This story begins on Earth and ends on Venus.            In the twentieth century, no one spoke about going to Venus, even though Venus is only 10% smaller than Earth.  The problems with Venus are the reasons why it is so attractive.              Venus has a thick atmosphere, a very thick, high pressure atmosphere.  Because of the heat resulting from its proximity to the sun, its atmosphere has never developed.  That undeveloped atmosphere is 90 times as thick as the atmosphere of earth, a high-pressure cooker mix of poisonous gases; carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid.  But it’s poisonous nature hides its value to nascent life.            People do not, as a rule, have a vision of 10,000 years.  The pyramids of Giza are only 5,000 years old.  This history, of necessity, covers a period of more than ten thousand years.  No single society of man has survived that long.  That doesn’t mean the goals are impossible.            The surface of Venus is an 864-degree hell where lead melts.     Before people could live on Venus, you would have to deal with the heat, poisons and the excess atmosphere which would be the equivalent of living in the crushing atmosphere 1 kilometer below the surface of earth’s ocean, double the depth of the scuba diving record.            These are things that would not happen overnight; and night is a problem.  If the heat of Venus was not a big enough problem, life on Venus would have to deal with long days and nights, 243 earth days for a single rotation of the second planet, longer than a Venusian year.            This story must involve earth civilizations thousands of years apart.            Book 1 starts ten thousand years before the Great Collapse. Book 2 straddles the Great Collapse.            Book 3 begins 1000 years after the great collapse.  As book 3 begins, Earthlings are recovering from the inevitable and massive failures brought on by bad governments, overpopulation, climate change, disease, the overreliance on delicate technologies, and new, unforeseen weapons like me.               In Book 3, Earth has lost contact with Venus for a thousand years and the results of the terraforming experiment are shrouded in the technology that shields the surface of Venus from the direct rays of the sun.                     Then, as things happen in these stories, there is another opportunity to finish the process that was started thousands of years before in Book 1.            But no one knows what they will find on Venus after a thousand years.  Will the Triad of Venus, which I will explain in due time, still function?  Will the colonists be friendly?  Will the colonists even be alive?  Will the atmosphere be cool enough to do the work necessary to fire the Triad?              There is only one chance to find out and it is a one-way trip.  Is it a suicide mission for the astronauts?  Almost certainly the answer is yes.  One thing is clear.  If they do not die, they will have one last chance.  Before we get to Book 1, let’s talk about how Book 3 starts. Book 3; Chapter 1: Earth, 1000 years after the Great Collapse-The Shooting Star Dewayne Johnson woke up with the twilight of dawn shivering slightly.   He was too thirsty to take time to coax the fire back to life.  He took a sip of water from the precious small store, and a cold breakfast.  Dewayne was a modern man, but he carried a spear and wore a loin cloth.  The small bag he carried had little room or weight, as befits someone who must carry all his possessions on his back. He was cold, despite the intense heat that he knew was coming with sun. After the quick meal, he was moving through the suburbs of a crumbling city.   Grass, trees, and bushes, large and small,  grew through the road blocking his view and changing his path.  A thick layer of dirt built up over many years hid whatever surface once paved the street.  There should be small ponds and streams this time of year, but they were all dried up. Even when the streams had water, they were little more than rivulets in what used to be concrete gutters.  It is the dry season in a multiyear drought.  Dewayne tried to remember when it last rained.  He had long lost that memory. In these conditions rivers are streams.  Streams, when they can be found, are stagnant ponds.  The small ponds are cracked, dried up mud.  Dewayne’s dark skin did not burn easily in the sun. He had been thirsty, constantly searching for water this hunt.  He wondered if he would be able to find enough water to survive the trip back to the Collective where he started. The sun was quickly rising in a cloudless sky and the heat was growing at an unrelenting pace.  Even in his prime, accustomed as he was to these conditions, Dewayne was uncertain if he would make it back to civilization if he didn’t find water soon or abandon the hunt. He stepped carefully.  Even this far out from the city center, there were slivers of glass and rusted metal that would easily cut through moccasins.  The potential death that could follow would be long and painful, dying of thirst and hunger unable to walk or perhaps the longer death from an infection. There were periodic deep rumbling sounds resulting from deteriorating structures, as windows, shingles, roofs, walls or even entire buildings fell or the mounds of already collapsed buildings fell further.  What used to pass as roads in the city were clogged with debris that merged into hills.  Large and small bushes and trees sprouted from these debris-hills, making them beautiful but treacherous in their instability. He was trapping this morning, but later he might be running from something. There were few large animals after the collapse, but they eventually came back from the woods to occupy cities, long since abandoned due to plague, war, depopulation and the general failure of power, information, and social order.  It was hard to say which blow came down harder so long after the great collapse. For a time, the cities were full of marauders, but they eventually moved out and became civilized again.  It happened after they ran out of victims, when the food supplies and weapons ran out, when the deteriorating condition of the buildings made them too dangerous. Dewayne was an outsider from an early age.  He was always uncomfortable in the new city states.  Even their outlying communities, the so-called “Collectives,” which buffered the cities from each other, seemed to always be full of strangers who knew him even though he did not know them.  It was a hard life in the wilderness, but the city-states and their collectives were hard too.  There was never enough food or water. Instead, there was a confusing system of rationing that Dewayne could never learn, so he was continually left hungry and thirsty. Here, he also starved and thirsted, but he understood the harsh rules of the wilderness. He did not understand the regulated life styles of civilization.  He did not understand how people could continue to cling by their fingernails to the trappings of civilization and the ancient technologies and weapons they hoped would protect them from each other. Dewayne was educated. When he turned his back on civilization, he could not forget what he had learned.  His wildness was tempered by knowledge.  Uncomfortable in the company of men, the need for society of others dragged him back to the Collective. Hunger and loneliness drove him to the collective; and a nervous unrest drove him from the Collective where he was raised.  So far, he had never been turned away, but he was tolerated only so long as he could produce what they considered sufficient.  He was only fed if the excess was sufficient to include him.   It was a trade and he understood that.  If he brought food back, more often than not, his presence was tolerated. On rare occasions, Dewayne ran into similar spirits from other collectives.  On even more rare occasions he came across an individual who had escaped completely, but they rarely survived for long alone.  As often as he found them living, he found their remains.  The meetings with the living were always temporary, the meetings with the dead were always short. The nomads were solitary or small groups. The one group of any size that Dewayne had come across were all dead.  They had died of thirst.  The recollection made him particularly conscious of his own meager supply of water. There was freedom and death in the wilderness.  Today, the dead city seemed to close in around him.   It was as if the ghosts of the past were here, waiting for him to make some mistake that would allow them to hold him here against his will and forever. There were two ways to make a living in the dead cities.  One was to find something of value.  That was increasingly unlikely, although occasionally there would be salvageable metal that was freed from the crumbling concrete; but that was far too unlikely to rely upon.  The other way was to hunt.  If he was successful, he would sell whatever game he brought back.  When the crops failed in the Collective, people starved, not only in the Collective; but also in the City States that depended on the agrarian Collectives. Dewayne frequented the more independent Collectives surrounding the City-State known as New NewHo which survived on the large inland sea by turning salt water potable. Providing water to the nearby Collective for irrigation. During harvest time, Dewayne had once been enlisted as forced agrarian laborer.  It offended him that someone of his intellectual skills was considered too untrained and too untrainable for the skilled positions.  Despite his wide range of technical knowledge, Dewayne had mastered nothing.  He had taken to hunting and trading which failed to support his aspirations, but satisfied his need to be alone. Technical weapons were outlawed to prevent insurrection, but spears worked well enough for defense.  Traps were the only effective method of hunting.  He carried a machete, beat out of the rusting steel of the buildings around him for close work and a similar homemade knife for butchering.  Today, he as he circled the city checking traps, he would run out of water.  If he didn’t find more water, tomorrow he would have to turn back.  It was not certain whether he could make it back or not; the smallest miscalculation and his bones would join the other failed nomads on the trail. The Collectives were farms or mines where forced laborers were sent to toil out their lives.  However, even the rich, the city dwellers, the governors and the director himself faced the chance of plague, malaria, dysentery and the like, diseases known and unknown, manmade and acts of god.  The poisons from the last of the wars killed quickly and slowly and none were immune.  And if it didn’t rain, at least a little, the ruling class died like everyone else. As the sun rose behind him, the crumbling buildings of the abandoned city before him cast long shadows.  He looked back at the rising sun, welcoming the light and fearing the rising heat.            As he turned back, Dewayne saw a shooting star in the still dark part of the sky.  He watched for it to fade, but it did not.   It grew brighter with each moment.  He had seen many shooting stars.  There were no city lights to dim the night sky except within the New NewHo itself.  There was something different about this one.  It cast an unnatural light and seemed to drift towards the city.  He was tempted to run, but he mastered his fear.  If it is one of the ancient missiles, running would do no good.   Where would he run to, and why? He wondered if anyone else would see it.  He was quite a distance from the last outpost of civilization.    He realized that it was a trajectory. He followed the trajectory. His heart beat faster.  There was a sonic boom and he crouched down in reaction dropping the spear and covered his ears.  In response to the shockwave, a sympathetic building gave way and fell with a thundering roll.  It lasted for a long time.  Maybe it is 2 buildings or 3.  Dewayne could not see the collapse through the intervening woods but he noticed the star continued its trajectory in the direction of the city.   It isn’t a missile, he thinks, it is slowing down.  It is a spaceship.  He had never actually seen one, but he was certain this is what a spaceship would look like, how it would act. He had seen satellites crash before, but this is not a satellite.  There is a thruster slowing its descent, the source of the strange light.  The engines seem to stutter, then a parachute deployed.  It could still be a missile, some missiles used parachutes, but why would anyone attack an empty city? Where is it going?   Will it crash?  He does a quick catalog.  The most likely landing site in that direction is the ancient airport.  A spaceship would land at an airport, wouldn’t it? The airport is on the far side of the city, its runways filled with thorny bushes; but that may not be visible from space.  If he goes to the airport, and expects to make it today, he must travel through several miles of overgrown city. There will be wild dogs, maybe hogs, even a bear or big cat.  Worse still, there is falling debris and the sharp objects which litter what used to be streets, now clogged with traps and pitfalls.  It is not safe.  In the suburbs, the collapsed buildings are low, there is not so much glass or sharp, rusted metal.  He wants to go back to the Collective first and get help, but even if he ran the whole way it would take a full day to get there.  By then…  What?  What would happen by then? Did Dewayne make up his own mind or did something that was done 10,000 years before make it up for him.  Human decision making has always been hard to pin down, the actions one takes when confronted with their own mortality or that of strangers. Either way, he started a hurried jog towards the city in the direction of the airport.  He’s moved through the edges city before, but never through the center and never alone. Book 1 LEGACY Chapter 1 Catherine and the robot; 10,000 years before the Great collapse           “You’ve picked a name with a lot of vanity attached to it,” the mechanical voice of Prototype 1 pointed out to the ruler that had brought the unruly provinces under control with an iron fist.  Through a million eyes, Prototype 1 could see the blood that ran in the streets.  It was not his program to count the dead, although the number came to him as soon as the thought.  So many millions were killed, so much land destroyed for years to come; but order was restored.            “I want to be the best of Catherine the Great and more,” the ruler said.  She was beautiful in her gown, standing in the expensive room.  The thick drapes hanging down from far above in the darkness were pulled back, the huge windows overlooking an enormous plaza, still smoking from conquest.  The land before her seemed to stretch out forever.  It was such a small part of her empire today.              She was happy to have an advisor who was not afraid of her.  There were too many mangled bodies in her shadow for human comfort.  But she had done what was necessary to secure the peace.  “I want to be Catherine the Great, beyond question.”            “You’ve united the largest kingdom known to man.  You have a reputation, however unfair, that you killed off your competition in the process.  Is that enough?”            “You did the killing.”  The robot made a perceptible nod of its head.  “I need a legacy.”            “What would you like your legacy to be?  Children?”            “At my age?”            “It would be a trivial matter with modern medicine.”            “And they would kill each other or be killed for some petty reason.”            “Perhaps.”            “You are my most trusted servant.”            In response to this the humanoid robot bowed more deeply.            “I need you to find me a suitable project.”            Hearing this the great killer of men stopped for a moment.  The moment stretched out.  A blue feathered bird flew across the window, ignoring the carnage below.  The robot was unmoved.  The ruler who would be Catherine the Great looked down at her blood red nails and coveted the bright color of the bird.            “Would it be acceptable if other countries, other empires were to participate?”            “Yes, that would be acceptable, perhaps even necessary.”            “Can it be finished after your lifetime if it is only begun now.”            Now the ruler paused, but only for a moment.  “Can it be done in your lifetime?            Again, the servant paused.  This time the pause was longer. “No.”            “So, you think you have found the perfect legacy but it must be completed after I have died and after you have ceased to function?”            “Your life will end despite probable life extensions; my memories will continue electronically for a period far into the project.  Statistically, as I exist now, and the way I reason will become obsolete long before the project is completed.”            “Is the project important?  Is it worthwhile?”            “Shall I tell you about it?”            “Tell me,” she commanded.            After a long dissertation, the robot ends with, “Shall we begin this?”            The ruler takes some time thinking.  While she thinks the world outside the window darkens, automatic lights come on in the plaza.  Men in uniforms are putting out fires.  Small drones under the indirect control of P-1 move through the air like tiny mosquitos, invisible except when one of the powerful lights reflects of a wing.  The numbers on a clock on the computer monitor change, she taps her red nails onto the antique wood of the table.            P1 is still.  Behind her are cabinets fitted with screens and very rare books made of paper and Velum which are designed to last for lifetimes, but all those books will be gone long before this project is finished, new screens will show vastly different pictures.              “Yes,” she says at last.  “We can begin.”

ALSO BY GREGORY FRIEDLANDER

ALGORITHM UNIVERSE THEORY BOOK 1 (Non-Fiction)

ALGORITHM UNIVERSE THEORY BOOK 2 (Non-Fiction)

SPIRALS IN AMBER, SECOND EDITION (Non-Fiction)

WORLD WAR C (Science Fiction)

HOW WE LOST THE WAR WITH CHINA (Non-Fiction)

THE FIRST BATTLEFIELD OF WWII (Historical Fiction)

THE ZENO SOCRATES DIALOGS (Historical Fiction)

THE EINSTEIN HOLOGRAM UNIVERSE (Non-Fiction)

HOVER KIDS (With W.B.; Children’s Fiction)

THE COUNSELOR’S SINFUL SERIES (With P. W. Adult Fiction)