New E-book: "Phoenix in the Machine"

Phoenix in the Machine by Leigh Kimmel

Dreams come true in cyberspace -- but so do nightmares.

Roger remembers dying in a fire on the launchpad. He's reconciled it with being alive again. However, being an infomorph in a simulated environment has been a difficult adjustment. Toni tells him he went mad the first time he awoke, and she had to crash the computer.

Now he helps her playtest the games her employer designs. But cyberspace outside Toni's local area network is a dangerous place. A disastrous experiment in Bangladesh left the world in a moral panic about AI and machine consciousness.

When a careless connection betrays him to those who cannot distinguish between an AI and a post-biological human being, he and Toni must flee. Their cross-country journey will either destroy him or deliver him the spaceflight he's awaited for a century.

Now available from Amazon.com for the Kindle.

Finding the Beginning

It's interesting that I should have been e-mailed a link to Shaunta Grimes' article How to Find the Opening Scene for your novel right now, because I've spent the past several days struggling to write a beginning for a piece I've been working on.

It has its beginning as an outtake from an earlier version of my novel Khuldhar's War, which I wrote over a span of almost twenty-five years, sometimes setting it aside for months or even years between drafts. Over the years I started it at various points, taking chapters out, adding chapters to other places, and generally struggling to find the beginning of the story I was telling.

And now, looking back, I've discovered that there are several other stories in those discarded chapters. They won't be novels of the scope of Khuldhar's War, but they'll probably turn out as novelettes or novellas of respectable length, delving more deeply into some of the backstory behind the novel, of how some of the characters came to be where they were when we first meet them in that novel.

So I went through the old files and copied several chapters, all centered around one particular event, into a new file. But when I went to smooth them into a unified story, I discovered a major problem -- I had no real beginning. The existing chapters were all written as part of a larger whole, and the characters had already been introduced -- but those chapters really weren't part of this story. They would've just bogged things down.

So I had to find a new beginning. An evocative one, and one that would give enough information that the world and characters made sense, but not so much that it started collapsing under its own weight. But every beginning I tried soon felt too static, and thus boring.

And then I had a breakthrough -- maybe I was starting too late, when my protagonist and his colleague are discussing events rather than dealing with them. Maybe I should back up a little more, show them actually at work.

Now the scene finally seems to be falling into place. It's not completely right yet -- there's a lot of places where I need to go back and slip in vital information, and I'm thinking that there needs to be more interaction. But at least I now have something I can work with, and I'm feeling a lot less despair about he process.

"Phoenix Dreams" Is Now Available as an E-Book

Starship Cat Press is proud to reprint "Phoenix Dreams," which was originally published in Lazarus Risen, an anthology of transhumanist speculative fiction.



Phoenix Dreams by Leigh Kimmel

In Greek myth, the phoenix is a bird that rises from its own ashes. Growing up in the city named for it, Toni knew the story well, and her experience with computer games made her comfortable with the idea of death being negotiable. So when she found a cache of old space memorabilia in her grandfather's attic, she never guessed that her eagerness to right a historic wrong would meet with such ferocious opposition.

But it only made her more determined to give this man his spaceflight, even a century late. She would learn the skills, develop the code, and do whatever it took