Political Post #1

Okay, here's probably my last post of what has been a fairly busy day for me. I guess as my first political opinion delivered herein, it should be more general than most succeeding ones I post here will be. Generally, then, I suppose many folks would label my politics as "liberal", and some of the Tea Party faithful who've drunk too much kool-aid might even call me a radical socialist card-carryin' commie-nazi bastard who loves islamofascists, atheists and goats about equally well.

Well, keeping in mind that American politics in general these days seems to be constantly shifting rightward at about the same rate that 90% of the American economy is shifting downward, I guess I can admit to being on the far left at this moment in time. Which for most of American history up until about 1980 would have probably placed me as a moderate-rightist, somewhere between a Grover Cleveland Democrat and an Eisenhower Republican. In my opinion, the kind of person America needs in leadership positions today should in general be a fiscal conservative and a social liberal (though on specific issues they might very well sometimes stray from that description).

Unfortunately for us all, since about 1980 we've tended to have leaders who are more the opposite, so now we have a land where the tv commercials are more squeaky-clean of sexual references than most other countries in the world but where most of the interior rivers spawn fish so full of mercury that I'd turn into a walking thermometer if I were foolish enough to eat one; where the top one-percent or so of income-earners make almost forty percent of the money; and where so-called "liberal" politicians or media-folk who run into a scandal are often forced to resign immediately from their position and apologize to the world on bended knee while "conservatives" often are allowed to simply claim some version of "youthful exuberance",  or "Satan made me do it" and are soon right back plying the good old fundraising circuit like nothing happened.

If I were to make a wish-list for what I'd like to see happen in this country, item number one (and the only thing I'd ask for if I were allowed just a single wish)  would be "restore our Constitutional rights to where they were before the constant chipping-away of a whole series of 'Imperial presidencies', which admittedly began far earlier but which has really seemed to accelerate since 1980 and particularly since 2001". If that makes me a radical socialist, then so be it.

Or maybe I'm wrong. At least I'm willing to consider the possibility. What do you think?

Excerpt #1 from Beyond The Empire: 

Down and down and down the lander spiraled, passing over millions of square-miles of sagebrush, cactus and sand. Rugged-looking wasteland, mostly; broken here and there by chains of desolate-looking mountains. Descending through a perfectly clear sky that lacked even birds or a decent breeze to make it interesting. That is, beyond a promise that he could soon walk for a while in air that wasn't filtered, replicated or way-cleaner than air was supposed to be. Maybe even find something to eat that actually once belonged to the plant or animal kingdom.

Plus the business, of course. Not my usual work, for certain, but somebody's gotta do it. Cruickshank had said he could use a break in his routine, and Razeela was always keen to take a little side-trip, but Blunt had decided to go himself. The last time he'd sent Cruickshank on what should have been the most-mundane of ground operations, it had taken him three days to return and a week to detox afterward. The last time Razeela went, there'd been a pile of slaver-cop bodies to dispose of and damned near an interstellar war.

I can't do worse than that today, Blunt told himself. Unless I don't come back at all.

At last, the controller granted him final approach, with several new waves of pointless instructions and rambling warnings as the price. Teeth clenched in a false smile that no one else could see, Blunt let the sentmech's chatter roll over him like just another wave of solar particles or gamma rays deflected by the lander's shields, and kept his eyes moving more or less alertly from one display to another on his piloting console. He was even quick to key on local gravity at the very instant the blinking green light indicated, which automatically nulled-out the lander's slightly stronger artificial version with only a minor resultant lurch to his insides. As the controller-mech pointed out several times during the approach in rather different language, these precautions and others eventually allowed the spaceport’s automatic tractor beams to grab the little craft and bring it in to a landing soft as a supermodel’s bottom, with minimum time and energy expended by the dog-karking Vikkanian Port Authority staff and no fresh dings in the konk-eating Authority’s landing surface.

Within ninety seconds of touchdown, Blunt shut off the lander's main power, most-happily killed the comm, and activated the airlock cycle. Precisely as the controller-mech had commanded before signing off with a rapidly spoken disclaimer of all planetary government responsibility for anything bad which might befall a visitor to Vikkania.

Beyond The Empire

Hello, and welcome to my new blog, which just happens to have the same name as my new science fiction novel: Beyond The Empire. Promoting my book---and my other writings, which are also mainly science fiction and fantasy---is one of two main goals I've set for this blog. The other will be to provoke some political discussion among you-all over my opinions on various current events, historical events, scientific discoveries, etc. which I will try to post here as often as I can, interspersed with a few excerpts from my own writing and sometimes also news from the larger world of science fiction.

I believe that the phrase Beyond The Empire also works in reference to many of my political and social views, as may become clearer once I begin posting some of them. I realize that combining politics/current events and science fiction on the same blog may seem like a lethal combination to some people; but frankly, persons who can't relate at all to at least the general run of my politics are probably unlikely to buy my books anyway, so I will ignore the advice of some of my friends, give it a try and see what happens.

Comment by you upon these opinions of mine will not only be welcome, but I will see it as being extremely important to the future of this blog. Hopefully, there will be a mixture of  views represented by your posts which should lead to some interesting discussions; but I'll take it as it comes, whatever it may be. Obviously we all have to stay within the usual rules for posting online. Comments which fall outside the bounds of legality or common decency may lead to bad results for the poster. Otherwise, though, let's just try and have some fun with this.

Before getting to the politics and such, however, I must  return for the remainder of this posting to the science fiction aspect. I've been writing short science fiction and fantasy works for a few years now, and have occasionally enjoyed some success with them, but this is my first novel, so I can only hope that readers will think it's as exciting, funny and insightful as I have tried to make it. In a separate post here I will soon put up a sample of the novel, upon which everyone is as welcome to comment as they will be on my political opinions. Other samples drawn from various parts of the book will follow at convenient intervals, possibly about one per week.  

Beyond The Empire is currently available on Amazon.com as a Kindle e-book at http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-The-Empire-ebook/dp/B004RCLY1G/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1299784914&sr=1-2, but anyone who doesn't have a Kindle reader may buy an e-copy directly from me for the princely sum of $4.99, and I'll format it as a Word file, PDF or a few other formats which my computer can produce, per what you ask for. You can contact me for that purpose at highlander2112@sbcglobal.net

Spammers and other undesirables who abuse this e-mail address will not only be detected and blocked by the spam filter but will also be tracked down by the nastiest space-pirates I know and summarily dispatched. Thus ends my introductory post. I'll be following it almost immediately with an excerpt from Beyond The Empire and then with my first political post, so I hope you'll look for those and comment/buy the book as you will.
-----William E. Frey