Kings of the High Frontier (Hardcover)

There had to be a simpler way. Heinlein wouldn't have lied to me!

I stopped being a NASA fan when they canceled the Moon flights in December of 1972. And I became an enemy of NASA when Skylab -- a better space station than MIR would ever be -- was allowed to disintegrate into scrap.

I felt that I was not alone in this rage. I knew that there must have been others who loved Space but despised or even hated the space program. What if some of them, I thought, worked for NASA? What if they took their expertise with them into a sort of Space Underground? What if NASA tried to stop them? We've recently heard about the Mars Underground, but this idea occurred to me two decades ago.

In the summer of 1976, I started work on a novel entitled Hidden Millions. The title suggested the laundered money that might flow into such a venture, but also the millions of people in the counter-economy who might be involved knowingly or unknowingly in the effort.

Suffice it to say that my abilities as a writer back then were raw and I shelved the 80 pages of the manuscript to concentrate on projects more appropriate to my skills...

It was in 1985 that I began to research a novel called Huntress, but at that time The Jehovah Contract was about to be published in the US and I only made some mental notes.

Then Challenger fell. And you note that I say "fell" and not "exploded." As we now know, the tank ruptured, but the spacecraft was not incinerated.

Shock turned to sorrow and almost immediately to rage. The disaster had killed seven astronauts and destroyed one fourth of Earth's space fleet. I knew that -- by then -- the scales must have fallen from the eyes of others both outside and inside NASA. After a brief year's detour to write Solomon's Knife, I began on the Dante-esque journey that was Kings of the High Frontier. Six years of my life went into researching and writing the novel, and another four years spent in abortive attempts to find a "sci-fi" publisher who would deign to publish it. It was not until 1995 that the eminent author and fellow Prometheus Award winner J. Neil Schulman offered me a way out when he approached me with the idea of putting the novel on the World Wide Web.

He and I had been involved in a previous electronic publishing venture called SoftServ, which received some notice and mild success. It was only with the advent of the Web, though, that the full advantages of Paperless Bookstm became obvious.

It didn't matter to Pulpless (tm) that my novel was 228,000 words long. Neil didn't have to buy paper or glue or ink, or pay for typesetting, or arrange for warehousing or shipping. He wasn't concerned that I had several full-color illustrations -- he didn't have to shoot plates or pay for color printing. He simply had to come up with a way to allow people to buy a copy of the book over the Internet and receive it immediately. And the proof that he did is in my hands in the form of this award.

With Neil's help -- and that of Samuel Edward Konkin III and J. Kent Hastings -- I was able to do what no billion-dollar New York publisher was able to do: bring to the world a novel of rage and hope, and a book that I pray will inspire young readers to find a way to get us off this dirtball and onward to our manifest destiny among the Stars.

I could not have done this without the help of Neil, Sam, and Kent, nor that of Brad "Doom" Linaweaver, who has boosted this book everywhere, even to the point of throwing his baby Sliders: The Novel onto the sacrificial altar by removing it from Prometheus Award consideration in favor of Kings. Rocket scientists Tom Brosz and Gary Hudson provided lots of information, and editors Richard Kyle and Anders Monsen helped immensely. Charles de Lint's trailblazing review in F&SF provided the novel with the mantle of literary acceptability that allows it to be viewed as something more than a curiosity. And I thank Claire Wolfe and Jim Davidson for their excellent in-movement reviews, as well as L. Neil Smith for his vocal defense of the novel in a public forum.

[Since the above speech, the novel has been published in hardback by Final Frontier Books, which is the version available through Amazon.com.] I give untolled thanks to eragents Brad Linaweaver and Ed Kramer, my publisher and fellow Illuminatum Vincent Harper and his lovely wife and partner Leslie for their unshakeable faith in Kings. Without their port and ceaseless effort, this book would not be in this beautiful, limited and signed hardcover edition today.

Most of all, I could never have gotten this far without the love and port of my loyal and steadfast Princess and Queen of the High Frontier: my astounding daughter Vanessa and my amazing wife Veronica.