THRUST NOVA LEGENDS: excerpts from my forthcoming novel

in the context of I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX having reached a new level of prominence - accounting for approximately one half of total ilx traffic now, and boasting 2013's most prominent and dangerous web agitator amongst its ranks - i hope no one gets bent out of shape if i leverage the reach of our interstitial treehouse to shine a spotlight on my forthcoming novel, while i finalize the negotiation of a self-publishing deal with amazon kindle. like most first novels, it is a dark sci-fantasy bildungsroman that draws broadly and deeply from the well of the author's own life. i'll be sporadically adding excerpts over the nest few weeks.

let's make two things clear. firstly, i'm not looking for praise here. you want to praise my work, that's your look out; it's incidental to me. secondly, don't dream that i haven't mailed a copy of all this to myself.

The Pachacamac slipped into hyperspace like a hand between legs. Thrust pushed the console away and walked over to where Candi still sat in her silk robe, drinking coffee.

"The presence of a cusp in the centers of CDM halos is one of the earliest and strongest results derived from N-body cosmological simulations. Numerical simulations for CDM structure formation predict some structure properties that conflict with astronomical observations. Aw shit!”

The ship rocked violently. Thrust sprinted back over to the console and swung the ship around. Candi didn’t even look up, lost in her thoughts and still turning over what he had said in her mind. Just what kind of range of discrepancies would they be talking about?

Thrust had located the bogey, and jerked the coil cannons towards it. “The discrepancies range from galaxies to clusters of galaxies,” he shouted over the din, as if reading her mind. The signature orange glow of the coil cannons started to fill the cabin. A high pitched whine cut through the noise. “The main one that has attracted a lot of attention is the cuspy halo problem, namely that CDM models predict halos that have a high density core or have an inner profile that is too steep compared to observations."

Thrust’s conclusion was punctuated with a deafening report from the cannons. The cabin filled with a momentarily blinding white light. When Thrust turned back to look at Candi, her robe was gone.

The broadcast was suddenly interrupted. “Glorps,” thought Thrust “another cruddamn Hegemony ‘cast.” The holoscreen flickered to show a giant space hangar, lined with black suited elite guardsmen. Then the Hegemon appeared, cutting down the corridor between the troopers, flanked by his two chilliarch admirals. The ‘cast swept along the hanger, following the three men in a dramatic tracking shot. Then the image gradually zoomed in on the twisted face of the leader himself.

Watching the Hegemon close-up, Thrust was bisected between revulsion and compulsion. A sudden thought struck him, but quickly he dismissed it, mocking himself. In that brief moment he had fancied he could discern a similarity to his own striking features beneath the extensive scarring on the leader's face. “I suppose he would be around the same age as my own father”, Thrust mused, “were my father still alive.” But his father was long dead, and he would never ever forget that space pod race.

lol

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.

Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.

But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many—perhaps most—of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven—or hell.

How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.

Thrust took the space elevator up to the spaceport’s observation lounge to watch the launch. He patched the link with Wilbur in the space garage into his Bluetooth earbud.

“Goddammit this is it, Thrust my friend. This is finally, actually, truly it. I wasn’t sure if we would ever see the day”.

Wilbur was being falsely modest for the occasion - he had never doubted himself, and neither had Thrust. Wilbur was that rare thing, a visionary of true genius, a man apart, just like Thrust himself.

“They still want to stop me. They, the narrow sighted, the bureaucrats, the masses. Just a couple of weeks ago the so-called department of public safety tried to stop the launch. The department of public limitation more like. A sea of grey suited mediocrity, slavishly devoted to making sure everyone stays as inconsequential as they are.”

“The bastards,” Thrust mumbled hotly in agreement. The planet filled almost all of the glass outward wall of the observation lounge, its surface layers dark grey from here, splashed brilliantly with electric lines and clusters of orange. “So what happened?”

“I had a word with Nelson at the club and he pulled some strings. Terrific guy. You see Thrust, they’re not like you and I. Ours is a natural superiority, something the average person is aware of intrinsically, and they resent it. This is why they try to limit us. They try to deny what they know to be the natural order. If only they can blind all vision, no one will be able see the difference. But I see Thrust, my eyes are wide goddamn open. Okay, this is it!”

The link snapped dead. Tense, silent moments passed. Then Thrust felt almost as if he could feel a vibration, surely just the anticipation. But no, there was a gentle tremor and suddenly a burst of light from below. Within moments the ship was visible. Mere moments more and it was there, moving in the direction of the spaceport – glory in chrome, long, hard and smooth, tapering to a rounded point at one end. Precisely the monument to technology and design that Wilbur’s genius had envisioned. Reflected orange light played along the underside of the ship; down below, the patterns of electric orange light had been largely obscured by a new, widespread blanket of deeper orange light, looking for all the world like half a continent aflame.

http://www.music-on-click.com/open2b/var/catalog/images/5127/0-8f014fc9-400.jpg

my cover art preemptively ganked by herbie hancock smh

christmas interrupted me before i finished the metaphor-dense description of extra-vehicular space sex i was working on, rip