Alan Smale

Alan Smale writes alternate history and hard science fiction. His novella of a Roman invasion of ancient America, “A Clash of Eagles”, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and his novels, Clash of Eagles (2015), Eagle in Exile (2016), and Eagle and Empire (2017), are available from Del Rey. His Roman baseball collaboration with Rick Wilber, The Wandering Warriors, came out from WordFire Press (2020), and Hot Moon, an alternate-Apollo thriller set entirely on and around the Moon, was launched by CAEZIK SF & Fantasy in July 2022. Alan has also sold over forty stories to Asimov’s and other magazines and anthologies.

alansmale.com

Uncaged welcomes Alan Smale

Welcome to Uncaged! Can you tell us more about your newest scifi book, Hot Moon? This is the first in a series, do you have a plan on how many books will be in this series?

Sure! Hot Moon begins in lunar orbit, with Apollo 32 Commander Vivian Carter and her Lunar Module Pilot, Ellis Meyer, getting ready to descend to the surface for their mission of exploration in the Marius Hills. But first, they rendezvous with Columbia Station, a NASA Skylab in lunar orbit, to bring much-needed supplies. And while they’re there, Columbia comes under attack from Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. It’s the world’s first space battle, with the retro technology of the era. Eventually, Vivian does get to the Moon’s surface, but not where and how she expected … and, well, matters go from bad to worse. Program that I always wanted to write. I call it my technothriller with heart, because obviously the space technologies of the US and USSR play a critical part in the plot and the action, but it’s also very closely focused on my characters – Soviet cosmonauts, as well as US astronauts. We get to see both points of view.

As you mentioned, it’s the first in the Apollo Rising series. I originally wrote Hot Moon as a standalone, so it’s complete in itself – no cliffhangers. The book will be satisfying for readers who go no further. But there will be a second book, Radiant Sky, with much the same cast of characters, beginning three years after the end of Hot Moon. That will also present a complete story, but I do have a third book in mind if the first two do well! That would be it, though. Apollo Rising won’t be one of those never-ending sagas. By the end of Book Three, my characters’ stories and the arc of the action will come to a close.

Easiest for me are the dialog-heavy scenes. Once I have a distinct idea of how the characters think and talk, active dialog scenes where characters are either in conflict, or trying to figure something out – those spill easily onto the page as if the characters are literally talking in my head and I’m just writing down what they say. A lot of my dramatic conversational scenes need very little editing. Hardest are the battle scenes and other extended action sequences, because there tend to be a lot of moving parts to keep track of, and I’ll often write them several different ways and then have to synthesize the versions together to make one smooth narrative. But it’s certainly worth taking the time to get them right.

Do you have a favorite character you’ve written? Has there been a character that’s been hard to

My main protagonist in Hot Moon, Vivian Carter, was a naval aviator before she was accepted into the NASA astronaut corps. She’s grown up in a traditionally maledominated arena and found her own way of surviving within that environment. She’s naturally snarky and independent, and a lot of her character comes through in her dialog. I enjoy writing her conversations with her fellow astronauts, and her much more adversarial interactions with her Soviet counterparts, Makarov and Belyakova, plus the book’s major antagonist, KGB/ Spetsnaz operative, Sergei Yashin.

Hard characters? Sometimes some of the bit players and spear carriers, the supporting characters who don’t get much “screen time”, can be a little harder to write because I want them to have their own distinct personalities as well. I want readers to be able to picture them and recognize what sorts of people they are, but in a small number of words, and in a way that doesn’t

distract or slow the action down. I like my books to be populated by “real” characters and not ciphers. Sometimes that’s a tricky balance to get right.

How do you come up with the title to your books?

For Hot Moon, I knew its title just as soon as I knew I wanted to write a book about the Apollo Program during the Cold War, with space combat sequences. It just seemed obvious: direct, short, unpretentious – a thriller title. The second book title was harder, because I wanted something in the same thematic vein, with the same associations with energy and spaceflight. It took me several days to settle on Radiant Sky, and it was another couple of months after that that the perfect title for a third book came into my mind. If there is one, I know what I’ll call it, but I won’t be revealing that for some time!

What behind-the-scenes tidbit in your life would probably surprise your readers the most?

The sheer amount of note-taking I do. Every book I write has associated files of notes that are longer than the books themselves. All my research doesn’t show up blatantly on the published page, obviously, but it helps to provide the authentic settings and personal and technical backgrounds to the stories I’m telling. Another tidbit would be that when I’m writing, I’m writing – not really pausing to stare out the window, not stopping to look up details. Pretty much just typing continuously.

Which comes first, the plot or the characters in the planning stages?

Really, the concept: the setting and situation. For my previous Clash of Eagles trilogy, I knew I wanted to write about Cahokia, the great moundbuilder city of the North American Mississippian Culture, long before the time of Columbus. I wanted an outside invading force, and it seemed interesting to me that it would be the Romans who were coming in – culturally very different from the Native Americans, and with very different motives from the Spanish, English, and French invaders in our own timeline. All of that predated the full plot and characters, although once I had the concept, everything else flowed naturally. Same with Hot Moon: I wanted 1970s Apollo and Soyuz craft, I wanted war in space, but with very clunky technology, waged by people who were having to figure everything out in real time, as they went along, improvising and making mistakes they then needed to recover from. I knew that the Moon itself, and the hard vacuum of space, would be “adversaries” just as challenging as the human antagonists. With that as backdrop, I developed the cast of NASA and USAF astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts who would inhabit that world. At that point, plot and character really developed synergistically, each feeding off each other. Here’s a situation: how does Vivian respond? How is she motivated, how do her actions then drive the plot going forward? What do Nikolai Makarov and Sveltana Belyakova want, and how do they react? How (and where) do the tough constraints that everyone is dealing with drive them and proscribe their actions? Where are the surprises? And so on.

I find that outlining a plot only takes me so far. Once I start writing the full scenes in the manuscript, the characters often steer the plot in directions that I don’t anticipate. Characters need to be true to themselves.

What are some things you like to do to relax when you aren’t writing or working?

I love to travel. I explored Europe pretty thoroughly in my teens and early twenties, and more recently have traveled through China, Mongolia, Japan, Morocco, Peru, the Galapagos … We’ve been held back by the pandemic lately, but I feel the wanderlust growing again.

I also sing with a six-person a cappella group called The Chromatics, three men and three women. We write a lot of original music, and have a whole set of astronomically correct songs that we’ve performed at the Kennedy Center, and at science museums and science fiction conventions across the country.

If you could have one all-year season, which would it be and why?

Forever springtime! The budding trees, the new life building. Although it’s hard to imagine what a perpetual springtime would look like if it never culminated in summer or led through to the gradual colorful decline of autumn. See, I’m being scientific again. From growing up in England, I really enjoy that annual cycle through four distinct seasons.

Do you prefer ebooks, audiobooks or physical books? Are you reading anything now?

I prefer physical books you can hold, and skim through, and riffle the pages. I love the look and feel of books. Functionally, ebooks are easier to carry around and often cheaper, so I do read them. But hardbacks are my true love.

What would you like to say to fans, and where can they follow you?

I’m extremely happy and gratified that people enjoy what I write, and that I’ve established an audience. And I do love engaging with my readers! I can be found online at https://www.alansmale.com, on Facebook as https://www.facebook.com/alan.smale/, and Twitter as @alansmale.

Enjoy an excerpt from Hot Moon

Hot Moon Alan Smale Hard SciFi

Apollo 32, commanded by career astronaut Vivian Carter, docks at NASA’s Columbia space station en route to its main mission: exploring the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon. Vivian is caught in the crossfire as four Soviet Soyuz craft appear without warning to assault the orbiting station. In an unplanned and desperate move, Vivian spacewalks through hard vacuum back to her Lunar Module and crew and escapes right before the station falls into Soviet hands.

Their original mission scrubbed, Vivian and her crew are redirected to land at Hadley Base, a NASA scientific outpost with a crew of eighteen. But soon Hadley, too, will come under Soviet attack, forcing its unarmed astronauts to daring acts of ingenuity and improvisation.

With multiple viewpoints, shifting from American to Soviet perspective, from occupied space station to American Moon base under siege, to a covert and blistering US Air Force military response, Hot Moon tells the gripping story of a war in space that very nearly might have been.

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1 Apollo 32: Vivian Carter Mission Elapsed Time (Hours): 105:40:16 tin can. Spacesuited, untethered, and in free fall, Vivian Carter struggled to focus her thoughts and make sense of the scene before her. Woozy from pain and shock, she heard no voices in her headset, nothing but the seething white-noise hiss of jammed S-band communications.

That can’t be right.

It was that empty hiss that freaked her out the most. She was alone in the void, between spacecraft, and as isolated as she had ever been. Comms were critical, and Vivian had none. She’d been out of it for long, precious moments. Ever since the Soviet cosmonaut’s bullets smashed into her shoulder and raked her helmet and sent her tumbling slowly in space, sixty miles above the mares and uplands, the basins and craters of the Moon. Since the impact trauma, she’d been suspended in a stunned reverie. C’mon, Viv. Snap out of it. Work to do. She dragged in a long, shaky breath. It was stale with pressure-suit odors, an odd blend of metal and rubber, Vivian-smell, and the acidic tang of pure oxygen.

An assault rifle in space? No reason why it couldn’t fire in a vacuum—ammunition had its own oxidizer—but dissipating the heat was another matter. Hopefully the weapon would jam before the cosmonaut could fire again. Vivian blinked hard to shake away the drops of sweat that wouldn’t fall from her eyelashes in zero G. Glanced down at the compressed-air gun she was still clutching in her gloved hand and not using. Squinted at the pressure gauge on her wrist. Low, but steady. Her suit was probably compromised at the shoulder and maybe the calf as well, even with its twenty-one layers of thermal and micrometeoroid protection. But the holes must be small, and her PLSS—the portable life support system that she carried on her back—could replace the leaking oxygen at that rate. If she could get back to her ship soon, she should

Okay, fine. I’ve got this. Maybe.

There was no time for self-doubt. A hundred yards ahead of her was the Apollo stack Vivian had seen in her dreams for a decade. A Command and Service Module mated with a Lunar Module, in glorious orbit around the Moon. NASA’s iconic image, the fundamental visual of the US space program since Apollo 11. Under its shiny hood, Apollo 32 was better equipped than the crate that brought Armstrong and Aldrin to the Moon ten years ago, but from the outside it looked pretty much the same.

A similar distance behind her, Columbia Station was a patchwork beetle, a blocky cylinder with an X of solar panels resting on its shoulders. It was a converted Saturn V third stage, flown from the Earth to the Moon and decked out as a Skylab. Inside it was a relatively luxurious living space with three separate levels, each a circular deck twenty feet in diameter. Vivian had just come from there, having escaped through the airlock of the third port in some weird slow-motion version of the nick of time.

And then there were the three Soyuz interceptors and the uncrewed Progress cargo tanker, stalking over and around Columbia Station in a careful ballet. Sinister predators from the USSR, come to assault the US orbiting platform. With oddly curved lines compared to the blocky angularity of Columbia and Apollo 32, each Soviet craft resembled a bell with a ball affixed to its top. Two of the vessels were black and the other two mostly dark green, and each had “CCCP” emblazoned in red on its side.

They’d appeared from nowhere. And they were jamming NASA’s communications so hard that Vivian couldn’t talk to her crew, Columbia Station, or Mission Control. Even with the collapsing détente between the Cold War adversaries, and with Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan, this was an astonishing development. Who’d have guessed the Soviets would be so bold? Four days ago, Vivian had been at Kennedy Space Center preparing for launch and dreaming of the Marius Hills: a pristine lunar landscape with volcanic domes and rilles, regolith yet to be trodden by human boots, a thousand scientific discoveries yet to be made. A landing site she had studied in so much detail that it was inscribed on her soul. And, ironically, that was the area she was passing over right now: the wide basaltic plain of Oceanus Procellarum.

Her Moon. Her mission. Her life, for so many years. And now it was all going to hell.

Three of the Soviet vessels were clustered around Columbia, with the Progress tanker apparently attached to the US station like a limpet, close to the airlock module. The final Soyuz interceptor still stood apart from the others, above Columbia from Vivian’s perspective, and rolling gently.

Vivian was about to concentrate her thoughts back onto her trajectory and use the gas gun to correct her course to the Apollo stack, when she caught a motion from the rotating Soyuz. The cosmonaut who’d just minutes ago shot bullets at her—with, what? An AK47?—had reappeared in the hatchway. He was easy to spot in his orange-tinged Orlan spacesuit, and even easier because he was lugging a tube that must be six feet long.

A tube he was now settling into a suit attachment on his shoulder, and aiming in her direction.

A rocket launcher?

Oh, man. You have got to be kidding me.

The Ocean of Storms, unrolling beneath her, might be the last thing Vivian ever saw.

Maryann lukowich

Maryann Lukowich is a family nurse practitioner. She currently has about two thousand patients from newborn babies to the elderly. She has been working as a NP in underserved areas for the past fourteen years, but has been a nurse for thirty-three years. She has worked in a variety of settings over this time: labor/delivery and the medical/surgical units in a hospital, caring for the elderly in a nursing home, being a school nurse, and working in various doctors’ offices. She is happily married and is a mother of two grown children and has a three-year-old grandson named Finley.

An Informative Children’s Book on Dealing with Sore Throat

Author gives parents a tool to help explain to their children what to expect when visiting the doctor and during recovery

From a veteran nurse practitioner comes this instructive children’s picture book, My Throat Hurts!, to serve as an aid in explaining to the young ones what sore throat is and how to deal with it. Being a nurse practitioner, Maryann sees multiple children for strep throat each year. This gave her first-hand experience on how children feel and react when they arrive at the doctor’s office. She hopes that with this book, she will be able to help parents explain to their children that there’s nothing to be afraid of. My Throat Hurts! is a children’s book about what to expect when a child has a sore throat and needs to go to the doctor’s office to be checked for strep throat. My Throat Hurts! was written so children will not be afraid to go to the doctor by teaching the process of a doctor’s visit, from getting the vital signs checked to testing for strep throat. It also explains the steps to recovery, such as treating with an antibiotic, how to prevent the spread of the disease, and when a person is no longer contagious and can safely return to their activities.

Maryann hopes that this book will be able to help and support parents and guardians everywhere; as well as ease and calm the young ones as they go through this experience.

This book can be purchased at online bookstores; www.amazon.com and www. barnesandnoble.com.

Upcoming Book Event!!! 2022 Frankfurt International Book Fair WHERE: Frankfurt, Germany WHEN: Oct 19, 2022 - Oct 23, 2022

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

What’s the hardest thing about being an author?

Finding time to write when I already have a full time job in which I work overtime as well as multiple volunteer organizations to which I belong. I also have multiple other hobbies I love to do such as playing the piano and quilting.

What is the best thing about being an author?

Being able to impart my knowledge to others.

What inspired you to write this book?

I’ve always wanted to write children’s books. Working in health care, I wanted to write something to help teach people to seek help when their child is ill and to teach children that it is not scary to visit the doctor’s office.

How would you describe your style of writing to someone that has never read your work?

It comes from a health care worker expertise. My goal is to help people.

Do you feel that writing is an ingrained process or just something that flows naturally?

Both. I love to write, so for me, it flows naturally.

What books are currently in your to be read pile?

My favorite writers are Steven King and Danielle Steele. My favorite book is the Bible.

Anything you would like to say to your readers and fans?

I hope to get more out to you soon!