Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Previously, as they say on TV, we saw our hero, former Denver homicide detective Edward William Bear, otherwise known as “Win”, compelled to place his lady-love Clarissa in paratronic stasis because she was suffering from a terminal degenerative disease even his adopted alternative culture, the North American Confederacy, couldn’t cure. His hope was that someday science would find a cure and revive her. Being the swell guy that I am, I named this disease after a dear old friend and colleague of mine: “Koman’s Mitochondriasis”.

Eventually, Win had Clarissa ensconced in a tidy little apartment carved out of the center of a small asteroid in the relatively new Venus Belt (See the novel of the same name), floating in the silent depths of space between Mercury and Earth. In time, his and Clarissa’s two daughters, Lucille and EdWina, were grown and signed on aboard the galactic fleet (you know about that from Tom Paine Maru). Life was now somewhat less than interesting to Win, so he lay down next to Clarissa and joined her in what he thought might be eternal stasis.

And believe it or not, that’s just the beginning of the adventure I call The Frozen Stars.

Nanoseconds pass. Minutes pass. Days and weeks and months and years pass. Then there’s a knock on the door and a pair of aliens enter to tell them that, while they were sleeping, fifty million years have gone by!

The aliens show them a telescopic image of Humanity’s home planet. Time has not treated Gaia especially well. The Mediterranean Sea is gone; it’s a shallow, arid valley. Europe and North Africa are now one continuous land-mass, Similarly, Australia has “crashed” into India. The Atlantic is now much wider. Baja California is a part of Alaska. Plate tectonics and fifty million years have re-made the face of the Earth that Win and Clarissa once knew.

The aliens seem friendly and well-meaning, if a bit bumbling and inept. One of them keeps wanting to eat Clarissa’s fancy dinner dishes. They not only offer to cure Clarissa, but they have already done it! Humanity is now scattered to a million different points in the galaxy, they say, and in some cases may not be recognizable after 2,500,000 generations of evolution, but the aliens can show Win where they are and how to get there.

They just want this one little favor …

The last book I wrote, Ares, took me sixteen years, altogether, what with distractions like watching my own daughter growing up, worrying about the mortgage and other bills, working around the continuously disintegrating house, and, four years ago, having a stroke and a quadruple heart bypass in pretty close succession. Unfortunately, there’s no stasis my family can put me into—and I wouldn’t be able to write like that, in any case.

I think there might be some who would be happy about that.

A lot of folks have been bugging me to bring Win back—again—for a long while. The last time, it produced The American Zone—I wish I’d heard more about how people liked it. If The Frozen Stars is successful, I have a book about murder at the Confederate ballpark in mind; working title: Take Me Out At The Ball Game. Like everybody else, I still have distractions, I get no advances from my otherwise splendid publisher, and I would be delighted to have your help overcoming these problems. Take a look at my Patreon account patreon.com/lneilsmith, if you will, and subscribe for a couple of bucks a month. Or a hundred, what the hell? I understand you can do something similar through Paypal. I don’t know the details, but when I do, I’ll pass them on to you.

Believe me, it’s great fun working with Win Bear again. I never understood Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who came to hate Sherlock Holmes and tried to kill him, or Dame Agatha Christie, who eventually loathed Hercule Poirot and did manage to kill him. Win reminds me of my dad, whom I miss every single day. And it’s my extreme pleasure to share him with you.