Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I completed my thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth books, so far, Only The Young Die Good and Ares a few weeks ago, and sent them to my publisher, Shahid Mahmud at Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick. If you’re surprised that I’ve written so many books, imagine how I feel! Interested readers and friends immediately began asking me when they would be published.

Only The Young Die Good is a sequel to my my wonderful little vampire novel, Sweeter Than Wine. Both concern the strange adventures of one J. Gifford, a typical midwestern farmboy and Army Second Lieutenant who survived the D-Day landing and was “brought across” in a hidden wine cellar in wartime France in 1944. He was only 24 years old at the time, and today, he still is, in appearance and physiologically, in 2019.

The 99-year-old Gifford struggles, despite his “condition”, to bear it ethically and decently. He is aided in this by his cat, Fiddlestring, his best friend, the local police homicide detective, and by his three-hundred-year-old inamorata, Surica Fieraru, the gorgeous redheaded Rumanian resistance fighter pilot who brought him over in the first place. Together, they confront—and are confronted by—a cast of unexpected and uniquely evil villains (there are worse things in the world than vampires) who threaten to destroy them and the happy life they have built together against the odds.

Ares is the novel I’ve lately been calling “the middle volume of the Ngu Family Saga”. As you’ll see, that’s not quite correct. Ares is a sequel to my celebrated novel Pallas the story of a young Vietnamese-Cambodian boy, Emerson Ngu, and his struggles on the terraformed asteroid of the novel’s name, to escape collectivism and excel in the wider world of freedom and capitalism. The story follows his life and loves from the age of eight until he is a rejuvenated eighty, and is full of violent adventures and (I hope) inspiring love stories. set in the future, about a century from now.

Ares is also the prequel to Ceres, a novel about a young girl, Llyra Ngu, Emerson’s great granddaughter, a Pallatian figure skater whose fondest wish is compete among the champions of Earth. Owing to the gravitational difference, going there straightforwardly would kill her. Her journey from Pallas, to Ceres (the asteroid her engineer father is terraforming) to Earth’s Moon, to Mars, and finally to Earth is a fight against the deadly physiological effects of gravity and against the murderous minions of eco-terrorism, as well.

Ares is the story of seventeen-year-old Julie Segovia, a young woman growing up in the poverty-stricken and crime-ridden “vote farms” of Newark, New Jersey. Julie, a currency smuggler, commits an act that is both criminal and necessary and then flees to avoid prosecution. She joins the recruit-hungry East American Marine Corps and eventually gets sent to Mars to help put down a revolt of the colonists—led by Pallatian dissidents, who have begun terraforming Mars in a unique new way—sent there by the East American government and the United Nations. She meets Billy Ngu, Emerson’s grandson, fights a deadly knife duel with him, and falls in love. I hope you enjoy this novel; for various reasons, it’s taken me sixteen years to write it.

The fourth book of the Ngu Family “trilogy” will be Rosalie’s World, which I have just written the first two happy chapters of. The young ice skater, Llyra Ngu, is now grown up, “married with children”, and has taken her charming little family to Earth’s first extra-solar colonial world, an Earthlike planet named after her great grandmother, Rosalie Frazier Ngu. There they face both challenges on an alien planet, and those they inadvertently brought with them.

I’m also writing, by popular demand, believe it or not, The Frozen Stars in which Win Bear and his longtime lady-love Healer Clarissa MacDougall, both of them in therapeutic stasis for uncounted years, get a second lease on life with a little help from the unlikeliest aliens you’ve ever heard of.

I communicated with my esteemed publisher day before yesterday. He’s been as busy, so far this year, as a one-handed juggler of chainsaws and bowling balls, but asked me which of the two new novels I wanted to tackle first, publicationwise (I said that, not Shahid). I told him Ares. He said, okay, post-production would begin on March 18th. Allowing time for various contingencies, the book will be on sale to you around April 22.

If you haven’t actually read Pallas yet, now might be a good time to start. Ceres comes after Ares, and you can read it after that. Shahid’s folks and I will go to work on Only The Young Die Good sometime later. I can hardly wait.