If I sound harsh, difficult, cold-blooded and not romantic, well, so be it. The business of writing is not romantic. The business of creating can be. The necessity of writing from your guts makes the difference between crud and an interesting and vital manuscript. And the joy of writing comes when you are involved in the creative process, when you shout or you laugh at something you have just typed. [I have been frowned at and finger-wagged at by my wife, a more serious soul, for laughing like an insane madman while writing. She can’t understand why I’d laugh at my own stuff.] The point is, of course, if it don’t entertain yourself there’s very little chance it will entertain somebody else. Even when it entertains you, that don’t mean anybody else will do more than moan and groan in total boredom.
Writing is hard work, at best, sometimes thrilling and exciting. But the business of getting published is a totally different story. You revise at edi-torial demand, willingly and happily. That is if you want that editor to buy your words, pay for and publish them. And the end-game is to get pub-lished so you will be communicating with the general public. Communica-tion is the point of it all; and the larger the audience the more communica-tion. Simple as that.
The harsh, personal reality of writing is that we do create for the pure pleasure it can bring to us and for the hoped for pleasure it may give some others.
CHAPTER THREE
INTRODUCTIONS ARE SHAMELESS ADS
Herein the author presents, without modesty or embarrassment a group-ing of Introduction he did for the Wildside releases of his books, at the re-quest of Robert Reginald who was responsible for putting these books to-gether for the publisher. It was fun and a delight to offer up this material. And I offer it here as an obvious promotional matter of fact.
And for better or worse this is an extra added “attraction” for the read-er, at no extra cost to his or her pocketbook. Well, not at this point, in any case. If the reader finds something here that intrigues their interest, they can get most of these books in printed editions or as ebooks.
ADAPT OR DIE
I’ve never been an over-sensitive writer; I have been fairly practical concerning publisher’s requirements and/or policy needs. I used to consider writers who complained about having their stories ruined by the editor as being somewhat childishly unprofessional. But there are times when a pub-lisher goes too far.
This book was originally published in hardcover as Last Call for the Stars, which was not my title for the novel. It was also butchered by the editors who cut it by one third to fit their length requirements. They deleted very important background, and even, to my horror, much scene-connecting material. It was as if the editors had taken an ax to the manuscript and aimlessly chop-chopped! What was left was a badly connected comic book of action, without any real inner guts left.
The theme of the book came out of the concept of Deep Freeze: have your dead body deep-frozen to be thawed when science found the cure to what killed you (and any damage caused by the deep freezing process it-self).
So I approached it this way:
What would happen is a man, whom I called General Hal Grant, went into the Frozen Death before he turned senile? It would be his last grand adventure. What would the future Earth be like? How many years would have passed since he was deep frozen? Assuming he survived Deep Freeze itself.
If a body could be cured of all illnesses that led to death, then Immor-tality was a very realistic promise.
And what were the implications of Immortality? Just consider one sim-ple thing like: is it possible to stay in love with another person for eternity (forgetting ideals and/or religious belief systems)?
Nothing turned out as Grant had expected!
Upon revival he and some twenty-plus other men and women, from varied time periods on Earth, were faced with the challenge of adapting to unexpected harsh realities or dying!
The title was obvious, and has been now reinstated along with over 20,000 missing words. The original manuscript had been written in the late 1960s, so some updating was required, plus new material added to more fully develop other characters. I think it is a far better book than the original novel would have been if not brutalized by editorial cuts.
I got some very good, tough advice from an internet friend, Heidi Gar-rett, who had read the hard cover edition and asked to see the revised ver-sion as soon as it was finished. I sent her a copy of the first full draft via e-mail, and over a three-day weekend she not only discovered typos and lines that were questionable, but pointed out redundant material, which needed fixing. All this was done via continual e-mail exchanges during that furi-ously busy weekend. I agree with her claim that Adapt or Die is a totally different story from Last Call for the Stars—and far better!
THE ERSATZ
The Ersatz was originally published as a paperback novel under the title, Lovers: 2075, and then later in a slightly improved version as part of Images of Tomorrow, a collection published by Powell Publications in 1969.
Now I offer it to a new set of twenty-first-century readers in this new updating of the original text.
Ersatzes exist in a world where universal peace, population control and boredom drove people to the edge of violence. The Ersatz was the ideal solution to such social rage!
Angry at your boss—take it out on your ersatz. That’s what they are for!
Nagged by your wife—whack your ersatz instead of her!
Have a husband who is cheating on you—blow your ersatz’s head off!
That’s what they were made for! And there was an endless supply of these android creatures! Even in an over-populated world. Ersatzes could be recycled! Mindless, soulless inventions of human science, they were the ultimate solution to man’s problems.
Only the National Organization FREE spoke to change things. FREE = For Rising Ersatz Equality!
Only FREE was mad enough to believe that ersatzes might offer much more to its masters than simply an outlet for its violent nature.
It was a losing cause, until….
Benny arrived!
“The Talisman” is a new and original story that I found in my files—lost until now. If I remember right, it came out of my dislike of door-to-door salesmen, but then it quickly became something totally different. It was written some years ago and simply filed away. I gave it to my friendly editor, Heidi Garrett, who loved it and encouraged me to put it with The Ersatz. And so it is here presented.
SLAVES OF LOMOORO
This is a special book for me, on several different levels. For one, it was my first SF book. And when it was published I used my late brother’s name as a byline, instead of my own. The reason for that is, in itself, a simple sto-ry.
But to get to the very beginning, before bylines were even a considera-tion, even before the time when I actually became a writer.
As indicated elsewhere, I have long had an interest in the literary worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs. That started when I was thirteen or four-teen, if memory serves me right.
My folks lived in West Los Angeles, which is, in effect, something like a small mountain range distant from Tarzana. When we moved in 1948 to Encino (in the San Fernando Valley), just one town slightly “northeast” of Tarzana, I found a local bookstore where I could continue buying Bur-roughs’ books, wholly unaware, at the time, how close I was to the actual living, breathing author himself!
Well, the owners of the store ended up not only telling me about Edgar Rice Burroughs living nearby, but that they could arrange, at no extra cost to me, to have some of my books autographed by the man himself. It isn’t hard to guess what happened next.
Sad to say, I never met Burroughs in the flesh. But I still have a couple of the books he signed, right within sight of where I’m sitting right now. I was told later by his secretary that these were the last books he ever signed. And the handwriting is somewhat shaky, to be sure. He was ill in the hospi-tal at the time, and not long thereafter he died at home.
It wasn’t until sometime later that I actually
discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., located in a small, Spanish-style building on the south side of Ventura Boulevard just a few miles away. This is where I found many surprising things, including a long list of unpublished ERB stories. I also, of course, got to see some of the original book cover paintings that were hanging on the walls. The most thrilling event for me was being escorted into the writer’s private office, seeing his desk and the wall full of books of the published editions of his works.
I was more than impressed.
During this period of my life I was a young fan and collector of Bur-roughs’ works, which even then were becoming next to impossible to find. This was before the publishing boom of the 1960s, which brought much of the master’s novels back into print. I was able easily to locate the Mars novels, the Tarzan books, and very little else. Secondhand bookstores be-came my usual Saturday hideaways. I eventually tracked down all of ERB’s published works, outside of The Lad and the Lion and Back to the Stone Age (although I had the latter in serial form). One of the Burroughs’ secretaries eventually found me a copy of Lad. She was a lovely person, generous and very friendly to a young fan. I still have pleasant memories of her.
Slaves of Lomooro is my personal tribute to the writer, and while it doesn’t approach the master’s work, I hope it will satisfy the fan. The orig-inal manuscript was too long to fit the size requirements of the publisher, so it was trimmed quickly by a friend; the original version has long been lost, and I resisted any attempt to restore it.
When the book was published in 1969, I wanted to keep it separate from Swordmen of Vistar and the two Noomas books, so I used the byline, Albert Augustus, Jr. My father (Albert Augustus Nuetzel, Sr.) had died shortly before this, and so my choice of a pen name constituted both a trib-ute to him, and to the memory of my infant brother, who had died shortly after birth.
The novel had the following dedication:
To my mother, Betty, this first
science fiction book is lovingly dedicated.
When I was very young, I started calling my parents by their given names, Betty and Al; for some reason, they thought this was cute, and al-lowed me to continue doing this. Some folks were shocked by the casual-ness of our family, but to me it was simply a reflection of the deep affec-tion, love, and closeness which have continued throughout the years—and still remains with me.
I hope the book finds a new audience in its second print edition. I’ve made a few corrections and I’ve tweaked a few scenes, but not very many. And I hope a few of my young fans and readers will take the time to ferret out the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and try them for themselves.
LOST CITY OF THE DAMNED
Lost City of the Damned was my first adventure novel. I have always had a soft spot for it. It was written as a result of an editor asking for an original book to publish, which I didn’t have at the time. So I rushed to my trusty typewriter desperately searched my mind for an inspiring idea. And I then remembered my love for the books of writers like H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Well, now, thought I, those stories were really fun. Maybe it would be a thrill and a half to write something along those lines.
I could offer up a lost city adventure set in the deep jungles of some mysterious location to….
The idea instantly inspired my mind! I simply had to try one of those thrill-packed romantic adventures! I could take the reader into the very depths of the South American continent to watch two desperately compet-ing teams race one another in search of ancient treasure. Now I’ll admit, not a starkly original concept, but what the heck!
Well, it sounded really appealing to me. And, in fact, I was on instant fire, as excited as I could get, frantically whacking at the typewriter key-board!
Well, I actually got excited when I wrote:
The valley waited, like it had been waiting for thousands of years—in silence and mystery—awaiting the touch of modern man.
It was a small valley, aged and savage, rugged and virgin except for the crumbled ruins at one of its further ends, under the lonely high snow-capped mountain. One large-peaked building was surrounded at every turn with rubble that may have once been a great city. Now it was waiting, like a magnificent monument of a dead age.
Nobody knew its origins; only legend and myths hung around it like some invisible mist clouding the long lost details of its wonder and glory.
The legend claimed that anyone who entered the sacred temple would die a horrible death.
All that needed to be added were a mere few items so that the PR de-partment could write:
Murder, danger, suspense haunt their trail as they search to discover the remains of an ancient civilization that may even have predated such leg-endary places as Mu and Atlantis. The promise of riches beyond imagina-tion drove them to face unimaginable dangers in the lost city of the damned.
Well, that would get me to read the book!
I hope you’ll enjoy this literary excursion into the past, written near the beginning of my writing career.
GOLD LUST
This is one of those adventure stories that have always fascinated me. The first one I wrote was Lost City of the Damned and I wrote a number of others, some of which are coming out in Wildside editions. They all were influenced and inspired by my early love of the Edgar Rice Burroughs nov-els.
I have always been fascinated by lost civilizations and have managed to actually visit some ruins in Mesoamerica, seeing the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca sites on our side of the world, and recently the pyramids of Egypt. It can be an amazing experience to walk among these ancient structures and imagine what kind of people might have lived there. The memory of their existence is fairly well lost in time, yet one can let their minds imagine all kinds of fanciful visions of a people long gone.
Touching the stones, walking the pathways, or even up the magnificent pyramids themselves, is breathtaking, and inspiring in ways that stay with you for a very long time. And you begin to wonder….
Gold Lust is the story about three people who get involved in a nasty triangle of lust and greed, and a search for ancient treasure on an island in the South Pacific where the remains of an ancient civilization protects a mysterious temple and its idol of gold.
Steve Floyd, the hero of Gold Lust, is a somewhat lost soul, barely sur-viving day to day by chartering his small seaplane to anyone needing a joy ride. When Virginia Donovan came into his life, offering a couple thousand dollars to take her to a distant island that very night, he was instantly in-trigued. Not since the death of his wife, years before, had he found any female so visually exciting. Most men would sell their souls to take her into their arms.
But Virginia comes with a nasty partner, who must be her lover. Yet she makes no attempt to hide her interest in Steve. She could be had for the taking. Or was she playing him for a fool? He could never tell if she was a Goddess of Love or a demon from hell. And there was no question that the woman was dangerous, willing to do anything to get what she wanted!
Yet he fell totally under her spell and re-discovered feelings he had thought long dead.
Virginia Donovan leads him to a golden Virgin Idol locked away in the ancient temple ruins of a lost civilization. A curse was supposed to have protected it for at least a thousand years.
Now, tell me, what could be more normal? Love, passion, betrayal, vio-lence, an ancient ruin and a mysterious curse all packed up in the promise of riches beyond a normal person’s wildest nightmare.
Well, that’s the kind of stuff that dreams are made of, as they say in cornball movies and novels. And one can almost believe such things could happen after you have touched an ancient stone, climbed up the side of an ancient pyramid and looked across the expanse of ruins left for hundreds and thousands of years for anyone to marvel at.
I’m a romantic, I suppose. And I will never stop being fascinated by such places, such visions, such stories of adventure in distant places.
TROPIC OF PASSION
I don’t mind admitting that Tropi
c of Passion was just a bit shorter than I expected and so you, the reader, are offered not only this novel, but a nice little adventure short as a bonus: “Amazon Gold Fever.”
The major story in this adventure duo was one of my early novels, which has been somewhat altered here to make it “even better” than before! Actually, in re-reading the book after so many years I had a different take on the subject and offered up some basic improvements, but not too many as to change the fun of it all.
Here we have a man down on his luck that gets a chance to improve his life when a woman named Ruby offers him an adventure and riches beyond his wildest dreams. (That sounds just about right! Even intrigues me!)