* * *
Ned smiled as it appeared on his starfighter’s scanners: Earth. Even compared to Anacron and Palandora it looked beautiful to him. There had been several times when he had been convinced that he would never see his homeworld again. He was filled with intense gratitude that each time he had been wrong.
His family was there, he knew, waiting for him perhaps. Or were they? Had they given up hope that Ned would survive the battles awaiting him on the other side of the vortex Smardwurst had taken him through? Certainly they must have considered the possibility; Ned had wondered about the same thing. But it had not been Ned’s greatest fear. When he had left Earth, the question that had bothered Ned the most was whether he would be able to control the Plasma force sufficiently to allow him to return home without the risk of accidentally harming his family. It was the terror of that night when he had struck out at Jared that had driven him away from his home. It was the fear that the Plasma had enslaved him and that he would remain its slave forever.
Looking back on the time he had spent with Smardwurst and General Marnax and Mirana and the others, Ned could not help but be pleased. He had helped to save the lives of billions of people from tyranny and death. He had overthrown the power of an evil dictator and his most powerful minions. But most importantly, Ned had found the answer, the control, and the power that he had been searching for from the beginning. He had found his ticket home. There had been many questions at the start of the journey and there were many unanswered questions now, but the one fact that stood out for Ned as all-important was that he was no longer the slave of the Anacron Plasma force. He was the master.
Afterword
A Brief History and Acknowledgements
I thought about science fiction a lot growing up. I would see a TV show or read something in a book and think about how I would like to have short-circuited the plot by defeating the bad buys with my amazing piloting skills or by casting bolts of lightning. I had little disjoint episodes of some science fiction story going through my mind quite frequently. Finally, when I graduated from high school and found that I had some time on my hands before college started, I had the spark of an idea that I figured might let me pull some of those ideas together into a coherent story. So I started writing.
My goal was strictly to write a story that I would enjoy reading. I would leave out all of the tedious plot elements that bothered me in other books (like the bad guy posing as the good guy – I hate that), and I would make sure nothing was gory or otherwise morally prohibitive. And of course I would work in as many cool technical-sounding terms and wacky names as I could. I had a couple of events and characters in mind, but most of the time I discovered the story as I wrote it. It was actually pretty exciting. So if the book seems amateurish, that’s really fine with me. I’m not an aspiring author. But I do think this is a fun story and will appeal to folks who like science fiction action that isn’t bogged down with too much character drama.
The story clearly incorporates archetypal elements that will be recognizable to anyone familiar with the movies and TV shows that epitomized the genre. In particular, my imagination owes an immeasurable debt to Star Trek, Star Wars (including Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire series), and the original Shannara books – not to mention a Nintendo game or two. I don’t think I’ve copied anything directly, (and I could name a few popular books that are much more derivative than this one,) but I have tried to incorporate the feel of the stories that captured my imagination growing up.
On the other hand, there are also similarities to a bunch of fiction that has come out after I wrote The Plasma Master – in names, similar characters, and plot elements. As much as I want to give inspirational credit where it is due, I’d hate to give the impression that some of these other elements were swiped. The term Matrix Plasma was derived from math, not a computer movie. The name and concept for Palandora predate a certain CGI movie by more than a decade. Just to name a few. Remember, except for some recent polishing, the story was completed in 1997.
In conclusion, I’d like to thank my brother Kevin for being interested in The Plasma Master back in the day, and for providing some editorial guidance in preparation for public distribution, not to mention the original cover art. The story’s introduction and resolution are probably ten times better as a result. (And yes, that’s the Anacronian “ten.”)
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