Peter Hodges

Bah…

The new box set of Battlestar Galactica and my recent acquisition of a Nintendo DS has set me back on my writing a bit.  Don’t worry…Collins and O’Leary are still going to fight the Rak’Lan hordes for humanity, but the person in control of their fate is rather…distracted right now. 

Let me plough through the rest of BSG and beat Super Mario eleventy-billion (for the DS) before I start posting writing samples again.

Pray that I get a lot done before BF2142 and NWN2 drop on us, otherwise…humanity may not survive the onslaught of the Rak’Lan.

…is awesome.

This is how sci-fi is supposed to be.  Complex relationships, tangled plot elements, deep story lines, philosophical overtones…if half of the sci-fi writers out there could be this compelling, no one would ever read anything else.

I’ll do a full review once I finish the discs.

Had I really licked the bottom of a hamster cage last night?  I came to my senses, tallied the abuses my body had been through, and decided that the easiest thing to remedy in the massive list of things wrong with me was the horrible taste in my mouth.  I opened my eyes, seeing the dim, artificial light of the guest NCO quarters.  I bit back a groan and stumbled to my feet, feeling soreness in my lower back and thighs.  I moved toward the bathroom, every step making my head pound.
Continue Reading »

“Something about our retreat just doesn’t add up, Michael.”  Shannon O’Leary sat across from me in the NCO cantina, nursing a dark brown concoction in a frosty, glass mug that might have been beer.  Her short, red hair hung in an even layered cut around her oval face.  Porcelain skin, a slightly pug nose, high cheekbones, and piercing green eyes pinned me helplessly to the chair across from her.  I was firmly in lust with her. 

“How did the LT get separated from the headquarters squad?  How did the Sarge get away with a good portion of the squad intact?” Continue Reading »

As before, I’ll be breaking Chapter Two into sections.  Expect to see the life and times of soldiers between battles, as well as seeing the political and military situation of Earth.

Enjoy!

Not too much going on, lately.

Alchemist is proceeding slowly, with me still bogged down in some edits rather than physically writing.  (Leave well enough alone, damn you!)  Loss of Innocence is actually picking up steam in its second chapter, exploring the relationship between the newly promoted Michael Collins and his friend Shannon O’Leary.  I’m also going to answer some questions in this chapter, including what actually happened to San Francisco and Shanghai; I’ll also build the universe a bit more through some narrative and dialogue.  Trust me…you won’t be disappointed.

I honestly haven’t touched the Privateer story.  Although it is nearly complete, and I think that is fairly competently written, my heart just isn’t in fixing that one up.  It was almost as though I wrote it in a vacuum of other ideas or characters that I really cared about.  I may throw it to an editor (either a friend or someone at a magazine) and see what comes of it. 

I’m currently reading The Dragon Reborn (the third in the Wheel of Time series; preparing for the last book, due out in the spring), The War God’s Own by David Weber, and my host of periodicals, which include Chemical and Engineering News, PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, Maximum PC, and Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I barely have time to get through them in the month it takes for the new ones to arrive.  (You might say that I have an information addiction.)

Currently on my list of things to read is A Meeting at Corvallis by S.M. Stirling and Coyote Frontier by Allen Steele.  Hopefully, I’ll have those read by mid-October so that I can throw some more reviews up here.  That’s if I don’t turn up any treasures in the meantime at Half-Price Books.

I’m not sure how I feel about this recent trend in science fiction.

It started with Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert in the Dune chronicles and is now gaining momentum as a trend.  CNN is reporting that Christopher Tolkein, son of J.R.R. Tolkein,  will be releasing a “legendarium” called The Children of Hurin as a stand-alone volume.  From what I gather, portions of this story have been published before in Tolkein’s Unfinished Tales collection.  This version will be a complete story, based on the notes of Christopher Tolkein’s father.

Spider Robinson has also jumped on the bandwagon, with an attempt to take an outline by Robert A. Heinlein and bring it to fruition as a novel.  Entitled Variable Star, it will reportedly have the same themes that Heinlein was so fond of:  coming of age, exploration of human culture, future history, and sexuality.  I definitely have mixed emotions about this one.  If you are interested in ribald, episodic science fiction that barely approaches adequacy from a literary standpoint, then Robinson would be your choice.  Personally, I would rather see someone such as Allen Steele, John Ringo, or the newly brilliant John Scalzi make an attempt at this work.

Nevertheless, the early buzz on this novel is that it is bad.  Especially troubling is that Robinson apparently disregards some aspects of Heinlein’s philosophy in the course of the novel to make a point about current political issues.  While science fiction is often known for espousing philosphies on all sorts of human interactions, I find that it is trite and unimaginitive when an author makes blatant political statements about current events through the narrative of his or her story.