It is now available and can be purchased on CreateSpace or Amazon.
Synopsis:
The Earth becomes a wasteland, following an onslaught of nuclear war and environmental disaster. Most of the world is conquered by the mysterious Klokan Empire. With advanced technology and an army of clone soldiers, they systematically exterminate all remaining human beings in a terrifying holocaust.
One clone soldier becomes gifted with an insight and spirit that sets him apart from the others, and he sees the Klokan Empire for the evil it is. He defects and becomes Kurt Stone, a deadly agent for the last human nation on Earth. He turns the tide of every battle, pushing the Klokan Empire back while confronting political schemes and civil unrest.
As Kurt's battles take him across the world and beyond, he follows in the prophecy of the Rider of the White Horse: a warrior who will defeat evil and save the human race.
This account of post-apocalyptic war features big-scale battles, explosive action, suspenseful drama, endearing romance, and gripping emotions. This grand tale is now presented in an all-new edition, with improved quality and new notes on the creation of this epic adventure.
Background:
In the 8th grade, I came up with my first truly original novel idea. It came to me when the class went on a field trip to the Anne Frank exhibit in York. I was (am) interested in WWII history, and I knew all about the holocaust. In fact, I had the sobering experience of listening to holocaust survivors speaking at our school. But it wasn’t until this field trip that I learned of the term “Aryan,” and realized that Nazi Germany was basically a huge-scale (and very scary) eugenics program.
The biggest lesson about the holocaust was that it happened once, and history can always repeat itself. Next time, it could be worse yet. I had a scary notion I had that I was compelled to explore: if Hitler had cloning technology, then he could have abused it to create his “perfect” race, and he could have truly taken over the world. The genocide, and the purposeful reshaping of the human race, would have been terrible. I suddenly had scary visions of a post-nuclear-war landscape, where clone armies were marching around and slaughtering every living thing.
My first few drafts for this story were pretty awkward; it’s hard to find the right starting point and the right voice sometimes. In those first attempts, I approached my ideas in a straightforward fashion, using literal Nazis as the villains. I took a lesson from existing science fiction, and made an attempt to veil Nazism with other names and concepts. Thus, I made them into the Klokan Empire. The term Klokan was originally a name I designated for a race of aliens, who would have had boney claws and spikes sticking out of their skin. Since I abandoned those story ideas, however, I cannibalized the name “Klokan” for this story.
Something was still missing, however. A certain theme, and plot structure, was lacking, and it got to the point where I didn’t know how to proceed with this story. One Easter, I was reading the Book of Revelation, just out of interest, and that’s when I came across the passage regarding the Rider of the White Horse. Many of the passages in Revelations interested me, for their metaphorical ideas and intense imagery. When I read this specific chapter, I realized that it could align perfectly with my story, and I sought to marry them together. I found ways to connect characters and ideas from the book in with Revelations, to the best of my ability.
From then on, the book pretty much wrote itself. I barely even remember putting that much effort into it; you know something is good if you have fun doing it, and it all flies by without much struggle or second-guessing.
It took about a year or two to draft this entire story, and it was all finished shortly after I graduated high school.
Publishing this story was another animal entirely, and I had absolutely no clue as to get any kind of professional writing career started. When it came to querying or submitting works for commercial publishing, I was totally lost, I didn’t know where to start, and I never found the motivation to invest much research or effort into it. After some brief research, however, I did come across some new Print-On-Demand companies, and felt they were easy and fairly risk-free. I was sold on the concept of it, I went through the process, and I got this book published by 2002.
I made very few sales; probably 100 or so altogether. Publishing was easy through these companies, but promoting these books was entirely up to the authors, and I was terrible at self-promotion. I tried to host a book signing at the local library, but only had one person stop by. In the end, it was just friends and family who invested in this book, and maybe a few random strangers.
What few readers I had before enjoyed the book, regardless of its issues. Now that I’ve taken the time to fix up the wording and grammar, I expect that I’ll be happy and proud of this creation again, and can present it to willing readers with confidence.
Redux Edition:
Starting in 2012, I went through the whole text line-by-line to fix numerous issues with the text. Most of the wording was re-arranged and re-written for better readability. The text is no longer so plain and flat. Redundancy is reduced, grammar mistakes are fixed, and the dialogue is sharper and flows better. A few chapters were merged together, one scene was cut out, some scenes were made longer, and a few really cheesy parts were rewritten so they work better. The whole thing is revamped so that it reads better and is more creditable.
In preparing for a new print edition of the book, some new notes were made outlining the book's creation and history (most of which is in this post anyway), and new cover art was made by artist Keyvan Ebrahimi.
Inspirations:
I was inspired by the various stories and films I was exploring at the time: L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth, James Bond movies, and the film Soldier, have all inspired this story. The name Kurt Stone was inspired by the actor Kurt Russell. To help visualize and design the various forts and bases that are attacked throughout the book, I designed them with a level editor for the video game Star Wars: Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight; doing so allowed me to map out exactly where these characters go and what they experience when traversing through the high-tech Klokan facilities.
There was some music that helped inspire me during the drafting and designing process. In those days, the film scores for 1997's The Saint and GoldenEye were the biggest things I listened to; they were both quite moody and had a mystique to them, and Eric Serra's music in particular was very appropriately modern. I discovered that certain CD-ROM video games had music tracks on them, so I listened to the Mechwarrior 2 music all the time; a lot of that has been inspiring for finding the right tone and atmosphere. As time went on, I acquired more James Bond soundtracks - Tomorrow Never Dies and The World is Not Enough - and select songs, including Rob Dougan's "Clubbed to Death," which I first heard on a Nissan commercial and might be the song that I associate the most with this book. Other fine songs that have inspired me include Rob Dougan's "Furious Angels," Dave Matthew Band's "When the World Ends," Moby's "Everloving," Sting's "A Thousand Years," Apollo 440's cover of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," Billy Joel's "Leningrad," Live's "Forever May Not Be Long Enough," PPK's "21st Century," and most recently, Imagine Dragon's "Radioactive." A collection of this music can be heard on 8tracks.
In Conclusion:
The first time I do most anything is usually the worst. It feels like I've spent more time and effort on this book than any other, because it came out so flawed on the first try, and I had to go back and fix some things. Now that I've cleaned the work up, I feel more confident in presenting it to readers as a grand piece of post-apocalyptic adventure. If you do order my book, I hope you'll enjoy it as is.
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