Life in the Private Kingdom: The Tribulations of a CEO by Hugh Aaron Why this book? To give the reader insight into what being in business is really like? Quite obviously. To show how being in business impacts the personal life of the CEO and those around him? Definitely. To ask — and answer — whether it's worth it to endure the constant struggle that being in business involves? For sure. As I got into writing the book, the above reasons seemed as good as any. Now, several years after the last sentence was cast, I see that none of those reasons addresses what this book is mostly about. It’s about how to deal with the chaotic world. The chaos peculiar to ordinary life is compressed and intensified in business. Momentous things happen more frequently, and usually more dramatically. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that so much is at stake, often the very survival of the business. Why would anyone wish to expose him- or herself to such extreme uncertainties? One answer is found in the following excerpt from Theodore Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt: "To be a forceful figure in the business world means, as a rule, that you must be an individual of one idea, and that idea is the God-given one that life has destined you for a tremendous future in the particular field you have chosen. It means that one thing, a cake of soap, a new can-opener, a safety razor, or speed-accelerator, must seize on your imagination with tremendous force, burn as a raging flame, and make itself the be-all and end-all of your existence." So an idea, one idea, is the inspiration, giving purpose to the entrepreneur's struggle. But the motivation runs deeper. Although always striving for security and minimizing risk, the entrepreneur thrives on conflict and is driven in a quest to outsmart and control the chaos. The entrepreneur does this by creating order, building an organization, inspiring a cadre of employees, developing strategies, and finding an edge — or, as economist Joseph A. Schumpeter put it, by creating “a private kingdom.” The chaos of life is more than just the devil to be defeated; it is also the most fascinating opponent a businessperson can imagine. Every problem is a challenge, every challenge a test of competence; every success is a triumph, every failure a goad to try again. Without this provocation the “raging flame” would soon die. Email: Hugh Aaron Top Séance in B Minor by Tim Buck My offering is a first novel of about 80,000 words, titled Séance in B Minor. Imagine, if you will, that tragic summer of 1856, when the composer Robert Schumann languished behind the walls of a Bonn, Germany, insane asylum. History records his pronouncements of ghostly visitations and dictations of music by the already-dead Franz Schubert. Something was produced and then lost to history during that summer of Schumann's own dying. Such is the rumor of my prologue. Chapter One introduces present-day psychologist Allison Hart. By Chapter Three, she is obsessed with a painting being done by once-famous artist Gregori Benedict, who now resides in a Chicago psychiatric hospital. Allison suspects an unconscious code embedded in the painting's hues and patterns. Intuition leads her to an alliance with aging musicologist Victor Kuhn, who eventually discovers something uncanny in the images of the canvas. Further investigations point Allison toward the cutting-edge technology of dream research in Phoenix, Arizona, where she becomes subtly attracted to physicist Jeremiah Burch. Volunteering to undergo a possibly dangerous experiment, she enters an otherworld that seems to go deeper than any dream. This provides clues prompting her and her fellow seekers to Germany for the dénouement, where they discover the unknown movements to Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Allison's motivation proves to be more than professional curiosity. Her mother died hopelessly insane when Allison was a girl, and despite attempts to repress the painful memories, questions about the afterlife percolate into her consciousness. Does reality spring from a divine fountainhead? Is there a connection between music and higher consciousness...between insanity and a spiritual realm? Overall, I would state my theme as the mystery of consciousness. Subsidiary themes include the wonder of classical music and a coming-to-terms with suppressed grief. I classify this novel as mainstream, rather than purely literary, setting my "treasure hunt" among the allurements of great music and the hauntedness of dreams. To read a chapter from Séance in B Minor, please see my website. Email: Tim Buck Top Olympia's Makeover — or He Thinks She Thinks by Richard Carter I have written a comic novel, Olympia's Makeover, which I think has commercial appeal and begs to be adapted as a screen play. This novel is in the tradition of Opera Buffo and aims to be seriously amusing. The novel takes place in Vienna at a college famous for its writing classes. Olympia is independently rich, an outstanding poet, and suffers from an inferiority complex because of her jet-set parents insistence on looking at her as a dandelion that has sprouted on the otherwise impeccably tailored lawn surrounding their self-absorbed lives. She is head over heels in love with the stunningly handsome fellow student, Jean-Philippe. Her admires her character, splendid good looks, and accomplishments, but she is sure, in the face of all contrary evidence, that he considers her merely as an American rustic, so she takes all his overtures in the direction of friendship and romance as a game he is playing with this unsophisticated American. The upshot of this mutual misunderstanding is that they continually misread other's opening moves in the direction of intimacy. The early-on consequence of this folly is Jean-Philippe's inviting Olympia to a costume ball, her refusal to go with him and then showing up in a costume that entirely disguises her from him. He is angry at being turned down by her and so goes to the ball looking for trouble, sees a woman with a splendid body, Olympia, and attempts to seduce her. She isn't sure that he does not recognize her, so she goes home with him and, when he unmasks her, he is stunned. "Olympia! It's you! What are you doing?" "Jean-Philippe, what are you doing?" "But I love you Olympia." "Then why are you undressing me?" "But...I didn't know it was you." "Then why are you undressing me?" This teaches her that he really loves her, but that he needs to be taught a lesson. Indeed, he needs to be made over. The mainspring of the action of the rest of the novel concerns Olympia's first giving herself a makeover to cure herself of a bad case of self-pity and then her giving him the makeover he needs to stop being a pig. This involves her using a tactic she read about in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, which concerns a horse race that, she thinks, will beggar him if he loses. He learns about this but goes along with it even though a recent inheritance has left him immensely rich. He pretends to be financially broken by Olympia's guile and takes a menial job to do public penance for his misbehavior toward her. She finds out about the inheritance and, when he finds out that she has found out, he still eats crow to show her he really regrets his being such a swine. This private game breaks the ice between them, and this comic novel concludes with Jean-Philippe as Olympia's makeover. Email: Richard Carter Top New Wine from Old Sin — A Vintner's Tale by Richard Carter This contemporary drama concerns how the "new wine" of the title — the unwanted child, Yannis — matures into that strangest and most appetizing of liqueurs: a fully matured adult human being. The "old sin" of the title refers to the foolishness of his parents, Basil and Lane, whose premarital affair leads to her pregnancy and giving birth to Yannis, whom she immediately gives up for adoption. When she and Basil marry, they cannot have children, so they adopt one, not knowing they are the child's true parents. He is often abused by Lane as being "some rich man's bastard." This novel, following the metaphor of viticulture, dramatizes Yannis's growth in the face of his abuse. The story unfolds as it proceeds through the four periods of Yannis's maturing. The first begins with that blissfully mindless pressing which produces conception, and continues until the beginning of puberty; the next fills the teenage period of furiously ardent fermentation; this leads into the third stage during which we constantly test whether our vintage has matured; and the whole process ends with that first blissfully mindless pressing having finally become a fully concocted adult. In this viticultural novel, that first period introduces Lane as a not too bright self-indulgent femme fatale who, when she first meets Basil, knows both that he will be the love of her life, and that she will continually cheat on him. They become lovers and Lane becomes pregnant but hides it from Basil for fear he will leave her if he finds out. So, when the baby is born, she puts it up for adoption. Since Lane can't conceive after they marry, they decide to adopt, and unknowingly re-adopt the child she had put up for adoption several years before. They name it Yannis. Lane, who immediately thereafter becomes pregnant, then treats the young Yannis like dirt. In the second stage, we have Yannis going through his childhood continually being abused by Lane until he reaches puberty. In the third stage, two neighboring families take him in order to shield him from Lane's abuse. One of these consists of a plastic surgeon and his lover, Yannis's nanny; the other includes a strange ménage embracing a blind judge and his prescient son, together with a large group of exotic animals who roam their house and its grounds at will. With their nurture, Yannis begins his final stage of fermenting into adulthood as he learns who he is and that Lane had never hated him, but was merely too self-absorbed to ever be a good mother to him. All that remains is for him now is to stop being drunk on his own spirits, which he does when he falls in love with a young widow who teaches him the delights of social drinking. To sum up, this is a novel which shows the reader a village, its inhabitants, and the child they nurtured into his ardent maturity. Email: Richard Carter Top

The Peculiar Transgression of Pharaoh's Daughter (A Love Story of Sorts) by Richard Carter This story explores the various ways in which the tension between the demands of the love of law and the law of love influences the actions of its characters. It is set in a town outside contemporary Manhattan, but proceeds against the ever-present backdrop of the Biblical story of how Pharaoh's daughter, acting contrary to the law given by her father, followed the promptings of love and saved the life of the Hebrew infant whom she then adopted and named Moses. That infant was to grow up as a prince in Pharaoh's Egypt, murder one of Pharaoh's subjects, and then become the lawgiver to Israel — among whose laws was one prohibiting murder. Here we have an account of the often conflicting demands of the love of law and the law of love which cries out to be treated by novelists. The Kennedy's "Camelot," which captured the imagination of so many Americans, is suggestive of a benign form of quasi-imperial rule in which the conflict between love and law appears to be strikingly relaxed. In The Peculiar Transgression of Pharaoh's Daughter, the characters, in their day-to-day involvement with one another, address issues raised by any serious consideration of Camelot as a model for us to reflect on as we presently search for ways to unite Americans into a society which is both more loving and more lawful. Among the issues the novel considers are: the need for evenhandedness in the treatment of different religions and ethnic groups; the place of love as a moderating influence on the rigors of law; love of beauty and grace as motivating individuals towards a kinder and less severe view of the follies of our fellow citizens; organized religion's responsibility in preaching doctrines such as that one in which the role of women is that of weak-minded troublemakers; and, as September 11 has taught us, the crucial importance of a learned and intelligent foreign policy. Although there is some heavy going in the conversations which take place in the novel, its cast of characters is rich and their interaction often surprising and amusing. Its presentation of the world views implicit in the writings and practice of Persian Sufism and Japanese Zen lends a suitably cosmopolitan milieu for a story conceived in recognition of the emergence of a newly sophisticated, profoundly multicultural era in America. September 11 makes considerations of these themes all the more imperative and, given the freedom of novelists to ignore all those boundary lines which so stifle thinking in various academic "fields" — as if their different professors were cows grazing on different grasses — the exploration of these themes in fictional form by novelists and poets is entirely appropriate. Email: Richard Carter Top Indigo by Warren Jones The main character, Wayne, is a professor, and that growing cliché in novels is battered about by Wayne within the second chapter: "A professor as a main character? Alan, you're killing me. Even if you point out the absurdity of such a character while using that character, all you are doing is generating this multilevel cliché, or copying some Woody Allen intellectual-bashing." The novel will continue along that style: What I write as the author is soon discussed and problematized by characters, in one manner or another. (I want to lure readers into questioning and analyzing the text before the characters later do.) The story begins ("I suppose entering into a novel is like amnesia") with Wayne, a white, upper 30s, Republican professor, and his wife, Indigo, a black, mid-20s, Democrat, political advisor, discussing the difficulty of creating the best opening to a novel. In that discussion, they talk about a standard writing technique that most first time writers fall into: using black and white colors and paired opposites. In the first chapter, they arrive at an upper class dinner party where witty banter is an attempt by the, all white, guests to create a humorous overtone to their nervousness of being around the young black woman. In chapter two, Wayne discusses with a class how characters in novels cannot be witty; only real people can be witty, whereas characters are contrived by authors. During that discussion, he argues with a black male student about that very idea; most of the class is terrified by the black student's "rudeness and loudness" until Wayne alerts them to the difficulties involved in intercultural argument styles: in public arguments, whites use "staying calm" and logical reasoning patterns and blacks use personal feelings, convictions, and expression. The coherent theme of the novel, chapter three onward, is the rise (hegemony) of the technoculture, from abortion arguments ("Oh, it's technology that now dictates when an unborn is alive: so is this a technocracy when technology dictates life, or a technotheocracy when technology supersedes even religious morality?") to tropes of a technoculture, such as "processing information" rather than "thinking." Extremist groups (Skinheads and "eco-terrorists") are an intricate thread through the novel, bringing up and problematizing not only race relations but also questions of patriotism. Current science theories (thixotropic fluids, Chaos Theory, String theory) are used as metaphors for life while other parts of the novel attack Literature for taking and misusing ideas from science. As an author, I am not interested in 80s hero-type or a 90s "self-abasing humble" type characters. Not comically successful, not tragically burdened, characters should be concerned with the problems, and underlying issues, of their realities. As an instructor and writer, I want readers to leave a novel with ideas that help them think more in-depth about issues, rather than prose/lytizing pedantic metaphors and pseudo-psychological clichés to live by. "Hollywood-style pitch": Indigo is Lodge's Nice Work and Walker's The Color Purple biting itself on the ass in the 2000s. Email: Warren Jones Top The Loyal Lynch Mob: The Robert Paul Prager Murder by Christopher Orlet On April 4, 1918, in the small coalmining town of Collinsville, Illinois, twenty miles east of St. Louis, MO, a drunken mob of 300 men lynched Robert Paul Prager, a 45-year-old German immigrant, for disloyal statements against the United States and President Woodrow Wilson. It was the most infamous case of anti-German-American violence in American history. The vast majority of the mob believed Prager to be a socialist and a spy, though there was no evidence to back up this claim. Mob violence against German-Americans was an all-too-familiar occurrence during the spring of 1918. And there was some reason to be skeptical of Germans in America. German saboteurs were blamed for the blowing up of a munitions dump and foundry in New Jersey less than a year earlier, and hundreds of American noncombatants lost their lives while aboard neutral merchant ships in the years leading up to America's entry into the war. The book will also explore the origins of the First World War, the internment of German-Americans, the muzzling of pro-German intellectuals like H. L. Mencken, who was not permitted to speak out on World War I because of his pro-German views — views that sprang from a love of the culture rather than from politics. Mencken and other pro-German intellectuals were enraged by the popular portrayal of Germans as barbarous Huns who committed atrocities such as the widely reported bayoneting of Belgian babies. Also explored will be the pro-British New England WASP oligarchy that alienated and demonized Germany, at a time when one-fourth of Americans claimed German ancestry. Finally, the significant cultural contributions of early German-Americans — all but erased by the war — will be discussed. The eleven men, ultimately accused of Prager's murder, were found not guilty by a jury of their peers. But not everyone was so pleased with the verdict. The Governor of Illinois and a New York Times editorial called the Collinsville incident a national disgrace. The story of Robert P. Prager can serve as a cautionary tale particularly now when we are faced with the ongoing war on terrorism, and many people of Middle East (or Asian) origin face similar threats. Email: Christopher Orlet Top Our House of Cards' Worship Hour by Pen Pearson Our House of Cards' Worship Hour, a book-length collection of poetry, follows the order of a Protestant worship service, with individual poems functioning as mock liturgy. Of the poems published in TVR, for example, "Sister Margaret's" acts as a Confession of Sins, and "One Day Desultorily Reading the American Heritage Dictionary, I Stumble Upon Farkleberry and ..." acts as a Lesson. All of the poems in the collection are informed by experiments in diverse voices, moods, and forms, including parody and homage, as the poems aim at replicating the multiple voices of a religious congregation. For instance, "One Day Desultorily Reading ..." is a loose-knit sonnet, and "Begging Meg," a Confession of Sin in the voice of an adolescent male, is a parody of Theodore Roethke's villanelle "The Waking." Tangential themes running throughout the collection include the inherent opacity of language, the state of contemporary American poetry, and female sexuality. Two poems from the collection were selected by Heather McHugh as notable work and were published recently in an anthology of contemporary American poets. Other poems from the collection have appeared or are forthcoming in Phoebe: An International Journal of Feminist Scholarship, South Dakota Review, and Blue Collar Review, as well as in other journals. The collection is sixty-one pages and contains twenty-eight poems. Email: Pen Pearson Top Godpop and Shelley by Clark Elder Morrow What if you were an 18-year-old girl who just happened to have for a godfather one of the wisest, most insightful and loving gentlemen in the world? Someone you could write to for profoundly affecting advice on all — or most — of the pressing issues of your young life? Shelley is that girl, and her godfather's letters to her form an epistolary novel entitled Godpop and Shelley. In these letters, "Godpop" (as Shelley calls him) responds to each of Shelley's questions and concerns — mostly those that are typical of a young woman her age, teetering as she is between high school and college, juggling all the attendant issues of career choice, romance, schoolwork and friendship, as well as the larger topics of life, death, faith, virtue, and so on. Throughout her post–high school summer, and into the fall, Godpop writes out of a lifetime study of the human heart, and explores with her hundreds of facets of the Big Question: How Should We Then Live? To all of these issues he brings a traditional Christian perspective, but he does so with the freshness and comic grace of a man who — like God — puts Reason at the service of a creatively minded and idiosyncratic Love. Sensitivity allied with common sense is at a premium in any age, but especially in our own, and just such an alliance is Godpop's stock-in-trade. His orthodox viewpoint provides a platform for delving into subtle examinations of family-life and day-to-day ethics — but at the same time he is having a rambunctious romp of a good time waxing playful and sentimental and silly with his beloved goddaughter. It is this C. S. Lewisian mixture of high spirits, good fun, deep insight, and accessible theology that provides Godpop and Shelley with its readymade audience: all those readers who love The Screwtape Letters and other Lewis stories. Although the fictional author of these letters never shirks the tough questions, and faces in the closing pages of the book a tragedy that tests all his convictions, he does so with a moral compass whose "true north" is the kind of fierce, supernaturally born love described in this extract from Letter 5: The other things you talked about I'll have to answer in my next letter, hon. I have to do some homework of my own tonight. But I must tell you this. Today, as I was arguing with a business associate, in the middle of an absorbing meeting, for absolutely no reason in the world, I suddenly got this memory-picture of you when you were about 4 years old, at the church carnival, tears filling up your eyes because the cotton-candy had stuck to your face! I stopped in the middle of my sentence and just stared into space while my colleague waited for me to finish. I wasn't aware of anything in the room: my whole heart and spirit were caught up in what my mother used to call a "surge of love." And so I remain to this moment. I pray for you nightly. Yours, Godpop Email: Clark Elder Morrow Top

Playing Arenas by Valerie Collins "Think laterally!" shouted the Intelligent Keyboard. "Hey! Whose side you on?" Bryan banged the keys with his fist. Who the hell did it think it was, coming out with one of Chris's favourite expressions? She said it all the time. Bryan thought it meant think sideways. Well, he did that anyway. He thought backwards, in circles, in zigzags, in floaty wisps — you name it. Anyway but straight. But according to Chris that wasn't thinking at all. Playing Arenas is a wildly funny yet poignant novel that follows musician Bryan Sparkes as he struggles to realise his dreams without losing his integrity — or his marbles. Cast adrift homeless and jobless in the exuberant Mediterranean city of Alberginia — the ex-pats' Big Aubergine — after the breakup of his marriage, Bryan refuses to give up his dream of musical success. He barges irrepressibly through poverty, sickness, and the minefields of shifting gender roles and political correctness, getting himself hired as a Great British Nanny with a chaotic Anglo-Alberginian family. But unrequited love, musician's block, and betrayal by his best friend take their toll on his zest for life. At his darkest moment, Bryan gets a new career chance — but to take it he must be reconciled with those who have wounded him most deeply. His final ordeal of a forest fire makes him realise that deep inside every one of us is a vulnerable human being bumbling around in search of purpose, fulfilment, and love — just like himself. Exploring the themes of blame, compassion, and forgiveness, Playing Arenas weaves magic and music, comedy and romance, fairy tales and New Age ideas into a hero quest with a timeless core. Email: Valerie Collins Top Malcolm's Messages by Eric Scheske Malcolm's Messages is a psychedelic moral novella. It's George MacDonald for the contemporary adult. MacDonald was a nineteenth-century Scottish poet and novelist who filled many of his fairy tales (such as "The Golden Key") with bizarre symbols and weird twists, so much so that the full meaning of MacDonald's stories are often hard to discern. So it is my intent with Malcolm. It's a weird little book that is packed with odd symbolism — some of it obvious, some of it obscure. My hope is that readers will like the story even though much of it escapes immediate comprehension. Indeed, I am hoping they like it precisely because much of it is puzzling. This is a risk on my part, I know, but I believe people enjoy a certain measure of doubt or incertitude. As limited human beings, we simply cannot understand everything. It follows that stories that cannot be fully comprehended might be enjoyable because they correspond to the human condition. Put another way, we are "hard wired" for uncertainty, so we enjoy things that don't give us the feeling of full certitude. This idea is not new. Flannery O'Connor, for instance, said there's a measure of uncertainty in her fiction. She even admitted that she doesn't see every level of meaning in all her stories (and added that, when that occurs, she knows she has written a good one). In a good Flannery O'Connor story, a reader can follow the story just fine, but there's a level — or many levels — of meaning that cannot be discerned or can be discerned only with concentration and contemplation. Malcolm's Messages is meant to invoke a similar process. The story itself is simple: a man studies for years in his basement, then emerges to speak to the people of America and is wildly popular due to his wisdom, simplicity, and sincerity. Much of the book's significance is found in the blatant symbols: the Berserker, the Wicked Gnome, the Four Sentinels, the Dwarves of the Corn, the Juggler, and other characters. The underlying meanings of such symbols are never explained. Rather, the reader is challenged to figure them out. Then there is symbolism that isn't blatant, such as Malcolm's companion, Mr. Rufus. He is a symbol of spiritual and moral development, a symbol of the ability of a mortally damaged soul to be redeemed. His character also represents the importance of service and humility and the greatness that comes from it. I cannot honestly say that there's an established market for such a book. Much of the book — from the wild symbolism to Malcolm's formal manner of speaking — is deliberately out-of-step with today's literature. But that doesn't mean there's no potential market. Malcolm's Messages might be unusual, but an offbeat approach often proves very popular, especially when the messages underlying the approach resonate with the reader. And I am confident Malcolm's messages will. You can read the first chapter of Malcolm's Messages at www.ericscheske.com. Email: Eric Scheske Top Out of Words by Sarah Skwire Out of Words is a collection of approximately 35 poems on the subject of language. From the earliest poem in the collection, "A Woman, Tired of that Particular Metaphor, Speaks," which explores the anger, frustration, and humor of having one's metaphors chosen for one, to the latest poem, "Poetry (I Hate It)," which explores the poet's stormy relationship with love, language, and Provencal verse, the poems in this collection explore the pleasures and the pains of a love affair with language. From formal verse to free verse, from witty verse with a serious center to serious verse leavened by a touch of wit, the voice in these poems is strong, passionate, and always in love with words. Several poems in this collection have appeared in The Vocabula Review. Others have been published in a variety of journals. For samples of the poet's work, please see the Vocabula poetry archive. Email: Sarah Skwire Top Radio Roger by John Kilgore Radio Roger is a sprawling fantasy epic, suitable for publication either as a single novel or a diptych comprising two parts, Devil's Twomonth (Chapters 1–28), and All Fall Down (Chapters 29–48). In an ambitious amalgam of high fantasy, science fiction, and magic realism, the tale traces the picaresque fortunes of the tiny village of Santa Lucia as she survives plagues, orgies, exile, sudden wealth, angels, visitors from space, and the relentless, four-years-continued assault of the Barbarian Empire. The tale begins one day when a small spaceship, arriving in flames and thunder from the depths of nearly forgotten legends, shatters the simple equilibrium of life in the village. Led by their cowardly mayor, Earl Swimmer, the villagers at first make their visitor extravagantly welcome; but soon, dismayed by his strange and impious behavior, they turn on the Pilot and kill him. This leaves them in possession of the gleaming miracle of his skyship, though without the faintest notion what to do with it. Soon afterwards, the town’s eccentric young priest, Father Troy, returns from a long absence to report trouble of a very different kind: terrifying strangers known only as Barbarians are on the march, bringing the forgotten abomination of War back to all the region. Galvanized by Troy’s warnings and led in turn by him, Earl, and finally Maria Tenspot — at first their witch, later their Queen — the villagers contrive an improbable escape to sea, building a giant barge, the Pestilence, and powering it with the engine of their captured skyship. In the process Troy is exiled and seems to have died. Under the Queen's policies of unswerving cowardice and continuous retreat, the Lucians thrive amid the general disaster of the Barbarian occupation, blasting up and down the bay, growing rich through trade while their yearly Twomonth celebrations reach unprecedented heights of pride and debauchery. But when the skyship's engine runs out of fuel (a thing no one had known could happen) they find themselves cornered at last, helpless as a Barbarian galley bears down on them. Terrified, Earl seeks the help of the skyship's radio, only to hear the voice of Troy speaking to him out of the ether. Thus ends Devil's Twomonth. Part II, All Fall Down, backtracks to give us Troy's adventures in exile. Captured by the Barbarians, he learns their language and is eventually taken before the King, Badjok, whom he tries to kill. But when he learns that Badjok has been secretly undermining his own offensive against Santa Lucia, Troy becomes the King's reluctant ally and counselor. After several years Troy gains access to a captured lander, like the one his villagers have obtained in the first chapter, and escapes to outer space, where at length he arrives at the Amara, a gigantic world-ship that tours the galaxy on a perpetual milk run, calling on Earth every 333 years. The Ceruleans, the strange tame people who inhabit the vessel, assist this process without understanding it; thus at last we see the origins of the Pilot who died in Chapter One. Troy falls deeply under the sway of a new lover, Jessrik, and is overjoyed to hear that the skyfolk plan to "take care of" the Barbarians. But he gradually discovers that the great ship is in a crisis of deterioration and that what the Ceruleans plan for Earth is a program of climate adjustment that will kill everyone. In the cliffhanger last chapters, Troy highjacks the Amara, then pilots her down to Earth in a conflagration that saves everyone: the Ceruleans from death in space, the peoples of the Great Bay from the Barbarians, and the Barbarians from themselves. In 2000 the story won a highly competitive $5,000 grant from the Illinois Arts Council, with Chapter 3 serving as the writing sample. My publication credits include numerous short stories in print and online journals, among them McCall's, Nebraska Review, Nebula, Space And Time, and TheScreamOnline. The first chapter of Radio Roger, together with a synopsis of the novel, can be accessed at my own home page. Other fiction of mine can be found at TheScreamOnline and Deep Outside. Email: John Kilgore Top

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