SOLDIER OF LIGHT

a novel by

Tom Cool

and

John de Lancie

This was an interesting project. Jim Baen and Bill Fawcett contracted me to write a novel with John de Lancie, the actor who played “Q” in Star Trek Next Generation. Among his other film and TV roles, John also played Jane’s dad, the bereaved air traffic controller in Breaking Bad. I would have done it for free, if I had known that doing so would place me within one degree of separation from Walter White. John de Lancie was a true gentleman and a fictive collaborator with a vivid imagination. It was a pleasure working with him.

SOLDIER OF LIGHT is a fantasy novel. The premise is that the Big Bang created ripples in SpaceTime, including shock waves that turbocharge psychic abilities. These “spheres of being” give some people superhuman psychic powers, including “the power to cloud men’s minds,” as Walter B. Gibson said of his anti-hero, The Shadow. I also derived inspiration from the cosmology of A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, by Vernor Vinge. (I confessed my creative swiping to Vernor via email. He graciously gave me permission to use the inspiration.)

The hero, Owen, tries to escape a disintegrating society with his wife, Kate, and their daughter, Constance, on their sailboat, Nepenthe. As the Earth enters deeper into the Sphere of Being, their minds change, either growing in power or falling into a comatose condition called the “deathway.” While this madness spreads, a superintelligent alien, The One, begins to wake from his hibernation in the bowels of the Earth. So our hero must confront an almost absolute evil in order to save the human race.

I think it’s a good book. Since I sold the rights to the book packagers, who in the years gone by have apparently misplaced them or sold them to other entities, I am not in a position to re-publish this particular book. I’d like to do that someday and I am willing to pay cash money to buy the rights, so contact me via LinkedIn (bit.ly/2UDnehN), if you hold the rights or know who does.

In the meantime, exceptionally avid readers can buy a Kindle version or a first edition hardback or paperback, circa 1999, from Amazon booksellers (bit.ly/3sZVfOE).

This illustration depicts the moment that Owen’s daughter, Constance, encounters a circle of adepts known as the Silver Stars. The basic image was generated by Midjourney in August 2023, which I edited and enhanced using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. It is against my policy to use artist’s styles in prompts for text-to-image generators. I made an exception to this policy for this image, because I wanted to allude to the seminal works of a great artist of my generation, Alex Grey (www.alexgrey.com), since the novel highlights the “oneness” psychedelic experience, of which Alex Grey is God’s own muralist. Alex Grey and I are contemporaries, both still exchanging vapors with the atmosphere, so I intend to ask him if he minds.

The illustration is in 16:9, high-definition format, suitable for a desktop.