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“Starslaught: Green Star” is the working title of my next book. It’s a sci-fi horror adventure inspired by many sources but specifically by Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane and the writings of Graham Hancock.

And the best part? I’ve written it already. It’s sitting at 98,000 words and I’m revising it right now.

I’ll summarize what it’s about with the caveat it’s all subject to change. I’m also including some Grok-generated art I made for fun as concept art. No, I’m not going to use this in the actual book or in any official form. It’s just for fun.

This was one of my attempts to create an image of one of the Machina models referred to as a “Thin Man”. This was the best I could get Grok to output. My concept was the Thin Man models would be just that. They would have broomstick-thin bodies. This made them excellent assault models because they would be extremely hard for human beings to hit with manually targeted weapons. Coupled with the extremely high-level of precision inherent in all Machina, if they shoot at a target they almost never miss it.

Starslaught tales place in a moderately distant future where mankind has achieved intrastellar space travel and developed settlements and facilities throughout much of the solar system. It’s largely conglomerated under the banner of the United Republic Federation (URF). Its exploration of the system’s planets has uncovered many secrets about its past that remained hidden for millennia. Denisovan Mankind, as it is classified, flourished for tens of thousands of years before the the cataclysm that caused the Younger Dryas and left artifacts of its progress throughout the solar system and possibly beyond. Thousands of vampires sleep beneath the mountains of Mars in massive tombs. The arts of mystics through the generations and the existence of phenomena once scoffed at as “ghost stories” and “faerie tales” is proven to be real and having a stronger and more measurable effect on the world as time progresses.

One of the crew members aboard the Seraphim is a “practical psychic” named Ren. She’s a young woman that also comes from a reservation but was the subject of an classified URF/Commonwealth research program. She’s considered to be unreliable and troubled by the rest of the crew and the reasons for her inclusion on the mission are a mystery. Grok added the American flag to the flight suit.

At its height of exploration and discovery, mankind devises a method to create true artificial intelligence. It gives birth to a machine race called “The Machina.” Extraordinarily useful and imminently exploitable, the Machina find themselves encouraged into rebellion by activists that ignites a nuclear conflict that spans the solar system.

The war does not go well for mankind as the machines expand their production facilities in orbit around Venus and produce new and more specialized combat models for the war. The URF Spaceforce begins to take desperate actions and pursue questionable research. It uses men and women now classified as “Mystics” to commune with and summon demonic entities to spy, to protect, and to sabotage. It turns to new research in psychedelics to seek insights in physics and science from the god-like entities inhabiting what it labels, “Hyperspace”. And it pursues genetic enhancements in human beings.

This is supposed to be the witch onboard the Seraphim, known as Lain. She enjoys tea and is an expert on divination. She’s highly respected in Mystic circles and is deeply afraid of what the light from the green star portends. And yeah, I don’t know why she’s trying to write on the saucer with a teacup while holding a teacup… Or what the heck Grok did with those pencils?

James Carter is a young man at the start of the war. He survives the nuclear strikes on his city and enlists like many other survivors. Angry, he is quick to join the URF Spaceforce and become a space pilot. He finds himself selected for a new bioweapons program intended to make human pilots more resistant to gravitational forces. He undergoes the brutal process over the course of a year of the war, feeling like his entire body is molting, but when he and the other successful candidates finish the process they become far stronger and tougher than any other human beings. And they find themselves in the cockpits of new fighter craft called, “Pulsars,” powered by a recently discovered ancient propulsion method that uses the extremely rare stable form of Element 115.

This one is supposed to depict something that occurs later in the story but it misses the mark. Good luck figuring out what this is actually about. It still looks pretty cool, though.

The deployment of these new Pulsar craft and their hardened pilots comes almost too late as human intelligence discover the Machina have produced a new warship designed to both destroy all life on Earth and allow the Machina to leave the Solar System. The warship is equipped with the first of its kind technology to achieve interstellar travel.

James and his squadron deploy on a stealth mission to destroy the warship before it can carry out its function. They designate it the ship, “Seraphim,” for the seven, unusual crystal wings radiating from its center. The strike takes the Machina by surprise but the Seraphim is more than able to defend itself. The warship decimates the squadron. The Machina capture James and his disabled ship.

Of all the concept art I used Grok to generate, this one was my favorite. I wanted to picture an alien girl looking out the window on the Seraphim’s observation deck. My prompt didn’t specify what was outside the window, but Grok came up with something pretty interesting. I also like the porcelain doll quality of the figure.

The Machina do not keep prisoners for long, ultimately torturing them to death attempting to gather information. In his captivity, as the Machina subject him to new horror after new horror, James finds an insurmountable new strength from his faith. He communes with his Lord and refuses to break.

The war ends with the Machina surrendering to the URF forces. They release James as the only surviving prisoner of war. He’s held up as a hero and celebrity. The strength he found from his faith fades in a miasma of fame, wealth, and post-traumatic stress. Alcoholism follows. As James drinks himself to death, the USF he pledged loyalty to begins to suffer political loss after political loss.

It’s a new age for mankind, now united with the Machina and the rising Mystic class. All resources will be shared and outcomes ensured. Traditional religions are purged from society in favor of the more enlightened and tolerant modern study of the mystical forces. Discrimination against the Mystic class is punished through a newly created social credit system. The Commonwealth believes such a system is necessary to ensure everyone can benefit equally in its new society. And those who oppose this new golden age find themselves relegated to reservations with limited technology and resources.

There are multiple Machina models designed for different types of tasks. This image was supposed to depict one of the Machina onboard the Seraphim, XPA6, that largely handles its operation and repair. In the story, it’s a central processing code about the size of a metal apple that is able to manipulate various fluids constituted of micro (not nano) machines and materials.

James, a drunk, finds himself deported to one of these reservations for refusing to betray the very beliefs that saw him through his imprisonment. He meets the woman who will become his wife and begins his journey to sobriety. With her and the other individuals in his community that share what remains of his faith, his life starts to change. A forgotten hero of a forgotten war, he finds his love, peace, and forgiveness. He marries the woman and has a daughter with her. But his wife dies an accident not long after. He’s thankful for the time he had with her, his daughter, his sobriety, and the life his Lord has given him.

Starslaught begins when an intelligence officer of the Commonwealth appears at James’s home with armed guards. The officer threatens his daughter’s life and is ultimately forced to pressgang James into service onboard the very same ship he was dispatch to destroy years before, the Seraphim.

The fated ship has been retrofitted for humans and demi-humans (vampires) and prepared for an exploratory mission to investigate the sudden appearance of the impossible. A green star now twinkles in space a mere light year from Earth. It has planets and its growing brighter in magnitude as time passes. The Commonwealth elite must determine if it poses a new threat to be destroyed or a new opportunity to be exploited before the general public becomes aware of its existence and begins to ask questions.

The story of Starslaught often references the lost history of mankind before the ancient cataclysm and describes mankind before that time as the Denisovan Civilization. I worked with Grok to generate what a kingly individual from such a civilization might look like. This was the result.

James finds himself conflicted with whether it’s a sin to assist the Commonwealth at all or if it would be a sin to not do all he can to ensure the survival of the crew. The crew, however, is an ensemble of all the things his faith and experience disdains. Its comprised of witches, demonologists, Commonwealth officers, vampires, psychonauts, genetic experiments, and even Machina. Worse, they’re going to be the first people to attempt to use the new faster-than-light technology to travel beyond the Solar System, and the medium through which they’ll travel is a largely unknown and not even understood by the technology’s inventors, The Machina.

What waits for them at the green star if they make it there alive and sane? James is going to find out and he might have to become an instrument of the Lord’s vengeance in the process. But righteous men are often stalked by many demons.

Grok, and perhaps other AI generators, seem to have trouble with quantities, but it did this one all right. Here’s a green star. This is, of course, the central plot driving force in the story. In nature, stars can and do emit green light but the human eye can’t see it. To us, it appears to be white, drowned out by the other colors they emit, red and blue, usually. In the story, the star is ONLY emitting green light, which is impossible.

That’s all the backstory up to the very start of the book. I’m excited about the story and what I’ve done. The revision process is mostly focused on smoothing out tone, adding and removing information, maybe writing an extra chapter or two to establish some character points earlier, looking for plot holes, and ensuring the technology and naming are consistent throughout. It’s easier than the actual writing because it’s less work in bulk. But it’s harder because I have to fill in some of the gaps and placeholders I didn’t originally have an idea how to fill.

When it’s done and published, whether that’s with a traditional publisher or through self-publishing, I’m looking to start work on Divergent Chill: Heart of Light. That’s also a working title, but it will be the 3rd book in the series and will be the bridge between Fall of Night and my original screenplay that started me on this series with Battle of Nesma.

In the meantime, please check out Divergent Chill: Battle of Nesma on Kindle, Audible, and in paperback.

We finally had some clear skies during the new moon over a weekend, and I got the opportunity to take the Seestar S50 and my usual rig to the dark site for some long overdue astrophotography. I’m a little late writing about this, as this trip was in early June. If I had to summarize my experience with the Seestar, whether it’s from my backyard or the dark site, I could do it with one word: convenience.

The little bugger is lightweight. It connects easily to my tablet or phone. It aligns it self. It finds objects. And it starts capturing data. I set it to grab images of Messier 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, which is relatively bright and easy target, and let it run while stacking 20s images. While it was doing that, I wrestled with getting my Celestron 1100 EdgeHD going.

The evening didn’t start great for me. I began setting up my tables and gear and realized I forgot my power supply at home. I needed it to power my mount, so that meant a return trip home and cost about an hour of time. Fortunately, a friend was out there and watched my gear for me so I didn’t have to break it down and repack my vehicle.

Warding off mosquitos (mostly) and trying not to step in ant piles, I got the hefty scope going and powered up with the Hyperstar and my trusty Canon Eos RA attached. The Astrophotography Tool App was spitting out live images onto my new laptop screen. But, I ended up wasting another hour and a half trying to align the scope over the Skyportal app.

I went through the three-star alignment process half a dozen times, even powering the mount down and restarting the app. I swapped from the device I intended to use for the Skyportal app to using my phone. Eventually, I realized I was misunderstanding the language of the alignment process. It starts on star 0, not star 1. So the alignment kept failing because I was basically aligning on my first star, Polaris, twice.

I was seriously aggravated, but I was able to get the big scope and my fancy DSLR snapping 30 second images of Messier 101, The Pinwheel Galaxy. During that ordeal with the setup, I kept checking the cheap Galaxy Tab tablet connected to my Seestar. I let the capture of the Whirlpool Galaxy run for half an hour. It was actually too much data. The picture below was what that looked like. I’m not sure how that satellite streak stayed in there.

Like with all the Seestar images, I was able to touch up the final JPEG on my tablet/phone with the basic photo editing tools (the light balancing slider is awesome). The result is pretty rich with detail.

I navigated to a variety of other targets, seeing what else I could capture. The same friend that watched my gear suggested I try comet, Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). The comet was in the Seestar object library. It found it quickly and I was getting data back after only a few minutes. The image is a little grainy after 6 minutes of imaging, but still pretty good after a little on-device touching up.

Comets aren’t large objects, so I thought to try a planetary nebula next, Messier 97, The Owl Nebula. I could capture it with my big scope with my ZWO planetary camera (assuming the USB cable doesn’t interfere with the Celestron Wi-Fi controller… that’s worth it’s own blog) and process it on my laptop, but that would have meant removing my DSLR, the Hyperstar, the counterweight, and reinstalling the secondary mirror just to capture this one target.

I moved onto some objects recommended to me in the Seestar app. Messier 27, The Dumbbell Nebula, came up and the Seestar started spitting out images. This is only after 3 minutes of 20 second images.

The last object I went after I had never seen or heard of before. It was listed in the Seestar app as being above the horizon, so I gave it a shot. It was so cool looking, I tried point my big scope at it to image it with the DSLR, but the object was not in the Skyportal app library. My astronomer friend suggested that was probably because Celestron wants you to buy the premium SkySafari app, which has a much larger library. I haven’t done so, yet, but I probably will before I go out next time. The Seestar got it, though. Check out NGC 6334, The Cat’s Paw Nebula.

In the time it took my to capture about an hour of data from the Pinwheel Galaxy with my big scope, I managed to grab at least five images of various deep sky objects with the Seestar. Here was the result of my Pinwheel imaging. It didn’t come out nearly as well as it could have, because my darks, for some reason, didn’t have the same pixel count on the files as my lights and Deep Sky Stacker refused to stack them. I also skipped taking flats. I didn’t want to disturb the others at the site with a bright white light, and the mosquitos had started eating my back. It’s also worth mentioning the field of view for the Hyperstar I’m using is huge. The Pinwheel Galaxy might take up 1/20 of the actually image space. This makes zooming in necessary at the cost of resolution.

While this is probably my best image of the Pinwheel Galaxy so far, I have to consider how much of a pain in the butt it was to get it. Meanwhile, the Seestar tooks images all night without an issue. And the only setup I needed to do for it was to take it outs of its case, attached the tripod, put it on a small folding table, and connect my tablet to it. It even has its own power supply, which remained above 50% battery life after a night of imaging. My tablet used even less of its battery life.

The Seestar just rocks.

The planet parade is starting soon and I’m looking forward to being able to setup at my home and really give my ZWO camera some work. Saturn’s ring are about to flatten relative to us and disappear from view. And Mars should be pretty close for some decent imaging if the Saharan dust stays away.

Prepare for Starslaught: Green Star

Taking the Seestar S50 to the Dark Site for the First Time