I would like to introduce visitors to the Author’s Lounge, to my newly released sci-fi series that follows the future history of a quirky time machine during its journeys to the goal of producing a space-battleship-sized Jump Gate. I believe you will find the creative progress that stimulated the creation of this series to be interesting.

The evolution of the series began with a conversation during the writing of TIME CHAIR, which I believed to be a stand-alone tale of Time Travel and the possibilities that could be realized by a time machine with serious limits to its use. Our conversation drifted to Jump Gates with which my conversationist was unfamiliar. I defined a Jump Gate as unique from a Star Gate that existed planet side and said instead, a Jump Gate is a spaceship-sized transfer-gate set in space. I said in my experience most Jump Gates used in Sci-fi were invented by some advanced civilization, but we discover them and learn to use them.

My partner objected with, “Aren’t we an advanced society?”

A statement I confirmed but added “A civilization advanced enough to create Jump Gate Technology had likely solved all of their societal problems.”

She countered with, “We humans often discover a new technology and only later find uses for it. After all,” she said, “Lasers weren’t always cat toys.” In seconds before I understood the arc that could change my time machine into a powerful Jump Gate.

My fifty-one-year career in leading-edge high-tech manufacturing informed me the path from a quirky time machine to a powerful Jump Gate should take three major steps. After all, if you have seen video of the discovery of the Titanic or an underwater valley full of black smokers, you likely peered through cameras I help make. If you have watched a space-shuttle launch, you were witnessing a flight in which our equipment flew, solving a dangerous problem concerning the shuttle’s backup computers. If you have heard of science’s search for neutrinos, the organization with which I was employed supplied the miles of cables and sensors frozen into the Antarctic ice in pursuit of this knowledge. We endured months of intense stress as we evolved current technology to find a way to cap a unique problem with a runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. I clearly understand how need-drives-tech to improve and evolve.

In Book one, TIME CHAIR

The time machine was passed from owner to owner to explore different legal and illegal uses for the machine. For the rest of the story, I needed characters that stayed with us a while and evolved through their life as the time machine evolved into the Jump Gate. The current tale already offered a perfect family in which to build the rest of the story upon. I would use them. The next three volumes would follow this family and their company as it discovers uses for this government-controlled top-secret technology. In book two, the time travel technology would have to be adjusted to work as a teleporter. After all, the time machine didn’t move through time itself. It transferred its passengers to wherever the machine was on the day desired. That part was easy.

Book two: TELEPORTER

I understood modifying the known tech and using it locally, on the planet and in near-Earth orbit, would easily fill the second volume. At the end of book two I needed to discover a way to travel outside our solar system and discover other worlds and meet our neighbors. A continuously accelerating spaceship solved that problem by using teleporter tech and dropping people-sized Teleporters in its wake to support immigration. Corporate problems trying to keep a business involved in secret government tech afloat while avoiding espionage and sabotage delivered serious challenges to the business while kidnapping keeps it personal. The first teleportation into orbit avoided the 5-G liftoff and the dangerous docking procedures as well as a fiery return trip that can go bad fast. But still, working in space is never without danger.

For book three, ROADMAKER

We find out traveling long distances in space is, ultimately, boring but traveling at insane speeds means any danger, when it does appear, shows up really fast and any solution to the problem requires an equally urgent solution. Even with years between incidents, a four and a half light year journey taken over one hundred years, offers plenty of opportunities to meet and defeat assorted problems. Sabotage, concerns over politics and religious opposition to emigration add to the many challenges encountered in space. In RoadMaker we begin to explore mining asteroids and find that business comes with challenges of its own.

In the final volume, JUMP GATE

I needed to find a reason to build a teleporter big enough to transfer large space-going vessels over multiple light-years in an instant. In settling our new planet, which is plagued with heavy gravity, heavy metals in the topsoil, and an unfriendly alpha species, we require more unique problems and solutions. But, when the Earth is attacked, and the new colony is cut off from Earth, the new colony comes up with new solutions to the attacks by an aggressive species using stolen space-tech. In taking this battle to the enemy we need to create the Jump Gate but the requirement to place a new Jump Gate receiver near the enemy adds more problems and demands a sneaky solution. Planet side warfare eventually moves into orbit and battleships pound away at each other while alien fighters take-on Earthly “mosquitoes” in a fast-changing field of battle centered around an ancient alien space station.

Thank-you Author’s Lounge for your interest.

The four-volume series titled the JUMP GATE SERIES is currently available from Amazon including: Jump Gate I – TIME CHAIR, Jump Gate II – TELEPORTER, Jump Gate III – ROADMAKER, and Jump Gate IV – JUMP GATE. Volumes are available via electronic download at the KINDLE STORE and in paperback or hard cover at recently reduced prices.

Click Here: Amazon