Ada’s Children is winding down, or I should say ramping up, to its exciting conclusion. I only have five chapters left to post, with the Epilogue coming in on Sunday, May 5. This presents you with a unique opportunity. If you’ve been telling yourself, “I really want to read Ada’s Children, but I’d like to read it for free,” now’s your chance.
I’ve switched on Substack’s “Seven Day Free Trial” feature. So if you subscribe on April 29 or later, you can read Ada’s Children over seven days, then unsubscribe. Easy-peasy! If you do take this route and you enjoy the novel, I hope you’ll support me by liking the individual posts and sharing them on Substack and beyond. Or you could even leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or your favorite review site. And of course, I really hope you’ll stick around for what comes next: Ship of Fools, my satire on conspiracy theories and anti-science beliefs.
Switching to Free
I now realize that requiring a paid subscription to read Ada’s Children was probably a mistake. Even after lurking on Substack for four months before going live with my own stack, I didn’t quite realize the level of commitment people have to fiction being free on this platform. Readers want to read for free if they want to or subscribe if they want to — it should be their choice. With so many great writers putting out free-to-read fiction, why should anyone be forced to pay? It was a case of me not reading the room. (I’ve been misreading rooms since all the way back in high school, so you might say I’m a pro at it.)
Then too, a novel is a lot to tackle in serialized form, and it may be that people would rather read works of this length in the traditional way (which you can do here). That’s especially true since I didn’t write Ada to be serialized, with at least one chapter of 6,000 words. Short stories or shorter serialized novellas probably work better here.
All that said, I didn’t really have a choice with Ada’s Children, because I was simultaneously publishing it in print and ebook form. I didn’t feel like I could offer it for free here while charging normal prices elsewhere. And I didn’t want to wait until May or later to publish, because in some ways the novel already feels dated. (Although some readers tell me it feels prescient, considering I wrote it back in 2019-20.) I needed to get it out there as soon as possible, and definitely before the US election this November.
Now that Ada is almost finished, I’ve decided to treat my next novel differently. I’ll be posting it with no paywall beginning on May 17. It will be great to post chapters without long explanations of why there’s a paywall and how to read the free sample chapters. Less shilling, more fiction!
Or maybe just different shilling, because I’ve given readers an additional way to support my writing with a one-off payment, via Buy Me a Coffee. If you like Ship of Fools or any of the other writing you find here, this is a great way to support my work, but not be tied down to monthly payments.
Ship of Fools Inbound
This satirical take on conspiracy theories and anti-science beliefs is a big departure from the sci-fi of Ada’s Children. (I really should stick to one genre, but I can never seem to.) Ship of Fools is a Pynchonesque satire featuring a science reporter, two flat-earthers, a space tycoon, a Young-Earth Creationist pastor, Nazi-fighting philosopher-cowboys (yes, many Nazis will be punched), an anti-vax yoga instructor, anti-space activists, and mysterious characters who may or may not know about secret portals to another universe. Oh, and interludes set in that alternate universe, in which the Earth actually is flat, with all the absurdity that would entail. In that world, the main character (Sam Rowbotham) is a Roundhead trying to expose the vast flat-earthist conspiracy.
The action begins during the Conspira-C Cruise aboard the ship Anóitoi (thus the title — although in another sense, everyone is a bit of a fool and the ship is planet Earth). From there, the story widens out to the Grand Canyon, Antarctica, the canyonlands of Utah, a lonely desert town outside Las Vegas, the beaches of San Diego, the Tranquility Lunar Base, and an alternate universe. It all wraps up at the oddly-named Universal Postal Union in Berne, Switzerland.
The novel is technically sci-fi, since it’s set at a vague date in the future, there’s a colony on the moon, and there are parallel universes. But mainly it’s sci-fi in the same sense that Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novels are sci-fi: there’s just a heck of a lot of science (but more laughs, I hope!). Some of the science has to do with orbital bodies, but other strands include how we know the shape of the Earth (beyond pictures from space), how we know the Earth’s age, and more.
At 147,000 words, it’s quite a bit longer than Ada. With sixty chapters, a prologue, an epilogue, and six interludes, and keeping to two chapters each week, it will take eight months to post the whole thing. Some chapters are short, so I might publish two in one day; but then again, some are very long, and I might break them in half.
The novel is in a late, but not final, draft form, and I hope to incorporate readers’ comments and suggestions when I publish it in ebook and print versions. That will probably happen sometime early next year. I’ll set the chapters to archive after six or eight months, after which you will need to subscribe to read them.
With Ship of Fools nearly ready to set sail, my free posts are also going to take a different tack. The temperature of the Earth is a big part of Ada’s Children; the shape of the Earth is a big part of Ship of Fools. So the Tuesday free posts are going to turn to topics like conspiracy theories, disinformation, hoaxes and truthers, science denial, and more. You can expect that to kick off next week.
For all of my paid subscribers, don’t worry, I’ll post the promised “exclusive bonus content,” i.e. a deleted chapter from Ada’s Children, on May 10.
I hope you’ll join me for this adventure into conspiracy theories, false beliefs, and disinformation. One of my beta readers said of Ship of Fools, “I haven’t had this much fun reading a novel in I don’t know how long. It’s a romp. From page to page I never know what to expect. I’m having a blast!”
Meanwhile, Chapter 27 of Ada’s Children, “The Taken,” drops on Friday. It’s another tear-jerker! You can check out the beginning of the novel here.