Writing - Extrapolated Worlds

Worldcon 2025

Doug September 2, 2025

Belated greetings from Worldcon 2025! Here’s my wife Joyce and I on the day we dressed up in Star Trek costumes. Those legs! Love my science officer.

We haven’t been to a science fiction convention since Boskone sometime in the eighties, when we were living in Boston and I was wrapping up my degree at MIT, long enough ago that I can’t really comment on how things have changed. About the only thing I remember from that long-ago event was the Orion slave girls from Star Trek who were not wearing much more than body paint. Not present at the 2025 Worldcon, alas, though there were certainly some amazing costumes (and also, some amazingly poor taste, but each to their own). My favorite was a woman in a full-on shiny silver spandex retro-futuristic spacesuit, complete with a custom backpack and a fully enclosed transparent bubble helmet. She could have walked right off the cover of an old-school pulp magazine.

Worldcon is where the Hugos are decided by fans, and it was very much a fan-oriented conference. There were multiple events to choose from every hour of every day, from panels about hard sci-fi topics like using Oort cloud objects to hitchhike between stars to how to craft costumes. (Plug for Joyce: she made her dress and my pants… the woman has skills!) It was impossible to go to all the things that caught my interest, so I focused on writer-oriented topics.

I was fortunate to get into limited-attendance “table talks” with several short-form editors. My favorites were Trevor Quachri and Emily Hockaday from Analog, who were simply delightful, and for whom I was a known quantity, as they’d bought a couple of my stories. My experience with other editors was “interesting,” as they say. My limited creds were of no import, and the message was that it’s a strict meritocracy. Which seems unlikely, based on my experience of the world, but it makes sense to walk that line when besieged by people trying to break into the market. And also, they get a truly boggling number of stories per edition – someplace between 100 to 1000 submissions per published story. Crazy. In any case, I did not manage to spark new business relationships. I’d probably have been better off to focus on fans – which makes sense, right? It’s a fan-oriented conference.

Another thing I noticed was that the crowd split into writers and other pros or semi-pros doing the hustle in their writerly garb, and fans. And if you presented as a fan, like by wearing a costume (oops!), you were automatically sorted into the ignore bin by the hustlers. No judgement here on my part – again, kind of makes sense. All grist for the mill. Next time I’ll probably do the Nebula conference, which is very much a professional focus. And should the opportunity for another Worldcon present itself (as in, I can couch surf, because big-city hotels are just way out of reach at the moment, because writing…) I’ll have a better handle on the dynamics.

Oh and final note, I read most of the Hugo entries, and perused the rest (peruse = they were so far out of my range of things I like to read that I would not ever read them In Real Life), and only one of my picks won: Ray Nayler’s “The Tusks of Extinction,” an excellent science fiction novella. The other winners were fantasies, which are not my cup of tea. And also not what I write, so… hmm. And there were some really good science fiction nominees! Which led to a lot of reflection on my part about market demographics and why people vote for certain things (genre preference, quality, whether or not the author – as opposed to their work – is perceived as deserving an award). None of which line up favorably for me, at the moment!

So to circle back to the start of this post, anybody up for some thinly-disguised Star Trek smut? I mean, romance? Romanscifi? I hear that’s hot…

Kirkus Review

Doug July 21, 2025

Way back in fall of 2024, I paid Kirkus Reviews $400 for a professional review of The Extrapolated Man. It was, I figured, a way to get some credibility. I could post it on Amazon and so forth. And then the review came, and I was shall we say, “disappointed.” So much so that I set it aside for a few months before returning to it. Now of course you, my hypothetical reader, might reasonably think “Ah he got a bad review and he’s in a funk.” And it certainly wasn’t a great review. It was sort of middle of the road review. No, what pissed me off at the time was that it seemed like a careless, half-assed review. A review written after a quick skim, by a college student in need of some extra money who wedged it in between term papers. And that’s unkind, but hear me out.

The Extrapolated Man is firmly, explicitly, consistently set in our solar system. Everything happens HERE. Even the plot element of a faster-than-light drive never gets our characters farther than Jupiter. And yet: “It’s a post-intergalactic war universe…” So let me think. Interplanetary is between planets, in our solar system. Interstellar is between stars, like, say, Star Trek. Intergalactic is between galaxies. Star Wars is nominally in a different galaxy, so I guess maybe kinda? Anyway I hit “intergalactic” and everything that followed was tainted. My dear reviewer was clearly not paying attention, so how could I trust him?

So there it sat for quite a while. I did eventually snip out a useful chunk and splash it around where it seemed like it might do some good. It’s really not a bad review. But I was, and am, unimpressed with the quality of the service.

Now I feel like a grumpy old man with unreasonable expectations, so without further ado, here’s the review.

A treasure hunter in a Mars colony discovers a potentially dangerous record of an ancient man’s mind in Franklin’s SF novel.

In the far future, Maggie Lebedev lives in a colony on Mars and is a “technomancer,” meaning she can repair and reactivate old technology. It’s a post-intergalactic war universe, and Mars and Earth are controlled by tharks, which are fearsome, murderous four-legged, two-armed creatures. Maggie and her crew come across an old shipwreck that contains a nuclear thermal rocket engine, which they can sell, and they also find a skull. It has a “brainstone” attached, which stores a recording of a person’s life. Intrigued, Maggie gets the interface working and finds it belonged to Lt. John Gray of the torchship Tereshkova. He was a Space Force pilot, but oddly there’s no mention of him in the records. So why the coverup? As Maggie connects to the brainstone and pores through his memories, a new threat emerges when a mysterious villain appears and tries to seize the artifact. Maggie learns that Gray’s ship can travel in hyperspace, a capability the tharks deny being possible. If she can resurrect Gray in another body, perhaps the two of them can restore Gray’s ship and permanently subvert the rule of the tharks. It won’t be an easy battle, as “the old lizards who run the United Colonies are not going to give up a single joule without a fight.” Franklin’s space drama is vast in scope and in its efforts to create a new world with all new life forms and language. The premise is irresistible, and the narrative’s alternating perspectives across very different time periods on the Mars colonies work well. The protagonists are attractive and relatable characters with loads of talents and capabilities. The complexities of the novel can be overwhelming at times, however, and the space-age lingo and ever-evolving plot points are cumbersome and slow the story’s momentum.

SF that delivers a complex world and compelling characters. – Kirkus Reviews

The Origami Man – sold

Doug May 1, 2025

I’m happy to report another sale to ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT. No spoilers here, of course, but my novelette “The Origami Man” is a mashup of three core concepts:

All wrapped in a delicious near-future setting in the Gulf of Alaska, where the Anthropocene has come to roost.

No idea when it will be published – hopefully sometime in 2025! More to come…

Forward Indies Finalist!

Doug March 18, 2025

The Extrapolated Man has been selected as a 2024 INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist! From their press release:

As part of its mission to discover, review, and share the best books from university and independent publishers, Foreword Magazine, Inc. hosts an annual awards program each year. Finalists represent the best books published in 2024.

The complete list of Finalists can be found at: https://www.forewordreviews.com/awards/finalists/2024/

“This year’s submissions have truly impressed me with their depth and diversity. Each finalist stands as a testament to the remarkable talent and vision within the independent publishing world. The INDIES not only celebrates these exceptional literary works but also plays a pivotal role in connecting them with librarians and booksellers, ensuring that a rich variety of voices continues to thrive in the world.” said Christopher Nesbit, INDIES Award Director.

[INSERT QUOTE FROM FINALIST PUBLISHER HERE]

Winners in each genre, along with Editor’s Choice Prize winners and Foreword’s Indie Publisher of the Year, will be announced in June 2025.

###

Since 1998, Foreword Reviews has provided trade book reviews of the best titles from independent presses. In print, and online, its FOLIO: award-winning design and editorial content makes the magazine a favorite among librarians, booksellers, and readers—an excellent resource when it comes to purchasing books. Foreword INDIES and the fee-for-review Clarion service complement our online content and print magazine, helping to showcase diverse independent presses and their authors for over 26 years.

New cover!

Doug December 10, 2024

I love the original cover – the back is a photo of the Pleiades by my friend Jerry Gipson, and the front was created by Charles Oines – and will continue to use elements of it. My original thought was that 90% of the hard science fiction books I surveyed featured a spaceship – usually dramatically unrealistic – and a planet. Phallus and chalice, as it were. So that’s what I asked for, and Charles delivered brilliantly, with a gorgeous and realistic model of the torchship UCM Tereshkova departing a partially terraformed Mars.

However, the cover said very little about the story (my bad), and did not resonate with “the market.” So I started looking for a new cover, which meant a new cover artist. I seriously considered generative AI. We’ve all seen amazing stuff at this point, and prompting seemed like a useful skill to pick up. But… solidarity amongst creators, and all that. I don’t want to be replaced by AI, after all.

I contacted a few artists whose work I admired, and those who replied were already overbooked. So on to the various services. I’d used Fiverr before for business graphics, but their covers looked like AI-generated slop to me. I eventually settled on Reedsy, which seemed expensive at $1K a pop, but had real people doing good work.

After paging through hundreds of covers, I found a couple artists who looked like good fits. One of them was Christopher Doll, who did the covers for Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series. Chris and I are peas in a pod… we both grew up in the same era of moon shots and Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and are avid modelers of science fiction subjects. (This is a golden age for modelers, by the way… the quality and breadth of subjects available now is amazing.)

So we were off to the races.

And here is the new cover by Christopher Doll! It is just a lovely piece that captures the heart of the novel: the warbot into which Maggie has restored Gray’s backup is shown holding his skull, while Maggie points at an iceteroid streaking overhead, and the wreckage of the hyperglider looms in the background of the back panel. I can’t thank Chris enough for bearing with me as we developed the concept, and look forward to working with him again!

Our Lady of the Gyre Released

Doug December 9, 2024

And it’s in the wild! Available now via Amazon Kindle or your Analog subscription, and it should be on the shelves of your local bookstore tomorrow 12/10/2024. W00t!

Extrapolated Worlds

Home of science fiction author Doug Franklin

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