The Official Website for the Tomes Of Atlantis Series and Other Writings by Aaron Marshall
Welcome to your official source for news and blogs surrounding the books and other projects by Aaron Marshall.
The Atlantean National Flag
UPDATE 4/19/2010: The Warstar Gambit is complete!
Actually, the novel was finished a few weeks ago, and I have since sent off several query letters to various agencies. Now the waiting begins, but in the meantime I am beginning the second book, a compilation of short stories entitled "Missions of the Elite".
About Me
Hi, my name is Aaron Marshall. I began wanting to write creatively in third grade and began working on illustrations and ideas for a titular group of characters called the Star Hunters when I was in high school. Things kind of got put on the back burner after college, but the desire to write someday for a living never left me completely. Over the past ten years I finished and self-published two novels, at the time part of an intended trilogy called "The Atlantis Chronicles"; they were "The Star Hunters" and "The Paladin and the Dragon". Both books met with very little success commercially, and I simply couldn't afford to market them effectively myself. I often received some scathing criticisms of certain aspects of my novels, even the series title, which some said seemed derivative. It wasn't easy to listen to such things, but I believe I did the right thing by doing so.
So last year I took a hard look at where I was and where I wanted to go as an author. I decided that mainstream publishing was the only truly profitable way to go, and promptly pulled both of my novels from my publisher at that time. Then I went in and "started knocking out walls", basically reimagining my entire series and refining it in every way I could imagine, from additional or subtracted story elements to grammar and punctuation suggestions I heard from friends who had read my earlier efforts. I made the mistake of wanting quick gratification, of submitting my books when I thought they were "good enough", not the best I could truly make them, the first time around. It's a lesson I learned well and intend to apply toward becoming a better writer and hopefully soon, a mainstream published one.
So last year I took a hard look at where I was and where I wanted to go as an author. I decided that mainstream publishing was the only truly profitable way to go, and promptly pulled both of my novels from my publisher at that time. Then I went in and "started knocking out walls", basically reimagining my entire series and refining it in every way I could imagine, from additional or subtracted story elements to grammar and punctuation suggestions I heard from friends who had read my earlier efforts. I made the mistake of wanting quick gratification, of submitting my books when I thought they were "good enough", not the best I could truly make them, the first time around. It's a lesson I learned well and intend to apply toward becoming a better writer and hopefully soon, a mainstream published one.
About the Tomes of Atlantis Series: The Star Hunters
What if the world you've grown up hearing about and believing in, its history, its nature, and its society, were one day suddenly turned on its head, and all you ever had been taught was found to be based on incorrect worldview assumptions and falsehood? What if you suddenly found yourself a minority among a people you felt did not share your values and beliefs? These are the questions that the survivors of Phantom Force, an international commando unit betrayed and left for dead by their superiors in the waters off of western South America, face as hard reality when they awaken to find themselves in Atlantis. It is much more than the amazingly advanced technology they see around them; it is the fact that a nation controls it whose majority are devoutly professing Christians that troubles them, even the American Christians in the unit who have seen their own country turn its back on God. The men learn a different version of history, and see its effects with their own eyes; they have been swept up in the winds of an oncoming renewed war with an ancient and evil Atlantean nemesis who also now threatens their home countries as well. The lives of these men, the newly named Star Hunters, will never be the same, and neither will the world they lived in.
Colonel John Carlson, the leader of the Star Hunters.
About the Tomes of Atlantis Series: The Electroknights
Atlantis and Zentonia's history of conflict spans millennia, and the cost in human lives has been enormous over that time. For that reason both societies soon came to depend on their highly advanced technologies to aid them, and one field of research early on was robotic and android soldiers. Robots and their more human-looking cousins could be used in situations which were impractical or even impossible for human engagements, such as the immense depths of the abyssal trenches or the icy surface of Pluto and the outer moons. The standard soldiers employed by the Atlanteans for this purpose are referred to as Guardbots, while their Zentonian counterparts are called Drones. Both have neurocircuitry which is incredibly advanced by surface world standards (such as being able to recognize friend from foe, or having visual records of their societies' citizens) but still fairly rudimentary by Atlantean and Zentonian standards.
However, in certain situations a level of tactical expertise and on-site decision-making is required that transcends what Guardbots or Drones are capable of. That is why the Electroknights (and their adversaries, the Zentonian Mechaknights) were created: to be a sentient, elite commando unit which answered directly to the high commands of either society but who could be self-sufficient if cut off from communications or orders. The Electroknights' team name is derived from Electros, the inventor and scientist who first developed them many centuries ago. The Mechaknights' name is derived from "Deus Ex Machina", Latin for "god from the machine", a reference to the practice of many Zentonians to worship their own technology in a Baal-based cult called Technotheology. Many entire rosters of Electroknights and Mechaknights have come and gone or gone through extensive refits across the centuries, most of them destroyed during the war. The two greatest leaders either team has produced through the conflict were Extremus, the White Paladin of the Electroknights, and Draco, the Red Dragon of the Mechaknights; their climactic battle at Tempest Island in 1434 AD ended with both armies being devastated as well as their both being buried in a lava flow. Both sides retreated to their borders after the battle and have since kept mostly to themselves, but lately the Zentonians, through a terrorist organization called PLAGUE, have been moving in world affairs once more. The war is about to begin anew, and this time the two societies' secret war will pull in the entire world...
However, in certain situations a level of tactical expertise and on-site decision-making is required that transcends what Guardbots or Drones are capable of. That is why the Electroknights (and their adversaries, the Zentonian Mechaknights) were created: to be a sentient, elite commando unit which answered directly to the high commands of either society but who could be self-sufficient if cut off from communications or orders. The Electroknights' team name is derived from Electros, the inventor and scientist who first developed them many centuries ago. The Mechaknights' name is derived from "Deus Ex Machina", Latin for "god from the machine", a reference to the practice of many Zentonians to worship their own technology in a Baal-based cult called Technotheology. Many entire rosters of Electroknights and Mechaknights have come and gone or gone through extensive refits across the centuries, most of them destroyed during the war. The two greatest leaders either team has produced through the conflict were Extremus, the White Paladin of the Electroknights, and Draco, the Red Dragon of the Mechaknights; their climactic battle at Tempest Island in 1434 AD ended with both armies being devastated as well as their both being buried in a lava flow. Both sides retreated to their borders after the battle and have since kept mostly to themselves, but lately the Zentonians, through a terrorist organization called PLAGUE, have been moving in world affairs once more. The war is about to begin anew, and this time the two societies' secret war will pull in the entire world...
The Thunderbots, a specialized, heavily armed sub-unit of the Electroknights
AS THE SAGA BEGINS: THE WORLD OF 2017
The Tomes of Atlantis series is often allegorical in its approach to storytelling, but sometimes very frank and direct as well. The near future it paints is a bleak one, and meant as much as a warning of where we could be headed as a society as it is simply as a story element. In this excerpt from Chapter Two of the first novel, Operation Trident, newly elected US President James Weathers reflects on the problems facing his country, just before a new crisis begins that will change the course of history forever and bring the United States to its greatest and perhaps final test as a nation.
President James Weathers sat at his desk in the Oval Office in the wee hours of the morning, sipping a glass of milk while looking over the headlines in the morning newspaper. He had gone through many such nights since he took the oath of office roughly a month before; sleep had come much less easily than it used to for him, as he had begun to shoulder the enormous burden facing his administration.
Weathers had been the first Independent ever to win the presidency, and had done so with less than fifty percent of the popular vote. It was a testament to the schism created within the nation over the past few administrations; the American people had spoken, and the consensus was that they were fed up with party-based politics and agendas that had brought the country to ruin in so many ways. He had inherited a position charged with the responsibility of turning around an economy where nearly a third of the people were out of work, and the majority of the rest were pinned down into minimum wage, part-time jobs with no benefits or foreseeable opportunities for promotion. The middle class had been systematically dismantled at the hands of corporate executives and ownerships since the mid-2000s; employees with seniority and benefits had been let go in favor of reorganizations which distributed their duties to lower-wage workers, then further cut-backs reduced even entry-level staffs to skeleton crews. On top of that, the capitalistic greed of companies that had sent American jobs overseas in exchange for greater profits via cheap labor had borne bitter fruit; the current trade embargo placed on the United States by China and other Asian nations was an irony that had further exacerbated the issue, and had only eased at the previous administration’s promises to slowly pull U.S. military presence from South Korea and other Asian countries. Countless American households now consisted of two or more family units living under the same roof, often two or three generations, simply to aid in pooling resources toward expenses. Bitterness on the part of the poor against the rich establishment had turned to anger, and the atmosphere was ripe for a civil uprising.
Since the U.S. had pulled its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan a few years earlier and adopted a more militarily isolationist policy, organized terrorism had spread almost unchecked throughout the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and parts of northern Africa; with the fall of Saudi Arabia and other key oil suppliers to militant control, gas prices had soared to just under $8.00 per gallon. This in turn had similar effects on groceries and other necessities, and many people were already falling through the cracks. Foreclosures, evictions, repossessions, and bankruptcies had risen every year for a decade, as many people found themselves unable to adequately pay for basic necessities. Many corporations had failed in every sector, from retail to banking to the automobile industry. The collapsed economy had reduced the value of the dollar to never before seen levels, and the following week, Vice-President Hector Garrett was scheduled to attend a worldwide summit in Rome the following week to discuss an international standard, centralized monetary system despite intense public outcry and opposition.
The socialized healthcare system that had been adopted some years earlier had come with consequences; each citizen was now rationed a certain amount of coverage for his or her lifetime, after which they were either on their own or had to look to family for help. Nonprofit hospitals and doctors had been overwhelmed by the numbers of people who were turned away from emergency rooms and out of hospitals due to lack of coverage. Social Security had undergone massive cutbacks, and 401(k) programs had been restructured more as life insurance rather than something available for retirement years in order to help stabilize a devastated stock market. In the case of “non-productive individuals” who were deemed to be posing an “unreasonable burden” on the economy (from the elderly to the disabled and the mentally retarded), their families were given power of attorney either to decide whether to care for them at family expense or allow state doctors to administer “humane sanctions”, and anyone who had reached the age of sixty-five was now required to fill out a legal form stating how they wished to have those sanctions carried out. Nursing homes had become referred to as the “concentration camps of America” among the populace. Many had scoffed at such a scenario as uninformed paranoia shortly before the current system had taken hold; no one was laughing now.
All of these factors had given rise to numerous elements of organized crime and dangerous groups of disenfranchised individuals, from street gangs to militias, throughout the nation. Violent confrontations between them and the overburdened police and National Guard had become commonplace in the news.
The journalistic media, from the internet to television, had become much more focused on the issues of the day and human interest stories in favor of the celebrity and sports-focused coverage of the past decade. Most people no longer could afford to attend games or movies, and several professional sports teams and some studios had gone bankrupt, the result of excessive costs and salaries within their industries which went in the opposite direction from the incomes of the fans who had once supported them. Home theaters, high-end electronic devices, and videogame consoles had become, like many other material belongings, things exclusive to the well-off, and most companies and developers in the once seemingly recession-proof industries had gone under. Entertainment had returned to a state reminiscent of the early to mid-twentieth century, when families used to gather around the radio or television. New personal computers were now a rare sight in homes; most people held onto older models and operating systems simply due to the fact they could no longer afford new ones. The internet and e-mail servers had become strictly regulated to monitor dissent and potential threats to the government and populace; among the victims of the many cutbacks had been the numerous social networking websites many individuals had used to post political statements and propaganda on. Telephone accounts were now heavily restricted, and all new cell phones now carried tamper-proof chips inside them designed to track and record calls and conversations to remote monitoring centers, as well as pinpoint the locations of the speakers; few citizens now used them to call outside of basic necessity. The days of abundance and excess in America were over.
Another bastion of American freedom had suffered greatly as well; The Religious Reform Act instigated by the previous administration now required every citizen to register their stated faith, and churches of every denomination were required to submit any planned sermons or topics of conversation to specially designated government authorities. This had been done in the name of preventing any speech labeled as divisive or hate-mongering, as well as to prevent any organized resistance to the increasing government encroachment on civil liberties. The United States no longer resembled the nation which had been founded on personal freedoms of self-determination and religion only two centuries before.
Weathers had thought over all of these problems many times during his short tenure as President. He was not a religious man, but as he had a military background and had personally earned most of his material wealth, he held mostly conservative values compared to some of his recent predecessors. He knew that the federal government had made many critical mistakes over the past two decades, and had gone way too far in its attempts to keep control and order amid the unrest. He had won his position upon the promise of restoring the civil liberties once taken for granted as well as a plan to begin restoring the ravaged economy, but he needed support from two hostile and bitter parties in Congress to aid him in implementing those things. He had quickly learned the difficult nature of dealing with men who had been granted too much power, and though he held the highest office in the land, right now he felt like the loneliest, most powerless man on Earth. As he read over the current best-sellers list toward the back of the Entertainment section of the newspaper, he took note of the title at the top of the list: Trapped on Planet Earth. It seemed very appropriate and relevant for the state things were in at the moment.
President James Weathers sat at his desk in the Oval Office in the wee hours of the morning, sipping a glass of milk while looking over the headlines in the morning newspaper. He had gone through many such nights since he took the oath of office roughly a month before; sleep had come much less easily than it used to for him, as he had begun to shoulder the enormous burden facing his administration.
Weathers had been the first Independent ever to win the presidency, and had done so with less than fifty percent of the popular vote. It was a testament to the schism created within the nation over the past few administrations; the American people had spoken, and the consensus was that they were fed up with party-based politics and agendas that had brought the country to ruin in so many ways. He had inherited a position charged with the responsibility of turning around an economy where nearly a third of the people were out of work, and the majority of the rest were pinned down into minimum wage, part-time jobs with no benefits or foreseeable opportunities for promotion. The middle class had been systematically dismantled at the hands of corporate executives and ownerships since the mid-2000s; employees with seniority and benefits had been let go in favor of reorganizations which distributed their duties to lower-wage workers, then further cut-backs reduced even entry-level staffs to skeleton crews. On top of that, the capitalistic greed of companies that had sent American jobs overseas in exchange for greater profits via cheap labor had borne bitter fruit; the current trade embargo placed on the United States by China and other Asian nations was an irony that had further exacerbated the issue, and had only eased at the previous administration’s promises to slowly pull U.S. military presence from South Korea and other Asian countries. Countless American households now consisted of two or more family units living under the same roof, often two or three generations, simply to aid in pooling resources toward expenses. Bitterness on the part of the poor against the rich establishment had turned to anger, and the atmosphere was ripe for a civil uprising.
Since the U.S. had pulled its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan a few years earlier and adopted a more militarily isolationist policy, organized terrorism had spread almost unchecked throughout the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and parts of northern Africa; with the fall of Saudi Arabia and other key oil suppliers to militant control, gas prices had soared to just under $8.00 per gallon. This in turn had similar effects on groceries and other necessities, and many people were already falling through the cracks. Foreclosures, evictions, repossessions, and bankruptcies had risen every year for a decade, as many people found themselves unable to adequately pay for basic necessities. Many corporations had failed in every sector, from retail to banking to the automobile industry. The collapsed economy had reduced the value of the dollar to never before seen levels, and the following week, Vice-President Hector Garrett was scheduled to attend a worldwide summit in Rome the following week to discuss an international standard, centralized monetary system despite intense public outcry and opposition.
The socialized healthcare system that had been adopted some years earlier had come with consequences; each citizen was now rationed a certain amount of coverage for his or her lifetime, after which they were either on their own or had to look to family for help. Nonprofit hospitals and doctors had been overwhelmed by the numbers of people who were turned away from emergency rooms and out of hospitals due to lack of coverage. Social Security had undergone massive cutbacks, and 401(k) programs had been restructured more as life insurance rather than something available for retirement years in order to help stabilize a devastated stock market. In the case of “non-productive individuals” who were deemed to be posing an “unreasonable burden” on the economy (from the elderly to the disabled and the mentally retarded), their families were given power of attorney either to decide whether to care for them at family expense or allow state doctors to administer “humane sanctions”, and anyone who had reached the age of sixty-five was now required to fill out a legal form stating how they wished to have those sanctions carried out. Nursing homes had become referred to as the “concentration camps of America” among the populace. Many had scoffed at such a scenario as uninformed paranoia shortly before the current system had taken hold; no one was laughing now.
All of these factors had given rise to numerous elements of organized crime and dangerous groups of disenfranchised individuals, from street gangs to militias, throughout the nation. Violent confrontations between them and the overburdened police and National Guard had become commonplace in the news.
The journalistic media, from the internet to television, had become much more focused on the issues of the day and human interest stories in favor of the celebrity and sports-focused coverage of the past decade. Most people no longer could afford to attend games or movies, and several professional sports teams and some studios had gone bankrupt, the result of excessive costs and salaries within their industries which went in the opposite direction from the incomes of the fans who had once supported them. Home theaters, high-end electronic devices, and videogame consoles had become, like many other material belongings, things exclusive to the well-off, and most companies and developers in the once seemingly recession-proof industries had gone under. Entertainment had returned to a state reminiscent of the early to mid-twentieth century, when families used to gather around the radio or television. New personal computers were now a rare sight in homes; most people held onto older models and operating systems simply due to the fact they could no longer afford new ones. The internet and e-mail servers had become strictly regulated to monitor dissent and potential threats to the government and populace; among the victims of the many cutbacks had been the numerous social networking websites many individuals had used to post political statements and propaganda on. Telephone accounts were now heavily restricted, and all new cell phones now carried tamper-proof chips inside them designed to track and record calls and conversations to remote monitoring centers, as well as pinpoint the locations of the speakers; few citizens now used them to call outside of basic necessity. The days of abundance and excess in America were over.
Another bastion of American freedom had suffered greatly as well; The Religious Reform Act instigated by the previous administration now required every citizen to register their stated faith, and churches of every denomination were required to submit any planned sermons or topics of conversation to specially designated government authorities. This had been done in the name of preventing any speech labeled as divisive or hate-mongering, as well as to prevent any organized resistance to the increasing government encroachment on civil liberties. The United States no longer resembled the nation which had been founded on personal freedoms of self-determination and religion only two centuries before.
Weathers had thought over all of these problems many times during his short tenure as President. He was not a religious man, but as he had a military background and had personally earned most of his material wealth, he held mostly conservative values compared to some of his recent predecessors. He knew that the federal government had made many critical mistakes over the past two decades, and had gone way too far in its attempts to keep control and order amid the unrest. He had won his position upon the promise of restoring the civil liberties once taken for granted as well as a plan to begin restoring the ravaged economy, but he needed support from two hostile and bitter parties in Congress to aid him in implementing those things. He had quickly learned the difficult nature of dealing with men who had been granted too much power, and though he held the highest office in the land, right now he felt like the loneliest, most powerless man on Earth. As he read over the current best-sellers list toward the back of the Entertainment section of the newspaper, he took note of the title at the top of the list: Trapped on Planet Earth. It seemed very appropriate and relevant for the state things were in at the moment.
A Note From the Author
The stand in front of the Atlantean Capitol Building
My current hope and plan is that the Tomes of Atlantis series will be comprised of at least eight to ten full-length novels, short story compilations, and reference guides. In short, it will be epic in scale and I believe rewarding in its ability to provide an entertaining and thought-provoking read. Keep checking back often for blogs and updates on my first novel, "Operation Trident", as it gets closer to submission for publication. And feel free to drop me a line via the contact information below or via response to my blogs here. Thanks so much for coming to the site, and I hope very much to be an author whose name you'll someday want to include on your bookshelf.
