This is home base, as it were for City of Amathar Press. Amathar is a huge city, roughly two thousand miles in diameter that resides inside the hollow world of Ecos and is the setting for Princess of Amathar, my first novel. The people are hardy, industrious, and blue. Please take note that this book was written years before Avatar was released. Inspired by the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs (which reportedly also inspired Avatar) Princess of Amathar is a sword swinging, sci-fi adventure.
Kate S. pointed out a feature of Amatharian society that I had actually forgotten about– recycling. Everything in Amathar is recycled from the clothing they wear to the massive aerial warships. I honestly don’t think a society of billions of people is truly sustainable in the long run if they don’t figure out how to recycle or reuse their waste products.
In addition, the Amatharians repair everything. We forget that just a few years ago, almost every town in America had an appliance repair shop that fixed everything from electric fans to toasters. In 1955 you might pay $25.oo for a new toaster, but you could get yours repaired for 50 cents. Today you can buy a similar product (not exactly, because toasters were made much better in the 50s) for $20.00 but it would cost you $125.00 to get it repaired. The Amatharians don’t have that problem. They don’t have money. Young Amatharians learn how to repair things as training for later making things and inventing new things.
I had Amathar in my head for many years before I started writing it. In many ways, it is the perfect world that I pictured when I was a teenager. It still reflects quite a few of my own personal feelings about the technological world. I have always hated talking on the telephone. I don’t know why, I just do. My cell minutes are usually in the single digits for any given month. I suppose that it’s no surprise then that there are no phones in Amathar. The Amatharians don’t like to hear voices that don’t have a face with them. They don’t have radios or any long-distance communication. This has the added storytelling benefit of leaving our hero alone without any way to contact help. On the other hand, I like to write. The Amatharians all love to write. Hardly any Amatharian reaches adulthood without having written at least one book, and they communicate extensively by letter. The letters are sent through vacuum tubes to each house, like we have at the bank. I have always been fascinated by those tubes. When I was in the hospital a few weeks ago, I saw that they used them to send records from one floor to the other.
The city of Amathar is huge– roughly the size of the continental United States or say, Australia. It is round and has a great wall around it. I have always been fascinated by city planning, especially when done long in advance of need. You can see analogs of Alexander laying out Alexandria in several of my stories.
I looked through the forward view port and felt my stomach drop away. Since coming to Ecos, I had come to expect things on a grand scale– seemingly endless plains, forests so dark and thick they seemed to block the sun, vast seas and broad rivers, huge flying battleships– but nothing had prepared me for the city of Amathar. Ahead of us was a wall that stretched to the left and right as far as the eye could see. Seemingly held within this wall was a city, straining to be free of its confines. It was a city of tremendously high buildings, tall towers, and massive constructions of bizarre shape and ungodly dimension, painted with a rainbow of pastel colors from red to blue with bits of silver and gold. The city seemingly went on forever into the distance, rising up into the horizon until it became a part of the sky.
“Just how large is Amathar?” I asked.
“The city wall is a circle two thousand five hundred kentads in diameter.”
That information took several moments to compute, and at least that long to comprehend. According to my admittedly incomplete knowledge of Amatharian measurement, twenty five hundred kentads was the equivalent of two thousand miles. This seemed beyond belief, and I questioned it, but the three Amatharians confirmed my figures. Here was a single city that would, had it been located on my home planet, have almost completely covered North America.
A great deal has been written about how easy it is to purchase and download a book on the Amazon Kindle. The Sony PRS Reader is only slightly less convenient in this regard. On more than one occassion I have seen a book being discussed on TV, went to my computer and purchased it, and then connected the Reader and transfered the book to it before the discussion was over. This week I got an add for a book by email, looked for the book online to see if it was available in eBook form (it was), and then purchased and downloaded it. This may not be the most compelling reason to buy an eBook Reader, but it is so nice, not to have to wait to go to the bookstore or the library to get the book you want.
For those of you who own an Amazon Kindle, or are thinking of buying one, please pick up the free first chapters of Princess of Amathar. If you like the book, it’s available complete for $3.19 in Kindle format.
One of the coolest new gadgets ever is the Amazon Kindle. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it is an electronic book reader. You download books like Princess of Amathar and hundreds of thousands of others and you read them on the screen. You can bookmark them, annotate them, and pick up where you left off. You can carry a whole library with you. You can also get newspapers and magazines. Best of all, it connects directly to Amazon (via cellular connection) and you can download a book when you need it in less than a second. It also plays music and lets you surf the web for free, but it is primarily a book reader. I am really looking forward to getting one, and believe me, I will let you know here as soon as I do.
Princess of Amathar has only one human character. All the rest are aliens of one type or another. One alien character is Malagor. He is a rather wolf-like fellow and the name just seemed to fit. For the Amatharians, I created long complex names that would look good, but would be difficult to pronounce aloud. I wanted them to sound vaguely french, because my main character had described their language as sounding that way. So my Amatharians became Norar Remontar, Vena Remontar, and the title character Noriandara Remontar. For the only human, my main character, I needed a name that implied heroic exploits and also to fit in with a plot twist, it needed to begin with the letter A. Alexander was a natural fit, though I don’t remember if I decided upon this before or after I wrote a major college paper on Alexander the Great. For a long time he didn’t have a last name, but I finally named him after a young lady I was working with (as I worked my way through college) whose last name was Ashton. So Alexander Ashton was born.
Princess of Amathar is a science fiction adventure novel in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Alexander Ashton, an earth man, finds himself mysteriously transported to another world– the artificial hollow world of Ecos. There he encounters a wide variety of alien races, including the reptilian Zoasians and their mortal enemies the human Amatharians. The Zoasians and the Amatharians have been at war for thousands of years and Alexander’s first encounter with both of them is when he stumbles upon a vicious battle, which the Amatharians lose. In the heat of battle, Alexander sees a beautiful female warrior, the Princess of Amathar, and falls in love with her then and there. When the Zoasians capture her and take her away, he vows to rescue her. The running series of adventures which he embarks upon includes a stop at her home city of Amathar, where he gets his first look at the human yet alien Amatharian civilization.
My first novel was Princess of Amathar. I originally thought up the story when I was a teenager. It was not a particularly brilliant plot, but was like the adventure stories that I enjoyed reading at the time. I wrote the first chapter several times over the years, but never got much farther. Writing a novel is really hard if you haven’t done it before. Just continuing takes a great deal of will power. About the time I started college, I made my last attempt to begin the book. I expanded the beginning while writing other things (mostly fanfic, which thankfully because no one ever heard of the internet in those days, never saw the light of day). I worked at it sporatically for years. After I got my first job teaching Junior High English, I began to share my writing with my students as I encouraged them to write, and they in turn encouraged me to keep going. It still took a long time. Then, when I was about 75% done, I began to share my writing with some of my teacher friends. With their feedback, I finally managed to finish. It was about eight years from start to finish, and this was only 93,000 words. Four fellow teachers helped me revise the book. When that was done, I was so proud that I immediately sent it off to a dozen book publishers. I recieved a dozen rejection letters. I stuck the manuscript away and forgot about writing for a while. Then one day I mentioned my book to a coworker, who suggested I check out Lulu and self-publish Princess of Amathar, if just for myself and my friends, family, and students. I did. I self-published it. Then a funny thing happened. I felt like I could write another novel and a new story just popped into my head.
City of Amathar 