The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a rad channel...
(With apologies to William Gibson.)
Honored samurai, ruthless ronin, wayward vagabonds, shadowy ninja and helpless villagers... welcome.
Opening Volley
When I started this newsletter, I hadn’t a clue the kind of reception it would get or the others I would meet. Quite honestly, it’s a lot to take in and I’m still not convinced that folks want to read a rambling stream of thought from my brain. But it’s a journey that I want to take, so the promise I’m going to make right now is this — I’ll keep it as succinct and entertaining as possible.
The Who (or “Trust me, you didn’t get a roll that allows you to move.”)
A lot of authors and readers have reached out with kind words since I started, but one person I found myself contacting was JJ Walsh. JJ isn’t a fiction author; she’s a long-term foreign resident in Japan penning a newsletter about sustainability and life here. She’s incredibly active in both the foreign and native communities, speaking on panels, doing podcasts, writing blogs, you name it, she’s on the successful circuit!
What caught my attention, as both a science fiction author and a foreign immigrant to Japan, was her February 20 newsletter on sustainable AIs. She starts with an extremely relatable and innocuous parable of her vs the Backgammon AI gaming computer in her Telsa and rolls it deftly into issues of sustainability and AI regulation all while quoting Hawking, EarthOrg and Musk (and a bonus link to the Top 20 Must-Watch Artificial Intelligence movies). Best part? She doesn’t belabor her readers with tech jargon, a million words or even a solution! JJ gets straight to the point of creating thought-provoking questions we should all be asking ourselves. Go read the article for yourself.
The Wall is Everywhere
...In the City-State of Los Angeles, IntraCity Security Corporation enforces martial law. Militia gangs designated as Outer Cohorts by a social physics algorithm control the Brown Zones. Hwarang warrior, Samuel Pointe, practices an ancient code of honor and justice...
The first book in series of four, LOM Book One is a no-holds-barred slaughter fest of martial arts and car duels along the highways and streets of the Los Angeles basin's most popular destinations. This is old-school cyberpunk written by an old school author native to the SoCal area. Bringing to it his intimate knowledge of martial arts, gritty street life, multiculturalism and LA, Frank Lechuga's debut novel will not disappoint. I read it not long after meeting Frank through Ernest Hogan, the father of Chicano science fiction and cyberpunk (and STILL ACTIVE — but more on him in a later issue).
Speaking to Frank on what inspired the LOM series...
The ideation behind the writing of LOM incubated over a period of time and stemmed from different sources.
No one single source or idea inspired the work; however, I can say that LOM began eons ago when I started designing and running role playing games of Dungeons and Dragons. I recall one day deciding to build a game applying the D&D’s format to a setting other than fantasy. I had always loved science fiction and dystopia so designing a game using D&D’s mechanics to create a dystopian scenario was easy. I called it “IntraCity” and I had my players creating characters that could be IntraCity Security officers or the gang leaders who fought them. Over time IntraCity evolved into the all powerful military-security bureaucracy I portray in LOM.
Growing up in the General Los Angeles area and the San Fernando Valley was certainly a generic source of ideas. Take the freeways that are prominent throughout LOM’s landscape - Interstates 5, 10, 405 and State Route 134. I’ve experienced these major transportation arteries devolve from the utopian thoroughfares of my youth to the deadly, dirty raceways and massive car traps they are now. Today’s dirty and decaying, L.A.’s freeways are definitely dystopian. Ask any first time visitor to Los Angeles how they see its freeways and the answer is not too far from that characterization.
This brings to mind the ideational sources of another element that is prominent in LOM. Some decades ago I read a short story, “Devil Car” written by Roger Zelazny about intelligent automobiles that hunted each other with mounted .50 caliber machine guns and some time later there was a television series Knight Rider featuring a robotic car powered by artificial intelligence. Both these works inspired me to create the robot car that is central to the LOM storyline.
Four cult classic science fiction dystopian movies were absolutely seminal in the creation of LOM. Each gave me specific ideas for backgrounds and character development — Blade Runner, Road Warrior, Escape from New York, and Zardoz.
Class warfare is at the heart of the LOM series. While a lot of post first gen cyberpunk fiction outlines gritty neon colored slums where everything is a hodge-podge of culture that somehow belongs to us all, LOM smacks readers in the face with a very large, very well-armed wall that segregates the different populations from each other — the Green and Brown Zones. In truth, that wall, as any person of color will tell you, has always been there. As a native of L.A. Lechuga knows and understands the wall and that it will, one day, solidify or crumble all depending on how humanity conducts itself in the now.
Pick up the LOM series here in ebook format. (Paper coming soon!)
Promises, Promises
Last week I flubbed up and I will not make excuses. In the late 90s, I was in the throes of passion for everything that was, Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson. I joined the alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo newsgroup and wrote two very distinct pieces of fiction that I thought were the cat’s pajamas. One I lost to hard drive failure. The other is “Now I Lay Me...” which I present without further comment.
We never meet without parting
Next issue... rían’s "Scarred Zeruel" (free fiction!) and the science fiction art of Alex Cipriano.
Until then!
Made in DNA