Jen Air: The Little Queen

Science has the power to turn dreams and fantasy into reality… but sometimes dreams become nightmares.

The Little Queen is a story primarily about two friends, Jennifer Airhart and Kaya Cade, who were very close when they were young. But in their teens their lives started to change. Jennifer’s parents vanished on an expedition and she became very shy and withdrawn. Kaya, while trying to figure out who she was, fell in with a gang and became a mean spirited bully, even picking on her old friend who had once been like a sister to her.

The two drifted apart and are now adults not having seen each other in several years. But then, one night, Kaya comes upon a corpse and then is attacked herself by a creature possessing superhuman speed and strength. Battered, confused, and with no-one else to turn to, she looks up her old friend and together they embark on an adventure that sees them come up against an evil corporation, faeries, changelings, Killer Aqua Bunnies, and The Little Queen - a young girl seeking revenge for her mother’s death.

Blending elements of fantasy and folklore with exciting science fiction, The Little Queen is a fun adventure and thriller that will leave you asking one question - Just where the hell did that lighthouse computer come from anyway? 

Available from the following sellers:

Amazon - iBooks - Barnes & Noble - Smashwords - Kobo - inktera - Scribd

Jen Air Series

My book series, now available in several stores.

‘The world is undergoing an awakening.  As science and technology marches forward, things that were once thought of as just the stuff of dreams and fantasy are being given real life.  Most dreams are good, but some when unguided become nightmares.
In this world there are organisations and corporations that do as they please. They are answerable to no one, and more conerned with wealth and power than with bettering the lives of ordinary people or having a greater understanding of nature and the universe.
And so, there must also be people who stand up to those who abuse knowledge and power.  To fight and guide others through these times.  People such as Jennifer Airhart, who lives in her lighthouse on top of a hill, always indulging her intellectual curiosity.  Kaya Cade, punk guitarist and part time criminal.  And Tenley Tych, changeling and pound-for-pound one of the strongest warriors in history.
Together with their other friends, robots and computers, they solve science based mysteries, battle evil conglomerates and other villains, all while protecting and helping each other keep away all the really bad stuff out there.‘

The overarching theme of these stories is how science and technology is able to give life to fantasy.  Really it’s the only tool humans have ever had with that kind of power.  This being drama and fiction of course, that often goes wrong resulting in monsters and other crises that our heroines have to defeat or put right somehow.  It should not be taken as an indictment of scientific progress, which on the whole is a good thing.  It’s just killer faeries are more exciting (although, I will still try to write a story someday where something new is invented and it works out fine and everyone is happy).  I suppose Jen’s inventions are benign… mostly.

The Little Queen saw elves and faeries come to life.  The next upcoming novel, Asterion, will mostly be a good old dungeon crawl loosely based around classical Greek mythology.  These are of course also available in the following stores:

Amazon … iBooks … Barnes & Noble … Inktera … Kobo … Scribd ... Smashwords

Jen Air - The Moon

Nice picture of characters Tenley Tych, Jennifer Airhart, and Kaya Cade standing on a hillside in front of the moon.

From Jen Air: The Little Queen.

ELFs & Synthetic Biology

So in my story, Jen Air: The Little Queen, (available now through Kindle), I mention refer to ELFs, or Engineered Life Forms.  Writing a whole genome on a computer and inserting it into a cell to grow.  But this is just science fiction.

But of course, in real life people are attempting to create artificial life in a lab, as a way to explore, for example, the origins of other life on earth and do all sorts of other things.  This is called Synthetic Biology.  It actually covers a range of disciplines with a number of different goals. And is defined by the site syntheticbiology.org thus:

Synthetic Biology is
A) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and
B) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

Some examples include Mycoplasma laboratorium, or Synthia.

Obviously no one is really anywhere close to creating faeries, zombie viruses, dragons, or any other monsters, as far as I know, and hopefully the real scientists will be a little more responsible about these things than the fictional ones.  But one day… one day I will have a barbecue I can take for walks and then fly me home.

The Fast Doctor

 An old sketch I quickly threw together back in 2010/11… something like that.  Who can remember that long ago?

Anyway, it’s meant to be David Tennant as The Doctor, and a tribute to The Fast Show, a BBC comedy sketch show from the nineties.

Basingstoke: Fame & Infamy

So, I mentioned I’d been starting to take more of an interest in local history, even though I didn’t think there really was much.  But I now know about several people who are connected to the town that was at least twice voted the most boring in europe.

I already mentioned Jane Austen before, who grew up in the village of Steventon a few miles away.  She stayed there until she was 25, and it’s where she completed the first drafts of a few of her famous novels; Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility; Northanger Abbey.  Although at the time, she was rejected by publishers.

Sarah Sutton who from 1981 - 1983 played the character Nyssa in Doctor Who was born in Basingstoke.

Another actress, Elizabeth Hurley, attended school and college in Basingstoke (pretty much everyone in town above a certain age claims to known her and some of the people she hung out with.  She was a punk, apparently.)

Thomas Burberry, maker of coats and inventor of Gabardine, had his first shop and factory in Basingstoke.  It burnt down in 1905.

And the family of welsh born Ruth Ellis moved to Basinstoke during her childhood, before moving again to London when she was 14.  On the 13th of July 1955, she became the last woman to be executed in Britain, for the murder of her lover.

Jane Austen

Above is the only known portrait of Jane Austen.  There are other portraits that people have claimed are of her, but turned out to be someone else, or might be her but no one knows for sure.  This is the only one we definitely know is her, by her sister Cassandra, and it’s… well, it’s not very good, so we still don’t know exactly what Jane looked like.

The reason I’m posting it is that I’ve decided, after thirty years, to take more of an interest in local history.  It just never seemed like Basingstoke really had much history.  Normally, people from Basingstoke are just pitifully thrilled to be mentioned in anything, like that line from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or a Monty Python sketch, or in The Young Ones.

But as it happens, Jane Austen grew up in Steventon, which is a village just about 7 miles outside of the town.  It’s close enough that we’ll claim her anyway and maybe this summer I’ll go and pay her place a visit.

More Dreams

I had a dream where my town was overrun by Dinosaurs.  Someone asked me how many dinosaurs I thought constitutes being overrun, and I would say when no-one dares go outside because you’re almost certain to get eaten, that’s overrun, and that’s what had happened in my dream.  My whole family was stuck indoors with the curtains closed, no one daring to venture out.

But then, tragedy struck - we ran out of milk.  Without milk, me and my family can't have tea (unless we mix some powdered milk, but urrrgh...) So you see this was the absolute worst thing that could have happened.

After an emergency meeting, we drew lots to decide who would go to the shop to get more (for some reason the shops were still open and presumably services continuing as normal despite the T-Rex stomping around outside).  It was my brother who went, while the rest of us just had to wait and hope he made it there and back without being eaten, because we needed that milk.

But it was all too real.  That is exactly what would happen in this house - dinosaurs or no, we just cannot go without tea.

Dreams - The Time Machine

People usually only talk about their dreams when they have nothing else to talk about.  This is probably why…

Okay, so, I dreamt I invented a time machine.  Amazing, right?  The endless possibilities… I could kill Hitler, sure, or go back and spark an industrial revolution in ancient Greece so by our time humanity will have already colonized the solar system.  I could do all that, sure… but I had another purpose in mind… something that’ll blow you all away.

Oh yeah - I was travelling back in time to visit stores in order to make a collection of all the Pepsi and Coca-Cola from different eras so I could have a collection lined up on my shelf back in the present.  Yup - I’ll be the envy of the world for sure.

I tried to look up what it could mean in a Dream Dictionary belonging to my sister in law.  From that, it seems most dreams have to do with what kind of man I’m going to marry, but no entry for pepsi, or even time travel.

I figure it probably had something to do with me watching Back to the Future.

I suppose though, my dream of my own private Pepsi museum is, unlike so many dreams, actually achievable.  I mean surely there must exist people who kept all their cans and bottles over the years, and maybe Pepsi themselves have kept a few old designs.  Or maybe movie props departments have some.

Jen Air: The Little Queen

Jen Air: The Little Queen, avaibable for Kindle from Amazon.com and other Amazon stores.  It’s $5, or free if you have Kindle Unlimited.  You can also get in paperback, but it costs more and I actually get less royalty from it, so don’t do that.

If you’re looking for a fun sci-fi fantasy action and adventure story in the vein of classic Doctor Who or movies such as Back to the Future, but with a mostly female cast, then this is the story for you.  If you’re not looking for that, then… I don’t know, tell me what you are looking for and I’ll see if I can recommend something.  Here's a longer description:

'Science has the power to turn humankind's dreams into reality... but some dreams can become nightmares.

Kaya Cade finds herself waking up to one such nightmare. Barely escaping with her life, she turns to her childhood friend for help, Jennifer Airhart. But Kaya had turned her back on Jennifer once before, so will they be able to put the past behind them to help each other solve this mystery?

What follows is a fast paced adventure seeing the duo battle the would-be-king of the research and development firm Stag Corp, gothic faeries, changelings, Killer Aqua Bunnies... and finally to confront The Little Queen - a young girl who has suffered a great loss and is determined to have revenge.

A fun tribute to sci-fi action-adventure stories from the past such as Back to the Future, The Goonies, Scooby-Doo and Predator, and a bit of classic Doctor Who. The story also touches on a number of issues such as genetic engineering and synthetic biology, and should humanity engineer it's successor, what kind of parents are we going to be?

But mainly it revolves around the friendship of the two main characters, who need each other more than they know in order to survive. This is the first in a series that will continue with some of the themes and characters established here.'