Blind Ambitions
Book II of the Implementation Chronicles

Blind Ambitions, the sequel to Blood Relations, carries the story a bit further. Zida and her crewmates arrived on Lennon in the previous novel. They found a chilly little world whose gravity was weak enough to allow people to fly by means of artificial wings. Many of Lennon's inhabitants live a tribal lifestyle, including Flyers. Zida becomes involved with Wolf, a young Flyer. Blind Ambitions furthers their romance against a backdrop of war and political strife.Although she is something of a naif in the first book, Zida is growing up fast. In Blind Ambitions she becomes the pawn in a power struggle between Rislo Cantato, the fascist ruler of Farquntry, and the leaders of the Majanatia, a collection of democratic city-states in Lennon's eastern hemisphere.
Cantato thinks she is a telepath, but she's been rendered telepathically deaf as a result of a murder attempt. Cantato takes some of her crewmates hostage and demands that the Majanatians swap Zida for them.
The climax of the book involves an attack on the Farquntrian capital by a fleet of zeppelins. That was fun to write.
The book is meant as pure entertainment, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have relevance to today's world. When writing a work set in the future, or on another planet, the idea -- at least for me -- is always to logically spin out possibilities that we see in our world today. What impact, for example will genetic engineering have in the next century? It's too soon to be sure, but already we can speculate about eugenics and cloning.
Science fiction has always been a literature of ideas, but I take my characters as seriously as I do the intellectual underpinnings of my work. Without people, there is nothing to write about. I've tried hard to give my characters a life beyond what you see in the book. I've written short biographies of all of them. Most of this information doesn't make it into the novel, of course; who cares that Gonzalo Taft, the expedition biologist, grew up in Lake Placid, New York, for example? Well, actually, I do. It helps me understand something of his background. I even know that the second in command, Willium Packer, had his pet dog killed in a bar on Mars when he was a teenager. Which actually does have an impact on the plot of Blind Ambitions. But you'll have to read the book to find out how.
The story goes on from here. And there is plenty of lead-in material, too, because this is part of a future history series. Of course, the danger in writing about the future is that you may live long enough to see some of your predictions fall flat. But Blind Ambitions takes place 400 years from now, so my potential for embarrassment in my lifetime is pretty low.
The first four chapters of Blind Ambitions are available in an altered form as the story Across the Wind on the Neverworlds web site. Neverworlds is an online e-zine of science fiction, and Across the Wind is one of the tales in the seventh issue. Interestingly, the main character of Blind Ambitions, Zida, doesn't appear in Across the Wind. Explaining her presence would have been beyond the scope of the story. So I took her out and re-worked it slightly. Still, you can get a real taste of the book, and the other characters in Across the Wind do appear in the novel.