Author’s Notes from Book III written in 2013
Note to the Notes:
SOME SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH OF NOTES TO THE NOTES
As mentioned in the Omnibus Nazi Moon, I had written a good chunk of Book III by March 2013, and as is my usual practice, did some of the Author’s notes (the personal ones) even before finishing the book. This may seem odd to some, but I have had this series in my head since the mid-1990s, which is something you can verify for yourself, since if you read the Timeline of the Solomon Confederation of Planets at the start of my novella Confederate Rising, you will see that there is an event at timeline 1999. And it matches with the events in Book III. I wrote Confederate Rising in 2018 and Book III of Overlords of Mars at the end of 2023, five years later. So you see, I really did (and still do) have this storyline in my head for years.
Please Note: This section was initially written between 7th March and 13th March 2013. At the time I had only written something close to half of the book. Read through it and then note the drastic contrast when compared to the notes written in late August of 2023, which follows it below, more than a decade later.
This book, the third instalment in the Overlords of Mars series, was without a doubt the most difficult to write. The necessity of having to have a coherent universe for my story required me to think about concepts of Nazi ideology that I have always found repulsive. To delve so deep and for so long in such a deranged world-view was not easy. In addition to this, just before I started this book, I happened to suddenly be going through the most personally difficult and trying time of my life. My relationship with my second wife having utterly disintegrated, and my 15-month-old daughter having been abducted by her to Brazil. The week before I began writing this volume, I thought I would literally go insane with pain. Then I went to see a film:
Cloud Atlas
And the combination of what I was going through, my own strange life experiences prior to this, and that film, resulted in something happening inside me that is almost impossible to put into words, and my life was changed forever. At the time of writing this I am only four days out from having seen that film (perhaps counter-intuitively, I usually tend to write a good section of the author notes before I even start the book, mostly because by that time the book is already fully formed in my head anyway). I have no idea how my personal affairs will turn out, but the one thing I am certain of is that if I survive the experience, it will not be possible for me to make the same mistakes I did my entire life prior to Sunday the 3rd of March 2013, when between 8.30pm and 11.30 pm I saw Cloud Atlas and was finally transformed into a completely different person.
Such moments of true and permanent enlightenment are rare in any life. What that film did for me —together with the absolute agony that I was going through with regards to how much I missed my daughter, who was now in Brazil, far from me, and possibly with whom I would have little if any future contact— was to finally show me The Way I had been searching for, for, quite literally, at least a few centuries, if not millennia.
What the hell does this have to do with this book you say? Kind of everything really, but not in an obvious way. Patience Padawan.
The main theme of anything I have ever written, though not really always clear or obvious, or even conscious on my part sometimes, has always been the same. Love. Ultimately, Love is all there is. The reply Giona gets in book two on page 322, [pg. 438 of this volume] when he asks how to get rid of the monstrous Gods of war, is one I have heard myself many, many times when, in some dark hole of frustration, either at life in general, my own stupidity or someone else’s, I asked the question of the universe of how to go about living a life of peace and happiness and doing good deeds.
Love. Love conquers all.
Was always the whispered response from the aether. And most times, it felt like a lie, because my life experience did not show me that at all. In fact, quite the opposite. Assholes win if you don’t stop them. Brute force is not stopped by love, and the meek and the nice get squashed by the rude and the insensitive. As a result, I had developed a hard shell of self-defence in order to protect my soft inner workings from the cretinous hordes we all feel surrounded by at times.
Giona’s follow-on request at this message that love is the answer,
Then show me. Show me the way.
is similarly taken straight out of my own life. And that too is a phrase I have repeated many times. This request, it seemed to me, always fell on deaf, existential, metaphorical, and —most of all— un-existing ears.
There was never a reply. Only shadows, hints of shadows, and a pervasive sense inside of me that there must be a better way than fighting everything all the time. But every time I relented even a little it was not just the strangers and the enemies of life that took the opportunity to slug me in the head, and heart. It was also the so-called friends and family. It was not paranoia. It was decidedly a pattern I spent years observing.
Be an asshole, people treat you nice. Be nice, people try to fuck you over. How the hell could love be the answer? How could it conquer all? And yet… without love. What do you have? Nothing. Less than nothing.
It is only now, after the particular set of circumstances of my crashed family life, and the seeing of that one film, Cloud Atlas, that I finally saw. I finally was shown The Way. The way to live that I have now remembered consciously, and understand consciously. The way of love instead of war. We forget it because somewhere along the line something or someone hurts us. And we become angry, or sad, or frustrated, or depressed, and it goes on so long we eventually forget to be anything else. This happens because the way of love is something we are originally all born with (bar some accident of fate I think) but sadly, it is not a conscious skill. It is just a natural phenomenon, and as such we are unschooled in its use.
The pivotal point, of how to become skilled in its use is that, above all, you cannot have expectations of anyone or anything. The moment you do, you will be disappointed and thus hurt. Pain brings chaotic emotions that further throw you off-balance and you begin to expect more in order to regain your balance and instead you tip out of balance further. The vicious cycle repeats until you crash and then the crashes build and stack atop each other until all you learn is how to try to stand on two feet here, in the material world, and you become so fixated on that, you forget that keeping your balance has not a damn thing to do with your feet. It has to do with keeping your emotions (the negative ones at least) under proper lock and key. Those emotions, can only come about in the first place if you have an expectation of a specific outcome. Expectations are a kind of insanity. A delusion about how the world should be (in your opinion) in order to please you.
No expectation, and you can accept whatever is as being reality, and you do not get hurt, angry, disappointed or sad. Do you get any negative emotions about gravity? Or the colour of your desk at work? No. Because these things are of little importance to us so we just accept them (you think gravity is of little importance? You’d be dead without it but you don’t ever expect it to just turn off, do you? So, you don’t worry about it). The secret is that if you can accept reality, instead of your deranged idea of how or what reality should be, then you will rarely feel any existential pain with respect to that reality.
If you think this is all mumbo-jumbo rationalisation, I assure you it’s not. Right now, I have to face the very real prospect that my family has disintegrated, and that my daughter may in a short time see me as just another stranger. If you think it’s easy to try to not have any expectations about those two things, well… it’s wrong to say this, it’s not the way of love, you understand, but fuck you.
I’m still new at this after all. Baby steps.
The truth is though, that disarrayed emotions lead only to one place. Fear. And fear eventually kills and drives love out. If, however, you were schooled in the proper skills of how to live in love, you would essentially never really feel fear. And without fear, there can only be love. It sounds simplistic, but I assure you it is not. Maybe, if I ever feel up to the task, one day I will write a short treaty on this much needed skill.
But back to us. What the hell does any of this have to do with your SF book about Nazis man? I mean, I’m sorry you fucked up your life, but dude… I just wanted a cool story about Nazis in space with some kinky sex thrown in, ya know?
I can practically hear my own voice in the crowd of people that is probably shouting something along those lines at this page while pointing a finger at it.
Well. It has everything to do with it. The Nazi regime was (and insofar as remnants of it persist, continues to be) the exact antithesis of love.
I had therefore (merely days after I finally saw the way of love as being real) to focus and think about and delve into, the exact opposite of love. Nazism. It does tend to make things just that bit harder.
I say had to, but really other than work, the alternative was to be alone with my still weak mind and lack of operational skill in a world that I had lived in all my life but that suddenly operated by rules completely foreign to me. I had nothing but time on my hands, as I tried to learn how to move about in this new place, where I was essentially the human equivalent of a bambi; that has just been born and there are lions circling while he still has to learn to walk.
So, it was either do something (write in my case) or quickly discover the path to a large bottle of tequila a rusty razor and a warm bath.
Damned English laws won’t even let you have a good large handgun to blow your brains out in a dignified and manly manner, so I’d need to go out like a little bitch in a warm bath. May as well get a large flowery margaritas glass and little umbrella in it to complete the picture. I can see the headline now:
Failed gay neo-nazi racist writer suicide leaves work on Space Nazis unfinished. “Good riddance,” says his mother.
You know how it goes, accuracy in the press and all that.
So, paradoxically, the only thing keeping my straying hand from the rusty razor and the flowery glass, is to write pretty obsessively about the most evil, fear-filled, anti-love thing you can imagine. Nazis. And I had to consider their sick and disgusting ways as they may evolve over a period of some nearly sixty years. On the Moon. To say I have had some pretty dark thoughts over this time is sort of like saying that the Pacific Ocean can be slightly wet. In addition to all this, I also had to try to guess how the average reader (there is no such damn thing!) would take the whole thing. How far could I push it before it became so overtly horrific it would be unreadable? On the other hand, I certainly didn’t want to make this ‘Nazis lite’.
Nazis are fucking evil.
Evil, bad, shoot-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out kind of evil. The shit they did in real life cannot and should not be forgotten. Ever. And it should not be trivialised. Which, I am well aware, pretty much anyone who uses them in fiction is kind of doing anyway. So, there is this dilemma to begin with, and then it just goes downhill from there. Once I started to consider the logistics of how the Nazis would boost the population on Luna (based on some pretty horrific research I did on their actual plans and even medical experiments the Nazis actually did in reality) the horror just grew exponentially. Then we had to have the slave labour. We had to, because Nazi Germany was not sustainable without it, and whilst the Luna based Nazis are somewhat of a mostly closed eco-system, there had to be a sustainable flow of slaves. And once you get used to having slaves on demand, well… you are going to think up of ever more perverse uses for them aren’t you. So, if some of the concepts in this book that I came up with gave you nightmares, it may help to know that they almost undoubtedly gave me many more and worse ones. A lot of fucked up shit I did think about I did not put in this book. I still wanted someone to actually read it, you see. And buy the next one too.
Which brings me to my overall point with regard to this book you are holding. I said it in both previous books loud and clear, but in this one I really want to be very clear for the last time.
I fucking hate the Nazis. I really do. And no, I don’t care they had some awesome technological advances. Mostly they got there by using hundreds of thousands of human beings as experimental chattel to vivisect, humiliate and destroy, with far less thought than you or I spend to flush the toilet. So, I’ll say it loud and clear for the last time:
If you think I am a Nazi sympathiser or that I am racist, or that I hate Muslims or Jews or Catholics or whatever other religion or class or ethnicity or nationality (yes, even the Germans) you can think of, because some of my characters in the book may behave in certain ways, or say certain things (and not just the Nazi characters boyo, any of the characters!) or because you think I am implying this or that idea, then, fuck you. You are a stupid bastard.
Now that we got that out of the way once and for all, I want instead, to remind you of something I said earlier. Everything I have ever written, even when I was not fully conscious of it, has only one purpose, to try and show a way to love. Sometimes stories can do this. Cloud Atlas did it for me like a lightning bolt straight to the heart, so I advise everyone to go see that film if you have not done so already. And I hope that, maybe, one day, one person, reading something I wrote, might in some way find him or herself pondering a little deeper certain things, and maybe, find their way a little closer to being able to live in love. Maybe it might even be by reading the contrasting vision of evil I have only really hinted at in this book, because trust me, in the absence of love, human beings can become the very darkest creatures in creation.
***
If this section was all too wishy-washy and flower-power for you, I understand. I do, really. I was one of you. All of my life until March 3rd 2013. All of it. So, let me explain it in a way that will resonate also with the engineers, the geeks, the pragmatists, the harsh-reality guys; the “soldiers” amongst you.
Think about what you can do with an antigravity machine that functions as I describe in this series. Any idiot with one of them can reduce a whole planet to slag, or indeed to another asteroid belt. If this technology exists (it does) it makes logical sense that we humans would not necessarily be the first to have discovered it (in fact we are not, Mars was destroyed by this technology sometime in the ancient past, see my first book the non-fictional The Face on Mars for the solid factual evidence for this; written in the geology of Mars, no less. No “channelled” or “esoteric” information in it, only hard, measurable, factual science).
So, if antigravity technology exists and we are not the first to figure it out it makes sense there may well be at least one and possibly many more civilisations in the Galaxy that also have it. And as there is an almost infinite number of Galaxies, there would also be a near infinite number of civilisations with it too. If antigravity technology allows wormholing, then travel not just to other stars, but potentially even to other Galaxies might be as easy as flicking a switch. It probably wouldn’t even take any actual time to “travel” the distance.
In such a reality, how do you think that the species that have discovered antigravity would relate first of all to themselves, within their own species, and secondly towards other species that have the technology?
Think about it a second, it’s actually obvious. There would not ever be a Galaxy-spanning evil race of beings that uses antigravity technology to make war on other species. Maybe isolated incidents, a small genocide here or there, the wiping out of a more primitive species in a tiny and dark corner of the Universe that doesn’t get much traffic, but really, the so-called prime-directive of Star Trek would apply. The reason is simple, if we all have zap guns, the first idiot who uses his zap gun to zap someone, regardless of the reason, would instantly have everyone with a zap gun firing at him just to make sure they are not next. The stupid people in such a situation die out fast.
It is no doubt going to infuriate every liberal, anti-gun, peacenik out there, but it’s true nonetheless. An armed society is a polite society. Just as long as everyone is armed. (But don’t worry my unwashed, long-haired, hippy friends, read on, you get your comeuppance in the end).
And when it comes to antigravity machines, once someone has one, they are armed. And they are armed enough that it really doesn’t matter if they are a good shot or not. You think close only counts with horseshoes and hand-grenades? Think again. With antigravity weapons you don’t even need to hit the right continent.
So… what would a polite, armed society —or indeed several such societies— do when they come across a less evolved, new, member of a new species that has literally just got antigravity tech last week?
There are really only two options, either everyone agrees to wipe them out immediately, or the only other alternative is guided progress to a point where they understand the rules and responsibilities that go with having such deadly weapons as antigravity capable craft. Given that there are myriad species with this technology, the more likely answer is the second one, as the wiping out of new races would undoubtedly be a primitive way of resolving issues and should only be used in extreme cases where it is clear that the new species in question is just very badly flawed. Even then, some hippy-type aliens (like say the Blues maybe) would probably be all like “Nooo… they are so cute, just kill off their leaders and throw them back to the stone age for a couple more millennia, you’ll see, they’ll be house-broken then! Promise! We’ll feed them and give them “religions” and shit, to make them nicer, serious… go-wann! Pleeese?”
Which now finally brings me to the point in a way that even the engineers who have no conception of “the love world” I tried to discuss before can understand (don’t feel bad, like I said, I was one of you. Honest, I was actually kind of like your leader really).
If the only alternative is: make friends with the Nazis or get wiped out together with them, and the one getting wiped out was only me, I am not sure at all that I would not say, “Wipe us out.” Seriously. The problem is that the aliens are kind of saying we will wipe everybody out, if you don’t play nice. That means people I care a lot more about than myself. It means your kids, it means innocents, it means the whole of humanity.
Although the idea of “forgiving” or giving a “pass” to, or “turning the other cheek” to, or in any way really “making nice” with Nazis is an obscenity I cannot personally see as possible for me individually, the reality is that, if you accept the premises of antigravity, alien races with that technology, and humanity beginning to expand into the wider universe where these more advanced aliens races exist, then, there is no alternative.
How in hell you would begin a process where you eventually have to embrace the Nazis as members of the human race, is essentially the dilemma I had in this book. I had not planned it this way, I promise you. I didn’t realise the implications of where this would be going, or had to go, in order to remain consistent and logical until I was too far into it to be able to say “You know what? I’m gonna write about something else now.”
Then again, I also never thought something would happen to me one day where I realised that most of the way I lived my life was badly flawed in some fundamental ways and that the “logic” and “reality” and “facts” that I had used as the ultimate measure of reality was actually just a sub-set of a higher truth, a more complete truth, and that this truth sometimes invalidated the “hard science logic” I thought was infallible.
In a million years I could not have imagined that. I never did drugs, but even if you had pumped me full of LSD, I would not have been able to imagine that. And so, you now have this book as a result. Forgive me if I have belaboured the point too much, but I was not going to get a chance to do it if not here. I still really don’t like the Nazis, and I never will be able to. But at some point, the sins of the fathers, must die with them. Just so long as everyone is aware of what did happen. Of what did take place. Because unless you are awake, unless you are aware, unless you keep being awake and aware and conscious, then, in slumber, in apathy, in ignorance, we descend back into the unconscious world of matter, and that place, if you are inclined to take a Biblical turn of mind, that place is the true Hell. And it exists. You may be in it without even realising it.
So, if none of this makes sense to you, then my dear reader, read it again. Think about it, and I hope one day it might help show you a light to a new world, one I now inhabit and I am not going to let go of, no matter what my own personal future will bring or take from me.
Love does conquer all. It conquers fear and fear is the only real enemy we have. May you live all your days in love.
G. Filotto – March 13th, 2013
