You will die like a dog for no good reason.
—Ernest Hemingway
Story Summary
In 2071, Sergeant Tachikoma leads a Marine combat armor squad. She knows the Corps never promised her a rose garden, only the chance to fight for her country.
Now, she faces her greatest challenge, two terrifying alien pillars that trapped her into reliving the same day again. The day she dies.
Today, she needs every ounce of courage to save her people from annihilation.
Based on cutting-edge theories on the nature of the universe, this white knuckle military SF thriller contains drama and mystery.
“This story is great, with a very firm grasp of the Marine Corps lifestyle.”
– Sgt D. Barrow, USMC
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More About The Story
I ended up writing a military SF story as my debut novel quite by happenstance. I was writing another story, just before Christmas 2012, when a phrase popped into my head, It's all Big Dog's fault that I died yesterday under a mountain in Afghanistan. I wrote the phrase down, and put it to one-side, so I could carry on with my other novel.
My good intentions didn't go as planned.
The ideas encapsulated in that sentence wouldn't leave me alone. It kept nagging at me. The idea literally forced me to start writing a new novel, driving me to run with the random phrase, morphing more and more ideas, until I ended up with creating the Bad Dog novel you are reading now.
But one thing became obvious, I wanted to write a story where the concerns of the character are driven by their desire to do their duty, and that her solutions came from military doctrine. The scope of the problem in this story is very much about tactics, but tactics are driven by doctrine and what is called the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, and act. The decision cycle was developed by the military strategist Colonel John Boyd of the United Staes Air Force. Boyd applied the concept to the combat operations process, and the Unites States Marine Corps took his ideas to produce their book on doctrine called, Warfighting, that I talk about in this novel.
For those of you interested in the science behind Bad Dog you'll all have to thank Professor Max Tegmark, for his ideas about us all living in a mathematical based multiverse, and Professor't Hooft for developing the idea about living in a holographic universe. Both of these men were the inspiration behind the pillars and how they work. Any mistakes in the physics are of course attributable only to me.
Ashley R Pollard
London, UK
January 2018
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Good luck with this Ashley!
ReplyDeleteThank you. If you read it and like it or don't like even, leave a review.
DeleteCool! Checking it out now! Love the cover.
ReplyDeleteMinor note: it’s “Ernest” Hemingway.
Doh! Good catch, corrected.
DeleteAnd you posted this from the future! Awesome!!!!!
ReplyDeleteIt's all down to Amazon's timey-wimey upload schedule that says 72 hours, but beat its prediction.
DeleteBoss artwork to the cover - I recall sourcing this bothered you, anyway you have come up trumps.
ReplyDeleteThanks for saying so.
DeleteOver the last week or so, I've been having kittens over sorting out publishing my book. No one thing is difficult, but the number of things you have to do and get right is long. And, I've got so many of them wrong and have had to redo the upload three times, perhaps four now, and the print versions have turned into a bit of a nightmare too. All my fault, because I forgot which version of the files I needed, and that I also needed to generate two text version: one for 5 by 8, the other for 6 by 9.
I can perfectly well understand why most authors would not want to dive into independent publishing. Its a whole different skill set.
And don't get me started on marketing or reviews.