[wingfear]

I recently posted two new novels on Kindle--they are not available elsewhere. You can find cover art, links to the Kindle pages, and sample chapters in PDF format on my website: http://mysite.verizon.net/vze89u9w/Novels2/Novels.html

The first is The Tinker God. It tells the story of Bob Wilson, a man who had discovered, and then hid, a technology that he thought too dangerous to be developed. When he retired, his work was reopened and villains (what is a story without villains?) tried to force him to complete its development. When he refused, they kidnapped his granddaughter Beth. He enlisted the aide of a young couple, Jesse and Thayla. They went to help Beth while Bob tried to find a way to unleash the technology without causing the disaster he feared it would bring.

Beyond Detection picks up the story about three years after Tinker closes. Bob and Thayla disappeared during a flight to Washington. They found themselves on a world that had co-existed secretly with ours. Its dominant inhabitants were only male, and they were incapable of reproducing unless they took wives from our world. They had been secretly capturing women from our world for millennia using a technology that was similar to what Bob had been working on. Our ancient writings actually mention such beings, calling them the Nephilim and Rephaim, or alternatively the 'Ben Elohim.' Thayla struggled to win the hearts and minds of her captors to avoid a forced marriage, while Bob set off on an adventure to understand what had happened to this world. He would bend its technologies to his will even if it meant the destruction of an entire race.

 

[wingfear]

Thanks for the question regarding the name Bob Wilson.  No connection to the Bob Wilson of the Manhattan Project was intended.  I have played with the name Bob Wilson and liked it since long before I knew that Los Alamos existed.  It has a nice sound to it, and it is a simple, straightforward name.  When I wrote the Tinker God, I was not aware that there had been a person involved with Los Alamos who bore that name.  I simply wanted a generic name.  Since I wrote the Tinker God, I have met a couple of folks who share the name, one of whom I work with on occasion. 

 

[wingfear]

No, it was a good question that I wish someone had asked about ten years earlier.  Because of your question, I looked up the historical Bob Wilson and his connection to Los Alamos.  Had I done that before I wrote the book, I may have chosen a different name.  Bob Wilson (the real scientist) had some deep concerns about the ethics of science, and I respect that kind of introspection.  I wouldn't want to demean it by appearing to have turned him into a character in a science fiction novel. 

Interestingly enough, if you Google search Bob Wilson or Robert Wilson and Wikipedia, you will find that there are many listed, including Robert Anton Wilson, a Science Fiction writer who authored 35 books.  According to Wikipedia, his goal was: " to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything."  The Bob Wilson of my stories would have appreciated that goal.  Although some of my other characters have strong beliefs, Bob Wilson is skeptical about anything he can't physically test and evaluate analytically.  He holds loosely to ideas others would accept as proven laws, which is what enabled him to develop the technology that forms the premise of the first novel.  As with the Bob Wilson of Los Alamos, I didn't know that Bob Wilson the writer existed when I wrote the story, and my Bob Wilson was not intended to resemble him, either.  He is a completely fictional character.