Francis Hamit, Author of New Epic Historical Novel, STARMEN, Shares Story Behind the Book!

Book Readers Heaven is Honored to Welcome Francis Hamit, Author of the New and Epic Historical Novel, STARMEN, to talk about how he came to write the book...and more! Please welcome this author and a man who I admire even more with this book than from all those I've read since 2009 (do a search in the right column to check out his earlier historical novels...)

Good Morning Francis, I understand that you used Kickstarter to publish this new book... Please tell us more!

Thank you, Glenda. It's good to be back here and sharing about what I consider a wonderful and extraordinary novel that had to be published with help! KickStarter provided the opportunity that I really needed at the time...

I proposed a project for Kickstarter which was to produce A Literary Experiment with Genres!

Here's the synopsis I provided which may show others who to consider funding their books in this way...

This is my COVID Lockdown project. It is the experimental blending of several genres. It's a detective story that begins at the El Paso office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1875. That also makes it historical. A huge balloon arrives with a group from the British Ethnographic Society. With them is George James Frazer, a young academic from Cambridge who wants to study the Apaches. The balloon is commanded by Rose Green, a beautiful young woman who is the daughter of Confederate secret agent Rose Greenhow. The balloon is surveying for minerals and is a threat to the USA and the Apaches and Mexico. A young Apache boy working for Pinkerton's becomes Frazer's guide. He says that Apache witches can fly...and later proves it by flying himself! The balloon intrudes on a sacred place and its crew encounters multiple troubles but Frazer, left with the Apaches, almost becomes one of them. Pinkerton's is hired to find the balloon and the missing heir to a wealthy Chicago family. Two detectives, one of them newly hired and suspected of being an agent of the Confederate government in exile in Britain, go in search of the heir. Their journey takes them to a curious small town taken over by a hotelier whose customers come from far way; very far away. Famous gunfighters are one of the amusements provided with showdowns and barfights every day. The Strangers win every fight. The missing heir has been arrested for killing a Stranger in a bar fight. He cannot buy his way out of it and his parents, fortunately, had appealed to the detectives for help. There are also romantic, magical subplots.

Here is what Jacqueline Litchenberg said about STARMEN

I read the manuscript of this book. As all of Hamit’s work, it is engrossing, well paced, easily readable storytelling. But the mixture of history, imagination, and insightful extrapolation doesn’t fit current commercial genre formulae. Notably, even after years, I recall many vivid images from the book that should be set pieces from an Indiana Jones movie.

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But it wasn't only Covid which brought me to write this book. It was done based upon the medical recommendation to prevent Dementia after spinal stenosis surgery in 2019 and 2022. I'm still recovering after two years. To share a little more on my health and work to regain my health, other defenses for my mind included more than a dozen of The Great Courses and playing with artificial intelligence art with ArtSpace.ai. Some of the academic material inspired parts of the STARMEN narrative. The Transcendentalist movement, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory and some game theory and history all went into the mix, as did the ones about Native American history. I also wandered around Wikipedia a lot! All of this built upon previous research for my Civil War spy novels. 

I decided to have fun with it and mix in a lot of genres. I don't like artificial limits on storytelling. And because of that I never submitted it to an agent or publisher. I'm really too old to wait for people to get back to me and I don't like other people telling me what to write or how to write simply because they want to chase the latest market trend. 

Wow Francis! I'm impressed, not just with the book itself, but with what you needed to do to bring about this epic novel... And I very much appreciate your sharing about your health issues... Right now I have seen too much ageism being thrown around on the news and it really is frustrating... Most of us who see that we are aging do something about it... I, for instance, started taking Neuriva for cognitive support. I remember that my mother, who had four children, would often call for one of them and she would go through, sometimes all four names until she got the right one out. I find that I do that now. And, I also forget names... I even laugh about it because I am able to produce book reviews with little trouble, but I'd forget the characters' names. Personally I think this is based upon so many interactions we have these days. It is impossible to even have the time to create "methods" like experts would share for remembering an individual's name... LOL I do not consider mixing up names a cognitive issue...

But, please, let's hear a little about the book!

As for the story, it is set ten years after the Civil War has ended when Reconstruction has failed, I had to do a lot of deep thinking about Jubal Early and the so-called Southern Historical Society and its "The Lost Cause" narrative. I believe it is the greatest disinformation campaign in history; one that is still running today. It is very hard to penetrate that myth and its glorification of racial prejudice.

It is only recently that counter-narratives such as "The 1619 Project" have appeared. People simply do not understand the absolute horror of that era. Slavery was a cancer that had to be demolished.

In STARMEN I use political intrigue to expose what I think really happened. Britain ran a lot of the Confederacy. Certainly they built and provided most of the crews for the commerce raiders. The Confederate Navy's home port is Liverpool and we travelled there in 2014 as part of my research. Britain funded the South as well by buying cotton and shipping arms and military supplies. At the end of the war they were very afraid the Union would point its half a million men army north and take Canada. Their internal diplomatic correspondence of the time reveals that and they were happy to get off cheap by paying 15 million dollars to settle the Alabama claims. No one knows what happened to the Confederate Treasury's four million dollars in gold. 

In STARMEN I have used it to finance Early's "Lost Cause" narrative; i.e, the South did rise again...at the ballot box, and, yes, that is a cautionary tale relative to our current political crisis. The Russians have been running disinformation campaigns here since the 1930s. Putting this all together required a lot of deep thinking. 

Getting it ready for publication required a lot of severe editing by Leigh. And since we are both disabled. it took a lot of time and a Kickstarter campaign and a small credit union loan to pay contractors to format it for the various e-book and print editions. Now there is the publicity campaign...

Thank you so much for being here today... I was, in fact, most impressed when you took the issue of early prejudice in America, beginning with our Native Americans and Black Slaves. I don't think I would have ever come to know exactly what has and is happening in America if it wasn't for the books I've read, often written by those who were/are recipients of the ongoing prejudice against them... In fact, as I read The End of White Politics, I am finding just how deep those historical roots still are. I am both amazed at the specifics and saddened by the continued attempts of the white community of America to not only destroy the involvement of our Black and Brown citizens, but to, if they gain power, to start "relocation" of those individuals... Specifically, to eliminate the Constitution and our Democratic country! It has been spelled out and provided for review (900 pages) Here's a brief video...as an overview... It was published by The Heritage group which provided all of the names to Trump to nominate for judges throughout the nation! And look what is happening from those appointments since then!

Thanks again Francis... Be Well!

Folks, my review of this fantastic novel will follow as quickly as possible...

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