Alex Roglitz is sick of aliens, sick of the quasi-realities he keeps getting teamed up with known as Quasars, and pretending to be sick until he can get transferred elsewhere in the para-policing facility he works for called StarNet. His dream nearly comes true until he's handed one last case and one last new partner--a fourteen year old girl! Things are not what they seem as Alex and Amanda track down clues surrounding the murder of the beautiful Geminarian interpreter who was raped by an alien...expecially when the victim decides to post bail for her own killer!
WHERE THE QUASAR
Xenophobe Alex Roglitz is sent to investigate a brilliant young couple who claim to be creating Quasars in their basement! Can Amanda save him when he's taken hostage by a mad scientist or will one of his former partners have to do the job?
QUASARFLIGHT
He hasn't seen the Silver Sphere aliens since they abducted his mother, but now the strange, powerful entities have taken over part of Canada and maybe even Alex himself!
Querent: How did you decide to write sci-fi based on dreams and dream research?
Ed: I've been fascinated by dreams and dreaming for decades. So many people dismiss dreams as something frivolous and unimportant, yet science has shown they assist in keeping us psychologically healthy. Every mammal dreams except the spiny echidna of Australia...I'd say there's something very important and valuable about them. I appreciate anyone who takes the time to make the study of dreams a serious science.
Quasar 169, the very first story in the series, is based on a dream I had back in 1991. I dreamt I was watching a news bulletin about a murderer who was on the loose. While the reporter read the script, the image over her shoulder of the suspect began to slowly shift into that of the victim. I woke up and thought that would make a cool story--a killer who assumes the identity of his victim completely, down to the DNA! It took me awhile to come up with the story that would surround that idea, and I decided to throw dreams into the mix since that's where the idea came from.
Q: What's Quasar 169 anyway?
E: She's the heroine of the series. She was created by the dream research facility known as ArtReal Artificial Realities. They've been making "Quasars"--short for quasi-realities--since the 1950's when the founder, Walter Neville, discovered a way to release a person's dream self from their conscious self within the wakeful realm. Quasars are ghost-like and don't last very long, but they can do anything a person can do inside their dreams...they can fly, pass through solids, breathe underwater, shapeshift, whatever. Amanda is Quasar number 169, and what makes her special is that she's the first physical Quasar ever. She's not ghostly--she appears solid and normal...mostly. Because she's different, nobody's sure what all of her abilities are or how long she'll last. They pair her up with this poor, malcontented Quasar Force officer who's trying to quit the force because he's a xenophobe, and make them work together on one last, emergency alien assignment.
Q: You mean xenophobe as in scared of space aliens, right?
E: Exactly. When Alex was five years old, his mother was literally taken right from his grasp by unknown space aliens, then never seen again. ArtReal and its para-policing partner StarNet weren't around back then, so there was nobody who could help him figure out what happened to her. His father went haywire and took out his frustrations on the kid. When Alex turned six, he thought he was going crazy because he began to sense things he shouldn't, like other people's emotions and point of views, which were just the beginning symptoms of his budding psychic ability. He figured he could use his abilities to help get a job as a cop when he was older, but they recommended him to StarNet instead. He fears aliens, but he's driven to find his mother again. He becomes good at the job, but he never gets any leads on the silvery sphere-shaped craft he saw that day, and the stress is eating him, so he tries to quit the Quasar Force team. Since 169 has been programmed to obey him more or less and no one knows if she can be reprogrammed to obey someone else, he's encouraged to stay on after she's assigned to him.
Q: Silver Sphere Sightings refers to the aliens which abducted his mother.
E: Yeah. All he saw that day was this enormous, reflective sphere in the sky trailing purple smoke or steam or something. A slit opened along one side and a vibrant yellow beam bled through and his mother seemed to float up along it into the craft. In the first story he dreams about the experience like it happened all over again. In Where The Quasar he encounters someone who might possibly be one of the kind of alien which took his mother away. In Quasarflight he finally confronts them with his new partner and learns a little more about them. I've written over thirty stories for the series so far, and all of it keeps coming back to what happened that day when he was five.
Q: Is it future noir?
E: It was supposed to be. I like dark films. I like noirish sci-fi. I have a very dark sense of humor, but it's the humor which keeps the stories from being too dark or too gritty. I wanted to write sci-fi that's as realistic as possible. Quasar is set in a parallel now where space aliens made official contact with Earth right after World War II, and since then they've shared some of their technology and ideas with us, and other species have made themselves known. It's like Men In Black in that StarNet tries to keep the peace between the visiting species and the native ones, but the aliens have a bit more free reign and everyone's aware there are now aliens among us. There aren't as many strange gadgets floating around in my stories, either. Sometimes the stories I write are more humorous, sometimes they're full of nightmarish horror and violence, sometimes they're loaded with graphic sex and erotica, sometimes they exhibit all that and more...definitely not for the squeamish, close-minded, or immature crowd.
