Archives for March 2019

Read New Persia:The Tempest on Wattpad.

Keep up with the ongoing project of bringing The Tempest to life. Offer suggestions and feedback.

I haven’t posted everything, yet, but there’s some pivotal scenes. Don’t read if you don’t want spoilers!

Why use historical cars, planes, and tanks in a science fiction setting when I could create whatever I want? I feel a setting needs to be internally consistent, and should have what Tom Clancy called verisimilitude. If you get the details right, the story is believable. When I use a real plane as a template it is much easier to get the details of its capabilities correct- how fast it is, what maneuvers it can make, how the ejection seat works. The pilot character Farad Hashemi knows this stuff, and I should, too.

Suri’s car is more whimsical. Traditionally, an aspiring young woman like her, given her country origins, would be interested in riding horses. I decided to be more modern and gave her a passion for fast cars. It’s far more practical, and Suri is both a forward thinker and an adventurous soul.

Readers of the forthcoming second book of the New Persia series will encounter a whole new set of foreign names. Names belonging to people are almost all either of Persian or Swahili origin. Names of military equipment follow the same pattern.

For instance, the Azanian light tank called the Mbwa is named for the animal called “Cheetah” in English. This makes sense because it’s a fast tank. In the setting, many animals from Old Earth have become legendary because they either didn’t make it across the gulf of stars or died out after the planet was colonized. Their names live on, much as the names of dinosaurs do on our own world.

The Mbwa light tank is modeled after the 1950s era AMX-13 light tank made in France. The tank looks like something from science fiction. I was attracted to the unconventional design, which includes an oscillating turret. It has a three-man crew and a 75mm autoloading gun. Instead of the gun elevating inside the turret, the entire turret moves up and down. Like many 1950s innovations, this one didn’t catch on. An oscillating turret cannot be sealed against chemical weapons or radioactive fallout, which in our world were possible hazards of post-WW2 warfare. So far, neither the New Persians or Azanians have discovered the secrets of the atom and both have agreed to ban the use of chemical weapons in war.

The Mbwa is light on armor, and its gun is too weak to penetrate the frontal armor of the standard Persian tank, the Karar. Will the Mbwa‘s mobility and fast-firing cannon compensate for its shortcomings? We’ll see.

The submarine “Yunes” plays a part in the story. The boat is named for the dolphin, the marine mammal (not the fish.) The name is Persian.

For “The Tempest’s” storyline I needed an appropriate submarine from the same post-WW2 era as the rest of the military hardware found in the rest of the series. I wanted the submarine to be something special. Generally the New Persians are inferior in technological progress compared to the Azanians, but occasionally they are the leaders in innovation. The Yunes is a shining example of New Persian technology, a design years ahead of anything the Azanians have on or under the ocean. The submarine is almost twice as fast as older designs, owing to its rounded, cigar-shaped hull. It has a larger battery capacity and a snorkel, allowing it to stay submerged except for daily trips to periscope depth to charge batteries. It’s the peak of diesel-electric submarine design, and because of the lack of nuclear power in the world of New Persia, it is unlikely anything better will come along for a while.

How could I justify an anachronistic submarine after closely following real-world developments from the 1950s so closely? It turns out I did.

The US Navy’s Barbel class was the peak of diesel-electric submarine development in the 1950s. Built between 1956 and 1959, they barely fit in my timeline for New Persia. With its radical streamlining and teardrop hull, pioneered on the research submarine Albacore, the Barbel class would have been the dominant sub class in the USN had not the even more radical technology of shipboard nuclear reactors made them obsolete as soon as they were built. The contemporary Soviet Foxtrot class submarine could not have competed with the Barbel in speed, sensors, or stealth.

In the world of New Persia, the Persians have an advantage at sea. Will it matter? We shall see.