Tonight we're going to recap Book One of the Twin Paradox trilogy, followed by a preview of SEASON TWO for this podcast series. The remaining two books: Twin Paradox Book Two and Twin Paradox Book Three are available for sale right now on Amazon. You can download them today or just listen to author King Everett Medlin read them to you over the next forty weeks. Season Two will start in April, 2021!
Tonight we're going to recap Book One of the Twin Paradox trilogy, followed by a preview of SEASON TWO for this podcast series. The remaining two books: Twin Paradox Book Two and Twin Paradox Book Three are available for sale right now on Amazon. You can download them today or just listen to author King Everett Medlin read them to you over the next forty weeks. Season Two will start in April, 2021!
Hello and welcome back to Twin Paradox. I'm King Everett Medlin and what you've been hearing is a SciFi trilogy I wrote four years ago under the pen name, Purple Hazel. Twin Paradox follows my first podcast series entitled Deathwalker Colony, which is now a full length novel available right now on Amazon.com. Go online and check it out! Deathwalker Colony is the third book in the Rijel 12 book series which includes The Rise of New Australia as well as its exciting sequel Return of Anarchy.
Tonight we're going to recap Book One of the Twin Paradox trilogy, including a preview of Book Two. I'll be creating episodes for all nineteen chapters and I think you'll enjoy it just as much as Book One. Speaking of that, here's an overview of what I just read over the past twenty-three weeks.
Twin Paradox Book One is organized into parts. Part One was called Collapse and Aftermath. Let's begin there. Chapter One was called The Great Collapse of 2028; however our story begins in the year 2086. A popular newscaster is peparting to take the stage where she's about to announce some very important news. We then flash back ten years to the year 2076 where we get to hear about an expose' she produced early in her career which detailed the awful truth regarding Earth's recent past. What follows is five full chapters depicting an apocalyptic scenario by which the economies of the western world might implode; causing a global meltdown of our current financial system. A new world order is established, and with a newer stronger central government, based not in Washington or New York, but in Brussels. Chaos and anarchy within the world's major cities is eventually quelled, though nations such as Israel and even the United States of America do succumb, either to outside forces or internal strife. A strong leader arises who people find worthy of their trust. Not a tyrant looking to seize power, he simply does what needs to be done. Wasteful or redundant government social programs are eliminated. Solar power must replace fossil fuels as the world is already running out of these at a breakneck pace. Those are just two examples of his reforms. The biggest challenge is yet to come and that's going to be the task of feeding all of mankind. Earth's human population is expected to explode by the end of the 22nd century, reaching 16 billion ... double what it is today. There won't be enough food. Solution? Find an exoplanet somewhere in the galaxy which can be colonized and exploited for its resources.
Part II was called Pioneers and Explorers. Here we find out how the G.U., or Global Union, devises a method by which humans can reach an alien planet many light years from Earth. But not before we get to meet several of the book's main characters, starting with Kelvin and B.J. Both will play pivotal roles in the coming chapters. One of them, upon hearing the news that scientists have designed a ship capable of traveling through deep space to a different star system, decides he wants a spot on the crew. His efforts in accomplishing this feat lead to him and his occasional lover getting selected, and that's not all. An experiment is proposed along the way which involves identifying then separating three pairs of identical twins - all age ten - all orphans - to be sent with them onboard the newly constructed Santa Maria galactic exploration vessel.
The means by which mankind will be able to travel to, land upon, colonize, and eventually return from an alien planet 2.3 parsecs from Earth ... laden with food for an ever-growing population of human beings ... involves a multi-step process. This is described in Part III: Journey and Conquest. First, the technology available for the initial leg of the journey will require 14.2 Earth years to complete. The crew of Santa Maria will only experience half that amount of time because of the effects of time dilation; and that's also part of the experiment being attempted involving sending three prepubescent twins into space with the rest of the crew. Space Programme, which I modeled after a real-life organization run by the European Union based in Darmstadt, Germany, intends to monitor the lives of the twins' counterparts back on Earth, while noting the eventual differences in how the space twins age. This is because, according to Einstein, an object in motion experiences time differently than one which remains sedentary. A person being hurtled through space at nearly the speed of light onboard a galactic exploration vessel will age roughly half as fast as his or her friends and family remaining on Earth. Thus, the three space twins at least in theory would return years later to find their siblings now pushing forty; while their own bodies would be that of a person in their mid-twenties. My reasons for setting things up this way will become much clearer in Book Two.
Part III: Journey and Conquest tells how otherwise normal educated rational individuals might be affected by the mental strain of being cooped up on a spaceship for many years heading toward an alien planet; then returning. The crew are divided into an Away Team and a Return Team, with another fifty to be left behind on Kapteyn B to develop the colony once constructed. However the behavior of the Away Team, as demonstrated in chapters ten and eleven, are only a precursor to the ever-growing madness which will pervade their colleagues assigned with operating the ship during its trip home.
In Part IV: Heroes and Scapegoats we see how the degeneration into sexual promiscuity and substance abuse reaches heightened levels of depravity. The captain of the Return Team, Steinhart Stehter, finds himself hard pressed to maintain proper decorum, but in a small way he's limited in what he can do. First of all, he's in a relationship with one of the female crew members (B.J.) and that's a clear violation of protocol. Fraternization is a big no-no, even if the man had every intention of doing so even before the ship took off from Earth. Thus, he's compelled to look the other way. He must draw the line though when it comes to marijuana use; and even that proves challenging. Switching crew assignments is about all he can utilize so to isolate regular abusers, and this does prove effective. Not long after doing so, one of the three space twins (Young-Min Jo) manages to detect a disruption in the long line of non-baryonic matter devices placed in intervals all the way back to Earth's moon. The cause, it's eventually deduced, must be random debris from a comet careening through deep space. This is potentially disastrous for the mission, in that the relief ship (Nautilus) requires these "matter pods" in order to function effectively. Reduced to auxiliary power, Nautilus will be delayed in linking up with Santa Maria. Worst case scenario it might fail in ever doing so, meaning Santa Maria will have to complete its trip home at 9/10 the speed of light, taking the whole 14.2 years to complete. Unfortunately that's precisely what's going to happen, as we find out in Chapter 23.
Every story needs an antagonist, whether human or otherwise, and for Book One I created Luigi Cadorna. Though Nautilus is an immediate victim of the space anomaly leading to the disruption of the pod line, after 30 months it does reacquire the next device. Ignoring a message pod left behind by Santa Maria explaining what must have happened and establishing new coordinates for a future link-up, its captain (upon Luigi's insistence) reactivates the ship's ADM or Alcubierre Warp Drive and Nautilus streaks toward home, bypassing Santa Maria. This, though selfish and cruel on the part of Commander Cadorna, serves his purposes well, because Nautilus will make it back to Earth years before the poor crew of Santa Maria. Why do such a thing? Simple. Cadorna wants to make sure his version of events gets told first. For there will be questions, no doubt. Plus a formal inquiry! And the prickly fellow will in all likelihood be called up to testify. Which he does; causing immediate controversy. When Santa Maria finally makes it back ... IF Santa Maria finally makes it back ... there's going to be a lot of explaining to do. Not the least of which by Santa Maria's two captains.
Twin Paradox Book One covers a lot of ground, mainly in terms of years. As mentioned, the story begins in the year 2086. The mission to Kapteyn B requires 14.2 Earth years. Additionally, the crew and colonists have to construct an agricultural center and explore the planet. For this they allocate yet another twelve months before Santa Maria can take off for home. Part of its task was to lay the foundation for future missions to the distant planet by placing non baryonic matter pods every one quarter light years so that a much more advanced spacecraft, still in development, might make the journey in a little over thirteen months. Impossible? Of course it is. For now, anyway. But years ago a physicist who's roughly my age came up with such a method. It's still just a theory but Professor Miquel Alcubierre, along with a host of others since he first proposed it (not to mention scientists at NASA) have been expanding and fleshing out concepts whereby man could someday travel through space at multiples of the speed of light. In 2012, a NASA laboratory announced they had constructed an interferometer that they claim will detect spatial distortions produced by the expanding and contracting spacetime of the Alcubierre metric. Today's science fiction very well could be tomorrow's real science.
The second issue raised in Twin Paradox Book One is the theory of the twin paradox. The way I portrayed this: orphaned twins separated at only ten years of age then observed to see how their lives play out; is terribly unethical, even if scientists from Space Programme intended to create this scenario and observe the results. Monozygotic twins have different DNA; different fingerprints. If raised together in the same environment they will display matching mannerisms and appearances. Nevertheless they are separate individuals with differing abilities, differing demeanors, level of intelligence, outlook on life ... there are many possibilities as to how they might turn out in adulthood. Therefore, what if one of those twins returned after many years on a deep space mission, physically much younger than their sibling only to be reunited? That's what's going to happen and that's also what's so intriguing about the Twin Paradox trilogy. I wrote these three books over the course of nine months back in 2016. I used the pen name Purple Hazel when it was published a year later and you can still find it for sale on Amazon. If you like, buy the next two books and read them. You've already got a pretty good foundation for understanding the original thinking behind it. But you don't have to. I'm about to start Season Two and that's going to be nineteen episodes during which I'll read all of Twin Paradox Book Two. So stay tuned!
This concludes tonight's podcast: a recap of Twin Paradox Book One. Watch for Season Two which is in production and will launch very soon. My deepest thanks to my wife Caroline for voicing the part of B.J. She had a lot of fun living vicariously through that character and I hope you enjoyed listening to her. Next I'd like to point out the theme music you've been hearing over and over again during these episodes. The artist is actually a team of musicians by the names Tristan Norton and Martin Kottmeier. I found them on Premiumbeat.com and this is the second time I licensed one of their songs. The piece you've been hearing clips of at the start and ending of each episode is called Up in the Sky. In my first podcast series Deathwalker Colony I used their song Watch the World Burn. For Twin Paradox Season Two I'll be playing their song Together We are Strong. My brother Dan Allen Medlin picked out that one from their catalog.
Speaking of Deathwalker Colony, it's now doing quite well on Amazon.com. Go online and download it today. I produced a podcast series where i read the first half of the book and it's totally free if you'd like to begin there. Deathwalker Colony is actually the third book in the ongoing Rijel 12 series which also includes Return of Anarchy and The Rise of New Australia. Book four wil come out in early 2023 and will be called The Tenth Hour Man.
Twin Paradox Seasons Two and Three will take us through the end of 2021. But more is coming. I'm already hard at work on yet another SciFi trilogy called Brynn of Ur. The first installment is finished. Second is now in progress. Part three I'll write later this year. The story line for Brynn of Ur was an idea I came up with several years ago when a coworker proposed a similar concept. I didn't use his story premise but it inspired what eventually became Brynn of Ur. The plot was so complicated I waited years before attempting to write it. And yes, there will be a podcast for it, likely in early 2022. For now though, get ready for Season Two of Twin Paradox. I think you'll love it.
I'm King Everett Medlin. Thanks for tuning in.
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