Control: V Max One Revisited
I, Dalton Lewis, re-read the introduction to V Max One. I am pleasantly surprised that it isn’t too terrible. We start with Ares Morgan, a young man who wakes up on a pier surrounded by ocean in every direction around him. Creatures swim in the water below him, strange creatures. One of them winks at him and carries a sword.
The novel occurred to me in a dream. So did Modern Goth, actually — a lot of my best ideas come from dreams. I pictured a young man helping a military group who was in front of a beautiful woman — the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. There was no tension, no nervousness, no shame, no self-hate, just someone else there with him who was a beautiful woman. I wanted to work to write that character — a guy who can learn to be okay with women — or die trying.
Incels — involuntary celibates — are a problem for today’s society. I understand. I don’t date much myself and sympathize with the men who don’t know how to date a woman or treat her properly and gets increasingly mad at women and themselves as a result. I’m a mentally-ill fortysomething single man. I understand.
I also had a main character with a mental health breakdown — albeit not as big a breakdown as in Ascension. I still wanted to show a future in which mental illness is diagnosed and treated with dignity and care. I wanted a future in which people fight for the mentally ill instead of merely being afraid of them — of us.
There is a considerable amount of sci-fi action because these stories need some sci-fi action. It’s a synthesis of pulp sci-fi with ideas about society and culture — therefore it needs battles in addition to ideas. Spaceships do shoot at spaceships. Battles are fought. It escalates into a big conflict, actually.
I created some characters that I really cared about. I wanted Ares to have a kick-ass, powerful sister to be co-lead with him. I wanted her to have a surprise storyline for her own — not to just exist to help him, although that’s what it looks like at the story’s start.
All in all the idea of a paramilitary group rehabilitating and recruiting troubled people is a neat one, I think, and then watching them fight countless bad guys is lots of fun. I wrote like crazy on this book and I’m proud of it. It’s free for the next few days so check it out if you want a free read.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
