I’m very proud of this story. I always wanted to write a smart action thriller like Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity or Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger. What I like most about Ludlum’s works is that he admits the dirt that the government does around the world. Clancy, however, tends to make the US an innocent player on the world stage–as if all we do is fix instabilities around the world, not cause them.
I grew up hearing about Watergate, Iran Contra, and the CIA shipping drugs into Black communities to fund the Contras in Central America. I grew up in a world where the FBI worked to take down Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and used COINTELPRO to take out the Black Panther Party and sew disunity through the media around the world. I grew up watching the CIA take out or try to take out democratically elected leaders all over Central and South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. But I’ve never seen these stories told, except in documentaries.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one bothered by the fact that the Supreme Court (many appointed by Reagan and Bush I), stepped in, in a unprescedented way, and installed George Bush Jr. as president. Did it bother anyone besides me that Jeb Bush was the governor of the state where the ballots got messed up? If that happened in a third world country, we’d call it corrupt.
Nine months later 9/11 happened, and we knew it was Bin Laden who did it, but the Bin Laden family was allowed to leave the US–the first plane flying after 9/11 besides blood transport planes. Why? Was it because George Bush Senior was in business with the Bin Ladens through the Carlyle Group? No one ever talks about this. No one seems to care. Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were both trained by the same people who were in power when 9/11 happened (all Reagan’s former advisers, who then worked for Bush and Bush Jr.). Included in that list, Dick Cheney, who once ran Halliburton–a company got that got rich off the Iraq invasions, which should have never happened because Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. No one seems to think that was crazy. For the most part, the media ignores it. Yet, the latest news is that Bin Laden’s journals say he was concerned about global warming, and the media used that to imply that Bin Laden and Obama had common interests. Amazing. So, according to the media, the guy who had business ties to Bin Laden and Saddam is irrelevant, but the guy who put a bullet through Bin Laden’s head was his ally? Damn.
Lunar Options doesn’t ignore any of these types of realities. Though a work of fiction, it takes place in the world of secret government public/private alliances where countries are manipulated for corporate profits. Where a few get rich off war while many innocents die. Lunar Options references the biggest conspiracy in the history of government/private world economic manipulation–a plan to move the world off oil and onto Helium 3–an resource controlled by a single corporation–a corporation owned by the president’s best friend. But unlike these corrupt realities when they work in our world, in Lunar Options, someone can do something to stop it. Someone can, AND someone does. In Lunar Options, we have a hero who decides to fight for the people.
I wrote this book because I don’t see too many of those people in the real world. I read a quote recently, “Courage is Contagious.” I like that. Sometimes I don’t think we see enough courage where it matters.