Fritz Walter

After moving out of home at nineteen, my first purchase was an old electric office typewriter from Olympia and a ten-finger typing instruction book. So I must have already known what I wanted, namely to become a writer someday. And with considerable determination: The Olympia was still a typebar machine where you could insert an A4 sheet sideways, had a cast-iron frame, and was correspondingly heavy. I bought it at a second-hand shop somewhere in Kreuzberg and then managed to get it home to Moabit by subway. By the time I finally arrived, my arms were hanging down to my knees...

I then followed a guideline from Nietzsche on how to become an author: Write down everything that comes to mind; not for others to read, perhaps not even for reading it myself later. The main thing is to write it down! After ten years, he wrote, one's craftsmanship has developed sufficiently to start on larger works, and enough material will also have accumulated.

That was 1973. In the summer of 1977, I visited my sister in France and spent a few days completely alone in an old farmhouse that belonged to the family, somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

In this idyllic tranquility, the main character and the basic layout of the fantasy world for 'Conversations with the Grand Master' were born. After all, what else can you do when the muse is breathing down your neck ...

Some short stories and fragments followed within this framework and finally a first novel, still intended as an exercise and a test to see if I could actually finish something like that.

That was The Bastard, 350 pages long and completed in 1985. Still all on the typewriter, with copy and paste in paper form, meaning cutting out paragraphs or even just parts and gluing them together again; some of those pages ended up being six layers thick. And then typing everything all over again. Error-free. On paper. The original version was, of course, handwritten.

Like all hopeful new authors, I offered the manuscript to various publishers, with the usual result.

But that couldn't stop me from writing; the muse had finally sunk her claws into me.

The 'Conversations with the Grand Master' lived on and grew. In it, I tried to incorporate some of my life philosophy and whatever other thoughts came to mind.

The work is set in the realm of fantasy. What fascinated and inspired me about this genre was the freedom it offers the author: You don't have to consider external constraints, as you do with a historical novel or a crime story, and you are completely free in shaping the characters, who could be of any race or kind, and the social, historical, and geographical world in which they act.

At that time, authors like Moore, Cherry, Asprin, Vance dominated the fantasy market, and you could regularly find humor, interesting characters, and above all alternative and sometimes highly bizarre social constructs in this genre -- and no orcs (except with Tolkien), no vampires and werewolves, little excessive violence, and not many dragons either (except with Gaffry).

When I'm standing in front of the relevant shelf in a bookstore today, I sometimes wonder if it was the right decision. Let's draw a veil of charitable silence over its contents. Anyway, it seems that pretty much all designs for the historical phase, characters, and plots have been narrowed down to the fantasy world created by Tolkien.

What is more, I couldn't find a single male author in the entire shelf! Fantasy is now a genre exclusively written by women for women. As I said: If I had known that fifty years ago ...

I have followed three guiding stars in my work, C. J. Cherryh, J. R. R. Tolkien, and above all Jack Vance, admiring all three for many years. At some point, when the 'Grand Master' series had probably reached volume six or seven, I read them again and was astonished to find that I had now surpassed Ms. Cherryh and Mr. Tolkien (no kidding!): Still too many clichés and no humor, and Tolkien wrote about war in two of his Ring volumes, even though he obviously never dealt with military history.

Although fantasy offers so much freedom, the internal logic of the story is still remaining valid. Characters must be congruent or, if they change, do so for comprehensible reasons; timelines must not contain unexplained leaps, and you cannot simply ignore the inherent logic of things. For war, that means God is on the side of the strong battalions, and a handful of people, all with lovable weaknesses, simply do not defeat the evil superpower solely because they are good! That has always rankled me in this genre. And not only there, by the way.

And using the literary trick of deus ex machina when you've written your heroes into a corner, as Michael Ende, for example, liked to do, is simply not acceptable.

So after all these years, only Jack Vance remains, of whom I know that I will never come close to him. And maybe Terry Pratchett. Although both of them could also falter now and then during the showdown ...

My fantasy series currently comprises nine volumes of 'Conversations with the Grand Master', as well as The Bastard as volume zero, so to speak.

A few years ago, I started delving into the technology and relevance of airships.

Whenever this topic comes up, the Hindenburg disaster is inevitably mentioned. It was used at the time by the propagandists of the aircraft industry to push the unwelcome, because more economical, competition out of the market, and is still cited today to keep them out. Disregarding the tens of thousands who have since died in terrible airplane accidents, whereas the Hindenburg had just 36 fatalities.

Yet today we have technology that could make airships exceptionally economical and at the same time ecologically interesting: With thin-film solar cells on the outer skin and hydrogen as lifting and fuel gas extracted from atmospheric moisture, they could remain airborne permanently, at minimal operating costs. If one is afraid of the oh-so-dangerous hydrogen, they could be remotely controlled like drones; plenty of interesting areas of application would still remain.

So operation is unproblematic and economical, construction, however, is not, because beyond a certain size, a construction hangar becomes impossible in terms of price or even technology. But you need one to protect the airship during construction from the weather.

But why not lift the entire shipyard into the sky? Where it will drift with the wind, and a ship under construction would no longer suffer as a result.

Having reached this point in my reflections, I decided to write a novel about it.

Heinrich Maria Scynkowsky is an airship engineer and IT expert on board the Europa III Air Harbor, called the Cloud Castle by its inhabitants, which drifts over the Mediterranean Sea. An outsider in thought and appearance, he is a grain of sand in the gears of the interests and intrigues that prevail there, and has to see how he gets along. He is not necessarily what one would call a good, law-abiding citizen, and handles things in his own way ...

That is the blurb for the first book of my science fiction series: Airborne. There are now eleven, six of them in the "current" timeline and five a quarter of a century earlier, Scynkowsky's young years, the hero's journey, so to speak.

A continuous subplot has the theme of Argentine Tango, as well as recurring problems with woke ideology.

I self-publish all my books and sell them through Amazon.

Fritz Walter