Daniel Keys Moran!

Last night I was browsing Matthew Stover's blog in the hopes of finding some new information regarding either Caine Black Knife or Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor. Alas, the last post was June 30th, which I have read a couple of times since it was posted. I vaguely remembered the mention that Stover sent Daniel Keys Moran a copy of Caine Black Knife.

I browsed the comments and Moran posted a response to Stover's entry...and it mentioned a blog of his own. I found Moran's blog via his Blogger profile and I also discovered that Moran is writing again! This post mentions that has at least half of The AI War finished. This post has more info.

Sometime during my teenage years I read Moran's second entry in the Continuing Time series The Long Run. I loved it. It was fun, exciting, and at the time exactly what I was looking for. I don't know where the book came from, I just know it was in a box of books I had. Perhaps my mother found it at a garage sale. I knew it was the second of three books in the series. The character of Trent the Uncatchable was permanently branded in my imagination.

It took years before I finally tracked down a copy of the first volume, Emerald Eyes, and I am not sure I could have been more disappointed. The book was to introduce the Castanaveres telepaths and set the stage for how Trent and Denise came to be in their later situations and the war of the govermnent against the telepaths. But, it lacked pretty much all of the later fun and action and fast paced goodness of The Long Run.

Since I read Emerald Eyes I have been looking for the third entry: The Last Dancer. I have been unsuccessful and because of the hit or miss nature (and how badly the miss was, despite how good the hit) I was unwilling to purchase even a used copy. My library system has been unable to locate a copy and I have a good library system.

When I found Moran's blog I found the books. Moran has the complete text of four of his novels, several stories, and a couple of scripts available here.

So...I will read The Last Dancer, possibly The Armageddon Blues and I will be ready for whenever Moran does publish The AI War. It's been a long time coming, probably moreso for Moran than for me, but it has been a long time since I read The Long Run and I've been looking for the rest for at least fifteen years. It is a mark of the book's impact on me that I still remember it so vividly so many years later.

I don't know how well the novel would hold up today, but I hope it does, because I found The Long Run to be engrossing at the time of my first read fifteen years ago as a teenager, and even in subsequent rereads.