An Epic Tale Told In The Classic Series Book Style
In the summer of 1998, a team of three fans of the classic children’s series books of the 1950s made contact with one another through a web site dedicated to the Tom Swift Jr. series.
The three men—Jon Cooper, Mike Dodd, and David Baumann— found that they had not only a common interest in such books, but a combination of skills that had the potential to produce a similar series in their own day. They began a collaboration that eventually created a new series for readers in the twenty-first century, books in the genre of Tom Swift Jr., Tom Corbett, Dig Allen, Rick Brant, Ken Holt, and other juvenile series that had been popular fifty years earlier. Their collaboration eventually produced the Starman Saga: a story originally comprising nine novels, two novelettes, and ten short stories.
The three men came to refer to themselves as the Starman Team. The Team was well aware that the golden age of series books ended in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, perhaps against the odds, the Team wanted to create a series of stories both reminiscent of that age and appealing to contemporary readers. Like the classic books, there would be no foul language and no extreme violence in the Starman series. The series was designed to encourage the human mind and spirit and extol the virtues of courage, honesty, and good-heartedness. The lead characters follow a philosophy that life is good, the creation is exciting as well as beautiful, hope is reasonable and worthwhile, and the spirit of adventure is worth pursuing.
In July 2000, the first volume of the Starman series was offered to the public. Assault on Mars was a lighthearted attempt to tell an adventure story. Its first readers acclaimed it with fervor beyond the hopes of its creators. The Starman Team then set to work in earnest. A growing roster of fans offered artwork, technical assistance, and helpful commentary. The fan base for the series continued to spread, and the support for the books created a demand for a second edition of the initial volume to upgrade its quality and bring it up to the style of the subsequent volumes. The initial adventure was rewritten and retitled Mutiny On Mars.
Michael D. Cooper is the pseudonym for Michael (Mike) Dodd, David Baumann, and Jon Cooper, each of whom played a vital role in creating the Starman series. Although each member contributed in different ways, no story was presented to the public until all three team members were in full agreement.
David Baumann
David Baumann is a retired Episcopal priest, in the high Anglican tradition. He has also been a martial arts instructor and a free-lance writer. He did most of the actual writing. From story summaries several thousand words in length he crafted the final text adding details, secondary characters, and minor plot developments.
Jon Cooper
Jon Cooper is a computer programmer. Though all three team members contributed very smoothly to the development of each book, Jon was the primary plotter of the stories. Jon’s family traveled for business throughout his childhood and teen years. During that time he visited nineteen foreign countries and lived in three, including a stay of several months in a thousand-year-old former monastery on an island in the Saone River in France.
Mike Dodd
Mike Dodd is a social worker and zeppelin builder. He was the science advisor for the series, and made certain that the scientific information was accurate and plausible. His wedding ring is made out of a moon rock, and he owns an authenticated piece of Mars, for which he paid $100. From his knowledge of astronomy and the nature of the Solar System, he contributed a number of ideas that shaped the stories in unique and exciting ways. He also suggested several eerie settings and unexpected twists of plot that have added a distinct flavor of fascination to the world of the Starmen.
Though the series was intended to fit into the genre of the classic series books, from the beginning the Starman series was not envisioned as a sequence of unrelated adventures like those of the classic era; rather, the Starman Team first roughed out an epic spanning a period from the dawn of time to the distant future. The Starman series, though made up of a set of separate adventures, actually tells one long story that continues from book to book. The saga is set during the 2150s and 2160s, a short but intense span of time that saw a host of momentous events in the epic.
During these years, the people of Earth gradually learned the true history of the Solar System and took their part in the second defense of the Solar System against its ancient enemy. This defense began in Mutiny On Mars and continued on an expanding scale in the subsequent books. The real enemy was not even identified and encountered until the third book.
Although there are many clues in the first five books, the secret history of the Solar System was not revealed until the sixth book, the gripping conclusion to the first segment in the Starman Saga.
When the action resumes in books seven and eight, everything is about to change for David Foster, Mark Seaton, and Joe Taylor, but one thing remains the same: the Starmen of Starlight Enterprise will always be dedicated to making the 22nd century an age of hope and adventure.
