Ballacourage Books

05/20/2026

It's interesting that sales of the Graven Moon are well below any of the Old Guy books. But what is more interesting to me is that among all the 5 star reviews (thank you) is one 2-star review. Which is fine if that is what you think, but the actual comment is "I thoroughly enjoyed this book. One story was the saddest story I’ve ever read. I almost wish I had skipped that one, but at the same time it is my favorite. Others made laugh and some gave things to think about."

I just do not understand how that becomes a 2 star review. It's probably a mistake, but of course we can't really do anything about it. So if 'Eddie' is out there and did make a mistake... otherwise, I guess a 4.7 rating is more believable than a 5.0.

We have no released a paper copy of the book as we weren't sure the demand was out there. If someone is actually waiting for that, leave a comment here. It might light a fire under my butt.

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09/08/2025

If any of you wan to watch a short interview with Tim Gawne on his 'Day Job' which involves understanding myopia, he was just featured on a professional website for vision professionals.

Tim Gawne, PhD, is a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In this interview, he discusses how chromatic cues can guide human eye growth. 

04/14/2025

The first actual rating of Graven Moon is in at Amazon. It is, of course 5 stars !. Sadly, that reader did not leave an actual review. But it is worth pointing out that honest reviews and ratings are quite important in today's literary world. Please take a moment to leave one, even if you didn't like it. All we ask is that if you leave a poor review, you at least explain why in a review.

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03/12/2025

The link to Graven moon on amazon is https://amzn.to/427YWiT

Tim Gawne is best known for his series of science fiction books about 'Old Guy': a giant cybertank with a mind of his own, in the far future where cybertanks have their own civilization. Here, many for the first time, is a collection of his short stories, many never before published. This include...

03/10/2025

Yes, The Graven Moon is up for pre-sale at Amazon. Mainly as we accidentally checked pre-sale and now can't retract it. It releases on March 12th, so only a few days. As stated before- it's a bunch of never before seen Gawne stories, some were previously published in obscure publications. THREE of them are Old Guy stories, and then there is a pretty good Novella called 'The One Law' Plans are to release it as an ebook in Smashwords next, and then work on the (painful) process of turning it into a real paperback book.

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01/14/2025

11/20/2024

Did you know that using AI to do book covers is not as easy as one would think? In case you wonder, this is a hint.

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02/14/2024

Something is in the works. In honor of that we have made a coupon for the rest of Feb for a FREE ebook copy of the Chronicles of Old Guy at Smashwords.

use coupon code at check out RR8K6

In the distant future mankind creates sentient cybertanks patterned on the human brain to help fight their alien enemies. Then, inexplicably, the humans vanished. They just went away. All that is left of the human empire are the cybertanks who, in their own way, keep the human civilization alive.

08/16/2022

I don;t know how it happened, but Moderan is now back in print. As you may recall we tracked down the family at great expense, and tried to make a deal to reprint it. I made her an amazing deal, I even had Harlan Ellison agree to write an introduction, and then... the daughter just went silent. I figured she mentioned it someone who told her we were trying to rip her off. Oh well. That's life. At least it is back in print.

https://www.amazon.com/Moderan-York-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1681372541/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1RO2IWT9YHRT0&keywords=moderan&qid=1660677144&sprefix=moderan%2Caps%2C87&sr=8-1

01/24/2021

And now a word from Dr. Tim Gawne-

Thoughts on ‘Fan Fiction’

Now and then the issue comes up of a fan writing “Old Guy” stories of their own.

I am both greatly honored and filled with trepidation and a sense of oncoming horror. For better or worse, the Old Guy universe is mine, I created it, and I have a sense of ownership – not just financial, but emotional. I don’t want another writer, even one more talented than I am taking them over and having them do things that I would not have them do.

Although after I am gone, if someone wishes to clone Kurt Vonnegut and they somehow get him to write an Old Guy sequel (which perhaps would require threats of grievous bodily harm, but by then it won’t be my concern), that I would be cool with. I think I will put that in my will, just in case.

Mind you, the idea of giant self-aware robot tanks is no more mine than the idea of giant space battleships and villains wearing black armor belongs to George Lucas (or now Disney, but you get my drift). You can write about Big Bob the Thundertank and his many adventures, go for it, but you can’t write about Big Bob the Thundertank who used to be friends with the cybertank known as Old Guy – not even in passing.

I would encourage anyone with the desire to write fiction to write their own fiction, in their own created universe, with their own ideas and style. If you are going to do it, do it! It can be either very different from the “Old Guy” universe, or very similar (as long as you don’t use the same names and characters), the trick is to do it your way. Write not just the stories you want to write, write the stories that you would like to read.

It’s an act of creation, almost like being a tiny god, to make up your own fictional universe. If you are into military science fiction and self-aware weapon systems, there are an infinite variety of approaches. You could do something like the Old Guy universe – but maybe the personalities are less eccentric, or maybe more – maybe they are clearly specialized into terrestrial and space-based units and have rivalries. Maybe the aliens are less deliberately inscrutable than mine, and there are clear good guys and bad guys and alliances and backstabbing etc. – or not.

The possibilities are essentially infinite. And so my suggestion is not to plan out directly what your universe will be like, but daydream about it, write a pilot story or two, make things up as you go along, see if it works.

You only live once. Be not a shadow but the sun.

Just make sure you come up with your own terminology. “Cybertank,” “BOLO,” and “OGRE” are taken. If you are stuck with a name just pick a cool word and try to come up with an acronym that fits.

And if, having written, you actually finish (finish! FINISH!!!) a short story or whatever, consider trying to get it published. Sleep on it, proofread it, proofread it some more, find a target journal, make sure it publishes content like yours, READ the instructions to authors, FOLLOW the guidelines to authors, and pull the trigger.

You will get rejected. Be sad but do not despair. It’s like an amateur athlete being invited to compete in preliminary Olympic trials: the honor is to participate.

If you do decide to try and publish, some words of wisdom:

1. Keep a record of what you have submitted where. Don’t resubmit the same story to the same place twice, even if you think you have ‘fixed’ it. It shows low class.
2. Don’t flood the market with hundreds of submissions. You have a day job (at least I hope so. If not, then bloody well get one!).
3. Don’t argue with the nice editor people about your rejection. Take it like a professional.
4. Do not ever use your own money to get something reviewed or published. Ever. You have been warned.

Perhaps the next great military science fiction writer is out there waiting to be discovered and set the literary universe on fire. The only thing we know for certain, is that it won’t happen if they don’t actually write anything…

Now back to my day job. I am trying to debug a blue+cyan light array for studies on the development of myopia, and the bloody manufacturer changed the peak wavelength of the blue LEDs without noting it in the datasheet. Grr.

On a lighter note, I’ve written the first chapter of “Snotty Nosed Punk and Old Guy Conquer the Universe” but I’m not sure where it’s going. Oh well. Thank goodness for day jobs.

10/09/2020

If you are into tanks, and isn't everyone? You should know Nicholas Moran, AKA 'The Chieftain' who does cool videos on youtube of him climbing around inside all kinds of armored vehicles, talking about track tensioning, and that eh is too tall to fit in some spaces. He works for the folks that put of World of Tanks, an insanely fun computer game.

Anyway, Dr. Gawne is a fan of his work, and it seems Nick also enjoys the Old Guy books (which he says he finds hysterical- we assume that means the humor, we HOPE he means the humor). So in a fit of insomnia, Gawne decided to see what a 'in the Chieftain's Hatch' would be like for Old Guy. It's kind of a joke between the two, so take it as it is. I don't know the best way to publish this, so I will try to see how much facebook lets me do this way.
-----------------------

Inside the Chieftain’s Hatch: Odin Class Cybertank

By Timothy J. Gawne (all rights reserved)

Hello, I’m Nicholas Moran, and welcome to Inside the Chieftain’s Hatch. Well, actually I’m the eleventh clone of Nicholas Moran, but same thing practically speaking. My original contract gave the producers of the show the legal rights to clone me if ratings held up, and thanks to all my fans out there, well, here I am! Today we’re at the Metropolitan Museum of Autonomous Weapon Systems on Alpha Centauri Prime, and we’re going to be exploring an Odin Class cybertank.

It’s been about four centuries since the show started, and not quite five centuries since the very first armored fighting vehicles were built. A lot has happened in that time, but nothing more revolutionary than the creation of fully self-aware armored fighting vehicles. The Odin was not the most powerful, not even close, but it set the path for the development of planet-based combat that continues to this day.

And here it is, all 2,000 metric tons of a truly sentient combat system. That big gun you see up there could level mountaintops, and in the field it could control enough distributed systems to dominate an entire planet, if not an entire system. A serious bit of kit. Well, it was back in the day.

Let’s start at the front. The glacis is sloped at 45 degrees, and it’s over 30 centimeters of hyperalloy. That’s an equivalent of about 8 meters of old-time rolled homogenous armor plate. A near miss by a decent size fusion bomb would only singe this bad boy. And check out the treads: there are 10 side by side, and three front to back, for 30 separate units. Now at one time when designers tried to build super-heavy tanks with multiple treads, the problem was: what the effing hell do you do when the inside units take damage? But the Odin class, if an inside track unit is damaged, it can retract it up off the ground, and it has these remote-controlled repair robots that can work on it in place. If all else fails, it can blow the tracks and let the roadwheels free run. On stone or hard packed dirt, an Odin can remain mobile with just five out of 30 track units operational.

There seems to be a small sign just over the second inside front left track unit. It’s written in a really small font. It says:

IF YOU CAN READ THIS I’M GRINDING YOU UNDER MY TREADS

Well. Cute, I guess. There was a movement way back when to make it illegal for any autonomous weapon system to have a sense of humor. An affront against humanity, yada yada. We all know how that ended up.

Now going around the side, we see the enormous side of the road wheels: I’m 1.96 meters tall, but they’re even taller than that. Bare hyperalloy wheel on bare hyperalloy tracks: the sounds of this at full speed could deafen a non-bioengineered human at 100 meters. Acoustic stealth was not a priority when they designed the Odins.

You can see on the otherwise flat surface of the hull all these little blister things – the bigger ones are point defense weapons, the others are distributed sensors. In combat an Odin would be getting data links from all over, and the main sensors up on the top of the turret and the tips of the sensor masts rival that of major astronomical observatories, but all of these little sensors spread over the hull are kind of like the lateral line of a fish. They’re a distributed array, and while each sensor by itself is limited, combined they have amazing acuity.

Note also these little stanchions spread around. While the armor itself was nigh on impenetrable, all these point defense weapons and sensors and whatnot were exposed and vulnerable. The stanchions were to enable the repair robots to scurry over the hull, replacing burned out bits and pieces as fast as they were destroyed. Well, ideally. As long as they weren’t destroyed too fast.

And check out the front of this track unit. The tread tensioning is automatic, done by some sort of servomechanism buried in this metal bulge. Progress, I guess. But I still like the reliability of a simple tensioning nut, you work it with a wrench, track is tensioned, it’s all good. What if this complicated servo-whatever develops a glitch and your track un-tensions in combat? What then I ask you?

OK, we are coming around to the back of the tank. You can see all the heat exchangers and blowers. There’s an old saying, amateurs talk tactics, and professionals talk thermal management. Well, they also talk about logistics, but they do talk about thermal management, especially when they’ve got two 300 megawatt fusion reactors onboard. In combat the cooling fins could be extended way out, regenerated if blown off, sprayed with cooling liquid in extreme conditions, and at full power the blowers could literally tear the asphalt off a road.

Look, on the rear hull down low, there’s a bumper sticker. They were a thing for a while on these kinds of units. Let’s see what it says.

THIS IS THE FRONT OF THE TANK
I’M DRIVING BACKWARDS


You know, that part about wanting to outlaw a sense of humor in self-aware weapon systems? Perhaps not such a bad idea. Just saying.

Now I’m going to climb up using these little stanchion things, and now we’re standing on the rear deck behind the main turret. For a long time combat systems have been integrated units with no way for a human being to poke around inside, or if there are hatches, they’re too small for me to fit into. So when we say ‘inside the chieftain’s hatch,’ well, I haven’t been able to actually go inside a hatch for the last 437 episodes. But the Odin class is so big, that it does indeed have human-sized corridors inside it, so we are – for the first time in 437 episodes – going to go inside the hatch!

There are a lot of little doors for the repair robots, but they’re a bit claustrobophic for me. We’ll enter here, through this launch bay, and it’s still a bit cramped but more than big enough to let a lot of systems go back and forth. This bay is mostly empty, although you can still see deactivated repair robots stacked up against the far wall. I’m just going to duck down through this blast door, and here we’re in another bay. In service it would be stacked near to full with all manner of support and weapon systems. You can see the little tunnels for the repair and service robots heading off in various directions, though they can all be sealed off with blast doors. A unit as big as this, it needed passages inside it for the repair robots, and to carry supplies and munitions and spare parts and all the rest. Which is why I – at long last – get to climb around inside it!

As you can see, an Odin class had a lot of stowage for weapons, and it would be easy to think of it as a kind of land-going variant of those old 21st century water-ocean aircraft carriers. But in the field, most of the firepower an Odin had on call would come from an array of distributed weapon carriers all around it – it wasn’t so much an aircraft carrier, but the captain of a fleet of aircraft carriers. Still, there’s no doubt that even the organic loadout of this cybertank was a beast.

And here is one of four machining centers. Tight packed, hard to tell what’s what, exactly, but this cybertank could make nearly anything given enough time and raw materials. The Odin class cybertank was the first fundamentally self-sufficient main-line combat unit since the wooden warships of the 18th century. That gave it both tactical, and strategic, flexibility.

OK, now I’m on my hands and knees, barely making it through a passage meant only for repair robots – and look, here we are at the commander’s cabin! I can finally stand up, and even for someone of my height, it’s not cramped at all. They had put these in for a human so-called ‘commander,’ more out of habit than anything else. Sometimes a human officer would ride along, but these cybertanks never had any captains other than themselves.

And engraved here on the top bulkhead, is the original serial number. CRL345BY‐44. Wait a minute, I know that number, it can’t be, it’s…

Hello Mr. Moran! As you were about to guess, I’m Old Guy. Welcome inside my hatch!

Wait, what – Old Guy? Aren’t you are still active? Why are you are in a museum?

Why not? The curator is a friend of mine. I decided to just hang out for a bit as an exhibit. I mean, this is just my main hull, I’m still doing a lot of work on the data networks. And I always wanted to be on your show. I’m a great fan!

What? You’re a fan?

Absolutely! I’ve watched all 12,534 editions of Inside the Chieftain’s Hatch. Great stuff – well, maybe your fifth clone was a bit dodgy, but mostly great all the same. Did you know that, amongst us cybertanks, you are known as the patron saint of track tensioning?

Well yes, number five was a bit off – they didn’t quite get the decanting right. There were lawsuits about that. But – patron saint of track tensioning? Really?

Absolutely. We’ve tried to get you formally canonized by the Roman Catholic Church but the pedants keep rejecting our entreaties. “Too narrow a remit,” they throw back at us. Oh well, we keep trying.

I am so flattered! But – wait a minute – you’re Old Guy! Stuff always happens to you, and it always starts out something like ‘I was just driving down the street one day minding my own business, when a horde of invasive nano-machines fell from the sky and threatened to lay waste the universe…’ stuff like that! I’m doomed!

You are being melodramatic. Most of my career has been quite boring. Sure, now and then something really interesting happens, but that’s only because I’ve been around for centuries, and I have thousands of remotes and subminds spread out over many light years. It’s just the odds. Most the time a quiet day at the museum, is a quiet day at the museum.

But that’s what you always say just before it all goes pear shaped! Wait a minute, what if I’m the threat? Maybe this clone has been hacked by evil aliens from another dimension, and I contain a cunningly fashioned super bomb and this was all a ruse to get me inside you so I could detonate and destroy you!

Sorry, but before I let you get inside of me I scanned you completely, I know every hair on your body by name, I have your every gene and epigene catalogued and categorized. You really are the 11th clone of Nicholas Moran.

You are sure about that? I’m not part of a fiendish Neoliberal plot?

Really I’m sure. You sound almost disappointed.

No of course not. Well maybe a little. You have such a reputation for attracting trouble…

Let me tell you a little something about reputations…

///// ALERT KLAXONS SOUNDING OFF /////

That sounded like an alert klaxon?

Yes it did. Something seems to have triggered the museum alarms.

You’re not just doing this to make me feel better, are you?

No. Really. Something is coming… It looks like a man. It looks like… frankly, it looks like you, although I detect a significant mass variance. Here, let me show you on this display screen.

What, no, wait – oh no! It’s my evil twin! The anti-Nicholas Moran! I am doomed after all!

An anti-Nicholas Moran? You mean a Nicholas Moran made entirely out of anti-matter?

No – it’s another clone of me, but made by the producers of my show to be smaller and better able to fit into confined spaces – he’s only 1.5 meters tall! They’re going to replace me! I’ve got to get out of here!

///// TO BE CONTINUED /////