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THE BAG OF WORLDS SERIES
Ismail, Mandy, Pon, and Nemeku face off against bullies, criminals from Earth, and interstellar criminals to solve the mystery of the Bag of Worlds.
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See below for Author's Notes
What would you do if your favorite uncle had a suitcase that could transport you to other planets? What if you fell through that suitcase into another world, complete with boy-hunting snake-men and giant eagles?
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Ismail felt like he had enough going on. The first day of a new school year? Check. Best friend moved to California over the summer vacation? Check. New status as favorite punching bag for his grade’s worst bully? Check. What next? “Next” happened to be a visit from his favorite uncle. But then his uncle, the mysterious Ibrahim, introduces him to the Bag of Worlds, an artifact from the past that allows the user to travel from our planet to three others.
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Ibrahim tells him just enough about the Land of the Silver Sky, the Land of the Sapphire Sea and the Land of the Golden Plain to capture his imagination. All these planets share a history with Ibrahim’s ancestors, but the connection is not as clear as it might be—a missing, second artifact might hold the answers, but even after almost three thousand years, none of the Keepers of the Bag of Worlds had found it.
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Unfortunately, even the most other-worldly of distractions can’t solve Ismail’s bully problem—Bill “the Drill” Tate, the reason Ismail can’t stand the idea of the new school year. Common sense told him that nothing would be able to protect him from the bully, not even his new friends, Pon and Mandy, or Nemeku of the Land of the Silver Sky. But the more that Ismail learns about the other three “Lands” and the peculiar invasions that threaten each one with separate and unique dangers, the less that concerns of our own world preoccupy him. He finds himself actively working with his uncle, with the help of his three friends. But new actors threaten their progress and their lives—who is Mr. Hermes? Who are the Shaggaroth, and what do they have to do with the ancient Bag of Worlds?
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Children, middle readers and young adults will enjoy the science-fiction and fantasy elements of the story and will be anxious to further investigate the mystery of the lost ancient star-traveling civilizations which deepen in the second book of the series.
Click on the link to go to the Amazon book page: https://bit.ly/4oWJ0KF
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Book Two of the Starstepper Saga, Keepers of Worlds, is now available on Amazon.
There is something strange and unworldly—call it alien—about the device that Ismail’s uncle calls the Bag of Worlds. It allows instantaneous travel to spaces far apart in the Milky Way galaxy and seems to be an artifact of an ancient star-traveling civilization that may still exist!
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Only four of these scattered worlds are connected: Earth and three others, which the Keeper of the Bag of Worlds, Uncle Ibrahim, calls “Lands.” These are real places—Ismail and his three friends have seen them. All of them have their original human settlers, as well as an invasive race from the evil Shaggaroth Empire. These invaders are trying to take each Land away from those settlers so as to further some twisted scheme of their own.
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The children—Ismail, Pon, Mandy, and Nemeku from the Land of the Silver Skies, are designated by a sick and bed-ridden Ibrahim as co-Keepers of not just the Bag of Worlds, the transport mechanism for the Four Lands, but of the Worlds themselves. Somehow this all gets tied up with a three-thousand-year-old mystery and a couple of star empires who have their sights set on Earth and her sister planets.
Now, on top of everything else, someone is transporting invader races between the Lands to subjugate the worlds one by one. Somehow this is connected to a mystery planet named Nu—really, its name is all the information they have on it, but it seems to be a homebase for those who are determined to subjugate at least three of the Four Lands. And even with unexpected help from the stars, this is still a race against time, weapons of mass destruction, and a criminal mastermind from the planet Nu. All will test Ismail and his friends to their limits—for some of them, beyond their limits.
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Click on the link to purchase: https://bit.ly/47okJXE
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SEQUELS: As of now, no new books in this series are actively planned, though I do have enough notes to wrangle into another book, maybe two, depending on the reaction tho these!
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NOTE TO PARENTS: Just as the first book dealt with bullying in a true and yet sensitive manner, this book takes on the sub-theme of the death of a relative of the protagonist and the way he works his way through the stages of grief. Again, this is handled with sensitivity, regularizing such matters as just a part of life.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
Some might understandably accuse me of ripping off the portal magic of Narnia’s wardrobe, which is fair I guess, but I did not do so consciously. Plus, Narnia is a fantasy world, and THE DIFFERENT LANDS OF THE BAG OF WORLDS UNIVERSE ARE ALL BASED ON SCIENCE FICTION PRINCIPLES, and regular people, no kings or queens, and no fantasy creatures either. There are some tangential aliens, but are all based on recognizable science fiction themes.
But where did the story come from? WHAT FORCED ME TO CREATE, FIRST, A UNIVERSE WITH FOUR WORLDS IN IT, THEN A UNIVERSE WITH MILLIONS OF WORLDS IN IT?
A goofy imagination, I guess.
I actually imagined, daydreaming as one does, of how cool it would be to have something as innocuous and portable as a suitcase that, when opened, allowed you to step inside it to another world.
So that’s how it started. The first several drafts of the first book didn’t dig too deeply into the science fiction elements. It was only when I started the sequel, Keepers of Worlds, that I realized that I had to create a series bible—details of all the world-building, all the mechanisms, all the “yeah, that happened, but how and why did it happen?” What is the technology based on, if not magic?
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ONCE I DID THAT, I RE-WROTE THE FIRST BOOK TO MATCH THIS NEW, MORE EXPANSIVE VIEW OF THE STORY, AND THE SECOND BOOK JUST FLEW OFF MY FINGERS.
I hope to write more books in this series if enough interest is shown in the first two.