After escaping from Nathaniel’s parent-entity (named The Mama-And-Daddy) and the agents of the evil Fun Toy Syndicate several weeks ago, the boys travel the stars. For a while, they avoid heavily trafficked planets for fears that the authorities were still looking for them. They are now extremely bored with skimming only the outer edges of inhabited solar systems, looking for interesting planets to explore. They have found nothing but boring, airless balls of rock and ice – until now. “The guidebook doesn’t mention any planets,” Doctor Bill reports, twitching his long, yellow ears.

“But what else could it be?” Haticat asks, scratching his whiskers with one hand.

“Whatever it is, it’s awfully small and close to the star. It’s possible the surveyors just missed it,” Captain Nathaniel reports, peering through the scope at the tiny world orbiting the red dwarf star Tizin.

“Well, if that’s so, Haticat just discovered a new planet,” Doctor Bill says.

“Yaaay!” Fred exclaims, jumping and waving his stubby arms.

Captain Nathaniel was running from the police of planet Pookatel when he first lost his memory. His plan to elude them by flying his saucer-shaped spacecraft through an ion channel ended up frying his brain. It also made him thirsty.

Nathaniel finds his backpack and rummages through it for a bottle of water. Underneath his spare blanket he sees a small, black bag. “What’s this?” He opens it to find a blue-grey, spiky-looking sponge and reaches in to take it out. Suddenly, he feels as if all his pleasure, energy, and creativity are forcefully sucked out of him. He is overcome by excruciating boredom. Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill, dependent on him for their continued life energy, collapse onto the floor of the ship. Gasping, Nathaniel backs away from the strange object. “Colossal sponge apocalypse,” he mutters. What a strange thing to say! Where had he picked that up? He can’t remember. Crawling over to his pilot Haticat, he attempts to wake him, poking him over and over. As he feels his own energy slowly replenish, Haticat groggily rises. “What happened? What is that thing in my backpack?”

It was in fifth grade that I first thought I wanted to be an author. We were assigned to write a short story for class. I wrote a disorganized account of a detective hiking through the jungle to watch some natives involved in a mysterious religious ritual. I never finished, but I think it was supposed to have eventually been found out to be part of a cyborg plot to invade Earth.

In sixth grade I met my friend Ryan at the bus stop. We acted out scenes from Star Trek mostly. Soon, I was at his house six days a week coming up with and playing out ideas for a television series we called Dan And Ryan’s Adventures. The characters were based loosely on us. Unlike other children who wanted to be Ghostbusters or Ninja Turtles, I always wanted to be me – except with superpowers. I knew that before we could ever worry about acting, directing, props, sets, or camera angles, I first needed to write the scripts, but writing was much more tedious than playing. Instead, I made longer and longer lists of our ideas without writing any of them out. As I grew older and learned more speculative science, the ideas became ever more sophisticated and we strived to be groundbreaking.

By the time I had graduated high school, Ryan had moved away and I had fallen in love with the written word. There is just something magically satisfying about capturing in mere words the action and images of a scene. I enjoyed repeatedly going over my rough drafts and refining them into perfection. It was all I wanted to do. I gave up on the television series idea and decided to write a series of novels. I had settled on calling it The Way Out Series. It had a triple meaning. It dealt with events “way out” in deep space where there was often only one “way out” from danger and my characters were “way out” of their minds. I was unaware at the time that there had already been a Way Out science fiction series in the sixties. I made my first real effort to write in 2000. The first episode was to have been called Inside Metha. It would cover how the two main characters, Dan and Ryan, first met.

Unfortunately, I could not finish. Between work and school I did not have much time. I was mentally exhausted and could not focus. I kept having writers’ block and I did not trust that I could think my characters out of situations that I put them in. I needed to put them in danger, but also have them survive in a way that didn’t seem too unrealistic. I kept trying to plan everything out ahead and outline in too much detail, becoming frustrated when things didn’t work out.

As the years passed, I continued having new story ideas until I had hundreds. How was I ever to finish writing the entire series in a natural lifetime? I kept changing my mind which episode I should start the series with and what should be backstory. Dan needed a way to survive danger and so I invented a form of reincarnation, allowing him to change his species over the course of his long lifetime. He was an eagle, a tiger, and a dinosaur. I had numerous ideas for Dan that took place before and after his adventures with Ryan, making Ryan less important, and the character Dan was becoming less and less like me anyways. Eventually Dan became Nate.

In the meantime, I developed other interests, such as art, travel, psychology, and politics. I wrote a blog on memetics and cultural evolution. I tried starting a business. It failed. I had depression. I had anxiety. It was only in 2012 that I made a breakthrough with my science fiction. I don’t fully understand what happened myself, but part of it was that I gave up trying to run my life and trusted God to lead me wherever, including what to write. I started writing The Spider, The Witch, And The Spaceship. It covered Nate’s childhood (then called Nathaniel) via frame story as he tells what he remembers to an interviewer. It also introduced the concept of fifth-dimensional shift, explaining how it was that the entire genre of Nate’s life changed from childlike space travel cartoon to serious spy thriller with time travel paradoxes. The idea of history and physics being different in parallel universes features much in Nate’s later life, so it was only natural to think that his childhood was spent in a universe seen through the eyes of a child, without sex or evolution, with only one language and one religion. It’s all based on my life experiences and the games I used to play as a kid, after all. I published in 2014.

I immediately began to think of what to do with all my extra ideas to make them marketable, but life threw me some setbacks. I was fired from two jobs. I was unemployed and sleeping on my parents’ couch. I started another business and failed again. I took care of my aging grandfather. I got distracted and wrote a blog on alien biology. I wrote a blog on politics. I wrote a book on moral philosophy. I eventually hit upon the idea to turn Nate’s adventures into short stories. By 2022, I had the overall plot arc of Nate’s life figured out and started writing. I now plan on writing 42 stories every year for 30 years. This will be the most epic series of all spacetime!

Season One, starting on January tenth, picks up where The Spider, The Witch, And The Spaceship left off, escaping from his parent(s) and takes him through his time in the war, his maturation of character, his gaining of special powers, and his first time machine. If you like it, please leave a review wherever you buy your books. It would mean a lot to me.

Nate has lived for centuries and seen many strange things. He’s seen worlds of fluorescent, wind-carved stone. He’s met beings made of swirling flame. He’s fought an organization of murderous, time-traveling criminals only to live long enough to become one of its founders. More than once he has lived through great ruptures in time as history changed all around him. More than once he has been told these things were all in his mind. Nate has lived many lives. He has been a human, an eagle, a tiger, a dinosaur, and more. Able to reincarnate in a new body when killed, Nate is an eternal pattern – a ripple through time and space, always searching for the next fascinating place and the next adventure. At heart he is an explorer, but when confronted by evil he cannot help to fight. Champion Of The Cosmos is an account of Nate’s life from his origin onward. It is a story of friendships lost and gained. It is a story of individuality versus conformity. It is a story of pride and humility. It is the story of how a typical young boy grew up to become a cosmic hero.

The story begins January/10/2025.
Stay tuned...

This is the story of a man named Nate who finds himself living in a psychiatric health care facility. He does not remember how he got there, but as he starts to remember things from his past life, he realizes that the universe has changed dramatically since he was young. A story of childhood nostalgia, sometimes comically illuminating the differing perceptions adults and children have of the world, The Spider, The Witch, And The Spaceship is also a journey through the memories of a man for clues as to the real reason he is where he is. Filled with tension between opposing claims of the ultimate reality, this is a novel that will keep the reader guessing until the end.

About The Author:
Daniel Noe is an author, artist, explorer, and contemplator of subjects large and small. He was born in Florida, grew up in New Hampshire, and has two younger sisters. Dan is fascinated by biology and has wanted to write science fiction since he was in fifth grade. He likes to take very long walks in the woods and look under rocks for small animals. He likes to build snow forts and watch lightning storms, but his favorite weather is fog. He likes bacon, pizza, and bacon pizza. He likes his burritos super spicy and his coffee ice cold. He very much likes cupcakes. He reads biographies, history, science fiction, and fantasy. His favorite authors include Michael Chrichton, Isaac Asimov, and Sylvia Engdahl. His favorite television shows include Star Trek, Doctor Who, and The Twilight Zone. He loves spaceships and dinosaurs and would like to ride either. Dan is a huge fan of Jesus. When Dan grows up, he wants to be just like him and create his own universes.

Never stop asking questions, for learning is the true spice of life. Expand your world. Leave a comment and start a conversation. I’d love to discuss the underlying science and philosophy.

Please support my work by buying my books or by tipping me at BuyMeACoffee. I need all the help I can get right now.

Check out my other blog at WayOutDan, where I post photos, book reports, poetry, and more. Check out my other other blog at FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse, where I link to the exobiology-related art of others.

You can also write directly to Nate’s disembodied essence in the servers of Twitter (@nate4669201609) as he currently exists. He would love to hear from you!

That night, Nate feigns sleep as the night nurse checks on him. Once she is gone, he gets up. Putting on his shoes, he prepares himself for his search. He won’t be sure what equipment he needs until he checks the engines out – and he still has to figure out how to get the equipment without arousing suspicion, but he is confident he will figure it out as he goes. Then, he hears a noise in the hall and freezes. The door opens. “Nate, are you here?” Derek whispers, entering the room with a large bag.

“What are you doing here?” Nate asks.

“What am I doing here? I brought you all the crap you told me to get you,” Derek responds, irritated.

“What?” Nate says. He looks through Derek’s bag. Inside are a chisel, a hammer, gloves, flashlights, a current meter, cable cutters, and a set of electrodes. “How did you get all this?”

“How did I get all this? What do you mean how did I get all this? You told me where and how to get it!” Derek exclaims, raising his voice.

“Shhh!” Nate says, checking down the hallway. Nobody is there. “Never mind; we’ll talk about it later. I guess we’re working together now.”

“Of course. We always work together on all your adventures. We’re partners,” Derek says, grabbing Nate in a one-armed side-hug.

“Oof!” Nate says.

Finding custodial work aboard a large luxury cruise ship bound for Pookatel, Nathaniel, Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill are able to escape Cartop while making a profit. They buy and store up food, tools, spacesuits, and other supplies, saving most of their money to one day buy a spaceship. The passengers are mostly Humans and the boys enjoy the Human food and entertainment onboard during their off hours, including the exciting light shows.

The ship travels slowly and the trip to Pookatel takes three weeks. The boys disembark with the rest of the passengers. Making their way through the crowds, they stop for a moment near a window to see the landscape near the spaceport. Pookatel is a low-gravity, airless world of smooth, rainbow-marbled rocks. It is home to several dozen Human colonies of airtight, domed structures connected by covered, pressurized streets. Sharp shadows fall across the rocky scene due to there being no air to bend the light and soften their edges. The dim blue of the nearby Ohllalleaho nebula is just faintly visible in the starry sky, the edge of the nebula starting just beyond the point that Pookatel’s sun’s solar wind would tear it apart.

While the others look outside, Fred looks around and notices some Human police officers watching them and talking to each other. When the boys start to move, the police follow. “Hey, those police are following us,” Fred says.

“Which police?” Nathaniel asks.

“Them,” Fred points out. Nathaniel and the officers lock eyes and the police start to run towards them.

“Run!” Haticat yells.

The plan is put into motion the next time the kids land on planet Cartop. They climb onto the couch-unit while inside The Mama-And-Daddy. Nathaniel wears a backpack. “What’s in the backpack?” Daddy asks him.

“Books, so I don’t get bored on a long trip,” Nathaniel answers with a partial truth.

“Oh, good idea, but then you’ll miss seeing all the pretty pavement,” Mama comments.

“It’s okay,” Nathaniel insists.

The next morning, Nate blinks himself awake. The cobweb is still in the corner of his ceiling. He is too hot. The heater is acting up again. It seems he is either too hot or too cold all the time. After stretching, he climbs out of bed. Looking through the window, he sees it is cloudy.

Shaking off his grogginess, he suddenly remembers something. The cobweb was gone yesterday! Had it been rebuilt in one night? That must be it, he thinks. History can’t really be changing. He feels silly for having entertained the idea for so long already. Looking back at the cobweb, he sees a large, black spider with a large, round, shiny abdomen. It has claws at the end of each foot. The abdomen has swirls of many colors. It is certainly not a cob spider. Nate remembers much arachnid trivia, but is unfamiliar with this species. It scurries away and slips through a hole in the wall. Then he notices the wastebasket near his bed overflowing with tissues. Where did all those come from? He doesn’t remember using them. Had someone snuck in while he slept and placed them there? Nate doesn’t want to think about these things now. He wants breakfast. He makes his way to the cafeteria hall and finds himself sitting with Derek again.

The children prepare for liftoff. “Power up complete. All systems are active. Running functionality checklist,” Haticat reports.

“Power supply and propulsion systems are operational,” Doctor Bill reports.

“Navigation systems online,” Haticat reports.

“Pressure seals are completed and holding,” Fred reports, “Emergency life support is operational.”

“Automatic safety check complete,” Haticat reports. Haticat and Nathaniel sit down next to each other at the pilot control station. “Where should we go?” Haticat asks.

“I still haven’t been to Lectipas,” Doctor Bill says.

“I want to explore someplace new I haven’t been to before – somewhere far away where The Mama-And-Daddy won’t follow us,” Nathaniel comments.

“Go to planet Candy!” Allison yells.

“We were just on Candy,” Nathaniel says.

“I’ll scream the whole way if we don’t go to Candy,” Allison threatens.

“No, we need to stop for fuel first. I don’t think Candy Wizards will accept tools and dresses as payment,” Nathaniel says.

“Aaaaaaaaaah!!!” Allison screams. She doesn’t stop.