Welcome to The Blog of the Kurgan

A first point of general housekeeping, because I am a man with the technological grasp of ways to get us to the stars, but also absolutely hate the minutiae of how IT “works” on this planet, (Earth), and because putting a dozen IT “professionals” against a wall to be shot every single day in order to “motivate” those who work like “professionals” to instead work like logical human beings in order to NOT get shot, is like… frowned upon, apparently (a sure sign that damned communism has taken over, I tell you), I would be ever so grateful if one of you that can afford it, is happy to do so, will not incur a famine in your household for doing so, etc. etc. could subscribe to a paid subscription.

This will let me test if what I did to set the payments up is correct and works or not. It should be fine and working, but as I said… I don’t trust these “automated” systems, created by a mixture of incompetence, arrogance, desperation and imprecision that seems to plague every industry on Earth today. The first one of you to do so, even if it is just a $8 a month subscription and you cancel it after the first payment has gone through, I will consider a founding member regardless of the amount pledged. I really just want to test this thing is all.

Right, if you have managed to work your way through that first paragraph-sentence, congratulations, your brain works at least as well as those of people who lived a couple of hundred years ago, who (no joke, this is real) had a vocabulary about three times as large as present day “literate” people, and whom had no issue whatsoever keeping a long sentence in mind, since it was/is all contextual.

You have also reached possibly the last (maybe, no promises) bit of “writer’s angst” I will share with you. And I say maybe, because the level of angst it causes is zero and it is simply something I am weighing up between me and me as to what I want to do to either please my own sense of aesthetics and/or reducing my level of pain-in-the-butt weird word typing/corrections I am liable to run into, so here it is.

The setting is on Germanic, Nazi Luna, so obviously things are done in German, which, like Afrikaans, is a language I find offensive to my noble ears, and as a result I have made zero effort to learn any of it, nor am I likely to ever learn any of it. You know, barring funny moustache guy 2.0 suddenly appearing and taking over the world and forcing everyone to learn it, or something. So that is the practical reality.

HOWEVER, I do want to place at least a little flavour of “GermaNaziness” in the whole story, because… duh… it’s about Nazis on the Moon! So I would tend towards keeping Inspektor Kord’s Title (and everyone else’s too) as the original German spelling. This is in essence, the approach I took in the books. It is a little less painful when typing it up in a word processor as you can just add the Germanic Titles to the local dictionary so autocorrect doesn’t do the “wreck-a-nice-beach” that automatic recognise speech programs tend to do. On this here blog… it will probably become an unholy mess and much sinful swearing on my part every time the “helpful” corrections make me have to re-type the damned ranks 17 times. Despite all that… since beauty, to my mind, is perhaps the most glorious personifications of God’s existence, grace and beauty, I must suffer for my art. So, Inspektor it will be, as well a AllAbsultuKammlerdörpfImHimmlersunderkartments will be all the other Germanic type ranks and related…. stuff.

Nevertheless, I would appreciate your views if you would be so kind as to click on one of the two buttons below.

Alright, that is it. The next post you see will be the start of the Lunar Nazi Oder Police’s Procedural featuring Ordnungspolizei Feldpolizei Inspektor Kord Siegfried Neubauer.

This post was originally published on my Substack. Link here

Well, it hasn’t even been 24 hours and my subscribers have more than doubled and some have even already pledged money, which made me have to quickly set up the payment processor thing. So, indeed, you can now sponsor me to the grand cost of $8 a month, $80 a year, or $120 as a one time founder fee (if I read it right). I think founder fees will get you at least a cameo in one of the stories if not a continuing character, subject to:

1. You agreeing to it (I will need the name you want me to use) and an email or something in writing telling me you are ok with it.
2. You understanding that your character has no guarantee of being a good guy, not dying horribly, and so on.
3. Of course, if you wish to have a character with a major story plot/line/good-guy (or evil villain for that matter) you can certainly fund it by sending me a brief synopsis and a payment commensurate with how much work/detail I have to deal with.

Now that we got the vicious subject of gold out of the way, allow me to give you a brief glimpse of my creative process. Please don’t despair if you think you will now have 16 paragraphs detailing how I am a wordsmith and each word is forged with the loving care of a pregnant hippo and the tears of angels, mixed with the neighing of unicorns from a meadow of rhododendrons filled with perfect snow-crystals.

People who use the made-up word “wordsmith” should face a firing squad without benefit of a last cigarette as far as I am concerned. If you care about that crap, you can read a post I wrote literally a dozen years ago on my way of writing, here .

Here, I shall reveal the true secret of how I make my stories come to life. Ready? (Drum-roll please)…

I make it all up as I go along.

Literally.

The characters sometimes drive my initial story off a cliff and a whole different one has to come up. The Overlords of Mars trilogy was pretty much the only series of books that I had a specific and laid out general idea of where things were going and the big plot lines from the start, but even then, my characters (like players in an old style pen and paper RPG) keep going off track, falling in lust or love with the wrong characters, get shot, possibly start and intergalactic war, and God only knows what else.

The more recent In the Shadow of Monte Castello was started simply because the opening scene of the story is an image/scene/idea I had while walking on my farmland at 3 am and thinking, how cool would it be if… Well, I don’t want to give you any spoilers, since it’s a new book, but honestly that was it. I only had this one flash of a scene in my head. No plot, no story, no idea where it might go and so on. And I thought, you know what? I am not even going to worry about it. So I just wrote it for fun, And I was done with the rough draft in a week and the finished thing in the second week. I have now completed book II of that series in rough draft and hope to have it out in a week or so. It took a little longer because it is about 50% longer and also I had to remember and check on port-plot-lines from book I in order to keep my continuity going. But let’s get back to Inspektor Kord…

We know he has black hair and brown eyes, is about 28-29 years old, effective and efficient at his job and normally is not required to dress in uniform.

I’m going to say he is somewhat partial to a very light leather or faux leather jacket under which he carries a shoulder-holstered pistol.

Being as we are on Luna and essentially a full extension of Nazi Germany on it, I am also going to make some assumptions. This is the only post where I will take the time to explain to you all my mental processes of how I am starting this story, just so you can see, I am literally making it up even as I write these words.

The usual service pistol of the police in Nazi Germany was either the PPK which literally stood for Polizeipistole Kriminal: police pistol criminal “office”, in 7.65mm (32 ACP) or the Walther P-38 in 9mm Parabellum. The Luger was generally more for military officers but might have made an appearance here or there, as might have the broom-handled Mauser, which however was quite massive and officially usually just for military personnel. On Luna, the “subhuman” elements should have been done away with for the most part, nevertheless, military officers and so on, certainly go around armed as a standard practice, so it is conceivable that an Orpo Inspektor, might find himself having to question or arrest an armed person, even in the utopian aryan Luna. So he needs to be armed. And he will be with some space-equivalent of a PPK. So it will be a smallish, high-tech, low-capacity handgun. Now… just what precise look and feel and most importantly, ammunition are we going to say it uses?

Well… advanced tech… German Nazi stuff… it’s not going to be limited to a single type of ammunition. I would begin to equate it with what in the Traveller RPG was called a Snub Pistol. Designed to be able to fire in vacuum too, it was a standard shipboard weapon that could fire Flechette rounds, normal sabot (solids), High Explosive, or High Explosive Armour Piercing rounds. So we’re going to say that is what the standard Orpo issue sidearm for an Inspektor is (although I already have it in my head that the special ops version of Orpo, will have a bigger handgun with selector switch that can fire in fully automatic mode…but, no, no, must not get side-tracked…).

I will say it has a seven round capacity, just like a PPK and that it can indeed fire a variety of rounds:

• Taggers – A mixture of paint and tiny electronic tags that embed themselves in the clothing/flesh of the target to make tracking them extremely easy.
• HEAP – High Explosive Armour Piercing rounds (to defeat personal armour or shoot someone behind certain type of cover).
• HE – High Explosive rounds; frowned upon if used in civilian spaces as the fragmentation could injure innocent bystanders. Can be useful in non-civilian spaces or strategically when there are multiple opponents or they are hiding behind cover.
• Solid rounds – A standard metal slug.
• Taser/Electrocution – A charged slug that releases a large electro-magneto-psychotronic charge. There are two types, a “stun” round that tends to put people to sleep with usually non-permanent neurological damage, and a “lethal” round that tends to fry all neurone links and reduce a brain to instant death and little chance of even PSI enabled people to read anything off the dead/dying brain.

And he carries two spare magazines to balance the weight.

Loaded as follows:

Magazine in the gun

1. Taser Stun
2. Slug
3. Slug
4. HEAP
5. HEAP
6. HEAP
7. Taser Fatal

Spare 1

1. HEAP
2. HEAP
3. HEAP
4. HEAP
5. Taser Fatal
6. Taser Fatal
7. Taser Fatal

Spare 2

1. HE
2. HE
3. HE
4. HE
5. HE
6. HE
7. HE

And for those of you that think this is WAAAAAAAYYY too much thought process to spend on just the guy’s gun, well… you, sir, (or madam), clearly don’t understand the subtleties one can glean from an inspector’s weapon and the specifics of his carry ammo.

He also carries a lockable blade relatively small knife, with tanto-shaped blade, but mostly uses it for practical things, not as a weapon.

So I now have all I need to start. No… wait, when working Kord also carries a small photo/video/audio recording device he can also dictate into and will translate things to text he can have printed out back at the office. He uses this as a general notepad, day-planner, interview recorder, camera for taking pictures and so on.

Right. Now, we are ready to start.

This post was originally published on my Substack. Link here

Given I launched this substack a few minutes ago and I already have more than 10 subscribers without me sending out any invites by email at all, just one tiny post on a rather small and closed social media platform (Social Galactic), I felt compelled to write at least a first brief introduction to the topic.

Obviously, the best thing is if you have read my entire Overlords of Mars Trilogy, which is all compiled into one Omnibus book: NAZI MOON . But failing that, you can read up about the general perspective of the Overlords of Mars for free at my blog, here. You need to be aware that some spoilers are probably inevitable though, especially if you read the author’s notes. Nevertheless, I realise some people will want to familiarise themselves with he general idea before investing in an 827 page book. And you can also do so by reading the first book only, for a fraction of the price, which you can get here .

Incidentally, that is my actual wife on the cover. Even if the picture and the book, where written several years before we got together in a permanent relationship. I used that image, which was from a random picture she’d sent me on a mobile phone a few years previous, because her eyes pretty much match the eyes of the woman I had seen in the first dream that sparked the writing of the entire series of Overlords of Mars (OOM).

At any rate, this attempt at serialising the work diary of Feldpolizei Inspektor Kord, are, for the moment, not Canonical, because frankly I came up with he idea about an hour ago and have absolutely not a clue if I can make it work, if it will suck, or not. So you’re coming along for the ride experimentally for now.

Kord is an inspector on Luna (our Moon) which is riddled with nazis of course, which have been there since the end of the Second World War. The OOM series is set in 1999, but Kord had been involved in an investigation before the events that introduce him in Book III.

In fact, by way of introduction, and because that chapter is quite short, I have decided to present Kord here as we find him in Book III, when he first appears on the scene.

Mars – Base Olympos. September 24, 1999.

Orpo Feldpolizei Inspektor Kord Siegfried Neubauer was bored. He was part of the fifteen-man team of officers and experts, each from various departments, that had been assigned to the tour of the Stirling-Zukhov alliance sector on Mars.

His group had two representatives from each branch, the Kriegsmarine, the Luftwaffe-SS, the Waffen-SS, the Ahnenerbe (both ‘regular’ and SD) and his own branch, the Ordnungspolizei, more commonly referred to as Orpo. He was the junior officer, his superior, Oberfeldpolizeidirektor Gustav Helmut Nadel was three ranks above him. At least he wasn’t relegated to note-taking, other than his own personal ones. Three branches had been cautious enough to attach an orderly for the express purpose of recording everything they were shown. The Orpo had one such orderly. The Luftwaffe-SS and the Kriegsmarine had the other two. Essentially three lowly corporals would be doing the same job. And no doubt, the Waffen-SS and the Ahnenerbe would requisition copies anyway.

A trip that had the potential to have been very interesting, he was soon discovering, was going to be anything but. He should have guessed that the Martians would hardly show them anything very interesting. Their methods of base constructions were primitive by comparison to the ones used on the Moon. The Martians essentially just used mostly antigravity ships to do all the heavy lifting and sometimes moles to create ready-fused tunnels underground. They had no purpose-built machinery as the Kriegsmarine had on Luna, and due to the presence of a breathable atmosphere on Mars most of their buildings, at least the ones they had been shown so far, had a considerable part of their structure above ground level. These were built mainly of structural beams easily manufactured locally by gravitic compression of local materials. Kord began to wonder just how far behind the Martians really where. Obviously, they would hardly be showing us their best stuff, but so far, everything I have seen is inferior in capability and quality to anything we have on Luna.

The monotonic explanations, all delivered in English, were mind-numbingly tedious. Obvious in the extreme. His flawless English was possibly one of the reasons why he was on this mission, that and probably his slightly unorthodox methods and abilities. Kord was an oddity even for the very special organisation that was Orpo. He had an ability to ferret out information and solve almost any kind of crime that bordered on the preternatural. In fact, he had been tested by the PSI division, though they never shared the results with him. They must have turned up something though, perhaps an ancient unclean bit of genetic code, or some temporal or philosophical dislocation in his psyche that meant he was not a perfect match for the most elite ranks of racial purity; or maybe it was his unusual style or apparently less than absolute tenacity when it came to thought crimes. Whatever the reason, despite his flawless record in solving all sorts of crimes, he had not climbed the ranks as fast as he should have. Kord was of the opinion that his own ability was what had held him back. Discovering misappropriation of resources within your own department was probably not a good way to move up the ranks. Why he had been sent out here then, he did not know. Perhaps it was related to his recent arrest of a relatively high-ranking Luftwaffe-SS officer that had misappropriated resources and destroyed two entertainment servers. Normally something of that nature might call for some re-education, a day or so of lectures and a dressing down from a superior officer, but Kord had done all the paperwork and filed it as a misappropriation of resources rather than an accident, and it had cost the Standartenführer a rank. He had been demoted to Obersturmbannführer with commensurate loss of privileges; including access to entertainment servers in the future. It would not change for at least a couple of years. His superiors had filed the paperwork dutifully, but Kord knew his actions had been unpopular. He had worked the case alone without sharing information precisely because he did not want to hear a superior tell him how to file the papers. Once done and filed properly though, no one wanted to have their name associated with the reducing of an otherwise perfectly documented case. The officer may have been a Standartenführer, but he wasn’t related to anyone in Kord’s Orpo branch, so why would anyone go out of their way; and they did not.

Or maybe, he thought sarcastically, they have finally realised what an asset my skills of paying fine attention to detail, the ability to work obsessively for not so much as a pat on the back, a promotion, or a raise in privileges, are really worth. And they have decided to give me a vacation on Mars.

He smiled to himself, wondering what sins Gustav Helmut Nadel was guilty of for having Kord along as his junior officer.

Good old Norse-Staff Helmet Needle, Kord added the ‘Dick’ on the end of Gustav’s surname himself, silently, in his mind. Gustav certainly had a very phallic name. Very unfortunately phallic. The thought made him smile. Gustav was not really a bad sort. He was just incompetent. But then, so were most people.

The English-speaking presenter droned on about the rate of speed of one of the moles and how they would be able to create tunnels at a rate of almost a kilometre per hour. Fascinating stuff, thought Kord caustically.

They were being shown the partially constructed foundations of a new building at Base One. Apparently, the Martians had agreed on some cease-fire between their varying factions. Kord knew the other delegation from Luna was also being shown a similar building, though belonging to the Stanger faction, thus creating separate facilities within Base One.

By careful questions they had been able to surmise that, while Base One was still somewhat in contention, the two sides had agreed to a no-go neutral zone for their guests from Luna and had opted to begin construction of separate buildings for each side. The currently contended areas became parts of the neutral zone, which seemed to actually compose the largest part of the Martian forces if their observations and data monitoring on approach from orbit were accurate.

As they continued to observe the mole in front of them —an object that Kord could not be less interested in— he noticed a small, open-topped ground transport, similar perhaps to a more futuristic looking version of an Earth Jeep, leave a small building about a hundred metres away. He noticed a woman, alone and seemingly dressed in military uniform, was driving it. He took his personal recorder, zoomed it in, and filmed her, ignoring the lecture on moles and their snail-like rates of rock penetration. If he was not mistaken, on Mars they had female military personnel. He wanted to laugh. These ausländers were comical. If Luna attacked en masse in the early morning, they would be able to have the whole planet brought to its knees before dinner time. He could not suppress a smile to himself. She was pretty too. Jet black hair, like his own. They had passed the new genetic purity laws long ago of course, but lingering superstition always took longer to change. Even though black hair was not considered impure —the Ahnenerbe had proved it beyond any scientific doubt decades ago— it still elicited a certain suspicion in people. The thought of the pretty woman in the military uniform with her black hair excited Kord’s sense of the improper. It would be likely, if I mated one like that, that our kids would have black hair too. Maybe dark eyes as well. A proper little set of un-aryan looking little bastards, just like me. His discordant sense of humour made him smile again. He wondered if she had any Jewess genes in her as she drove off into the distance.

This Substack will therefore cover the period during which Kord performed the investigation that seems to have stumped what was an otherwise fast-rising career. The events we will cover took place mostly in 1997.

If the German names and organisations are a little bewildering… read the Author’s notes on Book III concerning the various real organisations the Nazis had, and you’ll see I have actually “streamlined” the rabbit-warren that is German love for authoritarian bureaucracy. Orpo stands for Oder Police, and this explanation is taken from Book III. And yes, in the book, I do cover all the other branches (in the link to the blog too).

The second internal policing structure is what is known as the Ordnungspolizei, or Orpo (Order Police) Although in Nazi Germany the Orpo was the precursor of the Kripo, the name Order Police on Luna has rather different connotations. In a perfect society, which the Nazis on Luna clearly must believe they now are, given as the sub-humans are clearly and especially segregated from the good, clean and pure Aryans and thus cannot have any corrupting influences (you know, apart from being connected to the good clean Aryans by way of institutionalised rape, abuse, slavery and other even more vile practices), there cannot actually be any crime. As such, it just would not do to have a Kripo (Criminal Police). No, no, that would be wrong and can’t therefore exist. Instead the Luna Nazis have the Orpo, the much nicer sounding Order Police. Occasionally, a good solid Aryan citizen goes astray or, you know, slightly crazy, and may cause a slight disorder in the neat, clean, pure and good life of ordinary, solid Nazis. Like lose it completely and kill someone, or even several someones. Or maybe question in some meaningful way (or even just slightly) the order of things and the Nazi ideology on Luna. Such unfortunately misguided citizens need to be merely redirected —educated, if you will— back into the good clean fold of proper Aryan Nazis. The Orpo, though masquerading somewhat as a pseudo-civilian institution —though armed (in defence of the realm of course)—of purely benign and civilising influence, is in reality composed of some of the most secretive, sharpest and most totalitarian elements of Nazi society on Luna. They can literally ‘disappear’ anyone at almost any time and for almost any reason. They are also tasked with the identifying, tracking and sourcing of any PSI-related phenomena exhibited by non-Ahnenerbe elements of Nazi society, as well as generally involved in the subjugating of any unpleasant information that would not be good for average citizens or even average soldiers to trouble themselves with.

The Orpo, though strictly speaking not actually a branch of the armed forces, can and does rival any other organisational structure on Luna in terms of the power their individual elements comprise of. While an overt coup by Orpo is not possible, due to their lacking an effectively armed and plentiful armed component, they may indeed rule by infiltration and assimilation. Somewhat similarly to the Ahnenerbe-SD (which does retain an armed branch, though far inferior to the other armed forces on Luna) the Orpo rules by fear, secrets and infiltration. Additionally, though not officially confirmed, it is believed that Orpo may have access to highly trained PSI capable individuals. They also work closely with the Ahnenerbe-SD, or at least as closely as two such organisations can, like pit vipers placed in the same hole really.

So, this hopefully gives you the background you need concerning Kord, but you still have nothing on why Luna has Earth-Gravity as standard as well as atmosphere in all the areas that… have gravitors. You really kind of need to read the series to get the whole picture with regard to the technologies involved (all of which are pretty much real, my SF has a lot of S and just enough F to make the story interesting.)

Partly, this is why I am not sure if this will work. There are a LOT of technologies, concepts and ideas that are presented very early on in Book I, that make absolute sense, are based on very real technologies that absolutely exist and further plot lines develop on the basis of some of these ideas throughout the books. So, while this might work (If I don’t screw it up) it will probably tend to appeal most to people who have already read the OOM trilogy. At any rate, whether you all spread the word and get more subscribers to appear or not will let me know if it’s working or not.

At any rate, the rank of Field Inspector in the Orpo is roughly equivalent to a relatively junior officer in another branch of the military, usually a Lieutenant.

And in case you are wondering, yes, field inspectors did keep work product diaries and in fact many soldiers did too, as the image below of a soldier’s pocket diary for 1942 clearly shows.

And for a visual, Kord has black hair and brown eyes. In 1997 he would be about 28-29 years old and doing well for his age at already being a Field Inspector in an organisation like the Orpo. It also meant he could generally go about his business in civilian clothing, which didn’t mean much, and in fact could in a way be even more intimidating in Luna, since men not in uniform were harder to place in the very Germanic and hierarchical power structure present on Luna.

And in case you were wondering, yes, the Orpo was a real thing an had its own insignia too.

At any rate, this should be enough by way of introduction.

This post was originally published on my Substack. Link here