Introduction
to The Lofting Agency

This small website provides descriptions of my books in print, with some related material: these are available for several formats & platforms.

In 2014, after some professional legal pressure, I reacquired the rights to my science fiction novel The Shadow of the Ship: its Revised Edition was published in 2014.

Sphinx Daybreak is a science fiction novel (or fantasy novel, if you prefer), published in 2018.

Foundational to what you see in print and much more, my heartfelt Acknowledgements, or Thanks for Righting.

I provide a little procedural background in Writers' Tools & Workflow.

The review-and-essay website Troynovant.com, established in 2001, has reviews of these novels, along with much else. When the link is to that website's top level, it will open in a new window; otherwise within the current Lofting Agency window.

For folks undecided whether to prefer an ebook or paperback edition, here are some basic thoughts. Printed-Paper Books versus Ebooks: Costs & Benefits.

— Robert Wilfred Franson
    editor@Troynovant.com

  
Ulysses (to Achilles):

                     Time hath, my lord,
A wallet at his back, wherein he puts
Alms for oblivion, a great-sized monster
Of ingratitudes. Those scraps are good deeds past,
Which are devoured as fast as they are made,
Forgot as soon as done. Perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honor bright.

William Shakespeare
Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.139-145

  
The intellectual methods of science do not differ in kind from those applied by the common man in his daily mundane reasoning. The scientist uses the same tools which the layman uses; he merely uses them more skillfully and cautiously. Understanding is not a privilege of the historians. It is everybody's business. In observing the conditions of his environment everybody is a historian.

Everybody uses understanding in dealing with the uncertainty of future events to which he must adjust his own actions. The distinctive reasoning of the speculator is an understanding of the relevance of the various factors determining future events. And ... action necessarily always aims at future and therefore uncertain conditions and this is always speculation.

Acting man looks, as it were, with the eyes of a historian into the future.

Ludwig von Mises
"The Epistemological Problems", S.8
Human Action
A Treatise on Economics  (1949; 3rd edition 1966)
[emphasis added]