Why The Pen Name John Argo?

Worlds of Wonder, 3000 B.C. When we began publishing novels online in 1996, at the dawn of Internet publishing, I was deeply struck by the wonder of this new medium. Having a Classics background among other fields of study (English, History, Languages), I immediately compared the magic of that moment in time to another age of wonder: the ancient Aegean Sea, as the Hellenic age emerged from the Dark Ages following the collapse of the Bronze Age. To put almost precise numbers on it from what we know, there was a sweeping climate event that devastated part of the globe around 1200 BCE. Within a generation, the linked infrastructure of numerous great civilizations collapsed. Egypt went into a long, terminal decline; the Hittites all but vanished in Asia Minor; Mesopotamia went into a decine lasting for centuries. All through the Dark Age that lasted from about 1200 to about 900 BCE, story tellers throughout that part of the world kept alive memories and myths of gods and heroes (men and women who were half divine, half human) and other imaginative science fictions and fantasies of that time. When the Hellenic age dawned, and poets like Homer and Hesiod in the 8th Century began spinning wondrous accounts of ages past, the world got not alone the Iliad and the Odyssey, but other families of stories like those (still being made into movies in our time) of Jason and the sailors (Argonauts) aboard the magic ship of adventure named Argo, after the ship builder Argos who constructed her. Most famous among the stories is the quest of Jason and the Argonauts (literally 'Argo Sailors') to recover a famous Golden Fleece… well, from that ancient age of wonder, Jean-Thomas Cullen (a.k.a. John T. Cullen, yours truly) chose a fitting name to reflect the magic of the moment. This is before e-commerce, before cyber-crime, before the filth arrived. In that Age of Argonauts online, Neon Blue (later subtitled Girl, Unlocked reflecting on heroine DEA Special Agent Laurel 'Blue' Humboldt's inner conflicts) and Heartbreaker (SF novel by yours truly, retitled This Shoal of Space in 1998) had avid fans and readers all over the world. Those Argo days lasted but two years at mosst before the rest of the world caught on. But it was great. In the afterglow of Bronze Age memories of wonder, there was long a constellation in the Southern Skies, called Argo Navis (Ship Argo). Astronomers in recent centuries have broken Argo Navis up into its component parts (Carina, or Keel; Puppis, or Stern, and now you know why sailing ships' sterns were called poop decks; and Vela, or Sail) but the wonder remains. In reading stories first released on line as the first HTML novels, you are reliving a bit of that time. Visit Classic Reads at Galley City, and relive a bit of the magic.

Browse or Buy at Amazon

The book linked at left is an e-book edition to browse; or buy & download from Amazon for your Kindle reader.
     The middle link is for the corresponding print edition. Most of these are standard 6x9"; a few have added trim sizes available (5x8"). More info at Amazon.com.
     Most print editions are also available at Barnes & Noble online; or call/visit your local bookstore to order.

Read Half Free/Try-Buy at Galley City

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Visit Galley City's Classics Page to read half free/try-buy most of my novels. The Classics page features most of the 1990s first HTML novels I published on Neon Blue Fiction or The Haunted Village (see Clocktower Books Museum pages for more info).

Global Best Digital Novel 1996-1999. We can't call them bestsellers, because this is before e-commerce, so they weren't 'sellers'. As one Internet historian mentioned in her 1999 book, we were giving the books away promotionally. That's referring to Neon Blue (and its immediate successors, the SF novel This Shoal of Space in July 1996; Constitution Thriller CON2: The Generals of October in early 1997; and shorter works like the thriller Terror in my Arms in 1998). The author (John T. Cullen, writing genre fiction as John Argo) received excited fan e-mails from avid readers around the globe on every continent, in cities as far-flung as Toronto, Canada and Johannesburg, South Africa; nations including Germany, China, Argentina, and of course across the newly Web-installed USA.

Best Seller on Barnes & Noble. Barnes & Noble's Len Riggio was an early investor in innovative startups like Nuvomedia, producer of the first real e-book hardware, the Rocket eBook. We were bestsellers in the tiny but fervent Rocket eBook market in the late 1990s. By about 2000, Barnes & Noble had launched a website (bn.com and other domain names) where the John Argo books were high-flying bestsellers for over a year. Then B&N killed off that site (the e-book portion) for several years before getting back into e-books after a hiatus. During that hiatus, the number one e-book venue online was Fictionwise, where John T. Cullen a.k.a John Argo had many top sellers (including the top ten or more in Nonfiction/History) before Barnes & Noble purchased Fictionwise and killed it off by January 2012. The point is that Neon Blue, This Shoal of Space, and similar works from Clocktower Books San Diego were top sellers and popular works in a pioneering, innovative age when Web publishing was brand-new and wonderful. It was a venue frequented by web-savvy, tekkie, usually SF-literate, college educated men and women who enjoyed an innovative, intellectually rewarding, even literary read. With over a million books flooding the market by 2017, needless to say, that had all become history.