Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

My writing life…

Wednesday, December 13th, 2023

About this time every year, I start thinking about what has gone on in the previous ones, in this case, 2023 and before. With everything going on in the world and the US now—much of it not to my liking, to say the least—I couldn’t help thinking that I started to get serious about publishing my stories not lot long after 9/11. My first novel, Full Medical, was dedicated to someone we lost in that tragic, terrible, terrorist event, although it wasn’t the first that I’d submitted to agents and acquisition editors, mistakenly thinking that traditional publishing was the only possible way to publish a book.

Now, after many novels and short fiction works, I can’t say that I have a lot of fans (aka readers eagerly awaiting my next story?), but I can say that I’m satisfied with my professional writing life, as short as it has been. I can also wonder if my oeuvre would have been a lot more extensive if I’d been publishing my fiction all my life.

Looking back farther than 9/11, it’s not hard to imagine what themes I might have had in my fiction. Themes have always been important to me. A plethora of characters have expressed opinions on many social issues, and I’d have had many more expressing a lot more if I’d started earlier. Like the real world, different characters express different opinions as I try to present all sides of an issue associated with a particular theme. That’s not easy when there are many sides, or the one supported by a character is so evil and a sign of madness, but a wide spectrum makes the fiction seem more real, to misquote Tom Clancy a bit.

My aim has rarely been to settle an issue even though readers might think that they know which side of an issue I prefer. For example, my novel Gaia and the Goliaths (seventh novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series—see the ad below) has global warming and climate control as its major theme, but it offers nuclear power as part of the solution, something that tree-huggers and green parties would deny us although nuclear power is the non-fossil fuel par excellence and a lot more efficient, less costly, and less space consuming than solar, wind, and hydroelectric. (Nuclear power gets a bum-wrap because of bombs and waste products. The first causes people to become ostriches, burying their heads in the sand; the second is easily solvable by putting those nasty waste products where they can’t do any harm, i.e., off Earth.)

Most fiction (especially that published by the Big Five publishing conglomerates) is pablum because it ignores the difficult yet important themes. In other words, it violates Tom Clancy’s rule that fiction must seem real. I have no “official stats” to prove it, but I suspect that’s why my stories don’t sell well. Many readers don’t want to be reminded about real-world problems, so, to maximize the number of readers, the Big Five insists that its authors avoid important themes. That’s why silly romance novels, cozy mysteries, and fantasy are so popular—most fiction read is pure escapism.

Instead, the entertainment aspect is of secondary importance in my storytelling; writing a tale with a meaningful theme and plot that features it has always been more important to me. I can understand why many readers don’t like that. That’s okay. If my stories can only reach out to a few readers who want serious fiction, I’ll consider my writing life a success.

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Note: I’ll now take a wee vacation from writing this blog. May everyone enjoy this holiday season and read some meaningful fiction during their time off. I’ll resume this blog on January 3, 2024.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

The “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series. This entire eight-book series treats many important themes as these NYPD detectives solve crimes occurring in NYC, the US, and beyond. Please note that the eighth novel, Defanging the Red Dragon, is a free PDF download (see the list of all free PDF downloads on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page) that was an earlier holiday gift from me that’s still “evergreen,” i.e., as fresh as the day I wrote it (which is true of all my novels). The others are ebooks available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Is post-apocalyptic fiction sci-fi?

Wednesday, November 1st, 2023

Post-apocalyptic literature considers a possible if bleak future, so I suppose that one quality might make it sci-fi. It also teaches important lessons and provides warnings about when human beings are currently making mistakes, something it also shares with general sci-fi literature. But it’s often far from space exploration and ETs. The standard trappings of sci-fi, especially those of space opera (like movies from the Star Wars franchise), just aren’t there, though.

It’s hard to write post-apocalyptic literature. First, you have to create a believable apocalypse. A beta-reader for The Last Humans (the first novel in the trilogy of the same name) didn’t find its apocalypse too believable. I’m guessing that the Covid pandemic changed that opinion. The apocalypse in the novel is a bioengineered virus that spreads around the world. If you believe the Chinese, Covid wasn’t bioengineered in their Wuhan lab, but it still spread around the world. We know now that a viral apocalypse is a real possibility!

For that novel, I was more interested in the survivors. The main character, Penny Castro, an ex-USN SAR diver working for the LA Sheriff Department, rises to the challenge of surviving that apocalypse. That first novel (published by Black Opal Books) ends with some semblance of normalcy as Penny and her new family create a new life on a citrus ranch.

Of course, unless an apocalypse kills everyone (then there are no stories to follow!), there are the good, bad, and ugly among the survivors. Penny, her family, and her friends are among the good ones; others might want to finish destroying the world; and still others, driven by different motives, might want to stop them. The second novel in the trilogy, A New Dawn, picks up this theme. That theme continues in another part of the world in the third novel, Menace from Moscow (published just this year), tests Penny and her family again.

Now that I’ve finished this trilogy, I must say that it doesn’t seem to be much like sci-fi! A worldwide pandemic is clearly possible (Covid was one!), and the post-apocalyptic situation that follows that apocalypse is more like a standard thriller story. Penny is a noble warrior, a survivalist who changes history and leaves the world in better shape by doing so. This often occurs in real life: So many of our veterans are heroes in this sense.

In brief, I’ll continue to call this trilogy a collection of three post-apocalyptic thrillers. Readers can call it sci-fi if they wish. In any case, I hope readers will find it both profound and entertaining.

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Comments are always welcome. (See the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

“The Last Humans” Trilogy. Ex-USN SAR diver comes up after locating a victim for the LA Sheriff Department only to find a world gone mad. Missiles targeted at the US West Coast have released a killer virus that goes round the world on the prevailing winds. Her initial struggles for survival are described in the first novel, The Last Humans. Her battle to prevent an “improved version” of the virus to be released is found in the second, A New Dawn. And preventing enemy-survivors from recovering nuclear missiles tests Penny’s resolve even further in the third, Menace from Moscow. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (The first novel also has a print edition.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Sci-fi as extrapolation…

Wednesday, September 20th, 2023

The general public often misunderstands the progress of science, at best buying into the standard explanation that a theory is constructed to explain a lot of data and then tested over time as more data accumulates to prove the theory right or wrong, ad infinitum. That’s the so-called “scientific method,” and any child in a basic science course might hear or read that much without really experiencing it or understand what it means.

I suppose that explanation is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn’t consider the role of imagination, even among scientists—children are brainwashed to believe that advances just flow from cold, experimental facts, if that. The reality is that a theory originates because one or more imaginative people look at data and say, “How do I explain this?”, and then go about imagining an explanation. (Some people polish that up by calling it “creative thinking,” but imagination is the better word!) Same for new data especially if it contradicts aspects of an old theory.

We should perhaps consider sci-fi as an important way to use imagination as an effective tool to stimulate all creative thinking, a filter for determining what might be possible, which is why so many scientists (or ex-scientists who are still thinking like scientists) read (and even write) good sci-fi. Extrapolation of current science, often far into the future, is what makes that tool so effective. (I’m excluding fantasy and space-opera authors here, especially screenwriters, who rarely worry about contradicting even current science: “Full stop, Mr. Sulu!” or “Warp 9, Mr. Sulu!” are examples of their foolishness; ninja-like warriors fighting with light sabers are others; time-travel romances and cannibalistic ETs; etc., etc. In fact, most of what Margaret Atwood called “speculative fiction” is excluded!) The sci-fi author has to be prepared to win a few and lose a few, though. (Phasers were very much like today’s smart phones; but the transporter is beyond the impossible, albeit necessary for screenwriting purposes in Star Trek.)

I began writing the “Chaos Chronicles” trilogy, my version of Asimov’s Foundation  trilogy, long before my first novel Full Medical was published. (All three novels of that trilogy are bundled now—see below.) Unlike my hero Asimov, who basically swept FTL-travel and ETs under the rug (the first simply is accomplished by “jumps through hyperspace” and is never explained beyond that; the lack of the second is eventually explained in the extended Foundation series as a trick performed by the time-travelers in End of Eternity, but time travel is never explained), as a physicist I worked harder on my extrapolations than Asimov the biochemist wanted to do, at least for the FTL-travel and certainly for ETs. (The ETs might eventually be explained by congressional inquiries actually studying UFO phenomena! One should probably ignore the “mummified ETs” in Peru that excite the Mexican government, and certainly all the tales of abduction and seduction UFO nuts prattle about.)

A few weeks ago in this blog, I wrote an obit for an old professor of mine, James Hartle. (No, he wasn’t any more an ET than I am, but he sure was a hell of lot more intelligent.) Some of his work was with Hawking, and that motivated me when writing my sci-fi trilogy to consider what’s now called the multiverse, the idea that our Universe is only one among many quantum states of an infinite collection of universes. (Much later, this was the basis for my novel A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, a sci-fi rom-com.) I also knew something about zero-point energy. In standard quantum electrodynamics, that’s what allows a froth of virtual photons to give spin to the electron, for example, and the idea has been extended to the entire zoo of elementary particles, including the mysterious Higgs particle, that are, after all, just quantum states themselves (perhaps of only one particle?). In other words, there could be virtual universes as well.

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Apologies to Dr. Asimov…

Wednesday, August 30th, 2023

In my novel A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, a physicist and her technician “time travel” by hopping from one universe in the multiverse to another, thus allowing me to avoid the paradoxes associated with so many flawed time-travel tales. After one of these “jumps,” they find themselves on an Earth where only androids remain, a version of the completely robotic world envisioned by Aurora’s Spacers in Isaac Asimov’s Robots of Dawn, the third novel in his robot series. (The first two are Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. All three are classic sci-fi mysteries that I can highly recommend to anyone who truly loves quality sci-fi, not the schmaltzy space operas like Star Wars.)

I probably didn’t do Asimov’s creation any justice, so I must apologize…to his family now, since the master’s gone. The flavor of my portrayal is correct, but one short fiction episode of my novel can’t begin to describe the completely android world the evil Auroran roboticists of his novel desired. They did have a point, though. The puny explorations of our own solar system have largely been made using robots—primitive ones, to be sure, but robots all the same. Why endanger human lives when robots, especially those so advanced as Aurora’s, can be used to colonize faraway solar systems?

Of course, there’s a twist in that episode of my novel that helps answer that question: The main characters, both human, teach the robots something. While my novel is more a sci-fi rom-com and not a standard mystery disguised as sci-fi, Asimov’s answer is more complete if only because he uses a whole novel to support it…or not! (My novel has more fables to offer the reader and therefore more morals as if I were a modern-day Aesop.)

In fact, the meat of my apology to Dr. Asimov is more inspired by the fact that I didn’t put the discussion of this blog post in the end notes of my novel. While some of its sections (“fables”) refer specifically either to historical events (the demise of Hitler’s A-bomb effort, for example) or fictional settings (the android world, for example), I perhaps should have mentioned that the android world was inspired by Asimov’s third novel and not his first two. (Although one could argue that the “moon colony” section was inspired by Caves of Steel.)

Many of the “classic writers” of mysteries, adventure stories (now called thrillers), and sci-fi novels have influenced my stories. Isaac Asimov is probably the most important one. I can only hope that he’d have forgiven me. I did make him almost a god for that android society, after all. (He becomes Sir Isaac Asimov, the “master creator,” along with Hugh Everett III. You don’t know who the latter bloke is? Look him up. He’s important for explaining all the time travel techniques!)

You might wonder if AI, all the rage right now, is mentioned in my novel. Robots and androids are AIs, after all. Yes, an even larger and smarter AI is in my book, but only towards the end. There I might have to apologize to Arthur C. Clarke or Stanley Kubrick, but my AI isn’t named HAL.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules found on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. An applied physicist uses quantum mechanics to create a practical way to do time travel. Aided by her very intelligent technician, the pair take romantic trips to various universes in the multiverse as they explore alternative spaces and times, running into a lot of trouble in the process. This sci-fi rom-com makes sappy and trite adventures like The Time Traveler’s Wife more like fluffy fantasies. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Politics vs. science…

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2023

From the Church’s persecution of Galileo Galilei to McCarthy’s persecution of Oppenheimer and the Good Ole Piranhas’ (GOP’s) persecution of climate scientists later, conservative idiots and fascist politicians have tried to score points and foment hatred by blaming scientists. Politics vs. science has existed for so long that it’s a miracle that any scientific and technological progress beyond that made in weaponry has been made. It’s been an eternal struggle.

I saw some of this on a more personal level during the Vietnam War era. I was lucky enough to be able to take two related graduate level courses at UC Santa Barbara, general relativity and topology—small seminars of five students each with a lot of personal attention provided by two very smart young professors. The physics professor left a considerable impression on me, in particular (although the math professor recognized I had an advantage because I knew physics).

Professor James Hartle, that young physics prof, spent a good part of his academic life trying to unite quantum theory and gravitational theory to obtain a theory of quantum gravity, often working with Hawking. One of his later students once said, “He so easily could have tried to grab some of that limelight that shown on Stephen [Hawking]. He never did.”

As a Cal Tech graduate student, Hartle worked on particle physics with Gell-Mann, though, not general relativity (Gell-Mann discovered the particle classification scheme, known as the “eightfold way,” that is based on the SU(3) symmetry group that has eight generators). But the first thing I learned about him was that he was the graduate student who’d drawn many of the diagrams found in the original second volume of the Feynman Lectures on Physics where Feynman introduced general relativity principles using a linearized theory (in an introductory physics course, mind you!). In my UCSB seminar, we used those lectures as an introduction to meatier material. (It focused more on some classic texts, including Weinberg’s Gravitation.)

At that time, our professor and we students in that seminar had other worries: the Vietnam War was turning UC campuses into hotbeds of protest, mostly peaceful. When we weren’t holding hands in silent protest against the war during lunch hours, the undergraduates among us were worried about being drafted out of graduate school. Professor Hartle had similar worries: He was only an assistant professor at the time, and the US government wanted to draft him! Fortunately, the university went to bat for him: He didn’t have to go. I went on to graduate school and lost contact with this very intelligent fellow, but I later ended up at many scientific events where “everybody knew his name”: Kip Thorne and John Wheeler in New Orleans, Richard Feynman in Bloomington, and so forth. I even tried to keep up with his work on quantizing gravity that he did with Stephen Hawking—mission impossible! I couldn’t spend the the time on it to achieve any real understanding because I was working on other research and teaching.

Professor Hartle was one of the exceptions, a scientist who was lucky enough to get help in doing battle against an uncaring officialdom. Perhaps we can say that he fell “through the cracks”—fascist politicians had a lot of people they could pursue, so Hartle escaped their clutches—but the world of scientific research was made better and greatly improved by his escape, if only for his students that he guided during his long life.

James Hartle died on May 17 in Switzerland. He was 83. He wouldn’t have remembered me, but I will never forget him.

Drake, Fermi, and SETI…

Friday, September 16th, 2022

[Note from Steve: Frank Drake, the father of the SETI program and much of radio astronomy, passed away last week at 92. He was director of the Arecibo Observatory from 1971 to 1981. Consider this post my feeble attempt to honor this great man.]

I felt sad when I read about the demise of the Arecibo radio telescope, and even sadder when I learned about Frank Drake’s passing. When I attended a conference at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Mayaguez years ago (1970s)—it’s on the opposite side of the island from San Juan—we stopped on the way there to take a tour of that facility. It filled an entire valley and filled me with pride that human beings, scientists like me (at the time), could create such an awesome structure dedicated to exploring the Universe. At that time, Arecibo was a principal center for radio astronomy. Not only was it an important place for probing the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, it was also the home of SETI, a program whose goal was to search for signs of intelligent life in the Universe, presumably originating in radio signals emitted by other civilizations in the cosmos.

Frank Drake and others began that search. Fermi, the last physicist who worked in both the theoretical and experimental sides of physics, once asked the taunting question, “Where are they?” He was referring to ETs, of course. SETI was designed to answer that question. With both Arecibo and SETI gone, one has to wonder who’s trying to answer it now, especially considering all the exoplanets that have been discovered since Arecibo was built.

Of course, searches for ET life with radio signals depend on ET civilizations existing “out there” that broadcast in that narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Drake’s famous equation enters into that argument: Depending on the values assigned to the terms in the equation, the likelihood of such a civilization existing can be estimated. I haven’t seen any scientists revisiting this equation and adjusting the terms according to how many exoplanets have been found. Perhaps they should?

Of course, there are other ways for such civilizations to signal us. In A. B. Carolan’s Origins, the ETs are here on Earth, and they are us. In More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, I considered the possibility of interstellar probes launched by such a civilization looking for a new home. In other words, the ETs came to us, an unusual “first contact.” In Sing a Zamba Galactica, #2 in the ebook bundle, The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection (see below), I assumed that we’d discover the ETs by traveling “out there.” (In that novel, the “first contact” was with friendly ETs. I also included the ubiquitous alien invasion later in the book!)

Sci-fi writers often avoid Fermi’s question completely. In Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi universe, found in the Foundation series, there are no ETs! There’s a lot of good sci-fi without ETs (rarely of the variety known as “space opera,” e.g. Star Wars, that invariably contains ETs), so one can’t really criticize Asimov.

I guess we won’t have an answer to Fermi’s question for a long time, if ever. Frank Drake tried to answer it with the tools he had available. As exciting as recent developments have been (exoplanets and black holes, Space-X and new NASA programs, and instrumentation advances like the Hubble and Webb telescopes), we’re probably centuries away from sending expeditions to even the nearest planetary systems. (Such expeditions were limited to nearby Sol-type stars in the first two novels of the “Chaos Chronicles,” where “nearby” still means tens of light-years!)

Of course, it’s always possible that ETs will visit us as they do in More than Human or Origins. In the first novel, we’re descended from them in a sense. In the second, they came without knowing Earth already had tenants. Then the answer to Fermi’s question is simple: They’re here!

In any case, his question could be unanswerable except via sci-fi. And whether they ever come to Earth or we go out there, only the ruins of civilizations might be found because they’ve destroyed themselves. Right now, it seems we might be headed that way ourselves!

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The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

 

“Covid novels”?

Wednesday, March 9th, 2022

I reacted badly to an article in the February 21st NY Times, “Writers Wonder Whether People Want to Curl Up with a Covid Novel.” The reason? The Times wants to label any novel dealing with a pandemic in this manner, which is completely moronic, of course.

Is Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain a Covid novel? What about my own More than Human: The Mensa Contagion and “The Last Humans” series? We can’t ask Michael his opinion, but I can tell you mine: I’ll verbally blast anyone who says my books are Covid novels (as I’m doing now to the editors of the Times!).

Many stories have been written with a pandemic theme. Strain and More than Human are both about ET viruses, but mine turn out to be a lot more benign than Michael’s. In “The Last Humans” series, I consider the plausible scenario where an enemy uses a bioengineered virus as a WMD. Clancy also did that in one of his novels—I can’t remember which one—but his hero stopped that attack whereas mine has the more difficult job of coping with the post-apocalyptic aftermath. (Of course, in the real world, we might want to blame Xi’s China of doing that with Covid…or maybe Trump?)

The WMD scenario is actually more plausible than the ET scenario, but both are examples where bioengineered viruses can lead to drastic upheavals and die-offs. It would be another case of tech coming back to might the foolish humans who create it, perhaps well-meaning but not too bright as they ignore their unintended consequences.

I prefer the benign consequences of More than Human to Strain‘s. And I don’t know why I continue to promote “The Last Humans” series. The traditional publisher of the first book in the series (Black Opal Books) really disappointed me, and then the Amazon bots confused both books. The series seems to be doomed whether the Times might call it a Covid book or not.

Right now, I suppose that most readers aren’t in the mood for any fiction involving pandemics. I can understand that. But readers’ complaints about vaccine and masking mandates enacted to protect us against Covid fall on my deaf ears when I think that people would have had ample warning about pandemics if they had only read more pre-pandemic literature.

Sci-fi, mystery, and thriller novels often provide useful warnings about threats humans could face. When we ignore them, there can be real and deadly consequences!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Coming this spring! I hope you weren’t spoiled by the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, that you can download for free (see the list of free fiction on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). I was thinking about ending the series, you see, but I’ve changed my mind. Esther and Bastiann conspired with my muses (really banshees with Tasers!) to “encourage” me to write novel #8, The Klimt Connection. Despite the title (Gustav Klimt was an Austrian artist), the novel is another warning about how we can never let our guard down in the eternal war of democracy vs. autocracy (Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine is a recent example of the dangers). This novel will be published in ebook format by Draft2Digital. Look for it then, wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I told you so…

Friday, January 14th, 2022

I certainly wasn’t the first sci-fi writer to portray a viral pandemic, but my More than Human: The Mensa Contagion follows the progression of a contagion in human populations that was a preview of what we’re experiencing with Covid: Deadly at first and not so transmissible but then mutating to a more benign version that has “learned” not to kill so efficiently so the virus can survive.

Of course, this is no accident. Before I started that novel, I studied many aspects of viral pandemics, basically how viruses do their thing. I was super-specialized as a scientist; as a sci-fi writer, I’ve had to become more of a generalist because sci-fi themes cover most of science (assuming they’re not fantasies or space operas). Some topics I’ve had to study are: cloning, dirty bombs, possibilities for FTL travel, AI, and robotics. (You can have some fun trying to matching these up with fifteen years of works.) Becoming an amateur and armchair scientist in this self-educational enterprise, I suppose I’ve made some mistakes. (For the experts reading this, assuming they also read sci-fi, are always welcome to correct me.)

In a similar novel (similar only in its pandemic theme), The Last Humans, a virus was bioengineered and weaponized to have killer characteristics like the original Covid and speed of transmission of the new Omicron mutation. That usually doesn’t happen in nature because natural viruses tend to evolve from one extreme to the other,. But I imagined that a bioengineered virus could do both and be carried around the world on prevailing winds, no matter where the original target happened to be.

These books were warnings, of course, at least from the viral point of view. I will never claim to be prescient, but I can always say, “I told you so,” because I did. I studied the science!

And that brings me to an important question: Do people who diss science, don’t believe it, and believe the many falsehoods about our natural world and universe instead, do these people read sci-fi? Do they ever read anything beyond the lies and conspiracy theories propagated on social media and outlets like Fox News? I suspect not., At the most, they think Marvel Comics characters and Harry Potter tell us how the real world works! Their take on the real world is pure fantasy. Maybe these people could benefit by reading hard sci-fi, not fantastic tales from Hollywood, TV, or social media that just amplify and pander to their ignorance?

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules found on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

You’ll find the ebook versions of the novels mentioned above at most online retailers that sell quality ebooks. A print version of The Last Humans is also available.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

 

The science behind the sci-fi in A. B. Carolan’s Origins…

Wednesday, April 14th, 2021

Sci-fi often extrapolates current science or “invents” new science we might see in the future. A.B. Carolan’s new book Origins (see last week’s preview) does both, but it’s mostly based on ongoing scientific discovery about human beings’ past. Denisovan and Hobbit hominids have had more press lately than Cro-Magnons and Neandertals because they’re new discoveries. They flourished thousands of years ago, and bits of their DNA are found in modern humans’ DNA (modern humans are mainly Cro-Magnon descendants). A.B. summarizes the current situation in his end notes:

 

“When I began thinking about a plot with genetics as a theme, Anna Utkin [an early short story of mine] turned me towards human prehistory. The final inspiration occurred when I found the portrait of a young Denisovan girl. (The interested reader can google ‘What did Denisovans look like?’ to see answers to that question—I focused on the BBC version.) It might seem weird, but I immediately thought, ‘Here’s a young girl who doesn’t look like any girl I know.’ That led to other thoughts along the lines that we often react negatively to people who don’t look or act like us and don’t seem to fit into our personal ‘tribe.’ Could I write a story that takes such a girl and makes her into a reluctant hero—almost a superhero even? I could and did, and you have just read the first installment. I hope more will follow.”

“That BBC portrait* has an interesting history, by the way. From genetic material in a pinky and jaw bones (not from the same archaeological site, mind you), researchers were able to construct the entire Denisovan genome and then use it to show us what that Denisovan girl must have looked like. For me, that portrait is Kayla [A.B.’s protagonist], a twenty-first-century Denisovan descendant who is super-smart and can kick ass with the best superheroes”

“The search for the origins of modern humans and their cousins continues to be the focus of exciting research, and the Denisovans, only discovered recently, are no exceptions. Unlike the equating of ancient hominids to burros and horses, i.e., species unable to breed and have fertile offspring, a theory found in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (his first two chapters, in particular), which Steve and I read long after I wrote the manuscript for this book, the DNA evidence shows ancient hominids did interbreed. Yet I had to wonder: If they could do so, why not more? Why aren’t we more of a mix of Cro-Magnons (always called Homo sapiens by Professor Harari), Neanderthals, and Denisovans, as well as other ancient hominids thrown in? Considering that Cro-Magnons’ descendants have come to be the dominant species, maybe that just means that they were the bad-ass denizens of ancient Earth? Maybe they were so bent on conquest that they didn’t have that much time to intermingle? I then asked myself: Would they even do so if that hominid evolution was interrupted by visitors from the stars?”

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The “Marching Morons,” Part Two…

Monday, April 12th, 2021

First they ignored masks, social distancing, and washing hands…young (i.e. idiots less than forty) doing just what the virus wanted people to do. It was all about hedonism and freedom; “we deserve to have fun!” Completely irresponsible behavior! Now they refuse to be vaccinated. As we approach a situation where vaccine supplies are more than enough to vaccinate anyone over sixteen, i.e,. we can achieve herd immunity in a safe way, too many in this age group now express their freedom by refusing the vaccine.

Unlike the “marching morons” in C. M. Kornbluth’s classic novella, our current morons might be bright enough otherwise—and maybe that’s how their sociopathic behavior arises—but they’re too stupid to realize they’re playing Russian roulette with five chambers loaded. And, when it comes to public health, they’re selfish people who don’t care about their fellow citizens.

It’s not for lack of information. They obviously don’t read this blog, which isn’t much of a surprise (they might never read anything intelligent!), but can’t they see and hear all the warnings about the danger of those crazy actions mentioned above? Maybe they do; they just don’t believe them because they don’t want to.

Because of political proclivities, religious beliefs, conspiracy theories—whatever—some of these current morons rationalize their actions with them. That verb is absurd’ there’s nothing rational going on here. Others are just in defiance. They’re all marching over the cliff. Generally there a lot of hypocrites too…or maybe some part of their brain is just wired wrong, causing suicidal actions?

Their leaders, unlike the lemmings, sometimes exploit this for political and religious gain while secretly getting vaccinated (like Il Duce aka Mr. Trump the Big Loser), if the morons actually listen to them. Two recent cases show that all too often leaders are members of the marching morons too. Both Florida and Tex-ass governors have banned the use of “vaccine passports” in their states: No institution there can require a vaccine! This is the same thing as not allowing a “no shoes, no shirt, no service” policy or prohibiting states from requiring vaccinations for school children (why people are allowed to skirt these requirements for any reason is the ultimate stupidity!).

We’ll see who wins in future SCOTUS cases when this resistance to vaccination is adjudicated—I suppose the current court will approve policies that amount to mass suicide because they don’t give a rat’s ass about protecting public health (especially cult member Amy and the perverts Kavanaugh and Thomas). Democracy is being attacked from many directions! Logic and reason are thrown out the window!

If the suicidal morons only marched to their own deaths, I wouldn’t give a damn; I’m tired of these people, and the world would probably be a better place without them! But they’ll hurt the rest of us, and that’s equivalent to aiding and abetting murder. And if they kill me or anyone else I love and there’s an afterlife, I’ll try to make sure they go straight to hell when they die! I don’t want them to mess up heaven for me or my family and friends!

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Comments are always welcome!

The “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” series. A seven-book series ideal for binge-reading. You’ve seen some reviews in “Reviews not on Amazon,” and I’ll be archiving more on Wednesday.  Pick an ebook and jump in anywhere. Available everywhere quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!