(Note: While science and sci-fi writing motivated this post, some readers might find the following material offensive. Tough.)

The U.S. president wanted a Space Force. The U.S. military capitulated. And the U.S. Congress gave it to him on December 20. Sounds neat. Does it make sense?

Traditionally the USAF took care of most things happening above the Earth’s surface, including spy satellites and whatever secret weapons are up there (yep, and they’re just as dangerous as the U.N.’s black helicopters that will invade the U.S.). Astronauts have generally been a mix of USAF and Navy pilots, discounting civilian scientists, so there was already a lot of overlap with other services. And the U.S. NASA wasn’t above getting into the militaristic aspects either. So forget tradition. Maybe we should call a spade a spade? The military is in space, so maybe we should admit it and wrap it up in one tidy package?

Is there some savings to be had? Even if the answer were yes, that’s probably not an argument most reasonable persons would make…or believe. The current administration will have created a trillion dollar U.S. debt very soon, so what’s a few more dollars here and there? A precedent might be the moving of the Coast Guard into Homeland Security, but the creation of Homeland Security also increased federal bureaucracy and incompetence (not to mention murderous enforcement on the southern border where thousand of illegals are invading). Maybe they should have put anything to do with protecting the U.S., including what’s now in Space Force, into Homeland Security? Isn’t Space Force about protecting the homeland and not invading ETs or killer asteroids? U.S. of A., uber alles!

Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Smaller isn’t either. (Seems like the Goldilocks Principle needs to be applied here, but the Pentagon’s good ole boys would never listen to a girl.) And where does the Earth’s atmosphere become space? Where does it end and space start? I can’t wait for scramjet technology, where intercontinental flights hop and skip across the atmosphere, going from the USAF’s domain to the USSF’s and back. Who will have authority over those flights? Or might that be the FSA (not to be confused with the Russian equivalent of the FBI) instead of the FAA?

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Before I get into the subject of this article, let me wish everyone a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving. We tend to lose the meaning of this holiday that leads into the commercial end-of-year rush, starting with Black Friday…or earlier! It should be a time for personal contemplation about having family and friends and to give thanks for what we have in our lives. It’s not political or commercial but spiritual, a time to recognize our common humanity, something we share independently of political proclivities, religious preferences, or sexual orientation. We are all on spaceship Earth together, and we have a lot to be thankful for. Now, to the article….

While the sci-fi master Isaac Asimov certainly motivated me to write sci-fi—I read his first robot novel Caves of Steel at age twelve—I’m not Dr. Asimov. The ex-biochemist was also a master at writing popular science books that explained current science. I’ve failed miserably at that! A few blog posts, but not one book.

Like him, I’m a fan of Science News. Scientists are now super specialized in general, so we have to turn to more popular works like anyone else to see what other scientists are doing. I think both Isaac and I had that in common—we kept up with general scientific and technology progress in spite of our specializations. But the sci-fi master was already a generalist with many popular science books to prove it.

Of course, those books were also a respite from his sci-fi writing. His Foundation series is evidence for that. He wrote the Foundation trilogy, robot novels, and End of Eternity, and then he took a vacation of several decades to write all those popular science books. After that period, he returned to sci-fi and completed the Foundation series, bringing all those earlier novels together and continuing to write more, creating a masterful oeuvre the likes of which will never be seen again.

“Decades” is the key word. Like King and other famous genre fiction writers, Isaac Asimov got an early start. That’s difficult to do nowadays. I won’t complete two publishing decades until 2026…if I make it that far.

I’ve been tempted to write a few popular science books, but so much in that area is available now. In short, there’s no lack of authors and books explaining science. There’s also an apathy among readers who might otherwise read such books. Most people no longer care how things work; they just use the science and technology without thinking about it. There’s some interest in space science and astrophysics beyond sensationalism and controversy (is Pluto a planet?), but there’s also a societal disease where people think science is just belief and it’s responsible for society’s woes. And then there are the naysayers, deniers of global warming and climate change, or believers that the world was made 6000 years ago when humans were contemporaries of the dinosaurs (those fossils came from Noah’s flood, don’t you know?).

I would have a hard time channeling Dr. Asimov in such a toxic anti-science environment. True science is secular, but we’re becoming a belief-based society, even though the beliefs contradict facts. In one of the first Foundation books, there’s a scene where the principal confronts an archaeologist, telling him to prove his assertions by going out and digging up the evidence. The “scientist” refuses, saying that theories (his beliefs) are enough. Our scientists today haven’t gone to those extremes, but many in society have, denying scientific evidence while creating their own “theories” (intelligent design is the perfect example of an oxymoron, because the people who champion this belief ignore facts).

No, I’m not about to hit my head my head against the brick wall of public opinion. Let’s face it: it’s a lot more fun to write fiction that includes or extrapolates current scientific knowledge, allowing astute readers to see the possibilities in a fictional context. I just hope that my stories are enough to make Dr. Asimov happy. One can popularize science in many ways—mine are just a bit different than some of the old master’s.

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Comments are always welcome.

Evergreen Series: “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” Survivors of the Chaos starts with a dystopian Earth controlled by multinationals and their mercenaries, and ends with an expedition to the 82 Eridani star system. Sing a Zamba Galactica begins with first contact where Humans meet the strange ETs they name Rangers, and ends with a mercy mission where Humans convince one strange collective intelligence to cure another. In Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, a Human industrialist is bent on controlling near-Earth planets in the Galaxy, and Humans and their ET friends must try to stop him. Centuries of development in near-Earth space are covered in these novels, all three evergreen books; sci-fi is always current! And all three novels are contained in the ebook bundle, The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, a bargain you can find wherever fine ebooks are sold.

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

Today is a solemn but sad day, full of nostalgia and yearning. Fifty years ago, I was part of the party-like atmosphere in College Park, Maryland, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human being to set foot on the Moon. No good and wonderful event since then has brought the US and the world so much together to share our common humanity and hope for the future.

Space is the final frontier., but we have shied away from it and Armstrong’s hopeful and inspiring message, putting our petty and tribal squabbles ahead of that great adventure, going where no human has gone before. Will we return to space? The way into that final frontier is not to be found with militarized space commands, seeking to sully space with political saber rattling, but via a motivated and concerted effort by all human beings to go into that great beyond out of scientific curiosity. I don’t imagine that it will happen in my lifetime, if ever, which makes today doubly sad for me.

My heartfelt thanks goes out to all those courageous and intelligent space pioneers of the past. I regret that our collective myopia and efforts to further more trivial agendas have inhibited human beings’ reach for the stars. Hopefully we will come to our senses…sometime.

“Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.”—Isaac Asimov

When A.B. Carolan was writing Mind Games, he was torn between various names for a principal character. Should he call the android cop Olivaw, Rebus, or Rubik? Rebus won, in honor of Ian Rankin’s inspector.

But both Olivaw and Rebus are cops, so Olivaw fit the bill in that sense. Daneel Olivaw was Asimov’s android detective who worked with Elijah Bailey in the sci-fi mysteries Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. Given that Mind Games is part of the “ABC Sci-Fi Mystery Series” of books written by A.B., that was another plus for using Olivaw. But I’d honored Daneel in Rogue Planet, so I told A.B. that would be two honorifics, which seemed excessive.

Rubik was an alternative because of the famous cube that became such a fad. It’s really a monument to logic and reason and could be an iconic representation for AI. The android in Mind Games is a walking AI and part of an AI network serving to augment a planetary police force.

I was reminded of Rubik’s cube recently for two reasons. One was my observation that Ms. Ginger Zee, GMA’s weather person, was wearing a dress that consisted of square patches with the same color scheme as the cube—garishly strong but happy colors that looked better on the cube than on her (sorry, Ginger). Just my opinion, of course. I’m no fashion expert.

Many see the cube as a game, but there’s math lurking in its twists and turns. There aren’t many simpler structures in advanced algebra than groups. You have one basic operation (like multiplication or addition—let’s write it as *) and one inverse operation in a group, and the group can either be finite, like the one describing Rubik’s cube, or infinite.

The Rubik’s cube’s group is constructed by labeling each of the 48 non-center facets with the integers 1 to 48. Each configuration of the cube can be represented as a permutation of the labels 1 to 48, depending on the position of each facet. Using this representation, the solved cube is the identity permutation which leaves the cube unchanged, while the twelve cube moves that rotate a layer of the cube 90 degrees are represented by their respective permutations. The Rubik’s cube group is non-commutative because a*b isn’t the same as b*a—doing two sequences of cube moves in a different order can result in a different configuration.

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It comes in two forms: we meet them out there, or those out there come here to Earth. In any case, the theme is ubiquitous in old sci-fi. I’m not sure how much it’s used today. Recent discussions in the media of UFO sightings (remember, UFO only means “unidentified flying object,” not an ET’s vehicle, in spite of NY Times crosswords’ clues) might increase tales about first contact. Who knows? So it might be worthwhile to study how believable such tales can be.

Both versions have the problem that “out there” means the vast reaches of intergalactic space…and beyond. I’ve already discussed this in a previous post. Either version means someone, either an ET or human being, has to travel so far that it’s hard to get our minds around what the distance is. But let’s assume that it can be done, that two groups, ETs and humans, could somehow get together for the first time and have a chat. Why would they or we want to do so?

For humans, we could say that it might just be curiosity or the challenge. That’s why people who know nothing about climbing want to climb Mt. Everest—even why those who do so attempt the climb. That’s why people decide to visit all the continents after they retire. And that’s the scenario for the colonization of Mars in More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. But would that be enough to go to the stars?

Today isn’t 1969 or just before. I never bought into the competition with the Soviet Union to motivate the space race. Most people I knew didn’t. What motivated us was answering the question “Can we get to the moon?” We didn’t care about US pride or international politics. We were motivated by the challenge. Today one sees many people who even think going back to the moon is a waste of money. And the Pentagon certainly wouldn’t support that—all they probably want to do is put up more spy satellites, or sneak in a few satellites with nukes on them. And private industry just wants comsats and so forth where they can make lots of money. We’ve gone from sublime curiosity and meeting abstract challenges to greedy profit-making.

Sure we have a few visionaries like Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and their ilk, but not even the general public supports space research anymore, unless NASA can do it on a shoestring budget. And the politicos take this attitude and run with it. Budget cuts are crippling the space agency, as they are most scientific research.

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It’s hard for anyone to get their head around how far away the stars are. The nearest, Proxima Centauri, is 4.243 light-years distant—a light-year is the distance traveled by light in a year, going at 186,000 miles per second!

Three Sol-like real stars (i.e. like our sun) are where the Human colonies of New Haven, Novo Mondo, and Sanctuary are located in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection (a three-novel bundle from Carrick Publishing). In A.B. Carolan’s Mind Games, the main character visits two of those colonies, plus a much-changed Earth. The stars, 82 Eridani, Tau Ceti, and Delta Pavonis, respectively, are about twenty light-years from Earth. They’re G-type stars like our own. I started writing about these colonies around 2000, so I didn’t know if there were real Earth-type planets in those faraway solar systems. I still don’t.

Today scientists have discovered many real extrasolar planets. Some are in the zone where liquid water can exist, so a sci-fi writer today might choose one of those as a setting for a story. The stars I chose are still good ones, but if scientists find they have no planets or none are in that sweet spot relative to their parent star, I’m toast.

In addition, we now know some stars have a huge Jupiter-like planet in that sweet spot. That’s not a bad setting either because a planet like that can have a large moon that’s like Earth, full of life. Such is the case of Hard Fist, a satellite of Big Fellow, and where the action of A.B. Carolan’s The Secret of the Urns takes place.

When I began writing the books in the trilogy bundle above, no one knew if any stars besides ours had planets. At least now we know planets are ubiquitous. Three of my four fictional ones I’ve mentioned had life before Humans arrived. That might be less likely than being in that sweet spot—if water exists, it doesn’t mean life does. Both our moon and Mars have some water, for example, but no observable life.

Statistically it’s likely that life exists out there. It might not exist very close to Earth, though, as it does in my fiction. I’m thinking of an active biosphere, of course. Even Mars might have some life. And it’s unclear how long Earth will continue to have a biosphere unless we recognize the dangers of climate change. CCDs (that’s “climate change deniers”) are trying to get everyone to believe their lies.

Let’s consider some possibilities A.B. Carolan, in his short story “Harvest Time” two weeks ago in honor of Brian Aldiss, considers one possibility that’s also at the end of the first novel in the collection named above—a long-range starship. Its propulsion system, yet to be determined, would apply a constant acceleration and then a constant deceleration to arrive at the target star. Humans aboard might be in cryosleep or stored as frozen embryos, or even in banks of frozen sperm and ova, and the colonists could be woken at the end of the trip and nurtured by robots. Things could go wrong on the journey, as in A.B.’s short story.

Any attempts at organizing a galactic empire, or even a trade union like ITUIP (“Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”), a la European Union, would require faster communication between planets than that provided via long-range starships. Faster-than-light travel (FTL) was invented by sci-fi writers for that purpose. Many old stories talked about hyperspace; Star Trek had its “warp drive”; and my stories have ships traveling through the metaverses provided by some esoteric theories from particle physics, superstring theories to be precise, as considered in yesterday’s short story “Shipwreck.” It all boils down to skirting Einstein’s theory of relativity by leaving our universe where the speed of light mentioned above limits all velocities.

Humans haven’t been around too long, geologically speaking, and have wondered what’s out there for even less time. The way things are going, we won’t be going out there anytime soon, no matter how organized we become to do it. Some wonder if what’s out there will come to us. Either way, the distances covered will truly be a star trek. And all that’s still in the realm of sci-f for now.

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Comments are always welcome.

More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. Amazon reviewer S. D. Beallis called it “broad in scope and cautiously optimistic.” Amazon reviewer Debra Miller said she “was reminded at times of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.” Both comments indicate the epic nature of this one novel where an ET virus creates Homo sapiens 2.0, and then the new humans colonize Mars. Available on Amazon and Smashwords.

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

[Note: This can be considered a continuation of last Thursday’s post.]

Arthur C. Clarke’s quote is a good way to start this article: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is more than a glib remark from an old sci-fi writer. It is an important statement about technology.

Imagine a caveman from Earth’s prehistory holding a smart phone. He can’t call anyone and no one can call him, but he can hit a video replay icon, see the video unfolding, and drop the phone as if it were black magic. (He might react the same way with a mirror, of course.)

If we can’t explain something, we call it magic…or something fancier to make our ignorance more palatable. That’s how the phrases “dark energy” and “dark matter” came into existence—physicists are very inventive about hiding their ignorance. I don’t think they’d consider themselves in the same class as Ugh the caveman, but I don’t see much difference sometimes—Clarke probably wouldn’t either. (Of course, I could be wrong. For years I thought the Higgs field was just a mathematical device to generate spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak theory of Salam and Weinberg.)

Dark energy and dark matter express our ignorance about how to explain certain observed phenomena, though. It’s a bit different when we consider phenomena that seems to be more blatant about contradicting known physical laws. There’s magic in the extrapolation of the former needed to create good sci-fi stories. That magic differs from that used in fantasy stories. The boundaries are fuzzy, though, between these two situations.

Paranormal activity—the use of psi powers—has been featured in fantasy and sci-fi stories for a while. Unlike dark energy and dark matter, which was invented to “explain” some observed phenomena, paranormal activity has never been observed. That amounts to a double whammy against it.

Like time travel, I haven’t included psi powers very much in my sci-fi, in spite of a long-standing tradition of sci-fi authors of using it as a plot device. I generally consider psi powers to be more in the realm of fantasy. Yet in the three books of The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, I include psi powers as a plot device, and in Sing a Zamba Galactica, the second book, I consider time travel. Let me fall back on Mr. Clarke’s quote, though, to put both back in the hard sci-fi realm in order to assuage my guilt.

A.B. Carolan’s new book Mind Games goes farther. We have robots, but the androids go beyond commercial robots available today—these don’t exist either. So what does A.B. do? He writes about trying  to give androids psi powers. And he plops this down in the hard sci-fi universe I created.

Considering the aforementioned collection, I suppose he’s justified. The story is another sci-fi mystery for young adults where the main character Della wants to find out who murdered her adopted father. He had always told her to hide her powers, but she needs to use them all to solve the mystery.

Is this sci-fi or fantasy? Maybe those labels don’t matter. The main question might be: Is it a good story? You can read it and tell me via your reviews or emails.

I generally prefer a scientist’s approach in my sci-fi writing, taking known science and extrapolating it far beyond where a practicing scientist might go (any extrapolation is always dangerous), without contradicting current knowledge. Maybe the psi powers in A.B.’s book and my own are more an application of Clarke’s point of view than J.K. Rowling’s, more akin to physicists dark energy and dark matter and an expression of our wonder and ignorance about what might be true. Not fake science, just wild extrapolation far beyond what’s now known so that the science just seems like magic. Is Ugh the caveman smiling?

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Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Penny Castro is on a forensic dive off the SoCal coast for the LA County Sheriff’s Department. When she surfaces, she finds her fellow deputies and a witness dead from a virulent contagion. Follow her adventures as she struggles to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc) and in print on Amazon and in your favorite local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them for it). This novel was published by Black Opal Books. Visit their website to see a treasure trove of great reads. Support small presses and their authors.

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

As a scientist, I dealt with many equations. As a full-time writer, not so much. Many people know Newton’s F = ma. That equation, and its rotational form, τ = Iα, appear in Survivors of the Chaos (the first novel contained in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection). That’s about it for equations in my fiction.

Some people might think that Einstein’s equation linking the curvature tensor of space and time to the matter-energy tensor in General Relativity is the most important one in science, or Maxwell’s equation for the electromagnetic field (tensor form so it’s just one equation). The latter certainly has more application in our everyday lives than the former, if that’s important.

The most important equation, though, is exp (i π) + 1 = 0.

exp (i π) is usually written differently—e to the i times π—but I use the less common form to avoid superscripts. The functional notation exp ( . ) is shorthand for the irrational number e raised to some power. Here i is the imaginary unit that is the square root of -1; all complex numbers can be written in the form a + bi where a and b are real numbers. exp (i π) can be written that way too: cos(π) + i sin(π). The symbol π is the ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter, and some readers might remember that cos(π) = -1 and sin(π) = 0.

So there you have it: that most important equation just says that -1 + 1 = 0. “Big deal!” you might say. Well, it says that in a most beautiful and profound way, connecting the five most important numbers in mathematics. First 1, the first natural number, the numbers used in counting; second, 0, an important human invention signifying nothing, but also used as a placeholder, as in 1000; e and π, the two most important irrational numbers in the set of real numbers; and finally i, needed to create the complex numbers so important to scientists and engineers.

Why do these numbers link up this way? Maybe that’s not the right question. The better question: Isn’t the discovery that they do link up this way in one equation more important than any physical law ever discovered? There’s something immutable and unchangeable about this equation beyond any other in science.

Think about it. True science is empirical. Experimental data lead to “laws” like F = ma that explain many natural phenomena, but Newton’s law must be modified to explain special relativistic effects occurring at high velocities. There’s nothing empirical about exp (i π) + 1 = 0 at all. It would exist for some ETs living at the bottom of a methane ocean under huge pressures, or on a planet in the 82 Eridani star system (they’re there, and you can read about them in Sing a Zamba Galactica, novel #2 in the collection mentioned above). The symbols they might use in the equation could be different—maybe just sonograms—but that doesn’t matter.

That equation exists without any phenomena at all, and it can be considered a cornerstone of universal mathematics. It’s a mathematical tautology of the utmost importance.

Think about it this way: the equation connects natural numbers, integers, real numbers including two fundamental irrational numbers (ratios of integers are rational numbers), and complex numbers. The only thing that this equation doesn’t include are quaternions, the biggest set of numbers that includes them all that scientists sometimes use to describe three-dimensional rotations.

Now, isn’t that one beautiful equation?

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Comments are always welcome.

Mind Games. You know A. B. Carolan as the writer of The Secret Lab and The Secret of the Urns. Those novels are sci-fi mysteries for young adults (and adults who are young at heart). In Mind Games, A. B. tells a new story that’s set a bit farther into the future than his first two books. Della Dos Toros is a young girl with psi powers living in the Dark Domes of the planet Sanctuary. Her adopted father doesn’t let her use those powers, but she must do so to find his killer. This story about ESP and androids adds another action-packed novel to the ABC Sci-Fi Mystery series. Available in both print and ebook versions.

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

NASA scientists have just confirmed that the brilliant fireball seen in the southern US corresponded to the crash landing of an alien spaceship containing four distinct species of ETs. The skeletal remains indicate different bone structures, one with four legs and two arms. Preliminary investigations also indicate four different variations on DNA components and/or handedness of key amino acids. Stay tuned for further information.

SpaceX’s success with the capsule with Ripley inside (the dummy filled with sensors, not Sigourney Weaver, star of the Alien trilogy) might represent a turning point for the US space program. Since the cancellation of the shuttle program, NASA has depended on the Russians to get astronauts into orbit. After the SpaceX success, that dependence might soon end.

In the bigger picture, another turning point has already occurred. When private companies began launching successful space missions, a paradigm shift occurred: NASA became the science group with astronauts and payloads as passengers, and private enterprise became the transportation agencies.

I’ve always assumed this change was inevitable. Let’s assume it is. Will it be good or bad? Tech companies grow bigger, more arrogant, and more international as time goes by. Capitalism without controls is always bad, but only Europe seems to be reining in the abuses of tech companies. The opportunities for space exploitation, i.e. exploration of space for financial gain like big petroleum companies exploring for oil, offer potentially great rewards and seem boundless, so the same might happen to the space tech companies.  They could get rich by spinning off lucrative enterprises that have wonderful products made extremely expensive because of their origins.

Is this pessimism unjustified? Hopefully yes. But pessimists have the advantage that, if things turn out better than expected, they can rejoice. Yet Murphy’s Law, or its extreme version, Sturgeon’s Law (look it up), justifies being pessimistic.

I explored corporate domination of outer space in the future with my novel Survivors of the Chaos (now part of The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, a bargain ebook bundle of three novels). This is not uncommon in sci-fi or dystopian literature or movies (Avatar and Elysium are recent examples of the latter). My novel starts in a dystopian future where multinationals have their own mercenary armies controlling the chaos on Earth an their surrogates in space sponsoring all space projects and exploiting their findings. The book ends with three starships fleeing the chaotic Earth to colonize three planets in other star systems.

Such visions of the future are warnings created by pessimists, and these warnings are possible extrapolations of current conditions, including science and technology, of course. These stories are as old as sci-fi itself, but I find them more interesting than utopian drivel. Humans don’t have a good track record for creating utopias; they have a terrible one for creating dystopias and apocalyptic events. And, as science and technology progresses, the latter can become even worse.

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Comments are always welcome.

Dystopia:

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. The three novels take the reader from a futuristic worldwide dystopia to the stars and far into the future. The second novel answers Fermi’s question, “Where are they?” The third shows how Humans and their ET friends battle a mad Human industrialist. The whole trilogy can be considered an homage to Dr. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy with ITUIP (International Trade Union of Independent Planets) playing the role of the Foundation, and the mad industrialist playing the role of the Mule. Lots of enjoyable sci-fi reading await you. Available on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc).

Post-apocalyptic:

And don’t miss The Last Humans. Last man alive? What about last woman alive? Penny Castro, LA County Sheriff’s Deputy and forensic diver, finds she isn’t alone, though—there are a few others who survive the contagion and want to kill her. And the remnants of a US government could be the greatest danger for her and the family she’s adopted. This post-apocalyptic thriller (yes, it’s also sci-fi) will be released by Black Opal Books in both ebook and print versions on March 30 and available at the publisher’s website, online retailers like Amazon and Smashwords and the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc), and bookstores (if they don’t have it, ask for it!). You can pre-order on both Amazon and Smashwords.

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