Book reviews anyone? I’ll post two mini-reviews this Friday. They were on my TBRoR (“to be read or reviewed”) list. When authors query me for reviews, their books often go on this list, which is more a list I maintain for possible incidental reading. When I get around to them, I’ll review the book if I liked it enough to recommend to other readers. Note that these reviews ONLY appear on this blog—I no longer post reviews for TBRoR-books to Amazon for many reasons.

My formal reviewing activity is still done under the auspices of Bookpleasures.com. Authors might want to query there. First, there are many reviewers associated with that review site who might like to review your opus, not just me. Second, the reviews tend to be more extensive and therefore more useful for readers and the author. Third, reviews are reposted to Amazon if the author so desires—that means that your Bookpleasures reviewer reserves the right to point out negatives as well as positives. (Of course, I’ll do that even in my mini-reviews.)

Readers might excuse over-exuberance in a review that neglects the negatives, but such reviews don’t help them make informed book purchases. Neither does the Amazon ranking. A reader should always read the blurb for the book carefully and use the “peek inside” feature on Amazon before buying. Any author submitting a book for review should ask for an honest one and NEVER, NEVER pay for a review—paid reviews are inherently dishonest.

Genres. We love to categorize things and people. From “household appliance” to “environmental activist,” labels have pros and cons. They fill a need for order that many of us have. On the other hand, they’re often limiting or just plain wrong. Book genres are like that. Do you pay attention to them? They’re no doubt a convenience for bookstores, including Amazon, but in the online versions they tend to be used just as keywords. In a big book barn like B&N, though, you can often scratch your head about how they’ve shelved a particular book.

Read the rest of this entry »

The nuclear ogre has been sleeping in his cave since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s a long time, so it’s no surprise that small minds like Trump have forgotten or purposely ignored how terribly destructive that nuclear ogre was. Of course, awakening the ogre is the kind of blustery threat Narcissus le Grand likes to make. This pathetic man believes that like-minded tyrants will bow down before him because he controls the mighty nuclear arsenal of the U.S. His restrained use of Tomahawks against Assad in retaliation for the Syrian despot’s use of sarin gas shows he’s not reluctant to end his isolationist policies and shoot off missiles. How far will he go?

My first criticism: U.S. leaders have NO business talking about preemptive strikes. Their cause must be geared to sanity in this insane nuclear world, setting an example for the rest of the nations and their leaders. Emboldened by Trump’s rhetoric perhaps, India is talking about preemptive strikes. Against Pakistan? Against other non-Hindu ethnic groups? Will Israel unleash the nuclear ogre on Iran—or vice versa? North Korea against South Korea? Right now North Korean missiles can’t reach the U.S. mainland, but that can change. They can easily reach Japan and South Korea, though. That ogre owes no allegiance to any nation and is indifferent about which one he gnaws on. His only goal when awake is to fill his maws with human beings.

I’m in agreement with Il Duce’s limited response toward Syria’s Assad with respect to the sarin gas attack. It followed seven years of frustrating attempts at a diplomatic solution complicated by Russia’s entry into the foray into the skirmish on the side of the Syrian despot. In 2013, we thought Assad got rid of his chemical weapons—obviously he didn’t. The attack on that little Syrian town was obviously his tactic for determining how far he could go, so the measured response was correct. Whether this will keep him from using such weapons again—I would have liked to see all his airfields destroyed for that reason—and it might drive the particulars back to the diplomatic table, no one can predict what Trump will do in the future. Will he shake his nuclear stick at Assad now? What will Russia, Iran, and the various terrorist groups do in response?

Tyrants like Trump aren’t known for their diplomacy. In Trump’s case, that’s ironic because he and his minions are often touting his skills using that infamous “Art of the Deal.” So far in his administration, he has only governed like a tyrant with his executive orders, the one move against Assad being a notable exception. Even the latter bypassed Congress, and those executive orders tend to get bogged down in the court system. There is no deal making whatsoever (so far his healthcare wheeling and dealing has flopped because he can’t get the factions in his own party together). You have to wonder if his definition of “deal” is as twisted as those “alternative facts” used in his tweets, in other words. There is no diplomacy in his deal making, only bluster and strong-arming, “talents” he developed in his very restricted and surreal business world that has little or no relevancy in international politics, or even politics in general.

Hence my second criticism: Trump (or any other president, for that matter) should be forced to appeal to diplomacy before going to war, especially nuclear war. The less likely diplomacy is used, the closer that Doomsday Clock approaches midnight. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought us to the brink of nuclear war; diplomacy brought us back. There was no pre-emptive strike against the Cuban missile installations. Instead, Kennedy waited for the Soviet Union to blink. The threat of retaliation and assured destruction, not a pre-emptive strike, solved that crisis, and that threat was iterated to Kruschev in no uncertain terms, an example of strong diplomacy, to be sure, but still diplomacy.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Buddhist monk approaches a hot dog stand and says, “Make me one with everything.”  (Apologies to my Detective Castilblanco, who became a Buddhist.)

***

Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder. Detective Chen is framed for the murder of a U.S. senator. As her partner Castilblanco moves to prove her innocenc, they uncover a complex plot involving the underbelly of NYC as well as the overbelly corresponding to the rich and powerful. #3 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” this book is now on sale at Smashwords and is available in all ebook formats. Use coupon code XW55G. Coming soon this spring from Penmore Press: Rembrandt’s Angel, an international tour de force involving a Scotland Yard expert on art heists and an Interpol agent. Chasing down some dealers in stolen artworks suddenly becomes very dangerous!

In libris libertas!

In these days of acronymic texting and tweets, good praxis for spelling and grammar seems nonexistent. If my old teachers could see what’s going on, though, they’d be aghast or bewildered and think it was all some kind of code. They knew the rules, and even those who weren’t directly involved in teaching their students how to write and speak English would knock off points on a term paper if you didn’t obey them.

Many authors rebelled against this straitjacket of arcane rules, bending them for “literary effect” and perhaps a bit of revenge. That process still continues today. Punctuation has become one of the many victims on the literary crime scene, most of the time only criminal because arcane rules aren’t followed.

Before I do forensics on the punctuation crime scene, let me begin by stating up front there never was just one set of rules. Chaos reigned because there are many “manuals of style,” so many that professors would often announce that the term paper for the class must follow X manual of style. I can even imagine pedantic organizers of a new MFA program debating which one to use and how to enforce it.

Trying to control the evolution and use of language is like trying to juggle globs of oatmeal mixed with gelatin. Good luck! The French invented l’Academie to keep their language pure, for example, but I once knew a very educated Frenchman who insisted that “le weekend” was French and Americans had stolen the word. (The Spanish are more purist, using “el fin de semana,” which works in French too, of course, but is a wee bit longer—now wonder the French use the American word.) Changes creep into languages all the time “On the level” is ubiquitously used in English to mean something is correct, but it came into the language from the Freemason, who weren’t just masons, of course (Mozart was a Freemason).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always admired journalists. The good ones far outnumber those paparazzi and in-your-face reporters. They are maligned and persecuted even in democracies, and we all know what can befall them in regions of the world where despots and fanatics know the power of a free press and try to stop it at all costs. Many journalists, real or fiction, were childhood heroes of mine, and in my books the reader will find journalists of all kinds as principal characters (in my first book, Full Medical, ezine reporter Jay Sandoval helps bring down a government conspiracy; in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” Pam Stuart, Castilblanco’s wife, is a TV reporter often involved in her husband’s adventures; and in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, an investigative reporter plays a major role in toppling another conspiracy).

A free press is absolutely essential if a country wants to call itself democratic. “Free” means independent of government control. The concept is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Along with the independent executive, legislative, and judicial sections of government (with X systems, some of the first two overlap), one has four strong legs that lift up and provide a solid foundation. The first signs of a democracy coming apart, no matter how the despots spin it, can be found when any of these legs begin to crack. For example, Venezuela no longer has an independent press, legislature, or judiciary—the “president” is becoming yet another South American strong man. We have watched the process in Russia progressively worsen as the despot Putin consolidated his power. Many of Putin’s victims are, in fact, journalists.

It’s therefore no surprise that a despotic-minded Trump is attacking the press. As in 1930’s Germany, Bannon, Conway, Miller, and Spicer help engineer this attack—a formidable and evil quartet. Because a free press is involved with the control and flow of information in order to maintain an informed citizenry, also essential for a democracy, distortion of information and attacks on the free press are par for the course. Narcissus le Grand and his minions spend lots of time battling the press, spinning and manipulating information, and creating false information. As Goebbels well knew, and Putin and other modern despots know, tyrants can often win their despotic battles against the citizenry without guns or violence. A psychological coup d’etat can be just as effective if the citizenry accepts the version of news propagated by the government. This was a major theme in Orwell’s 1984, but that book was fiction—Putin and Trump are real despots, not fictional ones, and their techniques have been considerably by the march of technology, which despots can use as well as anyone else, if not more so.

Read the rest of this entry »

Protecting our environment is not a radical idea; it is a moral responsibility.—Bernie Sanders

***

Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder. Detective Chen is framed for the murder of a U.S. senator. As her partner Castilblanco moves to prove her innocenc, they uncover a complex plot involving the underbelly of NYC as well as the overbelly corresponding to the rich and powerful. #3 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” this book is now on sale at Smashwords and is available in all ebook formats. Use coupon code XW55G. Coming soon this spring from Penmore Press: Rembrandt’s Angel, an international tour de force involving a Scotland Yard expert on art heists and an Interpol agent. Chasing down some dealers in stolen artworks suddenly becomes very dangerous!

In libris libertas!

I loved those original Star Trek episodes because the best were based on sci-fi stories written by seasoned sci-fi writers, ones like Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison. They were often morality plays too, that is, good stories with some important themes mixed in. (Who could forget the message that racial prejudice is just plain stupid in the classic episode about the two black-and-white guys fighting on and on, one black on the left and white on the right, the other just the opposite?) These episodes often contained some sound scientific extrapolation too—your smart phone is a version of the Starfleet’s communicator, for example.

Episodes in the spinoff series, often written by screenwriters who had little training in science and often promoted pseudo-science, were much less entertaining if not downright distasteful. Generally speaking, of course, Hollywood fails at putting believable science into sci-fi and often creates pseudo-science in its screenplays. While maybe everyone knows Wiley Coyote can’t go over the cliff in an inverse-L-shaped path and finds it hilarious when he does so, is that any different than the Enterprise coming to a full-stop, thus violating Newton’s First Law? And Next Generation’s Counselor Cleavage reading minds is pretty farfetched and bordering on fantasy. Of course, the Star Wars tales are just fantasy episodes too—they even have princes, princesses, and knights who fight with sabers (making them neon-colored with sizzles doesn’t make them more sci-fi-like—it just makes them silly).

So let’s forget about Hollywood and move on to literature.  As a continuation of last week’s article, “Does Fiction Have to Seem Real?” let me ask, “Does the science in sci-fi have to seem real?” I’m talking about hard sci-fi. That’s still a broad sub-genre. But consider the sub-sub-genres of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic. While I enjoyed Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Howey’s Wool, and Redling’s Flowertown, my kneejerk reaction to these books was that there was no real explanation of cause, only the effect. I’ve changed my mind a bit, though. The story in these books is found in the effect—hence the post in post-apocalyptic. My own post-apocalyptic efforts—Survivors of the Chaos and Full Medical are examples—discussed the causes much more than the three books named, but that was a personal choice because I put as much emphasis on the causes as the effects. In my upcoming Oasis Redux (see the last pre-publication excerpt in my blog archive), I focus on the effect, and I’m satisfied with the result.

Read the rest of this entry »

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?—Kurt Vonnegut

***

Action on the southern border! No, it’s not Trump beginning the construction of The Wall. It’s Chen and Castilblanco fighting terrorists, a cartel, and neo-Nazi militias. In Angels Need Not Apply, this deadly duo from the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” goes undercover to fight crime as part of a national task force. On sale now at Smashwords until March 31—use coupon # KL38P on checkout. Last week, so don’t miss the opportunity to read this sizzler-thriller. Also available on Amazon but not on sale there.

In libris libertas!

One of the quotes on my website is from Tom Clancy. He’d answer the title question in the affirmative. He’s probably referring to thrillers in that quote, but most good fiction has to seem real. A few genres—horror and fantasy, for example—are exceptions, but even hard sci-fi and historical romance novels should seem real enough—the more believable, the better. I often see events from the latest tweet from our president to NYC crime scenes (they’ve become eerily similar in some ways) and say, “I couldn’t write anything like that because readers wouldn’t find it believable.” But maybe I’m limiting myself because readers don’t want believable?

Consider my arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin, first introduced in The Midas Bomb (he appears in many books). He’s a bit of a narcissist and psychotic, but I gave him a human side in No Amber Waves of Grain. Mr. Trump has no human side, yet Trump is real and Kalinin isn’t, although he seems more real to me than Trump because the latter seems to live in a fantasy world. When you consider real people like Charles Manson, Kalinin actually seems pretty tame.

Also consider Mary Jo Melendez of Muddlin’ Through. She represents what’s great about immigration in America (unless you’re Native American, you’re an immigrant or descended from immigrants). So do many of my characters. Bill Franklin, a gay man, and Kalidas Metropolis, a lesbian, play important roles in The Midas Bomb and Full Medical, respectively. None of these characters is real, but they also represent groups that many people don’t want to be real and would rather not have in fiction either.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m expecting a bloodbath in the EPA, NASA, NOAA and possibly other agencies as Mr. Trump wages war on the environment. Many employees there are civil service, but that might not stop Il Duce AKA Narcissus le Grand—he’ll just close down the agencies if he wants to get rid of them. The EPA, NASA, and NOAA are where many of those “bad scientists” can be found who disagree with the GOP claim that climate control and taking care of the environment have low priority. Narcissus le Grand even believes global warming is a hoax.

What’s driving all this is Trump’s desire to end all environmental regulations so that companies, his included, can pollute and destroy the environment as much as they want, a particularly virulent and dangerous example of capitalism without controls. Even now, they ship high-tech toxic waste and other crap to places like Bangladesh. Il Duce and his minions probably think it would be cheaper just to dump it somewhere in the U.S. How ‘bout not doing it at all?!

Disasters like that BP oil well in the Gulf, destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, poisoning wells and water supplies—those kinds of things are just part of doing business, according to Trump and his cronies. He names Pruitt to head the EPA and one of the gnome’s first public acts is to deny the role of CO2 in global warming. C’mon!

Many scientists are worried. A week before Il Duce’s inauguration, more than 250 volunteers met at UPenn for a two-day binge of downloading climate data and storing it on independent servers. “If you don’t want to do anything about climate change,” said Texas A&M atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler, “you are in a stronger position if you get rid of the data.” Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Center of Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists said, “With a president who doesn’t respect scientific information, one abuse could be data mysteriously disappearing from websites, or government scientific websites may suddenly have misinformation.” Most of the data that was saved was from NOAA, EPA, DoE, and NASA.

One of those infamous executive orders from Narcissus le Grand could restrict data access from outside the U.S. Trump’s evil minions are already talking about clamping down on the internet and allowing service providers to have multi-tier systems—that’s been on the GOP hit list for some time. And shortly after the inauguration, Trump ordered the EPA to delete climate change pages from the EPA’s website, but he then backtracked on that order when the roars of protest became deafening. The order for EPA scientists and other agencies’ scientists not to post on social media or communicate with reporters still stands, though. Inside the agencies that do climate-related research, Goldman says “morale is low. People are scared.” Scared for their jobs, because Il Duce likes to fire people who disagree with him!

Read the rest of this entry »