When considering Russia’s brutal oligarchy v. China’s fascist capitalism, it’s hard to decide which one is worse. Trump seems to have a bromance with Putin and has long attacked China, but lately he seems to be waffling on both (although the bromance might get him or his administration in trouble). The split personality of his waffling is baffling too because some in his administration are talking about more sanctions against Russia. Moreover, the original tirade against the one-China policy has become a recognition of it. If, after this waffling, will he still keep his campaign promises: Be a friend of Russia and an enemy of China? The former seems in doubt after firing Flynn.

The waffling is strange because up until now Trump seems to checking off items on a list of campaign promises, even if they’re completely crazy, harmful to the country, and insulting to millions of people. Immigration? California farmers, even those who voted for Trump, are wondering where they’ll find the cheap labor needed to harvest their crops. The Muslim ban seems stymied, and his only response so far is to blast the judicial system like any tin-horn dictator would do. And many ICE cases not related to his unconscionable and unconstitutional Muslim ban are still ripping apart families.

Trump is a family man who doesn’t seem to care about any family except his own. He’ll stoop to blasting Nordstrom for daughter Ivanka when she’s in the White House and supposedly not working in her business anymore. He’ll also support Kellyanne Conway who should be brought up on charges for hawking Ivanka’s products. One son-in-law is in the White House (nepotism), while the other wants to buy the Marlins. Maybe Trump will send his family out to harvest the crops for the California farmers. Might be good for them to see what real work entails!

But back to China v. Russia. Which one is more dangerous? I can’t choose—I find the leadership and power structure of both countries despicable. The Chinese have adopted the most polluting, ruthless, and oppressive form of capitalism imaginable. They’re no longer communists but extreme fascist capitalists, willing to silence or murder anyone who goes against China Inc. The Russians can’t make anything worthwhile, but that doesn’t bother the oligarchy. Putin, the mafia don, makes sure that only the anointed (AKA sycophants to the Russian mob boss) get rich and any opposition is killed, from people running against him in their fake democracy to members of the press.

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The United States is the only major nation in the industrialized world that does not guarantee health care as a right for its people.—Bernie Sanders

***

It’s Presidents’ Day—let’s remember some big-league presidents who made this country great, but let’s not forget that the position is far more important than any position-holder, especially those who embarrass us by not respecting it and not doing their job well.

***

Did you know the complete “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” is now available on Smashwords in all ebook formats, and at all its affiliated retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, and so forth) and lenders (Overdrive, for example). The first book in the series is on sale at Smashwords until March 1. Of course, the entire series is also available on Amazon in .mobi (Kindle) format.

In libris libertas.

Lion. Garth Davis, dir. Great movie, like many movies based on books and not cobbled together screenplays. The book in question, a true story, is A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley with Larry Buttrose. The movie stars Dev Patel as the older Saroo and the awesomely cute Sunny Pawar as the young Saroo. Rooney Mara plays grown-up Saroo’s girlfriend, Nicole Kidman and David Wenham, Sue and John Brierley, the couple who adopted Saroo, Priyanka Bose his birth-mother, and Abhishek Bharate the older brother who lost him.

Maybe the book covers the big gap in the middle where the young boy becomes a man in Tasmania. The movie doesn’t, but you will not miss it.  The story unfolds at a leisurely but intense pace. Some great scenery from the island and the depiction of impoverished existence in remote Indian villages and Calcutta provide an anguishing contrast between Third World and First World existence. I was moved by the children’s desperation in Saroo’s orphanage. This movie is definitely worth seeing. It received a Best Pic Golden Globe award and Kidman and Patel received supporting actor globes. I’m happy I didn’t miss it.

***

Gaia and the Goliaths. An environmental activist is murdered on a street in Manhattan after a protest. NYPD homicide Detectives Chen and Castilblanco get the case. While pursuing the clues to find those responsible, they discover the activist’s boyfriend is in danger because he has key information that will expose an international conspiracy involving Europe, Russia, and the U.S. As the tangled web unravels, an old nemesis of the detectives makes his appearance. #7 in the detectives’ series. Available on Amazon in .mobi (Kindle) format and on Smashwords in all ebook formats, and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, etc) and lenders (Overdrive, etc). #1, The Midas Bomb, is on sale on Smashwords until March 1: use coupon code PV57D. The whole series is now available on Amazon and Smashwords.

In libris libertas!

One parallel with 1930’s Germany that jumps out for any sane observer of today’s toxic political environment is censorship. This runs the gamut of a mob shouting down a speaker (they should have let the guy in Berkeley speak his mind so everyone could see what a bigot, hater, and idiot he is), to the statement from Stephen Bannon AKA Goebbels’s spawn that the media is the opposition. The latter, and Kellyanne Conway’s statement about “alternative facts” and blast that everyone in the media who criticizes Trump should be fired are only a step away from fascist censorship in this country.

Another example was Fox forcing the lumber company to edit their Super Bowl ad, something that company paid to produce. Why not run it instead of silencing debate? Let people express and discuss the merits of the ad. I suspect that Trump or his cronies pressured Fox to apply censorship. I’ve seen right-wing and insulting ads in the NY Times. They make money off them whether controversial or not, and Fox just made the real ad go viral on YouTube anyway. What did they accomplish?

The Fox example doesn’t even make sense. With respect to Trump’s Putin comment, which basically equated Russia to the U.S. for oppressive actions, Bill O’Reilly called Putin a murderer. Why didn’t Fox censor O’Reilly if Trump is such a friend of the despotic Putin? When censorship isn’t applied evenly, you have to question its application at least. Some censorship is justified, of course—the movie rankings X, R, PG-13, and so forth are a type of censorship, and it’s justified so that parents can make their own determination about whether their kids should see the movie. Excluding erotica and porn from public libraries might be justified too, but I’d hate to be on a panel that determines whether a book falls into one of those categories. I remember the case of some nut in Lexington, MA objecting to his children reading about modern families—maybe he’s moved out of the state by now to Texas.

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[In the sci-fi realm, we have subgenres like hard sci-fi, militaristic sci-fi, space opera, fantasy, and so forth. Star Trek episodes and movies can be considered everything except the first (reasonable scientific extrapolation is too often lacking). Star Wars movies are more akin to the last two. But the old stories that we now call space opera were a lot of fun. Consider this a bow to space opera with a wee bit of militaristic sci-fi and tongue-in-cheek. As they say, knowing the past can prevent us from committing errors in the present…]

Nth Contact

Copyright 2017, Steven M. Moore

                Captain Rick Hastings watched the screen. The Star Queen had just popped out of hyperspace and entered the unexplored solar system.

“AI, what am I seeing?” Something that sounded like a chaotic series of grunts, whistles, and sounds passing through several octaves filled the ship’s control room. “Standard, dimwit, not Draconian.”

“My apologies. I was conversing with Nigel. My sensors tell me there are several large starships in orbit around the fourth planet. More details will become available as we approach.”

“That’s not good,” said Nigel, his XO. Like many Draconians, the large humanoid had adopted a name that could be pronounced by Humans. The AI had no problem with his real name. “The last survey of this solar system showed it wasn’t inhabited. Should we write it off?”

“Because some ETs decided to steal our real estate?” He shook his mop of black hair, wiggled his eyebrows, and thought a few seconds. Compared to his XO, the captain wasn’t tall and had legs shorter than his torso. He looked stumpy in a uniform, a characteristic of many from his home planet where genetics had taken over adaption to a high-g environment. “Let’s at least take a look.”

“They’re coming to meet us,” said the AI, flashing up images of three ships speeding towards them.

“They don’t look friendly,” said the XO. “We should throttle back or take evasive maneuvers. Those look like missile-launching ports.”

“We can’t go FTL this close to the star,” said the Star Queen’s navigator.

“Take a course perpendicular to the planetary orbits,” Hastings told the AI.

“That’s an indeterminate command,” said the AI. “There are two possible—”

“Either way works! Just do it. Go FTL ASAP!”

“They launched missiles at us just before we went FTL,” the AI announced twenty seconds later.

“I’m getting my bearings,” said the navigator. Hastings waited. “Very clever, AI. We’ll pop up near base.”

“Forget about admiring a stupid machine. Just get us back to HQ. I’m going to my stateroom. I need some time to write up the report about this new contact.”

“Be sure and explain why you decided to confront the ETs who had taken possession of the solar system,” said the XO.

“Go to hell!” Hastings stomped out of the control room. He’d said it in Draconian, one of the few phrases he knew.

***

                “I’ve read your report.” Admiral Bonaventura studied his captain. “Did your XO forget to sign off on it?”

“My XO is a Draconian asshole. I’ll have his hide if he mentioned anything to you.”

Bonaventura frowned. “Am I a Draconian asshole too?”

Hastings retreated. “That remains to be proven. The Star Queen is a survey ship. I was doing a survey. Nothing says I can’t see who the trespassers are.”

“Your only weapons are found in your security detail’s small arms cabinets. What were you thinking? Whoever establishes the first colony claims the real estate.”

“Don’t you want to know what they were doing there? Colony ships aren’t battle cruisers.”
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Valentine’s Day is here. For the last month I’ve been receiving emails from 1-800-FLOWERS, book offers for romance and erotica books, restaurants with special prix fixe menus for a romantic dinner, and so forth. Romance sells in the commercial world—or businesses think it does, at least. I continuously reevaluate my writing career, so maybe it’s time to ask myself, am I doing a disservice to readers? Should I include more romance?

I’ll have to admit that I’ve never used the genre label romance or erotica for any of my stories and never used those labels as keywords either (genres are just keywords, of course). Such labels should help the reader decide what’s emphasized in a story, so I’d be misleading readers by saying a story is a romance. My stories are about human beings, though, so romance is included—it’s a part of being human, either by participating in it, lacking it, or choosing to avoid it. In the wide spectrum of human behavior, romance plays an important role. I include it; I just don’t emphasize it. That’s a choice I’ve made. I won’t apologize for it.

One reviewer of Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder (#3 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series”) complained that the title was deceiving—he was looking for more lust! Sexual lust is related to romance, of course, and Detective Chen felt both for her senator-lover in that story. “Sex games” was the SWAT team leader’s description of the murder scene where they found her with the senator’s body. What happens from thereon doesn’t have much lust or romance, so the reviewer was correct in a sense, but Chen’s lack of romance in her life and her search for it is still about romance—and that was a theme.

I generally put romance into my stories only if it fits—I’ve never sat down at my laptop saying, “I’m going to write a romantic tale today.” I don’t write romances, and I rarely read a story if that’s all it’s about. It’s not that I don’t think romance is important to human beings; it is. I’m just more interested in the rest of the plot and how it leads to romance…or destroys it. Somehow we’ve evolved to be the extreme sexual activists of the animal world. We’ve even tried to sanctify that sexuality to move beyond the obvious evidence that human beings are a randy bunch. We also sanitize it by calling it romance.

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People who, like us, live in a dying civilization have three choices. We can attempt to avert the decline as a child builds a sand-castle on the edge of the advancing tide. We can ignore the death of beauty, of scholarship, of art, of intellectual integrity, finding solace in our own consolations. Thirdly, we can join the barbarians and take our share of the spoils.—mystery author P. D. James

***

Gaia and the Goliaths. An environmental activist is murdered on a street in Manhattan after a protest. NYPD homicide Detectives Chen and Castilblanco get the case. While pursuing the clues to find those responsible, they discover the activist’s boyfriend is in danger because he has key information that will expose an international conspiracy involving Europe, Russia, and the U.S. As the tangled web unravels, an old nemesis of the detectives makes his appearance. #7 in the detectives’ series. Available on Amazon in .mobi (Kindle) format and on Smashwords in all ebook formats, and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, etc) and lenders (Overdrive, etc). #1, The Midas Bomb, is on sale on Smashwords until March 1: use coupon code PV57D. The whole series is now available on Amazon and Smashwords.

In libris libertas!

Are you a public library patron? My local public library helped turned me into an avid reader when I was a kid. I’ve given many print versions of my books (I don’t have many—I’m working on that) to public libraries around the country. Public libraries seem as popular as ever. They offer valuable services to the community too—beyond books, internet access for those who can’t afford it, reading programs for kids, opportunities for the public to meet writers, editors, and other people in the publishing industry, and community meeting spots, to name a few.

I’m obviously a cheerleader and lament that public libraries are often among the first victims of budget axes when communities find themselves in a bind. Like public schools, these budget axes are often sharpened when fat cats in town governments feel they need more salary (why a mayor of a small town makes more than a scientist is beyond me)—of course, some of those fat cats are school administrators!

One of the reasons I’m ending exclusivity for my ebooks on Amazon and adding them to Smashwords is because Smashwords has many more affiliates that service public libraries or act like one so readers can borrow ebooks and not have to pay for them. I’m not sure how much this benefits me financially—it might not at all—but I feel it at least brings me some good karma like reviewing (see below). Anything I can do to increase reading and literacy is worthwhile.

A new affiliate was just added to Smashwords; it’s called Bibliotheca CloudLibrary. This service offers the entire Smashwords Prime Catalog to subscribing public libraries. Library patrons can also survey the catalog and ask that ebooks they find interesting be available to borrowers, if their public library allows that. Of course, if your public library doesn’t lend ebooks, you’re missing out on a lot of good books. Your public library should welcome ebooks, by the way—their shelves are probably sagging too, something that convinced me to switch to ebooks as much as possible.

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It’s often interesting to do some soul-searching. Why do we write? We all take pride in what we write. Or just call it satisfaction after spinning a good yarn. (I’m obviously talking about fiction, but you can extrapolate to your circumstances.) Some people, even readers, might think that our pride or satisfaction makes us narcissists. Admittedly some writers carry that pride a wee bit too far.

I can see it in some blurbs or descriptions of books. Here’s a recent one: “Compelling! Provacative! Informative!” There are worse: “Sure to be a bestseller!” Or “Author Hits a Home Run!” The rest of the blurb might actually provide some information, and maybe they were written by PR personnel with an acute case of superlativitis, but if they were written by an author, narcissism might be indicated.

I’ve seen it in book fairs. Authors full of themselves extolling the virtues of their writing. Authors reading from their magnum opus in a boring monotone, offering a cure for insomnia instead of perceptions about their book, including its important themes. Worst case: authors reading for their own audiobooks! Next worse case: authors in love with the pronouns I, me, and mine in book trailers (at least Patterson seems to avoid that). I’ve also seen great humility. Being humble is a virtue. Nowadays there are many good books and good writers. I feel lucky some reader chooses to read one of mine.

Some creative people want to put themselves on a pedestal so that other mere mortals can worship them and bask in the light of their self-defined genius. Of course, non-creative people do that too (we even have a president who’s a narcissist—if that were his only sin!). It’s all about ego. While some feeling of self-worth is better than depression and suicidal tendencies, a balance must be struck. Relating to other people is a skill many of us lack now (including the U.S. president), but huge ego trips don’t help.

If you’re writing for self-aggrandizement, don’t. In fact, if you’re writing for any other reason than love of writing, your motivation is ill-conceived. Odds are you won’t have a bestseller, but you’ll maybe have a few readers who are fans. Odds are you won’t hit a home run in Yankee Stadium with your book either, but you might with your after-work softball team. (I’m guessing it has to be a print version if you swat at the ball with a book—hey, baseball season is almost upon us!)

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Snug Harbor

Copyright 2017, Steven M. Moore

                Not all the colonists awoke. Cryosleep had a risk that compounded over time, and almost two centuries is a long time. Adriana Cisternino-Cho had to decide whether to eliminate her husband’s name. James Cho had died in transit.

The exobiologist threw herself into her work as soon as she recovered in the huge ship that was in orbit. She didn’t want to think of the bodies that were spaced and sent to burn up in the new planet’s atmosphere. Others needed to visit the psychologists. She’d stopped going after two sessions. Nothing was going to bring Jimmy back.

The starship Vasco da Gama, the sixth colony ship a dying Earth had launched, had been assembled in LEO. It used standard technology developed over two centuries of exploring Earth’s solar system augmented in scale to match the size of the ship. The AI had kept watch over its cargo of a fifty-member landing crew and thousands of frozen embryos. They had parked the ship in orbit around the fifth planet of another system.

Only thirty-three of the skeleton crew had survived. Tests showed all the embryos were probably OK.

Dyads and triads had formed among the survivors who had lost their significant others. Adriana wasn’t interested. It seemed that only yesterday Jimmy and she said their goodbyes and entered their cryochambers. You knew the risks, girl. That doesn’t make it any more bearable!

Although the tests showed all the embryos were probably OK, she wondered about their future. If the planet wasn’t a feasible home for a colony, everyone would die, unless there was some possibility of reprovisioning the starship. Hundreds of more years in cryo? I’d rather die!

***

Two exobiologists were in the first shuttle party to zoom in on the planet, more of a survey crew that checked out five possible sites in more detail. They had done all the surveying and probing they could do from orbit.

“More land area than Earth confirmed. Mild climates are commensurate with axis tilt, but polar regions are stable. Oxygen levels in agreement with normal photosynthesis of local vegetation, which is abundant. Omnivore herds are plentiful in interior plains of continents.”

The AI summarized their findings ad infinitum. Adriana almost dozed. After it finished, Scot Cobb, their temporary leader, said, “Any comments? Adriana? Don?”

“We saw herds but no predators,” said Don Chang.

“That’s an oddity,” Adriana said in agreement. “There has to be some mechanism to control their numbers.”

“Food shortages?” said Scot. “When those strange grasslands are wasted, maybe the herds die off.”

“A possibility,” said Adriana. Why am I so agreeable? She didn’t buy Scot’s conjecture. I must be tired.

“There might be some lemming phenomenon,” said Don. “It will be interesting to study.”

“Will we be able to eat anything on the planet’s surface?” said Roberto McLane, an exogeologist.

“Let’s hear the AI’s ranking of the landing sites and see if we agree with it.,” said Scot.

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