There’s a lot of non-productive whining and misdirected finger pointing by defeated Dems still going on, considering that an arrogant HRC campaign simply dropped the ball, as well as non-justified chest thumping by certain knuckle-dragging GOP members, considering Trump had almost 3 million fewer votes than HRC. Both sides were ready to use the Electoral College to their advantage. Now one side abhors it and the other lauds the wisdom of the Founding Fathers for creating it. Those old colonists weren’t stupid, but many fixtures of U.S. representative democracy, like representative democracy everywhere, are flawed or out-of-date or just plain wrong.

That said, I thought I’d have fun reminding readers of this blog about a famous sci-fi master’s take on “democratic institutions.” Unlike John Galt’s overbearing and over-verbose multipage oration in Atlas Shrugged (parodied in The Midas Bomb), the old revolutionary Bernardo de la Paz’s speech in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress mixes a lot of keen observation about human nature and plain common sense to express in a few pages some interesting ideas. Heinlein, like a few sci-fi writers (but not yours truly), has been considered a Libertarian (Hogan, Niven, and Pournelle are others). The ideas expressed in these pages would never be in that third party’s platform, though.

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A man with talent has a head start. A man with drive succeeds.—Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. A trilogy in one book: ETs send a “gift” to humanity, a virus contained in a probe that crashes in South Africa and modifies human genetics. But is it a gift or a prelude to invasion? Colonizing Mars speeds up as a way to have an outpost farther out in the solar system and increase our chances for survival. When humans discover the ET ship in the far reaches of the solar system, one woman fights to have the ETs’ offspring accepted as our partners for the exploration of the galaxy. “I found the characters well developed and the plot fresh.  I was reminded at times of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.”—Debra Miller, in her Amazon review. (Available in all ebook formats.)

In libris libertas!

First of all, to all readers, thank you for reading! A love of books is one of the foundations of freedom; access to books is another. (Read Fahrenheit 451 for the proof.) If you’ve had occasion to read some of my works, a double thank you. I am honored and humbled that you’ve done so because I know you have many books to choose from. It’s a readers’ world! If you ever have questions for me, use the contact page—I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. For a quick summary, I can’t say 2016 was a resounding success, but there were more pluses than minuses, so I’m hopeful for 2017. Here’s a longer summary:

If it seems I’ve slowed down in 2016, you’ve missed some material, and a lot of it is free! I have three novels waiting in the wings off-stage left for 2017, but while we (my publishers and I) wait I’ve been busy with short stories and novellas, all free, either in my blog category “Steve’s Shorts” or as PDFs free for the asking. I’m currently working on a YA sci-fi mystery. I’ve also been busy with older books in my catalog.

Rogue Planet was the only new novel in 2016; it was published at the beginning of the year. But the second edition of The Midas Bomb was published about this time last year (2015). Both of these books have paper editions that sold like hotcakes at a recent holiday crafts show. The three novels waiting in the wings are Gaia and the Goliaths, Rembrandt’s Angel, and Oasis Redux.  You can read the blurbs for the first two already published books on Amazon or Smashwords. Let me give you teasers for the last three.

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[Note to my readers: This post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel will be released late in 2017, if not before. This excerpt is to whet your appetite. It’s taken from the middle of the novel. Penny Castro, ex-LA county sheriff’s deputy has managed to survive the apocalypse and is currently forced to live with her adopted family in a refugee camp near Edwards AFB. She has just returned from a trip to fill tankers with water…]

One week later I learned the truth in the adage that you can be a victim of your own success. Even though I’d insisted that I didn’t want any more violence in my life—the trip to the Valley was more about curiosity almost killing this cat—the USAF now considered Ensign Penny as an asset, although a reluctant one.

“I’ve never been to Vandenberg,” I told Rodriguez.

He stood before me looking a bit forlorn. Couldn’t see him well from my camp chair with the blazing sun at his back. “If it’s any consolation, I tried to dissuade the colonel because I know you don’t want to participate.”

“Why do they think I’d want to participate?”

“One major reason: we airlifted someone from the Santa Maria area who had managed to cobble together a coded message we could recognize and broadcasted it at a radio station.”

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That war [Vietnam] only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.—Kurt Vonnegut

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Family Affairs. This novel is all about family—Castilblanco’s nieces, adopted families, a terrorist’s family, and broken families. You also might think twice about taking an ocean cruise again. #6 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” will provide you enough mystery, suspense, and thrills to get you through the end of 2016 and all of 2017.  Given the above, you might need some distraction.

In libris libertas!

As a sometimes sci-fi writer, I’m always at a quandary about how many gadgets and technologies I should add to my stories. (The “sometimes” is an admission—sci-fi aficionados probably wouldn’t consider me a “purist” because I write mystery, suspense, and thriller novels too, sometimes combining the sci-fi with those genres. Genres are just keywords to describe storytelling, after all.) When author friend John Hohn (he wrote the entertaining novels Deadly Portfolio and Breached) posted on Facebook about his struggle with fixing up things around the house (one of many frustrations we share), the comment suggested this post about futuristic technology.

Ever watch an old Star Trek episode recently? That sixties show tried to make things futuristic with flashing lights and other gimmickry (some flunky would slide open or shut an Enterprise door and a whooshing side would be played, for example). The usual quality of the episodes aside (real sci-fi stories for the most part, not like episodes in the sequel-series written by screenwriters with no sci-fi credits and generally poor writing skills), the Star Trek gimmickry seems laughable today. But there were a few prescient ones, like the communicator, today’s smartphone, essentially a handheld computer that just happens to be a com device too. That said, the laughable part shows the danger of being too futuristic about your imagined devices.

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[Dickens wrote the story “A Christmas Carol.” This is mine, and it’s dedicated to author Scott Dyson, who is mastering the horror genre quite well….]

Toy Story

Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore

Curt Boggs’ coffee mug spilled its contents onto the Plainville Herald’s classified section. As he mopped up the spill, an ad caught his attention: “Hartley Mansion up for Sale.” He smiled as memories flooded into his mind.

He had left Plainville, Kansas for college long ago and never returned. His subscription to the newspaper followed him everywhere, though, even to the small Queens flat he now rented. The memories were mostly about Carol Hartley. She’d been a cheerleader; he’d been a fullback. A major knee energy in his freshman year at college had ended his playing days. The newspaper subscription allowed him to confirm every year that his football records in high school were never broken.

He wasn’t interested in buying the Hartley Mansion, of course. Even after Carol married Tom Rice and they moved into the family home—her parents were dead, weren’t they?—it was still called the Hartley Mansion. In high school, a lot of kids thought the old, rambling house at the end of Main Street was haunted. He knew better. Carol and he had made love in almost every room of that house, including her parents’. He couldn’t even remember what the father did. He was somehow rich and never home and mommy was always out shopping, often visiting the chic stores in Kansas City.

Would Carol be involved in the sale of the house? What had happened to her and Tom? He seemed to remember something in the Herald’s society page about ten years ago about their moving to Chicago. The classified ad had made him a bit curious this time, though. Time to revisit your roots, old boy?
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That’s what I often say about incredible current events, especially those associated with political machinations and criminal actions: I can’t write this because no one would believe me—real life is often stranger than fiction. But, in the case of my first published novel, Full Medical, maybe I was prescient, except that things could become much worse than what I portrayed in that dystopian thriller. The theme permeating the entire novel is about the rich elites ensuring the best medical coverage available on Earth at the time at the expense of everyone else. “Full Medical” means full medical coverage, and in that novel only the rich can afford it, but they go far beyond anything seen up until then. I’ll not go into details because I don’t want to spoil the story for you. (It’s the first book in the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” by the way.)

The book starts in 2053, so the first thing to point out is that I probably got the date wrong: the healthcare coverage apocalypse described there might occur much sooner. Not only is the GOP talking about doing away with Obamacare (most GOP leaders don’t even like its coverage of preexisting conditions and children up to twenty-six living at home, in contrast to Mr. Trump—who would have thought that he would be more “liberal” than the rest of his party?). GOP members are out to destroy Medicare too, the closest thing we have to single-payer (the correct way to do things).

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What does the “B” in Benoit B Mandelbrot stand for? Answer: Benoit B Mandelbrot.

***

The Collector. Most Nazis stole art not out of appreciation but for money—a famous piece can launder many dollars or be used to finance all sorts of things. What they finance here might give you the creeps. Detectives Chen and Castilblanco swim in the dark seas of illegal art in this mystery/suspense/thriller novel. Can they keep from drowning?

In libris libertas!

Mars. OK, half movie, half pop science program. This series on the National Geographic channel jumps back and forth between sci-fi (the movie) and mostly current science and technology (pop science). If you can get past that boring, pedantic, and new Cosmos guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who seems to be the expert on everything and everywhere on TV these days (will he soon be in a Lincoln car commercial?), and the smiling Martian, Andy Weir, it’s an OK hour each week compared to the rest of the shlock on TV. I find the jumps disconcerting, though, and the sci-fi plot badly written and contrived.

There are many good sci-fi tales about Mars, from Heinlein’s Podkayne to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, that are neither badly written nor contrived. If you skip through the boring potato-farming lessons, Weir’s The Martian is OK too. But this TV series creates numerous accidents for dramatic effect, not unusual for the genre, but they all seem like clichés here and far too numerous. (And I’ve just seen the first two “episodes,” so it will probably only get worse.)

Portraying the real psychological stress for human Mars explorers would be enough if done well, especially what will occur even during the long journey to Mars, which is mostly neglected by the TV writers. Even The Martian downplayed that—probably a good thing because, added to the potato farming, readers and viewers would end up in a mental institution pounding the walls and wringing their hands, or just slashing their wrists. But this will be an important factor in any colonialization of Mars (see the shipboard scene in my More than Human: The Mensa Contagion and references at the end of that book).

Still, let’s wish the series well. It’s new, it’s different, and it beats Happy Days reruns (hey, isn’t that the guy selling reverse mortgages now?). For TV these days, those are all pluses.

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Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder. #3 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” this mystery/suspense/thriller novel has more twists and turns than a carnival pretzel. Chen is accused of murder, so naturally Castilblanco tries to help her. But there is a lot more to the murder than meets the eye. Readers will have a great time unraveling it all with these NYPD homicide detectives and will be kept guessing right up to the climax. Soon available in all ebook formats.

In libris libertas!