My previous post about religion in fiction naturally is a segue into the topic of mortality in fiction. In typical thrillers, protagonists usually survive despite many odds against them, but they might be avenging the death of others near and dear to them. And while the main protagonists often live a charmed life because of luck or skills, secondary characters are often become victims. Most mysteries start with the victims, of course; there has to be a crime for the protagonist(s) to solve.

The novel Mind Games is a classic mystery/thriller in that sense, although it is set in the far future. A.B. Carolan starts with an heinous murder of a man’s adopted daughter, and she swears revenge. The ensuing action is more thriller than mystery, and many readers would just say that the story is just good sci-fi, which was my Irish colleague Carolan’s intention, of course [wink, wink]. I use this as an example to show that even young-adult literature can deal with mortality!

In general, victims can become a problem if readers become too attached to them (although in a mystery, that might be what the author wants because it justifies the revenge motive). An editor of Son of Thunder lamented when a Turkish detective who aided Esther Brookstone…well, read the book. Similarly, a reviewer was upset while reading Aristocrats and Assassins when a friend of Castilblanco’s wife…again, read the book. An attachment to certain characters often occurs, even villains.

I even toyed with the idea of killing off main character Ashley Scott in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, just to be radically different. After all, she doesn’t appear in any more novels on that long fictional timeline extending beyond the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series, although her novel can be considered a bridge book to the “Clones and Mutants” trilogy. (There are now a few other stories and series in between!) Yet one can argue that principal characters like Ashley Scott and even Esther Brookstone deserve to retire gracefully, living on in relative peace.

But fiction must seem real, and our mortality is part of our human reality. Good fiction must avoid the “lived happily ever” syndrome of childhood’s fairy tales. Shakespeare knew to include mortality in his dramas, most notably in Hamlet, which is a play that considers mortality in almost every scene. Mortality is also a big theme in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, where it’s closely tied to religion.

Fiction authors can add significant meaning to their tales by including mortality as a theme. One can argue that both the morality and religious themes are what separates profound fiction from fluff.

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The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. DHS agent Ashley Scott witnesses a murder in a riverside park. She and an investigative reporter become involved in the case…and a lot more. This mystery/thriller considers the answer to the following question: What will a future US government do to keep old agents who know a lot of secrets from revealing them when they slip into dementia and Alzheimer’s? You might not like the answer! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon).

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

If you’re a sci-fi fan, you’ll know Isaac Asimov’s answer to this question, although he might prefer the word “robots” to “androids.” In his “Robots Trilogy” (really part of the lengthy expansion of his Foundation series), he actually featured an eclectic mix, and I believe he actually called R. Daneel Olivaw an android. What he never considered as far as I know is AI (“Artificial Intelligence”).

Of course, androids and robots require artificial intelligence, sometimes not all that sophisticated, like when a robot does surgery or assembles cars. It doesn’t go the other way, though: AI doesn’t require robots or androids. HAL was just a lot of microchips and software programming (and could still be quite evil in 2001!).

Quality AI could be much more “useful” than robots or androids. Androids could satisfy human beings’ desires to have slaves (or willing sex partners?), but spending a lot of effort on copying the human body seems like a waste of time, especially because there are jobs where the human form isn’t too practical. (That surgical robot arm is an example where only a precise hand is required.)

AI can be a lot more useful because it can provide information and do it rapidly. Current AI is primitive in this sense—not much more than a super search engine that finds stuff and gloms it together (hopefully into something useful, but don’t count on it). In that sense, the AIs in my fictional starships that traverse the alternate realities of the multiverse are much more necessary than the androids and robots even though the human villains in Mind Games want to give then psi powers. Wouldn’t an AI with psi powers be more dangerous? (A bit of criticism never hurts, right, AB Carolan? [Wink, wink.])

Given the era when Asimov wrote his famous robot novels, we couldn’t have expected him to even conjure up a HAL, let alone an AI with psi powers. With AI such a fad now, though, isn’t it time to create such a super-villain. TBD!

Even though I’m an ex-scientist who writes sci-fi sometimes, just like many others, I’m not that keen on using AI. Current AI is primitive, like I said, and it must be trained. What might make a good sci-fi character, though, is one that trains itself. In Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, that scientist turned sci-fi author created such a character, not a villain like Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL 1.0 or like the one in my novel The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan.

Maybe it’s better to avoid that Frankenstein complex. What do you think?

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Mind Games. In AB Carolan’s third sci-fi mystery, Della Dos Toros finds her foster-father murdered and vows to avenge him. In her search for his killer, she discovers a vast conspiracy that could tear apart the government body of near-Earth worlds. Robots and androids with psi powers like Della’s? What could go wrong?

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

Progressive protests start with a few concerned and responsible citizens deciding they’ve had enough. I can’t claim to be the first (the EU has been going after Google for a while), but I’ve hated Google for a long time. I finally did something about it.

Long before their kissing Ronald McDonald Trump’s fat McD’s butt and changing their map names (Denali to Mt. McKinley and Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America), Google’s browser Chrome was annoying me a lot. I’d already stopped using Facebook and X; Zuckerberg had proven himself to be a kiss-ass fascist oligarch backing Narcissus le Grand; and that slimy Elon Muskrat, who has no creds as a serious leader or even an elected office and is a complete fascist, lost my support the moment he walked into the X HQ with his kitchen sink. (The Muskrat probably had it lying around one of his penthouses, having replaced it with a gold one, because he’s emulating his fuehrer’s love for gold that represents their fascist greed and desires for power.)

Most progressives more than likely grimaced when they saw those fascist oligarchs sitting there as special invitees to the Donald Jackass Trump’s inaugurations events, the Muskrat not hiding his obsequious attitude with his ubiquitous Hitlerian salutes. And right there among those fascist oligarchs were the owners of Google whose names, like Voldemort, I’ll avoid saying so their evil will not fall upon you!

So, my personal vendetta against Google is because I know these American versions of Russian oligarchs much better than Putin’s. All of them—that Big Bot Bezos, that slimy Muskrat, the arrogant Sugar-Mountain Zuckerberg, etc., these “made men” in the jackass’s mafia—negatively affect my life and yours (if you’re an American) a lot more than Putin’s. But Google’s SOBs were also affecting me, a writer, every day of my writing life.

Their trackers followed me everywhere I went on the internet. Every search produced pages of unwanted ads, allowing Google’s oligarchs to become even richer by selling everyone’s information and ad space in searches to unscrupulous company CEOs just as abusive and greedy as Google’s masters, as if I’d ever buy anything from the bastards!

How did I strike back? There’s not much an author can do, I’ll admit, but I severed all ties with Google! I use DuckDuckGo now. I never used Gmail for my own fiction writing. (AB Carolan needed an address to register his stories with the Big Bezos Bot’s Amazon, which is generally a waste of time. Since I also hate the latter oligarch, readers can now write to AB by using the “Contact Page” at this website. [wink, wink])

As an FYI and added benefit, DuckDuckGo beats the crap our of Chrome! It has new features I’ll use a lot as an author. (For example, I can make both a “printable version” or a “PDF version”  of a web article, ones that are actually readable. Chrome still depends on MS Edge to do the latter, which often produces a damn mess. What? Is Bill Gates part of this evil oligarchy?)

I haven’t begun to explore all the other options available in DuckDuckGo’s dropdown menu and elsewhere, but it’s straightforward search results without Chrome’s annoying ads by themselves is worth the change! (For example, as an author, I might search for old KGB agent Putin’s favorite Russian poisons. Before, I fully expected that I’d receive offers to buy some samples at least for a few days from suppliers in Moscow if I used Google’s Chrome!) If you’re an author who just wants dependable and factual information without pages of annoying and useless ads, don’t use Chrome!

So, bye-bye greedy Google! I’ve been loyal to you since you were an internet infant in nappies. Now you don’t deserve that loyalty because you’ve become an evil adult supporting corporate fascism and terrorism in America, I want nothing to do with you! I hope everyone joins me to choose more honest and less evil internet service providers so that Google goes the way of the dinosaurs! Or straight to hell where they belong with Donald Jackass Trump!

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Fascism and terrorism. Fascism is a human affliction with symptoms of simple greed and a thirst for power, a mind-destroying illness many psychotic and sociopathic individuals suffer from. Terrorism is its deadliest and most extreme form. Although we are seeing too much of the former in the US and all over the world now (see above), the latter is increasing as well (attacks made by crazed people using cars as weapons, for example). I’ve been fighting the battle against both in my prose from my very first novel, Full Medical, to my last (for now), Fear the Asian Evil, and in most tales in between those two, even those tales geared to young adults (who also need to learn how to fight these deadly social diseases!). All these stories are honest portrayals of the damage fascism and terrorism can do to freedom and peace in the world. Brave people in these stories struggle and fight the good fight, so let them inspire you! (Fascists and terrorists, many of them controlling our own government and companies now, will not enjoy these stories, of course. Their ignorance will return to haunt them because they will pay the price sooner than later!)

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

I’ve written several trilogies. The “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy is the most recent; it’s basically a continuation of the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, and “Revenge at Last,” a novella in the free PDF download of the same name, almost made Morgan’s trilogy into a series (and still might, depending on my energy reserves). Three other trilogies,, “The Last Humans,” “The Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries,” and “Clones and Mutants,” are quite different. One difference is that they have strong female protagonists (the last one, several).

I considered “The Last Humans” trilogy in a previous article; it’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi. Another difference then can be found in the type of sci-fi. Mary Jo’s adventures are more thrillers than mysteries; and most of the sci-fi is found in the MECHs, cyborg warriors representing tech that China, Russia, and the US all want to steal and are willing to employ evil agents to do just that. Mary Jo prevents that from happening in three different novels. (Mary Jo is an alias for Maria Jose, by the way) “The Clones and Mutants” trilogy is also a sci-fi thriller where new biological advances replace the robotic ones of the cyborgs.

The sci-fi is all different in these three trilogies, but the general lesson is always the same: There are evil people whose greed and desire for power are willing to make good people suffer to obtain it; so, if no one steps up to stop those villains, they will succeed. That important lesson is one we should all learn in real life during these troubling times when an evil and wannabe fascist dictator has grabbed power in our country and is making many of its good citizens suffer. We need more virtuous heroes and fewer evil fascist villains.

What Penny Castro (protagonist of “The Last Humans” trilogy), Mary Jo Melendez, and the clones and one mutant show in these three trilogies is that ordinary humans can step up and overcome terrible odds to defeat the forces of evil. This of course is a major message in a lot of fiction. My “ordinary humans” are also smart women who are mostly Latinas, and that belies the macho beliefs of ignorant American fascists like our DoD secretary that women can’t fight for what’s right and the far-right opinions in our country that “others” who aren’t extreme far-right WASP zealots like them don’t belong in America.

Of course, this is fiction, storytelling that should entertain anyone who’s not a fascist MAGA supporter. Guess what? I’ve known plenty of women who have exactly the positive characteristics of my fictional heroes. My characters have flaws like everyone does, of course—they’re very human, unlike many zombies in the MAGA hordes, but they also have courage and skills. That’s more than the DoD secretary or any other member of our wannabe fascist dictator’s administration has. If there is a God, He’ll be on these women’s side, not the side of the fascist devils led by the Orange Devil. Fiction must seem real, and fiction about heroes can become real if the real heroes in our society receive our support.

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“The Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries.” In the first novel, Muddlin’ Through, Mary Jo is framed and must struggle to prove she’s innocent. In the second novel, Silicon Slummin’ and Just Gettin’ By, Russia and the US are all after the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”) and she’s pursued by a stalker. In the third, Goin’ the Extra Mile, China goes after the MECHs. Readers will wonder how this all ends. All three novels are available wherever quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon). These are all “evergreen books,” stories as exciting and prophetic as the day I finished the manuscripts.

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

In a previous post, I’ve considered my strong female adult characters, Esther Brookstone, Mary Jo Melendez, and Penny Castro, protagonists from three different series, but what about those strong young ladies from AB Carolan’s novels, the “ABC Sci-fi Mysteries for Young Adults” [wink, wink]. My Irish collaborator from Donegal, Ireland, designed those stories to take place in the same sci-fi universe as my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” (which also has a plethora of kick-ass adult heroines who predate Esther, Mary Jo, and Penny). That didn’t limit that old Irish leprechaun that much: My sci-fi universe is huge and allowed my author-buddy to cover a wide span of space and time.

Let’s consider his three young ladies:

Sashibala Garcia. In The Secret Lab, this tween shares the spotlight with the mutant cat Mr. Paws. Shashi and her gang, “The Fearsome Four,” live on the ISS (International Space Station) in the future as Earth below goes through that period on my alternate future-history timeline known as the Chaos. The five uncover a conspiracy that involves the creation of other mutant animals for evil purposes. It’s a lot of danger and intrigue for the cat and gang to handle, but they handle it all well.

Asako Kobayashi. A long time later in that same sci-fi universe, this young protagonist from The Secret of the Urns lives with her parents in a small Human colony of scientists studying the ETs native to the moon of a Jupiter-sized planet. These ETs turn out to have a sad and secret past, but their immediate problem is with the Human miners who want to exploit the moon’s rare earth deposits, a plan that could very well destroy the ETs’ environment. AB makes it tough for Asako and her friends. Do they prevail?

Della Dos Toros. Much later still, in Mind Games, the father who adopted this young girl is murdered. They lived as outcasts on Sanctuary, one of three original Human colonies first mentioned in my novel Sing a Zamba Galactica. The father and daughter share a secret: They are empaths with ESP powers. In trying to use those powers to find her father’s killers, Della must travel from Sanctuary, her home planet, to Earth and New Haven, another of the first three colonies. She and her friends uncover a plan to take over all the planets in near-Earth space under the ITUIP umbrella (Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets) as danger lurks in three different worlds.

These three novels are a lot more profound than Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, but their motivation is the same: AB wanted to introduce young readers to the mystery and thrills of science fiction. What I’ve discovered at book events where I offer and/or talk about Carolan’s stories is that adults who are young-at-heart also like these novels. The fact that the three heroines are different but very special young women doesn’t seem to diminish that enjoyment. Way to go, AB! [wink, wink]

“So…what about Carolan’s Kayla Jones, the kick-ass protagonist in Carolan’s novel Origins?” you ask. She’s a very special character too. I’ll consider her next week.

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AB Carolan’s “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries for Young Adults.” Each novel in this series will entertain young adults and adults who are young-at-heart alike. They’re ideal for the first group, appropriate to tweens through teens that are more likely to make good book reports if they actually enjoy the books they read. AB Carolan might be an old leprechaun [wink, wink], but he’s young-minded and full of mischief. Like many Irishmen, he can spin a good yarn…as if he were a relative of the famous bard Turlough O’Carolan. (Have no fear. He writes in English, not Gaelic.)

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

It happens. Companies competing to monetize space? Yeah, that’s Boeing vs. Space-X at least, with the latter winning now, but don’t forget European, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other companies. Star Trek communicators? Smart phones can do almost everything Captain Kirk’s device could, although he never had AI on it and you can. (In fact, it will soon be on new iPhones whether you want it or not!) Comsats? Arthur C. Clarke predicted them, but he couldn’t have imagined Elon Musk littering valuable real estate in Earth’s orbital space with his clouds of tiny comsats. Worldwide pandemics? Michael Crichton imagined an alien one in the Andromeda Strain, but Covid proved that human beings can manage to create that without any help from aliens. (And Covid was even bioengineered if you believe it came from that lab in Wuhan, China.)

Surviving a worldwide plague was the theme of The Last Humans, the first novel in my trilogy, “The Last Humans.” It’s yet another example of sci-fi becoming sci-fact, as discussed in the NY Times (9/10/2024) article “10,000 Feet Up, Scientists Found Hundreds of Airborne Microbes,” with the subtitle “Hints that winds may help spread diseases around the world.” That novel’s prediction that a US enemy’s bioengineered virus now unfortunately seems entirely possible. It also means that even the short propagation time it took for Covid to infect the planet can even be shortened quite a bit as the contagion rides in the prevailing winds…like in the novel! Who knows what contagions our enemies are cooking up right now? I made an extrapolation from current science to create a story…and a warning, but we might not be lucky enough to be saved by new vaccine technology (mRNA) in the future. Or will anti-vaxers come to power and ban all vaccines like Robert Kennedy Jr. wants, giving humanity a death sentence if any future contagion is unleashed?

Of course, warnings from sci-fi don’t need to become sci-fact to be useful. Another warning in that first novel of my trilogy (with repercussions there and in the two following novels) was about water management and how massive fires make it even more difficult. 2024 is beginning to look like it will be the worst year in Earth’s history for climate problems, but it was already bad in 2019 when the first novel was published…bad enough for me to make some bold predictions!

Another example of sci-fi becoming sci-fact: I generally treat AI as a technology that’s helpful for humans in my sci-fi tales, but not always. Current AI might be artificial, but it’s not intelligence. True AI can be damn scary (just consider HAL in 2001 and the machines’ takeover in the Terminator series). In combination with other technologies, it might become even scarier. (A. B. Carolan’s Mind Games considers androids with ESP. Now that’s scary!)

Sci-fi plots often are extrapolations of current science…or even the same current science used in an evil manner. The threat of nuclear war, an old one, is often a theme. It’s considered in the third novel of my trilogy, Menace from Moscow. Perhaps we should pay more attention to these warnings from sci-fi authors?

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“The Last Humans” trilogy. A bioengineered virus spreads around Earth and kills billions. An ex-USN SAR and LA County Sheriff’s forensics diver survives and creates a future for her blended family after many adventures in what’s left of the US and two countries overseas. These three post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels The Last Humans, A New Dawn, and Menace from Moscow, blend together warnings about global warming, biological and nuclear warfare, and failed political systems like fascism that will make you wonder about humanity’s future. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (The first novel is also available in print format.)

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

Far too often!

The Star Wars series turned me off with its very first film (whatever number that was in their all-too-cute numbering scheme). I knew immediately that it was basically a fantasy filled with references to Japanese ninjas, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s characters (even the names!), and Isaac Asimov’s plot devices (the Foundation). Where were the lawyers at that time who went after plagiarists? (Or the ones even now?) Jedi warriors and fairy-tale princesses with light sabers? C’mon! (Okay, I’ll admit the music was interesting, but I liked that composer a lot more when he was leading the Boston Pops.)

Frank Herbert’s Dune series is even worse as sci-fi but at least it was in book form long before Hollywood screenwriters took a break from writing terrible scripts (e.g. Star Wars!) and tried to adapt those novels to the silver screen (a new Marvel Comics-like version is about to come out). Herbert’s books were already pure fantasy (forget that damn Hugo because it’s also given for fantasy!) filled with magic, mysticism, sandworms, and that miraculous spice existing only on one arid world, a coveted and moneymaking substance that Ponce de Leon might have searched for in Florida if he could get past DeSantis’s anti-immigrant Gestapo. (I’m sure Ron would have arrested him and sent him to New York if that fascist Florida governor and huge presidential primary loser had been around back then.) The Dune series is just more fantasy, whether in book or movie format. (The movies have been worse than the books, but that’s almost always the case!)

Too many people (a majority who have never read a book, by the way…if they can read—Trump can’t) conflate fantasy with sci-fi, and authors and screenwriters exploit them by adding a few starships and blasters to Harry Potter and call it sci-fi. (A silly author like Margaret Atwood might pardon their sins by calling it all “speculative fiction,” of course; she’s become rich peddling her fantasies.) That’s the formula for creating a sci-fi classic, right? Wrong!

Science fiction, sci-fi for short, even if you accept A. C. Clarke’s claim that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic (consider Ugh the Caveman finding some time-traveler’s smart phone, basically a little computer!), must be some sort of reasonable extrapolation of current science. Comsats were created by Clarke in his fiction long before Elon Musk littered near-earth orbits with his space junk! Sure, the farther into the future an author goes with his story, the more bold the extrapolation has to be, and it all often approaches Clarke’s limit. But science fiction stories nowadays have generally ceased to be a logical extensions of current science, stories that often contain clear violations of known physical laws, which is what fantasy does (and all the examples above, I might add).

I read very little fantasy now—I graduated from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter on Mars stories with their Jedi warriors and beautiful egg-laying princesses decades ago. (For all their sophistication, I guess those Martians didn’t have IVF; and John Carter probably never realized an egg back on Earth was already a chicken, so he couldn’t apply that lesson learned to Martian females’ eggs!) I especially avoid fantasy stories if their authors claim they’re sci-fi. (You can comment on this post and tell me if you agree or disagree.)

Or, you might want to read some sci-fi classics written by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and others (even some of mine?) to see how good sci-fi can be when it’s not conflated with fantasy! (By the way, the best sci-fi authors, like me, are ex-scientists. When they’re not, they can easily confuse fantasy with sci-fi!)

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“Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection.” There are three complete sci-fi novels in this one inexpensive bundle. The first, Survivors of the Chaos, will seem a bit too close for comfort to what’s going on in the US and the world today. The last leads into the novel Rogue Planet and the Dr, Carlos short stories. (The first book represents well deserved mockery of the current Iranian regime; for the second collection, see the list of free downloadable PDFs on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) These are “evergreen books” (as entertaining, fresh, and hopefully still profound now as on the day I finished their manuscripts), but sci-fi in general can never get old, can it?

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

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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(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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Most sci-fi readers and writers are familiar with the Fermi paradox, summarized by the question in the title, and the associated Drake equation that tried to resolve it. For those who are not, let me review that history first before going on to discuss a different take on the Drake equation that I found interesting.

The Fermi paradox first appears in my sci-fi books in the second book of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” In Sing a Samba Galactica, Earth colonists on New Haven, an E-type planet in the 82 Eridani system, have evidence for some local ETs and try to figure out how to communicate with them. Here’s the excerpt:

***

They had an informal meeting in the bachelors’ dining area.  Takahashi watched as Malenkov, ever the showman, pinged his beer mug with a laser pointer and then stood on top of a chair.

“At Los Alamos, in 1950,” he began, in his best orator’s voice, “the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asked Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York, as well as other physicists working on the atomic bomb project, this provocative question:  If life is so common in the universe, where are they?”

Malenkov waited for some chuckles to subside, gulped some beer, and continued.

“Fermi noted there are plenty of stars older than our sun.  If life were so plentiful, it would have begun on planets around these stars billions of years before it began on Earth.  In that case, shouldn’t Earth have been visited or colonized by a race much older than our own?  Even with slow means of space travel like what we used to come to New Haven, a civilization with a will to homestead could settle a large fraction of the galaxy in a million years or so.”

Malenkov looked out at his audience.  Takahashi, sitting in the cafeteria’s front row, smiled at him.  So which one of us is Holmes and which one Watson?

(more…)