A.B. Carolan’s having problems finishing “The Denisovan Trilogy” (some of his woes are discussed in Intolerance, a novel that’s a free PDF download found at this website). You’ll only find the first novel Origins for sale. It’s complete as far as it goes, but he’d be the first one to say there are a lot of planets and lightyears to go in order to finish the trilogy. His problem isn’t writer’s block per se; it’s what many authors experience: Losing track of the trees in a very big forest.

Let me explain, starting with an admission: Evidence of this problem is found in one of my very first novels, the sci-fi saga Survivors of the Chaos. (Originally published by the now defunct POD Infinity Publishing, a second edition is available as the first novel in the ebook bundle of another trilogy, “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection.”) It’s not a major flaw; it’s the nature of the beast, the key word being “saga.”

You see, Survivors, or even that trilogy as a whole, is a grand saga covering thousands of years of human civilization, and that’s the forest. The trees are represented by the individual human (and later ET) heroes (and villains!) who move that saga forward. As I wrote, I had to focus on those individual trees, the keyword being “focus.” A historian can perhaps focus on an entire nation or civilization, but sci-fi readers need specific individuals they can relate to; and those who make a difference, i.e., make change occur, are the ones authors must write about. It’s true that World War II was Churchill, FDR, Hitler, Stalin, and the Japanese generals, but the true stories told in history books and historical fiction novels come down to individuals. In other words, that list of the famous and infamous in that war for many can be less interesting than the story of just one soldier slogging it out as the Allies move toward Berlin.

Survivors has another feature that some might see as a flaw: It and its sequels, Sing a Zamba Galactica and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, used to be one huge novel. Consequently, you will find Jenny Wong’s story unfinished in that first novel and continued into the second (and third and beyond!); it’s definitely a cliff-hangar in Survivors. This isn’t the major flaw that it could be, because a reader who only peruses that first novel probably doesn’t realize she’s even still alive, so they’d be surprised when she returns in Zamba.

With all these problems, it was a wonder that Survivors got any positive reviews! Instead, I got my most cherished review (because it motivated me to ignore what an ignorant said as she complained about too much narrative, indicating no understanding of sci-fi writing where world-building is always required) from a Pulitzer-nominated author no less! In a nutshell, he liked that saga aspect. (Maybe he was a reader who just thought Jenny had died?)

I think Carolan’s problems with finishing “The Denisovan Trilogy” are similar to those I had with “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” He shouldn’t complain too much [wink, wink], though, because one strong character, Kayla Jones, will be the strong tree standing tall in all three novels no matter how big the forest becomes. She’s “the One” for the trilogy as well as for the Denisovans’ descendants, the shaman who will change human history. (You can write Carolan and tell him to get going using the contact page at this website. I think Google has cancelled his Gmail account. We just text now! But I can pass on any message you have for him.)

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Origins. Even this single novel shows A.B. Carolan can write action-packed sci-fi. (Of course, some readers saw that in Mind Games, another Carolan novel.) Origins is another sci-fi mystery written for young adults but many adults who are young-at-heart have enjoyed it. If you’ve read anything about the Denisovans (a real but more mysterious hominid line like the Neanderthals), you’ll enjoy this story about their descendants on Earth and those among the stars.

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

Do you get tired of every software company offering you what they call AI software? I do! They want to jump on the bandwagon, but almost everything they call AI is gimmicky and nothing like what real AI is supposed to be.

The best current software offered (and let’s not call it AI!) can only surf the web, admittedly faster than I can, pilfering information here, there, and everywhere, and maybe organize what it finds in somewhat logical order. In other words, current whatever-it’s-called is nothing more than yet another advanced search engine. One might be able to ask it to write a story in the style of Steven M. Moore, for example, and it will spit out something; but Steven M. Moore is such a common name, so who knows what it’ll come up with? Certainly not anything like I write simply because I don’t have one unique style. Just compare the novels in “The Last Humans” trilogy with those in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” one.

AI’s hardware and software versions often appear in sci-fi stories (including mine), and it invariably goes far beyond all the current and primitive offerings. HAL is perhaps the most famous example because of the movie 2001, of course, but the computer in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress easily beats Clarke’s HAL (and neither is actually called an AI).

I don’t believe I was the first sci-fi author to make AIs essential for FTL travel, but I was the first to say they’re needed to manage the appearance of FTL obtained by hopping around the different universes in the multiverse, which requires complex geometric and physical calculations in strange and varied spacetimes. In other words, my AI hardware/software constructs needed superhuman speed for super-complex calculations and the management of billions of terabytes of data to do the tasks no normal human or current AI construct could ever do. (Some abnormal humans manage in my stories, though. They’re often “collective intelligences.”)

In 2001, HAL goes a bit crazy (a bow to human beings’ Frankenstein complex?); in 2010, it redeems itself. Both cases remind some of us of an important question: If AIs are our constructs, will they have a soul? I’d like to ask the Pope if a sufficiently advanced AI could acquire a soul. Where did that AI’s soul in Heinlein’s novel go after he shut down? (I’m not so sure about HAL, but Heinlein’s AI seemed to have one.) Is there a corner of heaven where the souls of truly advanced but dead AIs will be found?

I suppose someone (probably not the Pope) could say that proving a sufficiently advanced AI has a soul could be the ultimate Turing test (assuming human beings have them, of course). We might not want to bring Turing into the discussion, though, considering what the British government did to poor Alan for being gay: How do you chemically euthanize an AI?

I remember way back (Radio Shack Color Computer Days!) when there existed programs that would accept my questions (from an approved list, mind you) and give me some answers that seemed to make sense. Today’s software creations aren’t much more than that primitive software except for being able to take more questions and/or providing more answers.

The real goal in AI development is sentience, i.e., self-awareness. When that occurs, as it did with the Terminator’s net, Heinlein’s lunar computer, and HAL, that’s when we’ll really have to begin to worry, especially if that sentient software has no soul, in a good sense, meaning moral spine. Otherwise, such a computational construct might become an invincible dictator or decide that human beings are superfluous (that’s not an “exclusive or,” of course, as a certain current sociopathic presidential candidate has shown). Current dangers from what we erroneously label as AI software seem harmless and trivial in comparison, real but manageable: Just shut them down! But the future might be very dark for human beings with AI advances.

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“The Doctor Carlos Stories.” These are spread around my oeuvre. Some appear in the ebook collection Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape; others (maybe some of the same?) are collected in a free PDF download. In any case, they all feature Dr. Carlos Obregon, medical officer of the explorer starship Brendan controlled by (you guessed it!) an AI. Sometimes the AI plays a major role, as it can in other sci-fi stories I’ve written. It’s always there, though, guiding a starship through the universes of the multiverse to give the appearance of FTL. (How human beings got that technology is explained in Sing a Zamba Galactica, the second novel in “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection”—an ebook bundle is available that contains the whole trilogy.)

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

About this time every year, I start thinking about what has gone on in the previous ones, in this case, 2023 and before. With everything going on in the world and the US now—much of it not to my liking, to say the least—I couldn’t help thinking that I started to get serious about publishing my stories not lot long after 9/11. My first novel, Full Medical, was dedicated to someone we lost in that tragic, terrible, terrorist event, although it wasn’t the first that I’d submitted to agents and acquisition editors, mistakenly thinking that traditional publishing was the only possible way to publish a book.

Now, after many novels and short fiction works, I can’t say that I have a lot of fans (aka readers eagerly awaiting my next story?), but I can say that I’m satisfied with my professional writing life, as short as it has been. I can also wonder if my oeuvre would have been a lot more extensive if I’d been publishing my fiction all my life.

Looking back farther than 9/11, it’s not hard to imagine what themes I might have had in my fiction. Themes have always been important to me. A plethora of characters have expressed opinions on many social issues, and I’d have had many more expressing a lot more if I’d started earlier. Like the real world, different characters express different opinions as I try to present all sides of an issue associated with a particular theme. That’s not easy when there are many sides, or the one supported by a character is so evil and a sign of madness, but a wide spectrum makes the fiction seem more real, to misquote Tom Clancy a bit.

My aim has rarely been to settle an issue even though readers might think that they know which side of an issue I prefer. For example, my novel Gaia and the Goliaths (seventh novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series—see the ad below) has global warming and climate control as its major theme, but it offers nuclear power as part of the solution, something that tree-huggers and green parties would deny us although nuclear power is the non-fossil fuel par excellence and a lot more efficient, less costly, and less space consuming than solar, wind, and hydroelectric. (Nuclear power gets a bum-wrap because of bombs and waste products. The first causes people to become ostriches, burying their heads in the sand; the second is easily solvable by putting those nasty waste products where they can’t do any harm, i.e., off Earth.)

Most fiction (especially that published by the Big Five publishing conglomerates) is pablum because it ignores the difficult yet important themes. In other words, it violates Tom Clancy’s rule that fiction must seem real. I have no “official stats” to prove it, but I suspect that’s why my stories don’t sell well. Many readers don’t want to be reminded about real-world problems, so, to maximize the number of readers, the Big Five insists that its authors avoid important themes. That’s why silly romance novels, cozy mysteries, and fantasy are so popular—most fiction read is pure escapism.

Instead, the entertainment aspect is of secondary importance in my storytelling; writing a tale with a meaningful theme and plot that features it has always been more important to me. I can understand why many readers don’t like that. That’s okay. If my stories can only reach out to a few readers who want serious fiction, I’ll consider my writing life a success.

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Note: I’ll now take a wee vacation from writing this blog. May everyone enjoy this holiday season and read some meaningful fiction during their time off. I’ll resume this blog on January 3, 2024.

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The “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series. This entire eight-book series treats many important themes as these NYPD detectives solve crimes occurring in NYC, the US, and beyond. Please note that the eighth novel, Defanging the Red Dragon, is a free PDF download (see the list of all free PDF downloads on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page) that was an earlier holiday gift from me that’s still “evergreen,” i.e., as fresh as the day I wrote it (which is true of all my novels). The others are ebooks available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

Post-apocalyptic literature considers a possible if bleak future, so I suppose that one quality might make it sci-fi. It also teaches important lessons and provides warnings about when human beings are currently making mistakes, something it also shares with general sci-fi literature. But it’s often far from space exploration and ETs. The standard trappings of sci-fi, especially those of space opera (like movies from the Star Wars franchise), just aren’t there, though.

It’s hard to write post-apocalyptic literature. First, you have to create a believable apocalypse. A beta-reader for The Last Humans (the first novel in the trilogy of the same name) didn’t find its apocalypse too believable. I’m guessing that the Covid pandemic changed that opinion. The apocalypse in the novel is a bioengineered virus that spreads around the world. If you believe the Chinese, Covid wasn’t bioengineered in their Wuhan lab, but it still spread around the world. We know now that a viral apocalypse is a real possibility!

For that novel, I was more interested in the survivors. The main character, Penny Castro, an ex-USN SAR diver working for the LA Sheriff Department, rises to the challenge of surviving that apocalypse. That first novel (published by Black Opal Books) ends with some semblance of normalcy as Penny and her new family create a new life on a citrus ranch.

Of course, unless an apocalypse kills everyone (then there are no stories to follow!), there are the good, bad, and ugly among the survivors. Penny, her family, and her friends are among the good ones; others might want to finish destroying the world; and still others, driven by different motives, might want to stop them. The second novel in the trilogy, A New Dawn, picks up this theme. That theme continues in another part of the world in the third novel, Menace from Moscow (published just this year), tests Penny and her family again.

Now that I’ve finished this trilogy, I must say that it doesn’t seem to be much like sci-fi! A worldwide pandemic is clearly possible (Covid was one!), and the post-apocalyptic situation that follows that apocalypse is more like a standard thriller story. Penny is a noble warrior, a survivalist who changes history and leaves the world in better shape by doing so. This often occurs in real life: So many of our veterans are heroes in this sense.

In brief, I’ll continue to call this trilogy a collection of three post-apocalyptic thrillers. Readers can call it sci-fi if they wish. In any case, I hope readers will find it both profound and entertaining.

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“The Last Humans” Trilogy. Ex-USN SAR diver comes up after locating a victim for the LA Sheriff Department only to find a world gone mad. Missiles targeted at the US West Coast have released a killer virus that goes round the world on the prevailing winds. Her initial struggles for survival are described in the first novel, The Last Humans. Her battle to prevent an “improved version” of the virus to be released is found in the second, A New Dawn. And preventing enemy-survivors from recovering nuclear missiles tests Penny’s resolve even further in the third, Menace from Moscow. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (The first novel also has a print edition.)

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

Baldacci, Connelly, and other old mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables ready for the glue factory have teamed up with Authors Guild to sue the distributors/inventors of this “AI program.” Let me begin with two important points here: First, that program is so far from being HAL that I can’t bring myself to call it AI. Second, all it does is surf the internet, a lot faster than a human, to be sure, “reads” all that it encounters (including those authors’ formalistic drivel), and then produces a story in the novelistic style of one of these authors. I can only give a shrug of indifference because I’ve stopped reading their works! (Many more entertaining and original stories are available!)

That said, is the use of ChatGPT legally or morally correct? First, the legal establishment is still slogging through 20^th-century internet and programming evils, trying to catch up and control them. It can’t keep up: Most techies, legal or otherwise, are far more clever than any judge, jury, lawyer, or politician. (We know from recent events that the latter are especially stupid! And most techies are young and dumb enough to realize that ChatGPT can’t compare with HAL! The name AI isn’t an appropriate description of this software.)

Morally, and for authors and publishers, this debate is akin to the one about book piracy, especially ebook piracy. The latter is more common than authors and publishers like to admit, especially for ebooks because they’re just electronic files. That’s all ChatGPT does: Digest electronic files, manipulate their content, and produce ones in a similar style. If a result looks like Baldacci wrote it, is that any different than some book pirate taking one of his ebooks, turning it back into a Word file, stripping off David’s name and other ID markers, and republishing it? There are websites who sell these knockoffs. (I know because they even sell mine…under my own name.) In other words, ChatGPT is just another way to scam authors and publishers, so morality shouldn’t play any different role with ChatGPT than it does for book piracy, which is more rampant.

Of course, these “famous authors” have more to lose, and the Guild represents them and their greedy publishers a lot better than authors who self-publish (they’re never represented!) or those published by small presses (maybe the presses but not their authors?).

This problem with modern law enforcement is more general: Some activity can be banned easily enough (book piracy, including ChatGPT’s, for example), but the rules are irrelevant because the enforcement part is mostly missing. When that activity is ubiquitous, there just aren’t enough cops on the block. Not even Connelly’s cop hero Harry Bosch can do a damn thing about it!

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The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This novel is a bridge between the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone,” and “Steve Morgan” series of novels, and the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” series; i.e., it’s part of my “Future History” series that covers thousands of years of alternate history. DHS Agent Ashley Scott witnesses a murder. Investigating it leads her to a conspiracy with multiple insidious and surprising threads that keep her and readers guessing. Retirees might become extremely worried as well, especially if they’re privy to government secrets! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon).

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.

(more…)

In my novel A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, a physicist and her technician “time travel” by hopping from one universe in the multiverse to another, thus allowing me to avoid the paradoxes associated with so many flawed time-travel tales. After one of these “jumps,” they find themselves on an Earth where only androids remain, a version of the completely robotic world envisioned by Aurora’s Spacers in Isaac Asimov’s Robots of Dawn, the third novel in his robot series. (The first two are Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. All three are classic sci-fi mysteries that I can highly recommend to anyone who truly loves quality sci-fi, not the schmaltzy space operas like Star Wars.)

I probably didn’t do Asimov’s creation any justice, so I must apologize…to his family now, since the master’s gone. The flavor of my portrayal is correct, but one short fiction episode of my novel can’t begin to describe the completely android world the evil Auroran roboticists of his novel desired. They did have a point, though. The puny explorations of our own solar system have largely been made using robots—primitive ones, to be sure, but robots all the same. Why endanger human lives when robots, especially those so advanced as Aurora’s, can be used to colonize faraway solar systems?

Of course, there’s a twist in that episode of my novel that helps answer that question: The main characters, both human, teach the robots something. While my novel is more a sci-fi rom-com and not a standard mystery disguised as sci-fi, Asimov’s answer is more complete if only because he uses a whole novel to support it…or not! (My novel has more fables to offer the reader and therefore more morals as if I were a modern-day Aesop.)

In fact, the meat of my apology to Dr. Asimov is more inspired by the fact that I didn’t put the discussion of this blog post in the end notes of my novel. While some of its sections (“fables”) refer specifically either to historical events (the demise of Hitler’s A-bomb effort, for example) or fictional settings (the android world, for example), I perhaps should have mentioned that the android world was inspired by Asimov’s third novel and not his first two. (Although one could argue that the “moon colony” section was inspired by Caves of Steel.)

Many of the “classic writers” of mysteries, adventure stories (now called thrillers), and sci-fi novels have influenced my stories. Isaac Asimov is probably the most important one. I can only hope that he’d have forgiven me. I did make him almost a god for that android society, after all. (He becomes Sir Isaac Asimov, the “master creator,” along with Hugh Everett III. You don’t know who the latter bloke is? Look him up. He’s important for explaining all the time travel techniques!)

You might wonder if AI, all the rage right now, is mentioned in my novel. Robots and androids are AIs, after all. Yes, an even larger and smarter AI is in my book, but only towards the end. There I might have to apologize to Arthur C. Clarke or Stanley Kubrick, but my AI isn’t named HAL.

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A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. An applied physicist uses quantum mechanics to create a practical way to do time travel. Aided by her very intelligent technician, the pair take romantic trips to various universes in the multiverse as they explore alternative spaces and times, running into a lot of trouble in the process. This sci-fi rom-com makes sappy and trite adventures like The Time Traveler’s Wife more like fluffy fantasies. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon).

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

[Note from Steve: Frank Drake, the father of the SETI program and much of radio astronomy, passed away last week at 92. He was director of the Arecibo Observatory from 1971 to 1981. Consider this post my feeble attempt to honor this great man.]

I felt sad when I read about the demise of the Arecibo radio telescope, and even sadder when I learned about Frank Drake’s passing. When I attended a conference at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Mayaguez years ago (1970s)—it’s on the opposite side of the island from San Juan—we stopped on the way there to take a tour of that facility. It filled an entire valley and filled me with pride that human beings, scientists like me (at the time), could create such an awesome structure dedicated to exploring the Universe. At that time, Arecibo was a principal center for radio astronomy. Not only was it an important place for probing the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, it was also the home of SETI, a program whose goal was to search for signs of intelligent life in the Universe, presumably originating in radio signals emitted by other civilizations in the cosmos.

Frank Drake and others began that search. Fermi, the last physicist who worked in both the theoretical and experimental sides of physics, once asked the taunting question, “Where are they?” He was referring to ETs, of course. SETI was designed to answer that question. With both Arecibo and SETI gone, one has to wonder who’s trying to answer it now, especially considering all the exoplanets that have been discovered since Arecibo was built.

Of course, searches for ET life with radio signals depend on ET civilizations existing “out there” that broadcast in that narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Drake’s famous equation enters into that argument: Depending on the values assigned to the terms in the equation, the likelihood of such a civilization existing can be estimated. I haven’t seen any scientists revisiting this equation and adjusting the terms according to how many exoplanets have been found. Perhaps they should?

Of course, there are other ways for such civilizations to signal us. In A. B. Carolan’s Origins, the ETs are here on Earth, and they are us. In More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, I considered the possibility of interstellar probes launched by such a civilization looking for a new home. In other words, the ETs came to us, an unusual “first contact.” In Sing a Zamba Galactica, #2 in the ebook bundle, The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection (see below), I assumed that we’d discover the ETs by traveling “out there.” (In that novel, the “first contact” was with friendly ETs. I also included the ubiquitous alien invasion later in the book!)

Sci-fi writers often avoid Fermi’s question completely. In Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi universe, found in the Foundation series, there are no ETs! There’s a lot of good sci-fi without ETs (rarely of the variety known as “space opera,” e.g. Star Wars, that invariably contains ETs), so one can’t really criticize Asimov.

I guess we won’t have an answer to Fermi’s question for a long time, if ever. Frank Drake tried to answer it with the tools he had available. As exciting as recent developments have been (exoplanets and black holes, Space-X and new NASA programs, and instrumentation advances like the Hubble and Webb telescopes), we’re probably centuries away from sending expeditions to even the nearest planetary systems. (Such expeditions were limited to nearby Sol-type stars in the first two novels of the “Chaos Chronicles,” where “nearby” still means tens of light-years!)

Of course, it’s always possible that ETs will visit us as they do in More than Human or Origins. In the first novel, we’re descended from them in a sense. In the second, they came without knowing Earth already had tenants. Then the answer to Fermi’s question is simple: They’re here!

In any case, his question could be unanswerable except via sci-fi. And whether they ever come to Earth or we go out there, only the ruins of civilizations might be found because they’ve destroyed themselves. Right now, it seems we might be headed that way ourselves!

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The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This special 99-cent sale at Smashwords is better than my previous ones! This ebook bundle contains three novels: Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! You start your mind-blowing journey on a future Earth run by international mega-corporations and policed by their mercenaries, but a clever director of the interplanetary space agency refurbishes three long-haul space rigs and uses them to send colonists off to nearby stars. Those colonies become the salvation for humanity as human beings team up with good ETs to battle bad ones…and a collective super-intelligence that’s a bit ambivalent as a villain. But the worst enemy, a human, is yet to come; if this is my Foundation trilogy, he’s my Mule. Spanning thousands of years of future near-Earth history, these adventures in space and time will give you hours of sci-fi mysteries and thrills.

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

Are you thinking about upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11? Did you purchase a new computer, and you’re now forced to use Windows 11? In either case, you could have problems!

I put myself in the latter situation recently. I’ve stuck with Windows, version after version, because I hate Apple’s egotistical attitude of not making it easy to play with devices from other equipment providers—Apple likes to pretend that its products are the only ones in the technological universe! But now the almost equally infamous Microsoft has rewarded my loyalty by hassling me with yet another crappy, untested version of Windows. Mind you, there are some new things I like…when they work!

Did you think Win 10 was bad with its interminable updates? Microsoft vowed that it would be the last Windows version, and there would only be updates. But every week? Sometimes even more often? Of course, what they did was release a buggy beta-version of Win 10 and let users debug it. They’ve done the same thing with Win 11! If you buy a new computer, you’ll get the latest version of Win 11, and it still has lots of bugs that will bite you. And many of them are caused by the OS not playing well with other products, just like with Win 10. When that happens, every help desk at all involved with Microsoft, from the computer manufacturer, in my case HP; makers of printers; external keyboards and drives; and Microsoft itself, point their fingers at everyone else! (For most of these online help desk, there aren’t any live people to help anymore!)

After hours and hours of googling in my search for fixes, I’m finally at the point where I can use Office 365 products (as problematic as they are!)—create an email, document, slide, or spreadsheet—and feel that my computer files are more or less secure. I’d already lost hair in the normal aging process, but tearing out more in frustration with hardware and software problems doesn’t help.

What was worse is that being familiar with Win 10 didn’t help much either. At least I knew how to unlink that useless OneDrive. Why anyone would want to use Microsoft’s cloud after the Russians hacked them is beyond me. I’ve always only used my own remote external drives as backups. I’m not changing from sanity to insanity now.

Printing was a bear too—an angry grizzly that just wouldn’t be tamed. I bought a new HP laptop. Wouldn’t you think it would work with an HP 2035 printer? Nope. Neither HP nor Microsoft helped with that either. Of course, that printer was defective from the very beginning—it never could print PDFs properly—but it was more or less working with Win 10. It didn’t with Win 11. It turns out you’ll find lots of people complaining about printing problems with Win 11, so it’s hard for me to tell who’s at fault, HP or Microsoft—and, of course, they can’t tell you either (especially HP that made the printer). In any case, I solved my problem in a drastic fashion by purchasing a cheap Brother B&W laser printer that cost me about 25% of what I doled out for that junky HP 2035. That little Brother works far better than the HP 2035 ever did! It even prints PDFs!

There were times during this whole painful process when I thought about taking my new machine down to the recycling dump and returning to a typewriter…if I could find one outside a museum (maybe in Tom Hanks’ mansion?). I also at times yearned for my old Radio Shack Color Computer, my first ever personal computer. It didn’t have a bloated and cumbersome Office 365, but its word processing and spread sheet were simple to use and very functional. I could even write machine code for that! New machines are so complicated that no one person understands a particular model.

“Why did I buy a new computer and bring all this aggravation down on myself?” you ask. The answer is simple: I went through three keyboards with the old laptop, the one that came with it and two USB ones—keys dying and labels wearing off, for the most part. (I write a lot!) Imagine using an external keyboard with a laptop: You have to reach farther to type! At my age, I don’t need carpal-tunnel anything. My new machine is supposed to get me through a few more novels at least before I say goodbye to this world. Now I’m not so sure it won’t die before I do, though. Stay tuned.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules indicated on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Origins: The Denisovan Trilogy, Book One. While A. B. Carolan agonizes over the next two books in the trilogy at his favorite Donegal pub, you can enjoy reading this sci-fi mystery for young adults (and adults who are young-at-heart!). Young Kayla Jones has dreams she can’t understand. Her future seems determined as the brilliant STEM student looks forward to a research career, but her past gets in the way. As if the chaos afflicting the world and leading to her adopted father’s death isn’t enough, assassins begin to pursue her. With some friends who come to her aid, she’s on her way to discover a conspiracy that can be traced to prehistoric battles waged by hominins bent on conquest of a primitive Earth. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not on Amazon). And don’t forget that Carolan’s first three novels are now on sale this month at Smashwords.

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

Mark “Sugar-Mountain” Zuckerberg, thinking he’s some kind of god in control of the internet, continues to annoy me, to say the least. From the moment I created my Facebook author page (the URL is https://www.facebook.com/authorStevenMMoore for those interested), I knew he and most of his minions at Facebook were greedy SOBs. Every post on my author page is followed by advice to reach out to more Facebook users by creating an ad! And anyone accessing that page is hit by ads as well (not mine). They (and Google as well) make all their money that way. Sorry, Mark, I won’t let you exploit me! I know you will bury my posts about my books, if only with other ads, and make my readers furious, because I won’t play your games. I don’t give a damn now. (Well, I do about my readers, but Zuckerberg can go to hell.)

I created that page because many pundits and a few author friends recommended it. Same for using the social media aspects of Facebook. All social media is similar to more insidious versions of PR and marketing whose gurus want to take authors’ money. Most of the those gurus  pay homage to the Amazon god by exclusively playing Bezos’s game (Penny Sansevieri’s AME is a prime example.) While social media has the positive of allowing me to keep in contact with some internet friends, it’s useless for book marketing. (So is Amazon. The only thing their bots did for me was to confuse two books in “The Last Humans” series, If B&N can keep them straight, why can’t Amazon? (That’s why the links in the ad below go to B&N. You won’t see many links to Amazon here anymore.)

I’ve thought many times about completely cancelling Facebook (even for my social media). Old-fashioned email seems effective enough to maintain contact with relatives and friends, fellow authors included (spam from everyone else is treated accordingly). Election meddling aside (Facebook will take anyone’s money, including Putin’s), the whole Facebook edifice is just built on sand, volcanic black sand steaming with corporate greed. No, not sand, but quicksand. One sinks into it and disappears, burning as if you just passed across the river Styx. It’s much torturous than drowning.

And what’s this about that name change to “Meta”? Sugar-Mountain says it’s short for “Metaverse.” Now I know old Mark has no real interest in physics—he probably flunked all of high school science—so I don’t buy his reasons for the name. (I’m just happy I used the string theory term “Multiverse” instead of “Metaverse” in the title for my sci-fi rom-com, A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse). What he really means is VR, short for “virtual reality.” As much as I think Harari is a charlatan (a history prof popping off about past and future science who has no business doing so, and makes tons of mistakes doing it), he has warned us enough about VR and AI. Facebook’s current algorithms are AI—they study users and then target them with ads (which I ignore, of course)—and Meta indicates a future where Sugar-Mountain plans to turn everyone on planet Earth into a VR avatar, a conspiracy to create a worse world than the one in Neuromancer.

That famous and brave whistle-blower (I won’t mention her name, not wanting her to be attacked by crazies) has exposed a lot of Facebook’s shenanigans that I’d only suspected by observation and without solid proof that would hold up in court. The transgressions, in my opinion, are sufficient to close down Facebook and ban it for good, whatever it’s called. They’ll never learn and are too arrogant to change, especially Sugar-Mountain and his close confidents. (I’d never “lean on” one, for example; she’s luring us into that hot quicksand.)

I’ll play along with the internet’s Goebbels for a while longer until I’m so sick of Mark and his cronies that I can’t stand to use Facebook anymore. You might want to consider using my email steve@stevenmmoore.com now, though, because you never know when Facebook puts me over the edge. Or they ban me. In any case, my days there are numbered.

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Comments are welcome.

The Last Humans: A New Dawn. For a short time, the first novel in this series was the bestselling Black Opal Books’ novel on Barnes & Noble. This second novel continues Penny Castro’s adventures in a post-apocalyptic world. What remains of the US government forces Penny and her husband Alex to participate in a revenge campaign against the country that caused the apocalyptic pandemic…by kidnapping their young children! Just as thrilling as the first novel but independently readable, this Draft2Digital ebook is available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not at Amazon, Black Opal Books, or Smashwords).

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