Carlos, this day when you perished at the hands of radical Muslim fanatics will never be forgotten. We miss you!

Chadwick Boseman, RIP. While Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, and other great historical figures you played would have established you as a great actor and sensitive man, your Black Panther portrayal inspired many. It also became a symbol for what we need to be in these troubling times: Resistant, resolute, and resilient agents for change. The big C often takes young victims and those in the prime of their lives. It’s always sad when it takes anyone. That other big C in our lives right now will be a thing of the past soon enough, so we must continue with our long battle against cancer…and the inequities in our societies, perhaps the most insidious diseases of them all.

Chadwick, you will be missed.,,but never forgotten!

Ah, spring!

The flowers sprinkled around this post prove spring has sprung. I hope they improve your mood. They improved mine, which has been slapped around a bit after the pandemics caused by COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd. That first pandemic is dwindling here in the NYC area, which is no longer the world’s epicenter—Brazil is. That second pandemic is still going on as I write this.

Spring always makes us feel good. The changes in the sun’s angle causing the dark days of winter to morph into bright spring days are exhilarating. Leaves come back on the trees; flowers start popping. (There are three kinds in the pics. Can you name them?) There’s a pleasant buzz to life as Gaia takes her perennial bow.

From ancient times forward, human beings have celebrated the coming of spring. What’s more, the plants and animals seem to join in that celebration…or even lead it. Hazel, the groundhog who lives under our shed every spring, uses our yard to feed, preparing for the little groundhogs who are on their way. (I’m sorry I don’t have a pic of Hazel. She’s a shy critter.)

As a kid, I often wondered why the ancients didn’t celebrate New Year in spring…and I grew up in California where winters aren’t that bad. I learned why that wouldn’t work for both the northern and southern hemispheres even before I started in school, but it was still a nice thought because spring seems to make the world seem better.

These are good thoughts to have in these troubled times. Spring is full of hope. We called it an Arab spring because there was hope for democracy in the Middle East; we now call what’s happening there the Arab winter. Darkness and despair are associated with winter; lightness and hope with spring.

Of course, spring is really the opposite of fall, summer of winter. Those oppositions don’t detract from my belief that spring is the real beginning of the year. It just occurs at different times in the northern and southern hemispheres, but it’s still a beginning. Life seems to rev up again each spring for all of us.

I’m sorry that victims of COVID and Mr. Floyd can’t see another spring. Or maybe they can…somewhere it’s eternal spring?

Today is the traditional day for remembering all those who have given their lives defending America in foreign wars, those courageous members of the armed forces who have made the ultimate sacrifice. We tend to confuse this day a bit with Veterans’ Day, which is fine—coming from a family of veterans, there’s nothing wrong with also recognizing those who returned. All members of the Armed Forces should be recognized and applauded for their service.

However, we are now at war within our borders and throughout the world, a war against an invisible enemy, COVID-19, so today we should also remember those healthcare workers, first responders, and all the support staff who have made the ultimate sacrifice in that war, along with those who have fought valiantly and are still fighting this pandemic.

Both groups mentioned above have tirelessly worked to keep us safe. In these trying times, we must remember all the heroes. They’ve all made America great and been tireless warriors in the battles that threaten the U.S. and the world.

Be smart…and stay safe. We will get through this.

I’ll admit it—I’ll miss pro football. Yes, I know, football widows have already realized that greedy NFL owners, to salvage something, are willing to risk players, sportscasters, and support staff’s health to create an anemic season, even if it means playing to empty stands. What’s Bob Kraft going to do? (I won’t mention what first comes to mind—this is a PG-13 rated blog.) If players refuse to play, will he fire them? Will he fire Tom Brady, that chap who put the I back in TEAM? (In spite of that, Brady showed, in spite of himself, that football is indeed all about TEAM.) Oh, right, the GOAT won’t be playing for the Patriots this season…or probably any other! But the Pats’ team play is why I’ll miss football.

As an old chap myself (older than Brady, and on a par with Coach B and Kraft), it was always fun to watch Brady make do with the players he had, Gronk or no Gronk, and shred the opposition’s defenses. (He’ll have the big G as a target at Tampa Bay, though, if they ever get to play a game.) Brady’s not bad for a forty-plus-year-old. I’ll miss him showing the world that getting old can mean getting better, even in the toughest sport there is. (Although Irish rugby might come close—look Mom, no pads!).

But Brady has betrayed the Pats’ fans. I’ve never liked his politics—Brady and Kraft (and Coach B?) are far too cozy with Trump and his policies (although all three are probably a lot smarter). Brady might just run for president someday; he couldn’t be any worse than the current POTUS. But he’s followed the money to Tampa Bay along with Gronk. New England’s fans don’t count for these two, just playing more football to make more truckloads of dollars keep arriving. (Not to mention the free Cads and trips to Disney World for Brady—when will Gronk get his due?)

I no longer live in the Boston area (I did, which is why I’m a Pats, Celtics, Bruins, and Red Sox fan—I’ve been a Celtics fan ever since Bill Russell and Casey Jones went there from USF). But I imagine the folks up Boston way aren’t too happy with either Brady or Gronk “retiring” to Florida. The Pats’ dynasty is over, and Coach B and Kraft don’t have a handy replacement for the GOAT, as far as I know. And with no fans because of COVID-19, who gives a rat’s ass about what happens to the Pats? Or pro football in general? The rest of the country hated the Pats anyway. You can bet I won’t be rooting for Tampa Bay. In fact, I won’t be watching NFL football at all. I’m becoming a football widower!

Maybe UCSB, my alma mater, will finally build a competitive football program? Probably not happening!

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Comments are always welcome.

Rogue Planet. A murdered king’s son fights to free his people from an oppressive religious tyranny. An epic military and romantic sci-fi novel with Game-of-Thrones and Star Wars fantasy elements awaits you. Set in the same universe as The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection and A. B. Carolan’s sci-fi mysteries for young adults, this book is available at Amazon in print and ebook versions, and at Smashwords and its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lending and library services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker&Taylor, Gardners, etc.).

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

Note from Steve to Cupid’s minions: Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day. Help guide the little cherub’s arrows (Cupid, not the saint) to their targets. Don’t disappoint your significant other. Fair warning!

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Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1921 R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”) was the first story about robots (it introduced the word, in fact), published long before Isaac Asimov made robots and androids famous in his novels. They are good and bad guys in sci-fi and hated by union workers and everyone else who fear the loss of their jobs to automation. They’ve even become comedy figures: “Danger, danger, Will Robinson!”

I don’t have a good name for it (perhaps the psychiatrists who psycho-analyzed Donald J. Trump can help here), but there exists a phobia about robots. I’d guess androids have a worse rep—they look and often act too much like humans! Blade Runner, one of two of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made (the other is Alien), plays on that fear (so does Alien, in fact). (Maybe that’s why Hollywood shortened Phillip K. Dick’s title, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” to the ambiguous Blade Runner.) I, Robot, the movie that has little to do with Asimov’s story, almost made robots into evil Nazi mobs…or mechanical zombie hordes. Hollywood just loves to ruin good literature.

I have robots and androids in some of my sci-fi tales. Their roles are mostly to serve man (without the meaning of the classic short story “To Serve Man” by Damon Knight, which is about that other phobia, evil ETs). In fact, my AIs are a bit more iffy (HAL started that trend in 2001, I suppose, but redeemed itself in 2010, by far the better movie). There’s no reason an AI can’t be a demagogue that wants to be king and control an army of robots and androids to the detriment of human beings. US presidents shouldn’t have a monopoly on that.

But back to my oeuvre: From the automated bar at the beginning of Sing a Zamba Galactica to a rebel leader in Rogue Planet, my androids mostly work for humanity or are indifferent, neither bad nor evil. In a sense, the cyborgs in the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” (the “Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans,” or MECHs) are just androids with human brains (that might be a better solution than Asimov’s positronic brains)…and good guys too. Yet, to make robots and androids more human, I wanted to create some who can either be good or bad characters in a story.

As many of you know, my alter-ego A.B. Carolan is in charge of my YA sci-fi mysteries now. The latest entry, the third book in the “ABC YA Sci-Fi Mysteries” series, is titled Mind Games. That robot/android phobia is an important theme. As in most of my treatments of themes, A.B. covers both sides: There’s a good android, a cop (not all that different from Asimov’s Daneel Olivaw). There are bad androids too, but humans made them that way (that’s usually the case—someone writes the programs!). But the central question is a bit more than robot/android phobia: What could possibly go wrong if androids had ESP? (That’s another theme in A.B.’s book, of course.) Not even Data had ESP.

R.U.R.’s legacy will continue long into the future as sci-fi continues to use robots, androids, and AIs as characters, reflecting their importance for our future lives and well being. I’m not sure they’ll be equipped with ESP, but what if future soldiers are no longer human but invincible robots with ESP who can read the thoughts of their human adversaries? Now there’s a tale of military sci-fi for you that moves far beyond Terminator and I, Robot. (Maybe Trump will populate his Space Force with them around his fifth term?)

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Comments are always welcome!

Mind Games. In this third book in the “ABC YA Sci-Fi Mysteries” series, A.B. Carolan’s main character finds her adopted father murdered. She’d agreed to hide her ESP powers, but she breaks that promise to find his killer. The pursuit involves three planets and requires many friends who comes to her aid. In uncovering the extent and perpetrators of the conspiracy is a sci-fi thrill ride you won’t want to miss, whether you’re a young adult or an older sci-fi addict who’s young-at-heart. Available in print and ebook formats from Amazon, and in ebook format from Smashwords and all its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lenders and library services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker & Taylor, Gardners, etc.).

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

Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy lives on and has become more important in these days of strife in the U.S. Let’s all work to achieve the fair society he envisioned where everyone has equal opportunity to rise to their potential and improve their skills in a society free of poverty, hatred, and bigotry. He had that dream; let’s make it reality!

You might not be a veteran or have a veteran in your life, but I assure you veterans have touched your life. The many freedoms you and I enjoy exist because many women and men felt the call to duty to protect our way of life, especially after 9/11 when terrorism created a new battlefront against forces of evil who would enslave human beings worldwide…and continue to do so. Freedom is a precious thing, and it is worth fighting for. Join with me today to celebrate our veterans, many of them wounded in mind and spirit in battles fought to preserve our freedoms. They aren’t Democrats or Republicans, alt-left or alt-right–they’re all Americans, and this is their day!

A Matter of Trust. Nancy Hughes, author (Black Opal Books, 2017). Kingsley’s husband goes farther than his usual trip to the convenience store and ends up in a horrible accident. She moves away from where they were living to take a job in a different bank. There she meets Todd, another new employee who’s a VIP. As head of the commercial loans department, she comes across some strange loans and wonders what’s afoot. He sleuthing becomes dangerous for her health.

Kingsley is a strong, smart female, the kind of character I like to read and write about. She takes too many chances, though, playing against her position as a staid bank-manager type. Romantic interest Todd, who has his own history along with Kingsley’s causing the romance to move forward by fits and starts, isn’t a strong character. I’m not surprised when he’s essentially absent from the story’s denouement. Kingsley’s two female friends she makes among the bank’s staff are wonderful characters on the other hand, and they join Kingsley in her sleuthing to make three musketeers who fight crime.

To limit calling the plot a classical mystery/crime story would be doing a disservice to it. I’ve never come across a similar one in my reading, it’s so original. Even with her husband’s death, it begins peacefully but builds up to a resounding climax like Ravel’s “Bolero” where this reader couldn’t flip the pages fast enough on his Kindle.

I’d call this an “evergreen” book—it will always be current. I hope other readers enjoy it as much as I did, and I’m looking forward to reading other books in the series.

Hunter’s Force. Val Penny, author (Crooked Cat Books, 2019). I’ve called Val Penny’s books the “economical Ian Rankin.” (She shouldn’t be confused with Louise Penny. Val’s inspector is Hunter Wilson; Louise’s is Gamache. Val’s stories take place in Edinburgh; Louise’s in Quebec.) First, they also take place in Edinburgh where Rankin’s Inspector Rebus hangs out. Second, they’re both mysteries and police procedurals. And third, I can’t afford Rankin (or Louise Penny, for that matter), but I can afford Val Penny. Unfortunately this third book in the series isn’t as good as the first two.

A Ukrainian crime boss’ daughter ends up living in Hunter’s son’s flat, and then she ends up dead there. The father learned American English, not British, so he mixed up the floor numbers (Americans say ground level is the first floor while Brits just call it the ground floor, with American’s number two being the Brits’ number one, etc.)

There are multiple subplots weaving in and around the main one of finding who killed the daughter—the mobster’s business interests in Edinburgh, and the continuing sagas of coppers and lowlifes from previous books. Somehow the author is losing the grittiness that made me compare her writing favorably with Rankin’s. I hope she recovers that.

Hunter’s force is the group of coppers who set out to solve the crime, led by Hunter Wilson. They have to work within a new system now because the Scots integrated all the police forces. It’s a bit like the NYPD being a local group that’s part of the FBI, ATF, and so forth. I wonder how Rankin deals with this.

This is still a fun read, though, that gave me an acceptable fix in my addiction to Brit-style crime mysteries. It’s also gritty enough not to be on Hallmark or PBS.

Landfall. John McWilliams, author (John McWilliams, 2015). I found this one night searching for “space opera” on Amazon. It’s a lot of fun, but you might guess it’s not great sci-fi—no reasonable extrapolations o current technology here (but believers in the power of crystals might love it).

Jan Lee is a scientist-industrialist (channeling Elon Musk?) in the near future—rich, brilliant, and the main character, in that near future and thirty years later. He comes up with a theory that uses both advanced and retarded waves (yep, you can describe any electromagnetic wave as a superposition of them) to send messages between the present and the future.  He even designs an experiment to test the theory. The story is about the experiment, which becomes very complicated.

Surprise! Both the Americans and Russians want this technology and the experimental results—the Message—believing that it will allow them to download advance tech from the future and rule the world. Of course, in the past, that near future, Jan Lee must fight them. He’s a martial arts expert as well as a scientist-industrialist (Bruce Lee in space? Iron Man?). He blows up the International Space Station so neither Americans nor Russians can have the tech.

Thirty years in the future from that near future, Lauren and Ellis, two FBI agents, are on a special mission to find the reentry vehicle that Jan Lee made his escape in. Is Jan Lee alive? The agents and readers will ask that.

Ignoring the advanced/retarded wave nonsense and the Monty Hall references, there are many things wrong with this story. First, Amazon can’t decide whether it’s sci-fi or a thriller—there’s nothing wrong with the combo, but it isn’t the definition of “space opera” (Amazon strikes again?). Second, the jumping back and forth between near and far future is a bit confusing. The near-future part is written in the present tense and the far-future part is written in the past tense. Third, the time-travel paradoxes aren’t avoided here. Finally, the ending isn’t done well—the author essentially creates a cliff-hanger so readers will buy the books that follow (that doesn’t work with me).

If you can live with all this, have at it.

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Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. “I found it amazing how many murderers think weighing a body in deep water or tossing a murder weapon there will hide their nefarious deeds. Not if Penny can help it!” Ex-USN Search and Rescue and current LA County Sheriff’s Department diver Penny Castro goes on a forensics dive off SoCal shores and surfaces to find herself in a post-apocalyptic world. A bioengineered and airborne contagion has been delivered to the West Coast and will be carried around the world, killing billions. Her adventures trying to survive in this new world will make you ask, “Could this really happen?” Published by Black Opal Books, this post-apocalyptic thriller is available in ebook and print format from Amazon and as an ebook version from Smashwords and its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) Also available from the publisher or your local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it). A sequel is coming.

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

The 18th century saw the beginning of many independence movements waged against aristocratic excess and oppressive colonialism. Americans are forever linked to France due to their help in the colonies’ war against the British. The hero Lafayette comes to mind. Perhaps motivated by that war as well as their own plight, the French threw off the chains of aristocratic oppression, starting at that famous Paris prison. Democracy was on the move. Later the nexus between Americans and French was further sealed by the gift of the Statue of Liberty, a symbol for all those invading those beaches in Normandy to help free France from Nazi oppression. That statue is still the most shining light of freedom today. Thank you, France, for that gift…and your support over the centuries. Vive la France! May our friendship and democracies forever remain bastions against tyrannies around the world!