How Not to Name Drop in Writing

I recently re-read Massacre of Mankind, an official sequel to H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds that was published in 2017, written by Stephen Baxter. It's a decent book, and Justin Fraser and I talk about it on this episode of The Wordy Pair Podcast.

Fun with All Men Are Brothers!

The Water Margin Story, a famous Chinese novel that goes by several different names here in the West, is so freakin' crazy.

The Strange Freedom of Old Sci-Fi!

Reading older sci-fi has made me think a lot about how, as time goes on and scientific discoveries are made, the universe of "plausible" science fiction narrows. A century ago, there were so many things that we didn't understand, or where our only understanding came from mathematical models untested in the real world.

Einstein wrote his famous paper on special relativity in 1905, but it took decades for that theory to be backed up by significant experimental data. Hell, there was a man named Herbert Dingle who was the president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 through 1953--not a crank or kook! In the late 1950s he managed to "un-convince" himself of special relativity and he spent the rest of his life trying to explain what he discovered (or thought he had discovered) was wrong with it.

It's worth noting that, just because a mathematical model is created to solve a particular problem (in this case, the apparent constancy of the speed of light), that doesn't mean that no other models exist that could also explain the same phenomenon and have different forms. Models with very little data to back them up should be met with some skepticism!

But think about all the discoveries that got data to support them over time (special relativity included)... each time that happened, some gap that science fiction authors could play with and still be "plausible" got closed up.

It's easy to forget that 50, 80, 100 years ago, authors were dealing with very different explanations about how the universe worked. One of the things that happens when you're writing in those olden days is that you could write a "hard" science fiction story hypothesizing a stable nucleus at high atomic number, or faster-than-light travel, or other things.

The video above contained some of my musings on the topic of how "not knowing" can sometimes open up paths for authors to write plausible works that we instinctively reject as impossible today. That means that works that could be seen as "hard" sci-fi 100 years ago might be classed as the softest of soft sci-fi today. Something to think about!

Okay, This Time It's Actually Released! (The Chasm of Color)

Stupid me, I made a post on Monday that said (New Release!) in the title but I ended up looking over my final draft one more time on Tuesday and found a couple more tiny things to change.

Now, finally, The Chasm of Color is out in e-book form!

I'm trying to figure out Amazon's print on demand stuff, so I'll add posts for the paperback and hardcover versions when they come out.

For updates, join my mailing list! You can choose whether to get only emails for Chasm stuff or hop on the general list:

The Scientific Setting of The Chasm of Color (New Release Imminent!)

The front cover for The Chasm of Color. Photo is edited from one by Matt Donders, via Unsplash.

The Chasm of Color is almost done! I made my final pass through the story today, and I've brought it up over 15k words with some additional character details and interesting thoughts and reactions (I hope). That makes it technically a "novelette," somewhere between a short story and a novella.

The Chasm of Color, a sample

Part of my cover photo, edited from a picture by Matt Donders, courtesy Unsplash.

My next work is another fun bit of science fiction, with another reference to the luminiferous ether, as in What the Soul Still Fears! However, instead of a story set in the modern day, The Chasm of Color takes place at around the same time as the Michelson-Morley experiment, in the late 1880s.

The protagonist, an assistant professor at the fictional Lexington University, has read the Michelson-Morley paper but is not convinced. However, he is unable to figure out a good reason for his uneasiness, until one morning over a year later...

Audio/Video Story Teasers #2: The PAEAN Project

 

Here's the second video in my series of short audio/video teasers, this one for my historical fiction journal story, The Paean Project. I really liked the slow escalation of tension and worsening conditions that go through this story.

This excerpt is from the middle of the story and happens after one of the astronauts has some kind of heart attack. The mission is still slated to slingshot around the moon, but right before they lose radio contact...

Check it out on YouTube!

The PAEAN Project (about 3100 words)

 0630 hrs (local time), March 19, 1968: I'm starting this journal without knowing exactly what will become of it. It may be destroyed, or I may be allowed to keep it, but I have had the habit for a long time, and my circumstances now suggest that recording these events may be advisable. I am sitting now in a dingy passenger cabin on a large cargo ship, having boarded yesterday under orders. The ship's name, painted on the front, is Cavalier, but it was obvious that this new name was recently painted on as I boarded. I am, or rather was, a communications officer at the U.S. Naval Station at Guam, under command of the Naval Forces Marianas. A few days ago, I and several other officers were ordered to prepare to change our station to a large cargo ship that had just arrived in port. We were not given many details, and the operation was treated with high secrecy, but not classified in any official manner, which is why I feel justified in keeping this journal. We are to set sail in about three hours, according to a schedule I have seen, but aside from that, I have no other details. We are apparently heading south. After we get underway, there is supposed to be a briefing for us. The crew seems to be a mix of Navy and civilian people, and I saw a large group of what looked like scientists housed near the aft of the ship.