The other day I saw something about the deadline to register to vote for some special elections is like, next week. I don’t live anywhere these special elections are happening, so I haven’t paid much attention to them. But every election is important, especially now. If you want to vote, you need to be registered. And who knows what new hoops will be added to the registration process in the coming years. So if you are an American citizen over eighteen, now’s the time to register. The information to do so should be on your state’s website, but you can also check out Vote411. And if you’re already registered, these sites should also let you check your voter status, because while voter lists need to be updated as people move or die, some go overboard. Any “mistake” found now can be fixed long before the next election, making the election run smoother.
To draw a bit of attention to this, and to give some slight encouragement to register, I’m running a book sale from Monday February 24th, through Friday February 28th. For that week, four of my ebooks will be free to download on Kindle. I think it is against the law for someone to offer you something to register to vote, but it’s not like I’m offering you a million dollars to vote. And it’s only four ebooks from an unknown author just to register. If I was rich and famous, I’d be doing other things to pull democracy from the jaws of authoritarianism.
If you’re not an American, you can still grab my ebooks. I just ask you to participate in your government however you can. Since America is no longer the leader of the free world, someone else will need to step up.
***
Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.
Useless Cogs is a collection of forty, of my science fiction stories. They range from only a few dozen words to a few thousand and are filled with time travelers, AIs, clones, aliens, even sexbots, although not often as you would imagine. As example, there’s a time traveler that’s always a step behind, an AI that’s late on rent, and a sexbot with bad software. Some of the stories are humorous, some horrifying, and some … depend on your point of view.
On The Day, for reasons unknown, people began changing. They went to sleep as their old selves and woke in their beds in different bodies: bodies that had belonged to other people. And each time they fall asleep, they wake in a new body. Set months later, “The Only Certainty” follows Derrick Gorton on an average day in this new world as he deals with food shortages, the semi-collapse of society, and how to finish his latest novel.
The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars
Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.
Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment