Nine
years ago, I wrote a short story about people uploading their consciousness to
computers and becoming a new species. At
the time, I knew a guy who – out of boredom, or something – was teaching
himself Latin. I asked him for help in
naming this new species. What he came up
with was Homo narratus, which he said
meant “man recorded” since the Romans didn’t have a word for uploaded. Anyway, I’m working on a collection of short
stories and I’m including that one. What
I would like to know is does Homo narratus
make sense, or is there an even better way to phrase it. I probably haven’t talked to that guy in like
eight years, and it would be a weird way to reconnect to just ask how his Latin
is. So if you know Latin, I’d really
appreciate your comments.
Tuesday, July 7, 2020
I need help from Latin speakers
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Fourth of July Sale!
For the last few years, I’ve tried to have a free sale for my ebook of political stories, Political Pies, around the Fourth of July. But this year – because of everything – I figured I’d include a few of my other ebooks as well. So if you are so disgusted with real politics you don’t want to even read fictional politics, you have a few other choices. All of these will be free to download from Wednesday July 1st, through Sunday July 5th. So grab them before you get too drunk.
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 this 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.
A Man of Few Words is a collection of fifty of my flash fiction stories. What would really happen if a “T-Rex on steroids” attacked a city? Why do science fiction writers make the best lovers? How does a company get to Second Base with VIPs? I explore these questions and more using less than 1000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and general fiction to science fiction.
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.
Who cleans up the mess when the time machine malfunctions?
A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories
Hopefully, in the not too distant future humans will return to the moon. We will build bases and colonies, make farms and factories, and live, love and learn. “A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories” contains five of my short stories that are all set upon the moon. They give the tiniest glimpse of the possibilities awaiting us there.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
A ticking potato
Fifteen
or twenty years ago, I was at some book sale and I came across a collection of
condensed novels. I think some science
fiction magazine back in the 80’s condensed three or four novels from the early
1900’s to fit in a 100 or so page digest sized magazine. I picked it up – for maybe a dollar – because
I do have an interest in classic stories, to see what has and hasn’t changed in
storytelling over the last century. Of
course, things don’t often go to the front of my “To Read” pile so it was some
time before I started reading it. But I
didn’t get too far.
I
don’t remember the title or author of the first story, all I remember is that
it was about some guy who had some invention and he needed money to build it,
so he went to an estranged, rich uncle.
The uncle invited him to dinner, and the first course comes out and they
talk for a bit. The first course is
clean up, the second is brought out, and they talk a bit more. And I got so thrown out of the story that I
had to stop. What’s the issue, you
ask? Well, when I say they talked a bit,
I mean it was like, the First Course arrives, “How’s your sister?” “She died
last year of TB.” “I’m dreadfully sorry.” “These things happen.” First Course
removed, Second Course arrives. “How go
your studies?” “Very well.” Second Course removed, Third Course arrives.
Now,
I don’t know if in the original version their conversation was more in-depth,
or if there were long, awkward silences where the narrator looked around at the
paintings, or what. If I can ever find
that magazine again – it’s probably in a box in the attic – I’d love to look up
the original novel to see what was cut out.
But by the Third Course in less than a page, I was completely out of the
story. I’m not sure what deeper meaning
there could be for us having to know what each course was, so I’m not sure why
those details were kept.
I
bring all that up, because I’m … I guess you could say sensitive to the flow of
time in stories. For example, something
that makes me groan every time I see it is a standard thing in cop shows. In one scene the main characters are talking
at the station when they get a call for a body in a parking structure
downtown. The next scene they get out of
their car at the parking structure and continue their conversation as if there
wasn’t a twenty minute car ride in the middle.
I understand it’s done because they have the set for the station, and
the set for the murder scene, so they want to use them as much as
possible. And it would cost too much to
set up a third set in a car and CGI the traffic through the windows. I understand that, but it still takes me out
of the show.
Fortunately,
when writing a story, we’re not limited by a set budget. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t
issues. For example, in one of my
current projects, these people are staying out in the woods for a while and are
eating potatoes and fish cooked over a campfire. My characters will be talking and putting
food on to cook. They’ll then talk for
two or three pages. So far, so
good. But then, maybe only five minutes
have passed in their world so I can’t just have them eating still uncooked
potatoes. But I don’t want to just end
the scene and come back with them eating or cleaning up and have them start the
conversation again. Did they just sit
around the campfire for twenty minutes without saying anything of importance?
I
realize that few people would bat an eye if I continued a conversation after a time
jump, but it irks me. I’m doing my best
to have natural, realistic, flowing dialogue that drops in little bits of plot exposition,
but I don’t want to write half-an-hour’s worth of in world dialogue while the
potatoes cook. My solution, as such, is once
I’ve dropped enough plot points, I have a character – usually the dragon – tell
a story. And I do lead the conversation
to a story, I don’t just have the dragon stand up in the middle of something
and go, “Story time.” I don’t have to write the actual story, just have her
start telling a story about X and have some of my main character’s
thoughts. So in a paragraph or two I can
have a story that takes as long to tell as the potatoes need to cook. And then the normal conversation can begin
again as they eat. So they’re not eating
raw potatoes, they’re not sitting around the campfire silently, and while there
is a time gap it comes without the bluntness of “End Scene.”
Sunday, April 5, 2020
Coronavirus sale II!
So
you’re still stuck at home, trying to make masks out of hoarded TP, you’ve
binged everything on Netflix, and you’ve read everything on your Kindle, but
you’re trying to save your money since you don’t know when you’ll go back to
work so you’re not downloading anything new.
Well, here’s your chance to get six ebooks for free. Between Monday April 6 and Friday April 10,
you’ll be able to download these six of my ebooks for the price of a few
clicks.
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 this 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.
Over
the years, I’ve posted several short stories on websites that later – for one
reason or another – died. While the corpses of some of these sites are still
around where you can read the stories, many have vanished from the internet.
And since there are few sites that will publish such previously published
works, the only way you could read them was if I self-published them in a
collection.
In
addition to such “lost” stories, I’ve included some new stories that – for one
reason or another – I feel I’d have a hard time finding someone to publish
them. So “Seventh Story Stockpile” basically contains stories I didn’t know
what to do with. But now I can move on to other projects.
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.
Partway
to a new colony world, board member Geoffrey Ames is woken from hibernation by
the caretaking crew of the Lucian. They require him to look into the matter of
their fellow crewman Morgan Heller. Morgan’s claims – such as being over 1500
years old – would normally land him in the psychiatric ward, except he can back
up some of his other claims.
“Rise”
is a standalone story set in my Human Republic Universe. The story follows the
events after the tragic deaths of the colonists on a small colony in a distant
star system.
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.
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
Thoughts on Picard
So
I’ve had a few days to think about the first season of Picard, and I have to say that I wasn’t all that impressed with
it. Now some will start claiming that
the reason I didn’t like it was because I don’t like strong women, or some such
shit, but the real reason I didn’t care for it was because I think it’s poorly
written. For example:
One
of the key points for the show is the attack on Mars. But what exactly happened? We see some synths go mad and kill people and
then lower the defenses and some ships show up – from somewhere – and blow up
Mars. But knowing what we know – that
this not-so secret Romulan group hijacked the synths to make people hate them –
that doesn’t really make much sense.
Like, if I were in charge of this not-so secret Romulan group, what I
would have done was program the synths to take hostages. Then have them call up the Federation Council
with some bizarre demands like all the organics being evacuated off Earth so it
can become a Synth Homeworld or something, and that for every five minutes
their demands aren’t met they’ll kill a hostage. And to show that they mean what they say,
they kill two hostages because it’s been ten minutes since this started. Then, when Starfleet Security shows up to
rescue the hostages, something goes awry and the shipyards blow up. That wouldn’t lead to as many casualties, but
I think it would be better.
During
the, I don’t know, Janeway Commission that investigates what happened on Mars,
they might find incidents of “minor malfunctions” of the synths in the weeks
leading up to it which in light of the events would just be seen as them
preparing for the showdown. It would all
be wrapped up in a neat little bow and everyone would think the synths are
deranged terrorists that we cannot negotiate with.
Instead,
we get this mystery: why did the synths go mad?
Because an organization known for “boldly going where no one has gone
before” would look at a mystery, shrug, and go it’s not our concern. Oh, wait.
When the problem seems to just be a malfunction – instead of deliberate
maleficent – people would look into it, and what are the odds that the
anti-synth people are better programmers than the pro-synth people? All it would take would be the slightest bit
of evidence that the synths were hacked to destroy the entire plan. You would think that this not-so secret
Romulan group would understand that people want to solve mysteries, so it’s
best to do your big conspiracy thing in a way that leaves little mystery.
Moving
on from Mars, I believe that in the first few episodes they talked of a
“darkness” or something in Starfleet.
This would suggest a cabal of officers going against the ideals of
Starfleet for their own gain. That was
interesting. Until it turned out to just
be Commodore Oh. Which just makes me
wonder how one officer had such influence, not only over Starfleet, but the
Federation Council?
I
guess she’s just lucky. I mean, at the
end, when everyone knows that she was involved in the attack on Mars, she’s
allowed to just leave. No attempt is
made to take her into custody and put on trial for this major act of terrorism.
Of
course, she’s rather stupid. She ruined
her plan. If she hadn’t mindmelded with Agnes,
then the bad synth wouldn’t have figured out she needed to build a transmitter. I mean, it’s not like the not-so secret
Romulan group had access to warships that they could have used to kill Picard
on one ship and thus prevent him from getting to Maddox and learning where the
other sister was. If Oh had just used
the resources she had – instead of trying to bring in some unknown – she could
have killed Picard in an unfortunate attack by “bandits,” gotten Maddox because
weren’t they already on their way to him, and still had the sister on the
cube. They could have gotten the
information, went to the synth planet, use “planetary sterilization plan five”
or whatever (side note, how many planetary sterilization plans do you need?)
and nobody would have known. This was
less a case of the good guys figuring out the bad guys plan as much as the bad
guys tripping all over themselves and the good guys going, “Hey.”
Since
I mentioned the bad synth, let’s talk about the big bad Cthulhu synths. I’m guessing that they started with this idea
of how will people react to synthetic life.
It’s an idea that will move from science fiction to science fact sooner
than many people suspect, so I applaud the idea of getting people to think
about it. I just don’t think Star Trek is a good vehicle for such a
story idea. Anyway, we understand that
organics can be devious and can even kill to further their goals. So we can either show the synths to be better
than us, or just as bad. And it’s safer
to go with the idea that they can be just as bad, I mean, we don’t want to make
the audience think too much. But to
muddy everything up, let’s just introduce these big bad Cthulhu synths because,
well, they couldn’t use the Borg to be the menacing threat anymore. Does that mean that whatever Star Trek there is in thirty years will
just have a Cthulhu synth as part of the crew?
I
think the problem with Picard is that
they took ten, thousand piece puzzles and took one hundred pieces out of each,
and tried to make one puzzle. Here and
there you have five or six pieces that fit together, but you also have seven
corners. The more I think about the
show, the more inconsistencies I see. And
not just with the other Trek shows, but even within itself. Like, the synths can make a magical wrench
that can fix unreparable mechanical things, but they can’t use it to make surgical
equipment to fix Picard’s brain thing?
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