Hear, hear!

The latest astronaut (of about twenty) to speak out.  John Glenn to NASA: Keep shuttles flying.  

 A few choice quotes: 

"The U.S. for the first time since the beginning of the Space Age will have no way to launch anyone into space - starting next January.

"Our astronauts will have to be launched in Russian spacecraft, from a Russian base in Kazakhstan, to go to ... International Space Station.

"Starting at the end of this year, and probably for the next five to ten years, the launches of U.S. astronauts into space will be viewed in classrooms and homes in America only through the courtesy of Russian TV.

"For the 'world's greatest spacefaring nation,' that is hard to accept."

Kindle-ing interest

(Last updated: September 2, 2024)

Readers frequently email to ask about the availability of my writing in ebook formats. The short answer is: most books, sooner or later, come out as ebooks. The timing varies from title to title, ereader by ereader, and country to country.

Prices change, too. For example, ebook prices for a title tend to drop after release of the corresponding mass-market paperback edition.

Shop for a Kindle reader

To Google, Yahoo, and Bing (and, ultimately to you, the blog reader, who has come upon this post): here's a snapshot of my novels and collections available in the most popular ebook format: Kindle.

Let's get physical

From the world of experimental physics, two very interesting recent reports ...

Theory suggests that the Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal quantities. But of course related matter and antimatter particles (e.g., proton and antiproton), when they meet, create a big bang all their own. After a while, if all were in balance, one would expect matter and  antimatter to wipe each other out.

So: how are we made-of-matter beings here to wonder about such things?

A tale of two sticking points

Nanotech is, IMO, seriously neat stuff,  Seriously counter-intuitive, too.

Simply scaling down familiar designs ceases to work below a certain size. If you want (as I have, in fiction) to put nanobots into a living cell, you must contend with random molecular jostling: Brownian motion.

Scale down a bit smaller still, and weird, wacky quantum-mechanical effects make matters yet more challenging. Things don't get much wackier than real forces manifesting because of the ephemeral appearance and disappearance of virtual particles from the quantum foam.

Countdown to Armageddon / A Stranger in Paradise

Updated 7-29-2023. 

The book was republished by ReAnimus Press in December 2022. The latest Amazon links are: hardback, trade paperback, and Kindle. Below, original covers are shown.

A highlight of my youth was book racks lined with Ace Doubles: two short science-fiction titles bound back to back.

In the spirit of Ace Doubles, Wildside Books has begun doubling up -- and that brings me to the latest collection of my shorter fiction.

On one side, the short novel Countdown to Armageddon (originally serialized in Jim Baen's Universe):

Hezbollah has obtained an atomic bomb and a would-be martyr eager to deliver it -- and that's the good news. The bad news, unknown even to Hezbollah, is that their physicist has also found a way to take his new bomb back to a turning point in European history.

Harry Bowen, an American physicist, and Terrence Ambling, a British agent turned historian, are determined to stop Abdul Faisel and prevent the nullification of all Western civilization. Their mission can be accomplished, if at all, only in the darkest of the Dark Ages --

And there, too, time is running out

But wait! There's more ...

Life, happily, didn't imitate art

(Minor updates 03-12-2011)

I've not blogged for more than a week, with life (in the form of the Nebula Awards weekend and some before-and-after vacationing) keeping me too busy.

No: I was not up for a Nebula award. (Thanks, though, to anyone who thought that.) What made the trip irresistible was the timing and the location. The place: Florida, just down the Atlantic coast from Cape Canaveral. The time: overlapping a shuttle launch.

A whole new spin on things

Moving individual atoms and "pictures" of the deed aren't new. This iconic photo is how many of us first learned it had been done. (Guess for whom the researchers worked?) Last year, in fact, when evidently I was not paying attention, was the twentieth anniversary of the accomplishment.

(Why the quotes above around pictures? Because a Scanning Tunneling Microscope doesn't use visible light -- atoms are too small to be seen that way.)

Twenty years later, here's a really neat update: manipulation of the spin state of single electrons in individual atoms, and images of that.

We live in interesting times, and not only because stock/bond/currency markets can make one giddy.

A strange and wondrous web

If you will excuse a terribly mixed metaphor, for a writer the web is a double-edged sword.

Of course the web is an indispensable resource, for reference data from the mundane (like the Social Security Administration database of popular baby names by gender and birth year) to the routine (Wikipedia -- subject to verification, of course), to technological and historical esoterica (wherein Google becomes essential). I can't not have Firefox open while I write.

But there's also all that time-devouring ... stuff.  Here's just a smattering of the fascinating and the weird that has recently caught my eye.