Posts about science fiction genre and books.
“They” claim you decide whether to click in a fraction of a second, so covers determine whether you look at a book. No matter how good the story, if you don’t click, it doesn’t matter.
I’ve been dithering over new covers for my Mars Colony series and finally pushed the button. I hope you like them. You’ll find the new covers on Amazon today and other favorite stores by the end of the week.
Intrigued? Good. If you haven’t joined me on Mars yet, click today 🙂
Wonders of the Galaxy! May 14, 2019, starting 1:00 pm PDT. Robby the 
Robot was sold in 2017, but there’s more memorabilia up for auction from the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, from the estate of collector Wes Shank.
Props, costumes, blueprints – all sorts of things from a classic movie. Some of the first ray gun props that actually lit up, long before CGI. Costumes from the spaceship’s crew, though no longer the original gray. Some thrifty producer dyed them brown for a later movie (I wonder which one?)
I won’t be bidding, but maybe I can dig up a copy of Forbidden Planet. It’s still enjoyable, with an extinct alien race that reaches across eons to threaten an obsessive scientist, his beautiful daughter, and intrepid spacemen. Yes, spaceMEN, because this was 1956, but the woman isn’t as badly cliched as you might fear (despite the poster), and the secret of the alien’s extinction is chilling. And, of course, there’s Robby the Robot, a character with personality and not simply a tin can on legs. You can’t beat a real classic.
Thanks to newatlas.com
Please get yourself comfortable as we take a daily tour through these fabulous blogs, listed below.
Each blog you visit will entertain you with exclusive articles and excerpts from this fantastic new book. Get an insight into the character’s head with interviews and profile images.
Then hunt down the mystery word inthis post to get you one step closer to the $10 Amazon Gift Card. Hurry! Only one day left to enter!
You are here to celebrate the release of Star Shepard, book one of the space western series, Shepherd of Light, by R.R.Virdi.
Star Shepherd knows a raw deal when he sees one. And he’s got the worst one in the galaxy: to deliver a mysterious package to a rebellion to change the scales of power in favor of the common man. As he meets with an old friend to seek much-needed help, he draws the attention of a genocidal admiral willing to destroy entire worlds if it means catching Star Shepherd.
Will Star survive the chase and bring hope to the rebellion, or deliver a gift into the hands of a worse power, tipping the galaxy into further chaos? amazon.com/Star-Shepherd
R.R. Virdi is the two time Dragon Award–Nominated author. Once, for his series The Grave Report, a paranormal investigator series set in the great state of New York. The second nomination coming for Dangerous Ways, book one of The Books of Winter, an epic urban fantasy series set in the same overall universe as his Grave Report novels. He has worked in the automotive industry as a mechanic, retail, and in the custom gaming computer world. He’s an avid car nut with a special love for American Ship classics.
The hardest challenge for him up to this point has been fooling most of society into believing he’s a completely sane member of the general public.
Follow him on his website. http://rrvirdi.com/
Or twitter: @rrvirdi or https://twitter.com/rrvirdi
Don’t forget to visit all the blogs and collect the 10 hidden words for your chance to win a $10 Amazon Gift Card.
Send your completed word list to kkantasauthorassist@gmail.com today! Only one day left to enter!
Starting on this date – but don’t worry – still available!
Tuesday 19th – https://rrvirdi.com
Wednesday 20th –http://indiescififantasy.com
Thursday 21st – https://readcommendations.com
Friday 22nd – https://mmcquillen44.wixsite.com/themadhouse
Saturday 23rd – https://www.authorerikamszabo.com/my-thinking-board
Sunday 24th – https://rainne15.wordpress.com
Monday 25th – https://www.maryrwoldering.com
Tuesday 26th – https://karensbookbuzz.wordpress.com
Wednesday 27th – https://katerauner.wordpress.com/
Thursday 28th – https://celthric.com
Blog Hop Tour organized by Author Assist
I’ve never hosted a blog hop before – what do you think? Is it fun? Do you like the givewaway with a word hunt? Did you figure out what the mystery word is? If people like this, I’ll do more. Thanks!
Titan’s a great place for science fiction, like my latest release. A cult thinks their colony will become paradise, but not if things keep going like this!
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has an atmosphere so dense and gravity so low, you could strap wings to your arms and fly like a bird.
That atmosphere will protect you from cosmic radiation too, and so from resulting cancer and brain damage, but you can’t breathe it. There’s no oxygen. But even if there was, one breath would freeze your lungs. There is water ice, so if you had enough power you could electrolyze (electrolysize?) yourself some oxygen.
Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have liquids in the form of lakes and seas on its surface. These liquids are made of methane but, armed with the right kind of protective gear, one could theoretically be able to swim without harm! NASA’s Janelle Wellons futurism.com
Hmm… if you used oxygen to burn a stream of liquid methane from the plentiful lakes, could you generate enough electrical power to keep the cycle going and still produce heat and light for your habitat? Other chemical reactions might work better, like hydrogen/acetylene, or maybe turbines running on tides in the larger lakes. Saturn is so far from the sun that solar panels aren’t efficient, but there is sunlight. A sort of perpetual sunset – orange, thanks to the hydrocarbon haze.
True color image of atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan
For a research station, perhaps you could carry everything you need with you, but for a colony you’ll need resources. There’s plenty of hydrocarbon feed so expect everything possible to be made of plastic, but what about minerals and metals? Titan may have a rocky core, but it’s buried under ice hundreds of kilometers thick. Saturn’s not hopeful either. Its outer layers are hydrogen and helium, and if you dive very deep you’ll never get out again. Maybe you’ll find meteors and asteroids captured in the rings.
#1 New Release on Amazon in its First Week
Titan – a cult colonizes Saturn’s moon – Woo Hoo – #3 in its Kindle scifi category! And it’s FREE through Feb 16th.
Don’t miss this new release. Are you reading this post after the 16th? Don’t despair. You can read it on Kindle Unlimited. (Or, shoot – just buy it.)
Want to say thanks? Please leave a review. A sentence or two is all it takes to help other readers find me. You’re doing me a big favor 🙂 Thank you 😉
Fynn learns the Kin’s secret when he’s shoved into a stasis pod.
He’s not going back to college, he’s going with his father’s cult to settle on Saturn’s moon Titan.
Halfway across the solar system, cut off from Earth, the Kin believe they’ll create a paradise. But their leader’s bizarre behavior may be more dangerous than the profoundly cold moon with its dense, unbreathable atmosphere.
I love proving it
I ran across this freebie story: the tale of an eco-warrior.
Free for a limited time
Together with his fellow student activists, Ben traveled to London on Earth Day to take one last stand. To make a final plea for an environmental solution to save the planet. Time is up on combating climate change. Humanity’s choice is about to be made. And most are choosing to leave the fate of the world to a mysterious geoengineering experiment.
Goengineering is a fascinating and terrifying idea. Humanity’s been changing the Earth for eons, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, without any plan. Would we do better if we had a plan? What about the law of unintended consequences? And what if we addressed one aspect of Climate Change, like land surface temperatures, but ignored others, like ocean acidification? There are a lot of apocalyptic dystopian stories to be spun from here, and I don’t want to live in one of them.
Here’s an article Anna Kucirkova suggested to me on geoengineering. I can’t vouch for the story or the article, but this is a topic that deserves discussion. I don’t expect to find a silver bullet. No solution that would fit inside a one-hour TV episode (not even of Star Trek TOS.)
I don’t see anything that allows humanity to go merrily on its way with fossil fuels, land and animal use, and economic inequality as usual. What do you think of our precarious future?
It’s hard to find free-use images of this episode. This shows fans viewing the Gate, taken by Konrad Summers at a Star Trek Exhibit at Queen Mary Spruce Goose Dome, Long Beach Ca, Feb 2008
The end of the year is a time for lists, and I found this 10 Best and 10 Worst Episodes of Star Trek – referring to the broadcast shows, even Deep Space Nine which I haven’t seen in ages. Any such list is fodder for endless conversations, but I want to discuss The City on the Edge of Forever from The Original Series.
If you haven’t seen it, stop now and go find the episode. Spoiler Alert: Links below lead to plot summaries and I discuss the episode’s pivotal event.
Refresh your memory of the plot here. You may not be surprised to learn that a “Best Of” episode came from a famous scifi writer, Harlan Ellison, or that it’s production ran over budget and over schedule, but did you know that Harlan Ellison hated the episode?
Various rewrites reduced production costs, and if some characters and scenes had not been cut, it would have been a movie instead of a TV episode. (Oh, the loss to humanity!) But the basic moral dilemma remained: if the death of a single, innocent, noble person would save millions, should that person die? Does your answer change if you love that person? It’s a Kobayashi Maru scenario where Kirk can’t cheat to win.
The biggest change was this: Roddenberry had Kirk make the heartbreaking decision. Ellison had Spock make it.
The question of which feels truer to Kirk, and to Trek, serves as a litmus test for fans of the show.
Is it believable that Kirk acted and allowed his lover to die? I can accept that. Kirk was a rather wild blend of traits.
What about the original story? My inner-Spock says, yes, Spock would have acted. So both versions could have been made.
Could Kirk and Spock have developed the relationship they had throughout TOS if Spock had acted instead of Kirk? Could Spock’s shadow have fallen across the Star Trek universe?
I think – No. TOS was made before season-long and series-long character arcs became popular, but even in that environment, characters grew and developed. I don’t believe friendship would have grown or that we would have seen more of Spock’s inner life if Ellison’s version had prevailed.
Star Trek TOS originally came to me as a pre-teen, science-loving, somewhat-awkward geek. Even back then, I could be critical. I cringed at some episodes, like Spocks’ Brain, but it’s all part of me today. So I haven’t read Ellison’s published version of his original script, but you can if you want. I understand the book includes a lot of Ellison’s rants over being badly treated and his negative opinions about nearly everyone involved.
In 1995, four years after Roddenberry’s death, Ellison published “The City on the Edge of Forever” again, this time as a standalone book titled The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay.
3.4 stars on Amazon – not overly impressive, but how could it be ranked higher when “this book insults Gene Roddenberry and the entire Star Trek franchise with no mercy. It also sometimes insults the fans.” While some reviewers were annoyed at half the book being an airing of grievances, at least one person thought Ellison’s famous temper was worth the price of the book.
