Lewis Perdue's Blog, page 35

John Orser: The English Professor Who Changed My Life

Die By Wire is dedicated to John Orser, my freshman English professor at Corning Community College.

John was first person ever to tell me I had a future as a writer. This was bizarre.

After all, I was a science and math geek. What's more, I had always been a weird science wonk (International Science Fairs and  blacking out the entire neighborhood when an experiment fried the Mississippi Power & Light transformer on the pole outside).

I took freshman English at CCC  because I had to, not because I wanted to.I wrote a piece of short fiction because I had to, not because I wanted to. Then Professor Orser called me to his office and told me I had a lot of potential.

Really?

Creative writing, I thought, belonged only to oddballs with a desultory connection to reality. Despite John's words, I continued in math and science when I transferred to Cornell University.

While I wasn't looking, John's words kept worming their way through my life. Sure, I had actually earned money by being a reporter — supporting myself at CCC by working for the Elmira Star-Gazette. But journalism seemed more like a term paper to me, something where data had to be arranged in a correct, complete and contextually accurate way. I continued newspaper reporting, putting myself through Cornell as a reporter for the Ithaca Journal.

To be sure, Professor Orser came back at odd moments, but at Cornell organic chemistry, quantum bonding orbitals, protein folding, Coriolis effects, neurobiology  and more science crowded out his words.

Then something happened.

My love of journalism outgrew my love as a scientist. I changed my major at the end of my junior year. All my major courses became electives and I took all the courses for a communications degree in the final two semesters of my senior year.

I had enough credits for a degree in biology with a concentration in ecology, evolution and systematics, but Cornell does not allow double majors. That hammered a wedge between the right and left sides of my brain. Kierkegaard loomed. Either/Or popped up. Choices must be made. Leaps of faith taken.

Although my coursework fully allowed me to consider myself a scientist, the lack of that earned degree robbed the work of legitimacy and divorced my new world of words from my former life with math and science.

So it was that the writer only John Orser could see took over. After a brief teaching stint on the Cornell faculty, I returned to my home state of Mississippi to serve as a top official in the administration of the state's first non-racist governor: Bill Waller.

Less than a month after arriving in Jackson, I started a novel. A thriller so bad it's long been destroyed.

Orser's words never let go. I started another terrible novel in 1974 — The Trinity Implosion –just after arriving in Washington to serve as News Secretary to moderate Republican Congressman Thad Cochran. (A moderate Republican! Imagine that! It's a thought too unbelievable to put in a novel these days. Fortunately, Thad's still around — still moderate, more intelligent than ever and blessfully beyond the ideology-über-alles GOP "mainstream.")

There's a whole 'nother story about how a novel as bad as The Trinity Implosion could possibly get published. Fortunately, the very few paperback copies that may still exist are hard to find. I have but one. And that's enough. Maybe one too many.

At any rate, I kept on writing fiction and the seed that John Orser had planted deep in my head continued to grow. It grew most quickly in 1979 after I accepted a position on the faculty at UCLA to teach journalism and serve as the faculty adviser to a superb university student newspaper: The Daily Bruin.

Two years later, my first best seller — The Delphi Betrayal — was published. And Professor Orser's prescient fantasy became reality. Another pivotal figure appeared to make that happen: editor Patrick O'Connor who saw a bestseller in that book — but only after he assigned freelance editor Kathy Gordon to teach me how to shape it into a proper page-turner.

Too many times, we think of people who shaped our lives too late to let them know how vital and lasting they were. I've given Kathy my thanks, but lost touch with Patrick before I had the chance.

Fortunately I thanked John in person back in 2009 when Corning Community College selected me their Distinguished Alumnus of the Year. (To my absolute shock, they also asked me to deliver the Commencement Address for their fiftieth anniversary.)

So it was, that I thanked John at commencement and for lunch the next day.

The lasting lesson from this is that words can change lives.

Thank you for those words, John!

Die By Wire Is Now For Sale!

I have previously written 20 books, including several bestsellers that were published by the traditional way with NY publishers. My friends and colleagues Lee Goldberg, Barry Eisler, Joe Konrath and others have convinced me to go the indie route with my new book, Die By Wire.

In that spirit, I've just uploaded the epub version to the Goodreads store.

Please let other Goodreaders who have read and/or rated my previous books that they should look for Die By Wire in the Goodreads store, Kindle, Smashwords and on the iBookstore in a week or so. Also a Createspace version on Amazon tomorrow.

More information at my author site: lewisperdue.com/DieByWire

Die By Wire – On Sale Now & Ready To Read!

Die By Wire - Inspired by the true story (see Economist, below) of volunteer women snipers who have terrorized Russian troops in order to protect innocent civilians in countries Moscow has invaded over the past 20 years.

Mira Longbow knows the face of evil. As a professor, she studies it better than anyone else on the planet. As a member of a dedicated and deadly cadre of women volunteers, she does something about it.

So, it's no surprise when Mira's University of Amsterdam seminar is interrupted by a mission to take out the mastermind of a global child-bride, human slavery trafficking ring that has been too rich, too powerful, and too slippery for law enforcement.

Three thousand miles away in Afghanistan, highly decorated Spec Ops warfighter, Jackson Day, tells his commanding officer that, owing to some personal history with Mira, he would rather single-handedly face off with a regiment of Taliban jihadis than knock on Longbow's door.

But the choice is not his. Mira's gift for languages provides their last hope of understanding a garbled conversation Day recorded on a covert mission in a remote corner of Iran.

The apocalyptic conversation seems to describe a devastating and diabolically creative terror plot to make a large number of passenger aircraft suddenly disappear over the Atlantic.

For her part, Mira has little patience for Day's interruption. The last thing that she needs is a distraction from her new mission. Not to mention the unavoidable, white-hot rekindling of feelings she has carried for Day for half a decade.

From the very beginning, their sense of duty compels them to cooperate. And as they both had feared, the close quarters required for this ignites an inevitably combustible passion which has simmered for way too long.

Very quickly they realize they are after the same villain – and he has to be stopped. But they realize that neither of them can do it alone

Together, their combined skills and feelings for each other forge a complete and awesome weapon to strike at the evil heart of terror.

But only if they can move fast enough …

Get your copy now to see if they make it in time.

Quantum Theories Of Consciousness Get More Likely (And The Idea Of Determinism Less Likely)

In Perfect Killer, I write about the emerging theories of consciousness being rooted in the quantum levels of the brain. One of the issues that the "meat is everything scientists have with this is their belief (belief — not scientific evidence, mind you) that quantum coherence cannot exist at the temperatures where organic cells function.

Well, this new research shows that quantum coherence can exist at organic temperatures.

The following excerpt from Perfect Killer will tell you why I think this is important:

"Okay." I turned to face them. "Let's begin with a question: Did you really decide

to attend this seminar today, or are you here because of some unremembered incident last

year or maybe during your infancy?"

The attendees unanimously gave me the confused stares I wanted.

"Or maybe you're here because of some artifact lurking in your DNA?"

Their befuddlement deepened.

"Some among us today believe everything you do is predestined. These

reductionists and determinists whose dogma dominate brain science today think free will

is an illusion and consciousness an accidental by-product of synaptic electricity."

A couple of the faculty members present, acolytes of the orthodox, frowned deeply

at this.

I tapped an index finger against my temple. "'One hundred percent in the

meatware,' they say. 'Inspiration, meditation, right and wrong, eloquence, philosophy, do

not exist; transcendence is a fantasy and everything's just the meat talking.'"

Most heads shook their disagreement.

"This issue transcends science because free will underpins our relationships with

others and forms the philosophical foundations of law and society. Genuine accidents

carry a different reaction than intentional injury or insult. Courts treat two people

convicted of identical crimes very differently if one's insane or visibly, provably braindamaged.

"Sadly, the scientific mainstream has mishandled free will. They have a vested

intellectual interest in promoting politically correct science over reality, just as the

Renaissance Vatican favored the religiously correct over provably factual heresy.

"They conveniently forget Albert Einstein when he said that 'science without

religion is lame; religion without science is blind.'"

I ignored an assassinating frown from a slight man sitting toward the back of the

room. The man, Jean-Claude Bouvet, had a lot to lose if I was right. A widely published

author and leader of the "consciousness as meatware" movement, Bouvet was a pompous,

brilliant man who received lavish research funding from large pharmaceutical companies.

"We will speak heresy today," I continued. "Because like Copernicus, our search

for truth requires that we see things as they are, rather than as we would like for them to

be. This means setting aside politics, social engineering, and corporate profits to accept the

unwelcome pain of unexpected discoveries. Unlike our reductionist colleagues" — I

singled out Bouvet with a glance— "we will deal with science rather than fantasy."

Bouvet mumbled something derogatory, and I continued without acknowledging

him.

"Our quest for the truth begins with three important steps:

"One, free will derives from consciousness. Two, consciousness is our perception

of reality. Three, reality is weird."

This produced a titter of nervous laughter.

"There's no real argument over the first two steps," I continued. "Because without

the awareness provided by consciousness, there can be no exercise of free will. And even

the most orthodox priests of reductionism agree that consciousness is perception. But the

nature of reality divides us bitterly.

"The reductionists believe we live in a classical, clockwork universe as defined by

Sir Isaac Newton where any future action can be predicted by knowing all the data about

its starting point and every starting point can he determined by reversing the process.

"The classicists also believe that all action must be local. But entanglement—the

foundation of quantum cryptography now being tested by banks for money transfers—

proves that actions on a particle here can instantaneously affect an entangled particle

anywhere else in the universe.

"Uncertainty and entanglement mean that biological reductionism is about as right

as the Vatican was about astronomy in Copernican days. Quantum physics has trumped

Newton's classical physics in everything from semiconductors, global-positioning

satellites, and nuclear bombs. Despite this, classicists cling to predictability despite

quantum physics' proof that uncertainty rules the universe.

"In our quantum world, we cannot even predict the behavior of a single electron or

proton in any atom of your body. We can calculate probabilities of its behavior, but

nothing is certain—not even whether that particle will exist a nanosecond from there.

Thus, classical reductionism falls short because quantum reality prevents it from

determining starting conditions, and this means they cannot forecast actions based on

those conditions. In place of their fantasy clockwork, reality consists of infinitely

nonpredictable sets of mathematical probabilities. In other words, uncertainty is the only

thing of which we can be certain."

"I can't sit here and let you mislead these people." Bouvet's angry interjection

riveted the room. "Your theory is misleading because quantum physics determines science

at the very small levels of atomic and subatomic particles, whereas people and the cellular

structures that govern life and our behavior are many times larger. A biological system is

too large, too warm and messy, for any sort of coherence or quantum phenomenon to

govern it."

He jutted his jaw at me like the tip of a spear. Eyes flitted from him to me and

finally fixed me with expectations.

"An excellent recitation of the current dogma," I said, nodding evenly at Bouvet.

"But one rooted in the erroneous belief that biology and physics operate by different

rules."

Bouvet snorted.

"Biology is not immune to the laws of physics," I responded. "Every atom in our

bodies obeys the same rules, adheres to the same quantum mechanical properties as every

other atom in the universe.

"Biology is chemistry; chemistry is physics; and quantum mechanics rules

physics," I said. "Biology may seem like the study of large, messy systems, but all life

depends on chemical reactions: metabolism, cell division, DNA replication—you name it.

Chemical reactions depend on electron bonding orbits, and those are entirely quantumbased.

What's more, every atom in your body is composed of the very same subatomic

particles as those in a doorknob or a distant star.

"Let's do an experiment. Imagine your head, then visualize your brain." I saw

some eyes close. "Pick a neuron, any neuron. Then select a random molecule, and from

that molecule, single out one atom. I paused to let people focus as more eyes closed.

"Okay, focus on a particle in the atom—proton, neutron, electron—doesn't matter.

Particle physics tells us that particle is a wave and a particle at the same time, which says

that even though the results of our experiments allow us to perceive it as one or the other,

it is in reality probably neither. Superstring theory indicates that energy and matter are just

different patterns of vibration from space-time, the basic fabric of the universe. That is the

ultimate weird nature of the reality we must understand in order to comprehend

consciousness and, through that process, come to grips with free will."

"But you're still confusing the rules!" Bouvet interrupted. "Quantum mechanics

applies to the very small, not to biology."

I gave Bouvet an indulgent smile. "If you'll allow me, Doctor?" He slid sullenly

into his seat without replying.

"Quantum effects underlie all processes, even those with large, observable effects

which—"

"Name one!" Bouvet's temper burned down toward the limits of my patience.

"Well, Doctor, a nuclear bomb fits pretty well. Hard to miss one of those, and yet

quantum processes underlie the whole thing."

"But—"

"Every biological process including consciousness is rooted in quantum physics,

which carries the inherent uncertainty that makes it impossible to determine the fixed

starting point you and other reductionists and behaviorists need to predict anything at all.

Doctor classical physics is dead. You need to get a grip on that."

In the front, a slight young man with thinning sandy brown hair tentatively raised

his hand. I nodded at him.

"Doesn't that just shift the issue of free will around from the tyranny of biological

predestination to the chaos of rolling dice?"

Bouvet smiled at the young man, then shot me a challenging look.

"You might think so," I said, "if not for some very good published studies into

cognitive behavior therapy—CBT—showing that people with various problems—

depression for example—can create new interneuronal connections through directed

thought. What's more, the research proves these people overcome their psychological

problems in far more significant and lasting ways than those who pop a pill."

I looked around the room and, for the first time, saw Jasmine inside the door,

leaning against the far wall nearly hidden in the standing-room crowd. I took a deep breath

and desperately scanned my notes for an intelligent thought. Her hair framed her face like

an aura and created the perfect backdrop for the dazzling diamond studs in her ears. Her

eye shadow sparkled faintly violet, and she wore a bright cornflower-blue polo shirt and

khaki slacks with lots of pleats. A large leather bag hung over her shoulder.

"CBT upsets the reductionists because classical physics offers no provision for

something as ethereal as the mind to act on the physical world. In other words, their

dogma rests on matter creating thoughts, but they have absolutely no intellectual

explanation for thought-creating matter."

Bouvet squirmed and fidgeted. He was beside himself now, barely able to contain

his growing indignation. Orthodoxy fed such incredible anger, I thought, and it didn't

matter whether the beloved dogma was religious or scientific.

"How's this possible?" asked the brown-haired man in front. "Is this your fantasy

or is there a plausible scientific explanation?"

"As a matter of fact, new work in this centers on a small set of nano-capable

structures in every neuron called microtubules. These work on a quantum-level scale,

possibly through a biological variant of a Bose-Einstein condensate in surrounding water

molecules, which enables them to achieve a quantum coherence. World-renowned

physicist Roger Penrose and his colleague Stuart Hameroff theorize that quantum

consciousness may entangle itself in space-time, which means our thoughts may even

permanently alter this basic fabric of reality."

"So, why don't we read more about CBT?" The question came from a crowd near

Jasmine. I smiled at her, then said, "Mainly because the multibillion-dollar drug industry

has a vested interest in keeping the truth covered up. CBT research fails to get research

funding because the pharmaceutical companies can't afford for the world to know their

products are a poor chemical Band-Aid that does not fix the underlying problem and that

their science is based on the buggy-whip science of classical reductionists who do get

funded by these megacorporations. In a real sense, those who are addicted to the big

research bucks are not seekers of the truth, but seekers of grants. And you don't get grants

by challenging the establishment's dogma even if it is provably wrong,"

"Bullshit'." Bouvet's anger finally overran his self-control. "I've had enough of

your insupportable, insulting, and completely unscientific speculation!"

I watched him search the assembled faces for some support. Finding none, Bouvet

elbowed his way toward the door.

Jasmine shifted slightly and nudged Bouvet off-balance. The pompous Frenchman

ricocheted awkwardly off the doorjamb, then disappeared.

I couldn't tell if she had done it on purpose. Then she offered the room a faint

conspiratorial smile. Mona Lisa again for an instant. Then applause resonated in the small

conference room and spilled from the doorway.

eBookNewser Picks Up Die By Wire Cover Contest

eBookNewser, which is THE website for industry news about ebooks picked up the Die By Wire cover contest.

Click image to cast your vote

Cast your vote now!

The contest ends at my bedtime tomorrow night.

Beware! I go to bed around 9 p.m. Granola Coast time because I get up about 4:30 in the morning.

The voting's running close.

And if you like to keep up on ebook industry news, head over to eBookNewser.

(NOTE: If you're surfing around, you may spot a Kindle or other version with one cover or another. That's because we'll be offering Die By Wire for sale on Thursday, Dec 8 and we have to work ahead a little. However, the cover you see may or may not be the final cover selected by the voting. Vote your own preference. We'll finalize the cover as soon as the voting closes.)

Don't Buy My Book If …

If  you're going to buy only one book this holiday season, don't buy any of mine.

Buy one from Peter Winkler who makes me ashamed ever to think again that writing us a struggle for me. In fact, you should buy a lot of copies of his book and give them as gifts.

From the Los Angeles Times: A disabled writer's book unfolds a tap at a time

"Peter Winkler, his body trapped by rheumatoid arthritis, wrote the first biography of Dennis Hopper to come out after the actor's death. Little did his agent know that he had to punch out the manuscript one letter at a time, using a red plastic chopstick."

Read the rest. Read it NOW!

First Non-Racist Gov. Of Mississippi & My Former Boss Dies

From the New York Times today:

"William L. Waller, who as a prosecutor in 1964 twice tried to convict the segregationist Byron De La Beckwith of murdering the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and who in 1971 forged a coalition of poor whites and newly enfranchised blacks to become governor of Mississippi, died Wednesday in Jackson, Miss. He was 85.

"Mr. Waller, a Democrat and self-described "redneck," used his governorship from 1972 to 1976 to appoint blacks to administrative boards and commissions for the first time in post-Reconstruction Mississippi. He elevated three historically black colleges to university status, and he abolished the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which had fought integration."

Please read the rest of this obituary.

I was teaching journalism and writing at Cornell University in early 1973 when I got a call I had never expected that prompted me do do something I had vowed never to do.

I never expected that an Ivy League degree (except maybe from Princeton) would ever be acceptable in Mississppi. The Ivies sent a whole lot of civil rights workers and Freedom Riders to the state in the 1960s. To the old-time segregationists and Klansmen who ran the state, Ivy leaguers were just a bunch of "nigger-loving, trouble making Communist agitators."

So when I got a call from one of Bill Waller's top people asking me to come back to Mississippi and work in his administration, I said "no." I had vowed never to go back to Mississippi.

That resolve grew stronger every time I looked at a stained glass window in Sage Chapel on the Cornell Campus honoring Michael Schwerner (Cornell, '61), James Earl Chaney, and Andrew Goodman whose murders in Mississippi were immortalized in Mississippi Burning and etched into my heart.

If anyone wonders why I vowed never to go back, the answer is not a short one and not appropriate here, but is explained in my thriller, Perfect Killer.

But Gov. Waller was something of a hero of mine and hard to say "no" to. He stood tall in my mind as the foolishly brave man who defied death threats and social ostracism and had stood up to the racists and the Klanners and the Citizen's Council and the school-house-door-standers and the other bush-league demagogues.

He was persuasive. I went back.

I am thankful I did. It was hard and filled with my own very public slugfests with some of the dinosaurs in the state legislature. I won some, I lost some. But some of those old farts ended up in federal prison thanks Bill Minor, the only journalist in the state who paid any attention to my battles and followed up on some of the skeletons I had unearthed.

The experience working for Bill Waller changed my life in ways I still offer thanks for. He was certainly not perfect and had his own visible flaws. But he had courage. And unlike way too many politicians of today at every level, he wasn't just a man of words, but a man of action. Results counted with him, not rhetoric. Action mattered, not promises, positions, or pontifications. And when he made a threat, by damn, retribution was never far behind.

God bless him!

 

Help Lew Perdue Pick A Cover For His Next Thriller

Die By Wire is ready to roll as soon as I get a cover picked out. But I can't make up my mind. Can you help me, please?










If you'd like to put in your $0.02-worth, head over to: lewisperdue.com/DieByWire and cast your vote.

Die By Wire: Truth or Fiction? (Yes.)

When guardian sniper Mira Longbow arrives in Amsterdam to take out the head of a global child-smuggling ring, she quickly stumbles across a diabolically creative, high-tech jihad that will bring the West to its knees.

Problem is, she also crosses paths with Jackson Day, an unwanted visitor, and would-be lover from her turbulent past in Iraq. Day is a deadly effective loner assigned to the Army's Asymmetric Warfare Command whose motto (and his) is "Never Fight Fair."

So, when Day shows up to enlist her gift for languages to decipher a tangle of voices recorded of a high-level terror meeting at a remote Iranian safe house, she wants nothing to do with him or his distractions from her mission.

But, after the heat of their first encounter, they put aside their simmering differences when it's clear that Khan Nasiri -- the same wealthy shipping tycoon behind the child bride smuggling operation -- is a terror mastermind who has discovered that every modern fly-by-wire passenger aircraft is a disaster waiting to fall out of the sky.

And Nasiri intends to demonstrate to the world just how easily fly-by-wire can become die-by-wire. Cyber-jihad everywhere, anywhere. Death on demand. The countdown begins.

And they are the only two people on the planet who can stop it in time.

Die By Wire -- inspired by the real-life story of women snipers who protect innocents in war-torn regions -- brings together a heart-thumping, clock-racing thriller that also tells the shocking true story of the global exploitation of young girls whose plight has been excused by worldwide law enforcement as an acceptable cultural practice.

VOTE NOW!

10 Billion Reasons That I'm Taking "Die By Wire" To E-Book First

Don't get me wrong: I love dead-tree books. I have a house full of them … Five or six thousand or so. But this headline tells a lot of the reasons I am handling this one myself:

Total Mobile eBook Sales Forecast To Reach $10B By 2016; Now Close To 1 Million Books In Kindle Store

"For the record: this is eBooks only – all in all, there are more than 1 million books, newspapers, magazines and blogs available for Amazon Kindle today, the company professes on this page (see 'Massive Selection') and elsewhere.

"Conveniently, Juniper Research this morning released a new report on mobile eBook sales, which it forecasts to reach close to $10 billion ($9.7b) by 2016, up from $3.2 billion this year.

"The research firm says the expected jump in eBook sales for portable devices can be attributed to the growing number of dedicated eReader devices on the market, an upsurge in usage across smartphones and tablet computers and the rise of brand bookstore apps like Apple's iBookstore and, of course, Amazon's Kindle Store.

"Juniper Research says the increasing demand for tablets means that such devices will account for nearly 30 percent of all eBook downloads by 2016."

For dead-tree fans like me, Die By Wire will also be available as a physical book through Amazon simultaneously with the e-book. PLUS …readers who buy the physical book will be able to download the ebook for free.

There are some other very good reasons I'm taking this route. Stay tuned for more.

Help Lew Perdue Pick A Cover For His Next Thriller

Die By Wire is ready to roll as soon as I get a cover picked out. But I can't make up my mind. Can you help me, please? (Pretty please?)

With your help, this will be an e-book by the end of next week. So, if you'd like to put in your $0.02-worth, head over to: lewisperdue.com/DieByWire and cast your vote.

Die By Wire: Truth or Fiction? (Yes.)

When guardian sniper Mira Longbow arrives in Amsterdam to take out the head of a global child-smuggling ring, she quickly stumbles across a diabolically creative, high-tech jihad that will bring the West to its knees.

Problem is, she also crosses paths with Jackson Day, an unwanted visitor, and would-be lover from her turbulent past in Iraq. Day is a deadly effective loner assigned to the Army's Asymmetric Warfare Command whose motto (and his) is "Never Fight Fair."

So, when Day shows up to enlist her gift for languages to decipher a tangle of voices recorded of a high-level terror meeting at a remote Iranian safe house, she wants nothing to do with him or his distractions from her mission.

But, after the heat of their first encounter, they put aside their simmering differences when it's clear that Khan Nasiri — the same wealthy shipping tycoon behind the child bride smuggling operation — is a terror mastermind who has discovered that every modern fly-by-wire passenger aircraft is a disaster waiting to fall out of the sky.

And Nasiri intends to demonstrate to the world just how easily fly-by-wire can become die-by-wire. Cyber-jihad everywhere, anywhere. Death on demand. The countdown begins.

And they are the only two people on the planet who can stop it in time.

Die By Wire — inspired by the real-life story of women snipers who protect innocents in war-torn regions — brings together a heart-thumping, clock-racing thriller that also tells the shocking true story of the global exploitation of young girls whose plight has been excused by worldwide law enforcement as an acceptable cultural practice.

Hurry! Voting ends Dec. 7.