Colin Weldon's Blog, page 4

Space X lands the Falcon 9 again… Sort of

I love following the progress of SpaceX. Their pioneering technique of landing the Falcon 9 on FOUR STRUTS after its been in orbit has revolutionised the way in which private space travel is going to operate. It has not, however, been without its slight hiccups. After successfully landing the Falcon 9 on the drone ship today one of the struts gave way and what followed was a very slow arcing of the rocket as it fell towards its fiery doom. It was spectacular to watch but probably very painful to witness by the SpaceX team.  The video shows a perfect landing right on the X and then the eventual buckling of one of the landing struts. It reminded me of the old models used to make when the glue hadn’t set properly on one of the annoyingly small fixtures that would take hours to align. It would usually involve breaking the whole model and throwing it in the bin in a fit of frustration. What I admire about SpaceX is their refreshing candidness when things like this go wrong. The public reaction to these events seems to be overwhelmingly positive with Musk’s twitter account full of praise and encouragement to just keep at it to never give up. It is a true testament to something I read once by Richard Branson in which he states that we learn by doing and falling over.

Keep sending them up Elon.. Keep sending them up.

 

http://www.space.com/31653-spacex-rocket-landing-crash-droneship-video.html

 

Credit: SpaceX

Credit: Elon Musk via Instagram

View full size image

Inspiration- Phobos 1 and 2

There have been lots of little inspirations for the writing of The Agathon, not least of which is an interesting little event that happened on October 1988. To begin with, I was fascinated by this as I had never heard of it before. The Russians launched two probes in 1988 and set them on a course for the orbiting Martian moon of Phobos. They named them Phobos 1 and Phobos 2. Contact with Phobos 1 was lost shortly after launch. Phobos 2, however, made it to Mars and on March 26th 1989 began sending images back to Earth. What it sent back has baffled scientists. While photographing the Martian surface at an altitude of 6000 km it sent back an image of what looks like a large cylindrical shadow being cast by something very large in orbit. See image 1 and 2. It was determined to be a shadow as you could still see objects clearly through it. The probe was then turned around and sent to take photos of the orbiting moon Phobos. Contact with the probe was then suddenly lost. The last image the probe taken of Phobos was released by on December 1991 by Marina Popovich, a retired air force Colonel. See Image 3 + 4. A strange elliptical shape can be seen in the foreground.

While natural formations of an asteroid or some other object could explain this, I found it to be an interesting platform to start focusing on the Martian moon Phobos for my book. It is a great “what if” set of circumstances to use as a jumping off point for a sci-fi novel.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL FOLKS !!

While you can certainly draw similarities with  my use of a strange monolith on the surface of Phobos to Stanley Kubrick’s epic movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, my main line of inspiration was actually ANOTHER strange formation found on Phobos. YES there actually IS a strange Monolith on the surface of Phobos. See image 5+6. This is a very strange object jutting out of the surface of the moon and it was these photos that inspired the Monolith in The Agathon.

Check out the video of Buzz Aldrin talking about it on CSPAN just under images 5+6

The unknown mysteries not only behind these wonderful images are fantastic fodder for a writer to go play with. We may never know the answers to these, but in my opinion, maybe that’s the best way to keep it. Humans love a mystery. What do you think these photo’s represent?

 

Forward we go

 

Colin

 

Image 1 + 2

Image 3 + 4

 (Marina  Popovich with last photo Phobos 2 took. You can see the odd Cylindrical object below the moon.)

Image 4

 

Video of Phobos 1 and 2 incident

 

Image 5+6

 

Buzz Aldrin talks about the Monolith on Phobos

Writing diary – Plotting

Spoiler alert !!… if you have not read The Agathon yet and don’t want to know plot details then skip this blog. 

 

Sticky notes are great, but eventually you have an apartment full of them all over the walls so it becomes problematic. Not only that, but the order in which they are placed becomes a nightmare. Lessons learned from book 1. What I find really helpful is starting out with a simple notebook and jotting every single possible idea down in no particular order. This can take weeks or months but every writer knows that if you don’t put those thoughts down on paper when they pop into your head, they could be lost forever. 3am tends to be a strange idea generating hour for me, so a notepad by the bed for sleepy plot ideas works wonders. I then try to visualise these ideas on either a blackboard or white board and try to put them all in a chronological order. The meat, as it where, is yet to come but the outlined major plot points for acts 1-3 should be written in big black writing on a board so that you have something to work with. For example here is how book 1 was laid out.

Act 1 – World building : In Sci Fi you have to establish certain facts about where and when your characters are living. So what I tried to do early on was establish this by SHOWING, not TELLING. I’ll talk more about showing and telling in a later blog. So here is what we learn in the first act.

 Humans live on Mars
The year is 2339
There is an ancient signal being transmitted to Earth that the humans cannot decode.
Carrie has abilities (she is telepathic and is manifesting electrical impulses from her hands)
Carrie works with Doctor Tyrone Tyrell in the observatory on Mars
There is a Monolith on the orbiting moon Phobos which is being used to amplify the signal.
Carrie’s mother died when she was very young
There is black organic substance found in a cave on Mars that liquifies organic material on contact
It is communicating with Carrie
Carrie’s father is commander of the human colony on Mars.
The Agathon is the first faster than light ship every built and is under construction in orbit around Mars.
There is a change in the signal and a powerful Gamma ray destroys the Earth
A large chunk of the Earth is on a collision course with Mars
The black organic liquid is brought on board The Agathon

Act 2 –

With the Earth destroyed, the surviving humans board two space stations and, along with a handful of transport vessels, sets a course away from the debris field
There is a lottery. The winners of which board the Agathon and set a course for the origin of the signal.
There is an explosion on board The Agathon and they set down on a planet to make repairs.
They discover an ancient artefact which gives them clues as to the origin of the signal makers.
They discover that there has been a malfunction in the FTL drive causing a space time distortion which has slowed time to a point where they have jumped 1000 years into the future.
They set a course for what they think is the Signal makers world

Act 3 –

They discover what they think is a planet
The planet attacks the ship making it crash land.
They investigate and discover the planet is artificial
The Black substance attacks Tyrell and enters his body taking over his mind
The machine planet is alive and captures Carrie’s father
It kills and replicates one of the crew who then tries to destroy the ship
Carrie rescues her father and does battle with the alien machine using her newly honed electrical abilities.
The ship escapes using their FTL drive at the last minute.

Okay so that’s a rough outline of the major plot points. There is no real in depth look as character motivation yet as that is handled at the character creation stage. I use Scrivner to map out character traits and try to incorporate those traits within the story.

Plotting gives you a basic A-B-C look at where you want the book to go and while it should not entirely dictate the structure of your book it lets you follow a path rather than writing blind.

 

Writing Diary Jan 2nd 2016 – Character Traits

 

It’s 2016- There is a lot to do.

Happy new year and welcome to a brand new writing year. Having recovered from a binge session of watching ‘Making a Murderer’ on Netflix it time to begin this year with book three planning. I wanted to talk a little about character motivation. Why do your characters do what they do and why. It is the fundamental reason why people read stories. It’s one of the more sadistic traits of a writer that makes them take their well thought out protagonist and drop them a world of shit, just so that the reader can watch them squirm their way out. There has to be internal and external obstacles for a character to overcome which I will go through in more detail when my characters begin to develop over the course of this next book. To touch on these briefly, an external obstacle is anything that stands in the way of a character reaching his or her objective. There must always been some sort of objective, whether it be trying to save the human race or overcome a internal trauma that has plagued the character and held them back. A battle is an excellent external obstacle. A character must defeat an enemy in order to survive. Simple. An internal obstacle that is preventing the character from doing that could be his or her fear of weapons or the psychological scarring received on a previous battlefield. The internal obstacles take a little more time and thought in order to convey the mindset of a character, but once it is firmly set in the minds of the reader it becomes a powerful storytelling tool. Look at Carrie Barrington’s internal obstacles in the first Agathon book. She dreams of her mothers death every night and has strange visions of an alien world she has never seen before. Her external obstacles become very clear when she starts manifesting powers that she struggles to control and hide from the rest of the colonists. She not only has to overcome these obstacles, but also move forward in dealing with the burden of battling the alien planet so that the Agathon is able to escape.

 

Ok more from me later it’s back to plotting in my notebook

 

Forward we go

Colin

Writers Diary 31st Dec 2015

Character development in fiction is a tricky one. Especially if those characters aren’t human. You not only have to create a history for that character but also an entirely unique socio-economic background for an entire race. My first two books mainly centre around human interaction but in the third one we spend much of the first act with an entirely new race of aliens on another planet. I have to not only create “realistic” physical characteristics but also a geopolitical structure of another world. Needless to say, it is taking up a lot of notepad space. My cork board is filling up with little sticky notes of ideas, many of which will be trashed, but its this part of the book which is so vitally important. You cannot simply wing it when you create such an integral part of your story. There has to be some sort of plan in place. I use the writing program Scrivner for most of this process. It has an inbuilt cue card and cork board feature that I find really useful. It organises characters, scenes, maps, places and research into one very handy program. I link my Scrivner novel file with my dropbox account so that it automatically backs up to the cloud every time I close the program. I can’t stress the need for backing up enough. Imagine spending six months writing something and your computer decides to pack it in or you spill coffee all over it. Believe me it has happened So back up every fifteen minutes. It is a habit worth getting into. Today has been dedicated entirely to the opening scene. I have not written a single word in the first draft yet, nor can I until the character traits of the initial character introduction are locked. I am opening the book with an action scene. It is not something I recommend doing for a first book as it brings the reader to a heightened point in the story with very little run up but it happens to fit the intro to the character Tark’AN quite nicely and could explain a lot about the background of the race I am introducing in once nice little sequence. Hopefully it works well. Time will tell.

 

Writing Diary Dec 30th 2015

Two days left in 2015 and two books written, one of which is published and the other one being edited and proofed. Not a bad year all in all. Right now I am in sunny LA watching the sun come up (thanks jet lag), and planning book 3. This stage in the process is very much just jotting down thoughts. This is an important chapter as it all comes together in an epic conclusion to the Agathon series. At the moment I am scribbling down thoughts in a notebook. There is an entirely new set of characters that need naming and fleshing out before the first chapter can be written in mid January. The first chapter has to be the hook that brings the reader into the world. I liken it to the moment you dip your toe in an ocean to see if it is warm enough to jump in. It has to be inviting enough make the reader dive in head first in the warm water. Plotting the book takes place over three stages, acts one, two and three need to be etched out. While I do not plan each scene as that defeats the enjoyment of seeing where the story takes you as a writer I do create a framework from which to work from. A set of ideas are written down and I write the scenes around that framework and flesh them out as I go. At the same time, I have to keep a careful eye on the promotion of book one as it is new to the market and I am constantly getting feedback and ideas from readers.

 

 

 

The Agathon Chapter 2

                                                              Chapter 2

                                                                   Main Observatory

                                                    Gamma Event T plus ten minutes

 John Barrington stared at the viewing chamber. The view had been taken out to encompass the debris field. He rested his hand on Carrie’s shoulder. Tyrell was hunched over a console,punching in various commands. Watching the ever-expanding flotsam of rock as it floated serenely outwards into the black of space,held a strange meditative quality to it. The orbiting arrays, satellites and space stations had been obliterated in the blast. The shockwave had carved a chunk out of the orbiting moon and it was left alone without its owner like a wounded and abandoned pet. Carrie had not spoken since her father had arrived at the observatory. She seemed unable to take her gaze from the viewing chamber.

“I don’t understand, Father, it was right there. I was watching it all night. It was so alive. Am I dreaming?” The commander lowered himself to meet her eye level and glanced back at the floating rock, still grasping at his own straws and in awe of the devastation.

“I don’t know, Dice,” he said, calling her by her childhood nickname.

“Why don’t you go back to the habitat ring and try to get some sleep. Doctor Tyrell and I have a lot of work to do before the rest of the colony wakes up and finds out what has happened.”

Carrie was quick to respond, “I cannot, Father. I have to stay here with you. Please, I have to stay with you.”

He turned his gaze back to the viewing chamber.

“Okay, Dice. I could use your help anyway. I need to talk to Tyrell for a moment.Do me a favour and contact Lieutenant Chavel on comms. Tell him to come to the observatory immediately, for a briefing. Don’t tell him what has happened here until we figure this thing out, okay? I also need you to get a hold of Doctors Meridian and McDonnell. Tell them all to get here quickly, but do it calmly, Dice.”

Carrie’s face blushed slightly at the mention of the lieutenant’s name. Her father knew that response well, but he did not have time to get into it with her.

“Yes, Father.” She paused. “I’ll get on it.”

She stood from her perched observer chair, went to a nearby workstation and sat behind one of the computers. He watched her. John, I love you, save Carrie.

“John?” Tyrell’s voice said from behind him. “We should really think about where we are at. Take stock of the next steps. There are decisions to be made.”

The commander acknowledged the doctor with a small nod and made his way over to meet him at his workstation. He took a seat next to Tyrell, while keeping an ear tuned into his daughter’s voice as she tried to reach the others. He addressed Tyrell in his soft monotone.

“Talk to me, Tyrone, what the hell happened here tonight? Why wasn’t there any warning?” Tyrell closed his console down and addressed the commander directly.

“Commander, we were just attacked. It was unprovoked. There was no warning. The signal changed without provocation and without the slightest indication of any new or unusual cosmic events. We have been tracking this thing for over a hundred years and, for whatever reason, the species that created the signal and the structure on Phobos have unilaterally decided that today is the day to end our race. Other than the data collected from our array and the obvious change in the signal to a concentrated Gamma burst, I have no other information to give you at present. Right now we need to focus on one thing and that is to find out who, if anyone, has survived.”

Barrington looked back at his daughter and tried to compose his thoughts.

“Jesus Christ,” he said to himself. “Okay, Doctor, continue to liaise with Tosh. I am going to try to raise Jerome Young and see what we can do from here. I need you get a visual on The Agathon, to see if there is any damage or effect from the Gamma pulse on any of the ship’s systems or personnel currently on the vessel, or on an EVA.”

He turned to one of the consoles and tapped in a few commands.

“Computer, initiate comms with Charly Boyett on The Agathon.” Flight Officer Charly Boyett’s voice came over the comms, “This is Boyett.”

Her strong tone sounded well beyond her thirty-one years and held an assuredness that Barrington took great comfort in.

“Charly, status report,” Barrington said.

“I’m currently on the flight deck, knee deep in fibre optic cable, sir. The number two plasmonic field generator just won’t play ball with us up here. It keeps generating random ion field formations around the secondary wave guide conduits. We have to nail it down or it could cause the FTL to cascade during our first flight, and we really don’t want that, sir. How’s everything down there?” The sounds of plasma torches could be heard in the background as she spoke.

“Charly, we have a situation down here.” He stopped for a moment to gather his thoughts. “Have you got the main sensors active yet on the flight deck?”

“No, sir, not yet. It’s a real mess up here at the moment to be honest,” she said.

“Okay, Charly, I need you brace yourself for this. The Earth has just exploded in space. It’s gone.” There was silence.

“Sir, can you repeat, please? It’s quite loud up here and it sounded like you just said the Earth had exploded.”

“Charly, that’s confirmed. I need you do a full systems and hull integrity check. Get the forward array up and running and link it up. Start monitoring. I need you focused, Lieutenant, there are going to be a lot of frightened people up there and down here when this breaks. I know what you left behind and I know what it took for you to come here, but find strength and use it.”

The commander’s voice was locked into the steady elevated rhythm of a trained leader and he made sure to leave no room for hesitation or doubt in his voice. In a catastrophic event, the mind needed direction to stop it from breaking down. Sometimes a strong voice was all it took. There was silence on the comms then Charly’s voice piped up above the noise. “Silence on the deck, everybody shut up!” The ambient noise ceased immediately. Charly continued, “John, is this some sort of joke, a drill or something? Because if it is, it’s not that funny, sir.”

The commander couldn’t help but admire her candid nature. He had taken a shine to her early on when they had first met and allowed a certain level of informality among those under his command, up to a point. He found that it had strengthened loyalty. He took a moment and softened his voice.

“Charly, this is not a drill. Listen to me. All we know down here is that there was a change in the signal some time ago, which fired a Gamma ray burst into the Earth’s core. We’re picking up the pieces down here. I wish I could tell you more but I don’t have it right now. You are in command up there, I need you to listen and act. I’ll be in touch shortly but right now, we’re at Colonial Emergency level 1. Just keep your team in check and focus.”

There was a moment of pause and then a clear response.

“Yes, sir.” He could hear her voice beginning to tremble but closed off the comms.

“Barrington out.”

The screen went blank and Barrington was left looking at a sombre reflection. He looked up and saw David Cheval standing in the doorway. Carrie hadn’t mentioned anything to the young lieutenant on the comms, but she had made herself very clear that he was needed to be there quickly. Now standing in the doorway he acknowledged both the commander and Tyrell, who hadn’t noticed that he had arrived. He then glanced at Carrie and gave an involuntary smile. She had grown used to the wave of feeling that filled her mind when he was in close proximity. It was a feeling of attraction she encountered amongst most men, but it was particularly strong with this one. She reciprocated his gesture with a small wave and turned her attention back to her console. The magnitude of what had just occurred was too confusing to combine with the urges of a clearly passionate attraction from a young officer, even if he was a handsome one. Her obvious blush responses were not lost on Chavel, as he made his way over to her father. She observed him as they shook hands and spoke. She began to sense the changes in the officer’s mind as the news was being broken. Grief and panic were old friends to Carrie and she didn’t need to sense emotions to recognise them but once her mind was open, it was hard to not to let them in from others. Chavel held himself with composure and strength, but inside his mind was in turmoil. The warm feelings she had sensed moments ago were gone. Shock released the floodgates of every feeling all at once and Carrie’s sensitivity to them was increasing on a daily basis. She had begun exercises in segmenting her thoughts from others, out of fear of having her own mind washed away in other people’s thoughts. It had become a terrifying thought that somehow her own consciousness could be washed away by thoughts of the other colonists. It was her father who had given her the idea.

“Build a home for your thoughts,” he had told her one night when she couldn’t sleep. “Somewhere they can be safe. Build a house in your mind with impregnable walls. It will be your own fortress. That is where you go when others flood your thoughts. Don’t open the door, Carrie. Not to anyone. Not to anyone!”

The fortress she had constructed in her mind had begun as a steel cube structure a thousand feet high, with a door ten feet thick, only accessible via a thin rope bridge over a bottomless ravine a mile wide. It had been a rather extreme version of what her father had been talking about, but it served its purpose well. The rope bridge could be retracted at will, leaving enemy thoughts no chance of getting across. She had even added weapons to the exterior. Large plasma cannons, each with their own compartment, scattered themselves along the walls of the cube. She had even test-fired them one night. It had been a spectacular show of force, as they tore through the fabric of her mind with power and ferocity. She had found it empowering and had been impressed at her ability to create such a devastating show of force, albeit an imaginary one. The years had changed her fortress, as she grew surer of what it had represented. The steel cube had been replaced with an ancient Earth castle, complete with moat and drawbridge. Her father and Chavel were deep in conversation. The lieutenant’s attention was focused on one of the screens, as her father gave instructions. She turned her attention back to her task.

“Open comm to Doctor Meridian, please.” She spoke to the computer which responded in kind.

“One moment, please.” There was a long pause, then a sleepy female voice answered.

“Yeah… go ahead, hello?”

“Doctor Meridian, this is Carrie. I apologise if I woke you.” A yawn.

“Not at all, kiddo, how are you. What’s up? You discover the meaning of life yet?” Carrie smiled. She was very fond of the doctor and she of her.

“Not yet, Chase. I think that just got a little harder, to be honest. Are you able to come to the observatory, please? Something has happened. My father and Doctor Tyrell are already here and it is important that you come right away.”

Meridian didn’t hesitate in her response. “Of course, I’ll be there shortly. Let me just get dressed, sweetie. See you in a mo. Meridian out.”

Carrie stood and walked over to the stations where her father and Chavel were talking. An air of urgency was beginning to fill the room. The kind that follows an accident or emergency, where the fight or flight responses kick in. Her senses were heightened as she approached the trio. She knew what the two officers were thinking, but Tyrell was different. She paused for a moment as their eyes briefly met. While his expression was one of sincere acknowledgement, she still couldn’t read him. All she saw was a void behind his eyes and something else. Something dark.

“You okay, Dice? Did you get hold of the others?”

“Yes, Father, they’re on their way now.” She turned to Chavel.

“Hello, Lieutenant,” she said, nodding to Chavel.

He gave her a warm smile.

“Hello, Carrie. You doing okay?” he said.

“I don’t really know what to do, to be honest,” she replied looking back at the viewing chamber.

“I know what you mean,” he said.

There was a moment of silence between the two. Carrie felt a warm feeling from Chavel. A comforting attraction from the lieutenant. There was a chime behind them and a motion activated door slid open. Doctor Meridian entered with a smile and a slightly dishevelled look. She approached the group near the console that the commander was seated at and placed a hand on Carrie’s shoulder.

“Morning, boys and girls, what’s all the hubbub about? The world better be coming to an end because I was in the middle of a beautiful dream.”

                                                                         Main Observatory

                                              Gamma Event T plus two hours twelve minutes

While the others were huddled discussing the evening’s events, Tyrell had returned to his personal lab to the rear of the observatory and had been trying to raise Tosh on comms. The signal was blocking transmissions from the base on Phobos, so he had given up for the time being and was busy looking at the expanding debris field on one of the viewing chamber feed displays. The flotsam of rock, ice and molecular dust formations was beautiful. It had been so fluid, like an expanding cloud of bubbles in a deep ocean. Each handful of the once dense and richly developed planet now drifted outwards in a perfect sphere, bound for the great unknown. There was no discernible outline of any of the once vast cities or technology. The heat of the explosion had seemingly vaporised all evidence of any human existence on the surface. I wonder what it felt like, he thought, gently stroking the side of his face. He tried to imagine what the melding of flesh, bone and rock in a nanosecond would have felt like. Finally becoming one with the creator. All energies combined into a cataclysmic fusion of life and matter. You lucky little insects. I wonder what you know! The sensors were busy targeting various debris formations and trying to catalogue and count the larger chunks of planetary fragments. Tyrell was tracking several of the larger fragments and had begun a grid search for vessels in the area that may have been disabled, but that could have possibly survived the explosion. He looked over at the large cylindrical holding tank in the corner of his lab. A sample of The Black sat quietly inside. The tank had a variety of tubes and cables spouting out of its top and bottom. Tyrell tended to keep hislab several degrees cooler than the main colonial habitat ring. The Black reacted more positively to it and he had gotten used to the cold, after spending so much time with it. His own analysis of the deadly alien substance had not been particularly fruitful. He knew it liquefied organic material on contact. And that occasionally it would alter its shape in the tank for no reason and then return to a gelatinous state. He had lost count of the amount of small rodents he had placed in the tank for experiments.

“It is this world’s cockroach,” he had told an unimpressed

Barrington. He knew Barrington just wanted it destroyed, but he had held him off to try and learn what he could about it. He turned his attention back to the display. The orbiting space station had been completely obliterated but there were several Jycorp ships scheduled for cargo and personnel runs to and from the moons of Mars and the colony itself. If their outer shields had been able to protect against the ionising radiation, there could still be survivors. Although less concerned with this area of the event than the reason for the change in the signal, Tyrell thought it would be prudent to at least examine this possibility. He entered a new algorithm into the search parameters, to detect energy signatures emitted from spacefaring craft, and let it run. He instructed the computer to begin filtering out background radiation, to try and lock onto signals being sent from both Phobos and any other ships in the vicinity. The computer began to process the data while Tyrell turned his attention to the expanding mass of rock.

“Computer, what is the status of the signal?” Tyrell said, while making his observations.

“Signal has reverted to previously established patterns, Doctor,” came the familiar female voice.

“They hit us hard and went to sleep?” he said out loud.

“Please repeat request,” the computer said.

“Never mind,” he said. Then something occurred to him.

“Computer, can you scan the debris field and begin a trajectory plot for the debris fragments? Then begin a collision threat analysis.”

“Of course, Doctor, beginning now,” she said calmly.

“Doctor, I have found something which falls into the parameters, as outlined by your request. Could you please direct your attention to coordinates indicated on the screen?” He tapped some commands into the panel.

“Can you give me a visual?” he asked

“Of course, Doctor, one moment.” The screen lit up. An enormous black shadow filled the visual, almost completely blocking out the surrounding star field. At first Tyrell thought there had been a malfunction in the display, until he adjusted the visual contrast manually. The unmistakable contours of rock and ice formed on the screen. The surface of the rock was molten and had begun to glow with an eerie electric crimson. The surrounding edges left a trail of ice and companion debris fragments.

“Computer, size and course of object?” he asked.

“Object is approximately 1100 miles in diameter and is on a direct course for impact with planet Mars.”

Tyrell looked at the continent of rock, as it appeared motionless. A strange fear began to embrace him. It was a curious sensation. An odd urgency began to take hold. Perhaps the insects had not been so lucky after all. He glanced over at the sample of The Black and stood from his chair. He took a breath and made his way out of the lab and back towards the others. He caught the eye of Barrington, who immediately knew something was wrong. Walking over to the group, he called to Carrie.

“Carrie, I need you to input a new set of coordinates into the

viewing chamber.” Carrie frowned with curiosity, but obeyed Tyrell’s request. She made her way over to the chamber and took her seat. As she tapped in the information sent to her control panel from Tyrell’s station, the viewing chamber came to life. The enormous piece of rock floated casually in the glass cube.

“What am I looking at, Tyrone?” Barrington said. There was silence in the group. Tyrell sighed.

“The apocalypse, John.”

Merry Christmas to The Agathon fans

Hello there, wishing you and yours a very happy Christmas and a Sci Fi new year. We have had some significant scientific advancements this year on our way to FTL technology from the driverless car to the full test of the W7-X fusion reactor not to mention SpaceX’s successful landing of the Falcon9. While the technology like “The Betty” featured in The Agathon is a long way off we can still look to these small steps as an encouraging leap forward in the possibilities of the human race. Here is hoping that 2016 brings us even closer to our goals of breaking our reliance on fossil fuels and using the abundant renewable resources to fuel our planet not to mention making bigger strides in our ultimate goal of landing humans on the soil of the red planet.

 

 

 

 – The W7-X Fusion reactor

 

 

 

SpaceX lands Falcon 9 rocket!

Well there you have it. SpaceX have successfully launched and landed the Falcon 9 and without so much a scratch on the surface of the lander. Well maybe one. After deploying 11 ORBCOMM satellites the Falcon 9 began its journey back from its 100km hight landing vertically on the floating barge to cheers and hugs from all the ground staff. This marks a significant leap forward in the reusable rocket market. The cost savings for such a feat will pave the way for privatised space flight and make the cosmos more accessible both to private enterprise and to space tourism. I think Elon Musk should seriously consider a move into FTL technology

 

Check out the full flight videos on the SpaceX Website

http://www.spacex.com/

 

 

 

“Where is book 2?” I hear you ask. “Coming Soon!” I reply.

 

Hot on the heals of The Agathon is the next in the series. Book 2, Reign of Arturo will be launching early 2016 so don’t stress you will find out what has happened to Carrie and the crew of The Agathon. All good things come to those who wait and I can promise that the sequel is going to deliver.

 

Here is the blurb:

 

For 1000 years the surviving humans drifted. Bound together on board the remaining space stations. A civil war has erased their past. The Agathon, believed to have been lost during their mission, has now become a myth, a bedtime story to be read to children. Now ruled by the tyrannical Chancellor Arturo Verge, a rebellion begins to stir on board Earth One, led by Aron Elstone and the crew of his ship, The Unity. Across the Galaxy, The Agathon emerges from hyperspace. Lost and damaged, the crew must land the ship on a strange ice covered world. When Carrie agrees to leave the ship with Tyrell in order to find the mysterious “Others”, her father must come to terms with the loss of his family as they finally make contact with those left behind. What Carrie discovers on her journey with Tyrell finally opens her eyes to her strange powers. The fate of all life in the galaxy now rests squarely on her shoulders. A burden she must carry alone.