Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 100
August 3, 2017
Authors and characters…
Some readers and reviewers try to identify an author’s characters with the author or some alter-ego of the author. FYI: writing fiction is NOT the same as writing an autobiography. In fact, because characters are fictional creations, they usually have no relationship to the author.
Consider the antagonist, the villain. Your average author isn’t a psychotic serial killer, mad scientist, or a sociopathic business person. You wouldn’t expect an author even to aspire to be one of these. But a goo...
August 2, 2017
Steve’s shorts: Chiba…
[Note from Steve: Let’s have some fun with space opera….]
Chiba
Copyright 2017, Steven M. Moore
Erid Ariklai lost patience with the robocab’s obsession with safety. He took control by leaving the unit’s AI smoldering behind the front dash.
Your heavy boot can do a lot of damage!
He was focused on controlling the cab now, but he took time to smile at Mira’s thought. She often thought he was too impulsive.
He had three patrol cars in pursuit by the time he crashed through the guard barrier and...
August 1, 2017
The curse of the opposition…
The GOP had eight years of opposition to come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act AKA Obamacare. They dominate Congress and the presidency but have completely failed to garner sufficient votes for a change! What’s the problem? The roots of it can be found in those years of opposition. They were so concentrated on opposing everything Obama and the Dems proposed that they forgot how to govern…if the current GOP pols ever knew! (Three do remember: Senators Collins, McCain, and Mur...
July 31, 2017
Monday words of wisdom…
Gaia doesn’t have to end in a nuclear bang. She can end in the whisper of climate disaster.
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Rembrandt’s Angel (a mystery/thriller from Penmore Press). To what lengths would you go to recover a stolen masterpiece? Scotland Yard’s Arts and Antiques Inspector Esther Brookstone goes the extra mile. She and paramour/sidekick Bastiann van Coevorden, an Interpol agent, set out to outwit the dealers of stolen art and recover “An Angel with Titus’ Features,” a Rembrandt painting stolen by the Nazi...
July 28, 2017
Book review of The Three-Body Problem…
(Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem, Tor, 2006)
I’ll admit it: I struggled through this Hugo Award winner. It’s a cross between a physics textbook; a historical account of China, including the Cultural Revolution; and a story about first contact.
The physics is a bit much for the average sci-fi reader perhaps, especially for those who think Star Wars, Star Trek, and other Hollywood gruel are real sci-fi. The history is more interesting. I feel I don’t know enough about China. Books like this o...
July 27, 2017
Information overload…
Maybe I’m just getting old, but every day it seems to be more difficult to process the information I look for and find. I seem to be drowning in it. I try to be selective, but the selection takes time too. Some days the selection process takes more time than processing the information I’ve received.
Information is now mined by corporations who sell what they’ve mined to other corporations. The latter are probably in the same boat I’m in. Will Corporate America come to a grinding halt when it...
July 26, 2017
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #147…
Freebies. Although my books are never free now (except when a reviewer offers to do an honest review), I do offer other freebies. Here’s a description of a few:
First, there are my blog posts. Among these you will find book and movie reviews as well as short stories and novellas (archived in the following blog categories: “book reviews,” “mini-reviews of books,” “movie reviews,” and “Steve’s shorts,” respectively). The op-eds usually aren’t related to writing or the book business, but you mig...
July 25, 2017
The prophet of greed…
It’s not surprising that President Trump’s favorite book is Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead or that Rex Tillerson’s is Atlas Shrugged. People call Trump and his cronies populists. I call them narcissistic sociopaths. Their admiration of Ms. Rand, the prophet of greed, is all the proof anyone should need. According to the NY Times, many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—all one-percenters, of course—even consider her a saint. The fallen Uber CEO is probably a disciple too.
This Libertarian heroine (Pau...
July 24, 2017
Monday words of wisdom…
Save your breath; don’t worry about Death. A better praxis is to worry about taxes.
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Rembrandt’s Angel (a mystery/thriller from Penmore Press). To what lengths would you go to recover a stolen masterpiece? Scotland Yard’s Arts and Antiques Inspector Esther Brookstone goes the extra mile. She and paramour/sidekick Bastiann van Coevorden, an Interpol agent, set out to outwit the dealers of stolen art and recover “An Angel with Titus’ Features,” a Rembrandt painting stolen by the Nazis in Wo...
July 21, 2017
Movie Reviews # 47…
War for the Planet of the Apes. Matt Reeves, dir. Andy Serkis (of Lord of the Rings fame, as Gollum) does another incredible job as Caesar, the leader of the apes. I liked the ape actors better than the human ones, and for good reason (see below).
Starting with Boule’s book, these stories have never been good or believable sci-fi. Sure, a virus can cause major changes (see my More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, for example), but producing intelligent apes who spend most of a movie on horseb...
