Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 153
April 21, 2015
Double speak meets double-image…
While Sen. Rubio’s announcement was overshadowed by ex-Sen. Clinton’s, the senator from Florida’s worries me more. His party has practiced Orwell’s doublespeak for decades and he continues to do so—nothing new or surprising there—the party of Lincoln’s modern pols aren’t Honest Abes. But my worry is about the double-image—the good-looking pol with that baby face and shock of perfect hair pretending to speak to a young generation as the prophet leading them into the promised land of upward mob...
April 17, 2015
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #86….
Item: Refreshing and discouraging. The plethora of new indie authors and entertaining indie ebooks is both refreshing and discouraging. Discouraging because it’s harder with each passing week for a writer to rise above that vast sea of talent and become noticed. You can’t even give ebooks away anymore, at least not in the numbers seen a few years ago, and the new price points for indie ebooks are so low that an indie writer has to sell many of them just to recover costs—forget about making a...
April 16, 2015
Interview with Professor Hans Nylander…
Steve: Maybe we should start with your saying something about yourself.
Nylander: I’m a South African astrophysicist. I do research and teach at a Johannesburg university and belong to the staff of South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO), acting as a theoretical consultant. The SAAO facility features the South African Large Telescope (SALT), a cooperative venture financed by South Africa, Germany, Poland, New Zealand, the U.S., and the United Kingdom. It’s the largest telescope in the s...
April 15, 2015
Pre-release excerpt from More than Human: The Mensa Contagion…
[Note from Steve: This sci-fi novel is a stand-alone epic about an ET virus and its effects on human society and its space exploration. It will be released soon. Maybe this excerpt will brighten your tax day?]
Groom Lake, Nevada
Chief Master Sgt. Bob Sanchez studied his monitors and laughed. “You have to see some of these signs, Lucy.”
Senior Master Sgt. Lucy Chang was studying high-res satellite images taken of the base. The UFO fanatics’ signs were often creative. Sometimes that was the on...
April 14, 2015
To Mars and beyond…
My new epic sci-fi novel, More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, is the tale of an invading ET virus and its effects on human society and space exploration. That’s a strange combo (it’s sci-fi, after all), but the space exploration isn’t interstellar this time like it was in “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” It’s restricted to our solar system, to Mars and beyond. Being a wee bit more local, many of the events are in the realm of the possible. Most of the action is current day only because of th...
April 10, 2015
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #85…
Item: Don’t judge a book by its cover. Have you seen the proposal for the cover to Harper Lee’s “new book”? It’s terrible. I reviewed Harlan Coben’s book The Stranger and noticed that his book’s cover is poor quality too. Is traditional publishing cutting costs by not paying for a good cover? My sample isn’t very large, of course. As a reader and reviewer, I’ve never judged a book by its cover. My judgement of a cover can only be the subjective opinion of someone who knows little about graphi...
April 9, 2015
Obama v. Menendez?
These days I don’t trust Senators or Representatives any farther than I could throw them, and my throwing arm isn’t nearly as strong as it was when I played catcher as a kid. That said, I have to wonder about the Justice Department’s indictment of New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez. Is this an Obama payback for the senator’s resistance to Obama’s Cuban initiative? Or, is it a Machiavellian stroke on the part of the Obama administration to appease the traditional and powerful ultra-right-wingers...
April 8, 2015
Giacometti and Revene’s Shadow Ritual…
(Eric Giacometti and Jacques Revene, trans. Anne Trager, Shadow Ritual, Le French Book, 2015, 978-1-939474-29-2 (ebook)/ 978-1-939474-30-8 (trade paperback) /978-1-939474-31-5 (hardback))
Mysteries and thrillers set in historical contexts represent one of my weak points. I’ve written a few that come close in their dependence on historical backstory (my character Castilblanco is a history dilettante) and have read many more. The startling success of Brown’s The DaVinci Code caused a resurgence...
April 7, 2015
Christians in the crosshairs…
Egypt’s persecution of Christians, once controlled by a brutal dictatorship, is now sanctioned by an equally brutal military junta. ISIS’ persecution, at best forced conversions of Christians to Islam, and at worst their bloody beheadings, are in the news, the stories often accompanied by gruesome YouTube videos. A recent CBS Sixty Minutes’ segment portrayed the plight of Christians in Iraq, ironically more protected under Saddam Hussein, once persecuted by al Qaeda in Iraq, and now threatene...
April 6, 2015
The new guardians of what you read…
[I apologize for the length of this post. I wanted to clearly lay out why I cannot support Joe Konrath’s new “Ebooks Are Forever,” or EAF, initiative. This proposal allows public libraries to peruse and purchase from a list of indie novels, a list controlled by Joe. Skip to just after the *** if you want just the bottom line, and go back and fill in background material as needed. This initiative will affect all readers who check out ebooks from public libraries! It also negatively affects mos...
