Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 18

Drake, Fermi, and SETI…

[Note from Steve: Frank Drake, the father of the SETI program and much of radio astronomy, passed away last week at 92. He was director of the Arecibo Observatory from 1971 to 1981. Consider this post my feeble attempt to honor this great man.]

I felt sad when I read about the demise of the Arecibo radio telescope, and even sadder when I learned about Frank Drake’s passing. When I attended a conference at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Mayaguez years ago (1970s)—it’s on the opposite side of t...

A new experiment?

I often experiment with my fiction writing…and that’s not just true for sci-fi (see this Friday’s article that’s a homage to Frank Drake). The main reason is to avoid becoming formulaic like so many old mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables. Experimentation keeps my storytelling fresh, unlike most of the novels those stables produce. It also justifiably sticks the thumb in the eye of any so-called expert in the publishing business who tells authors to write for the market—again, those ar...

Mystery and thrills…

I call all the books in my “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone Art Detective,” and “Inspector Steve Morgan” series mystery/thriller novels because they’re not exactly novels in the classic sense—readers often learn a bit about the crimes as the stories move along. They’re not exactly thrillers either—there’s not that much heart-pounding and intense action, the literary equivalent of the audiovisual pyrotechnics overload Hollywood pumps out for the addicts who demand that fix. ...

Are you your characters?

A fiction writer creates characters, so this is a natural question to ask such an author. I guess my answer if asked it would be ambivalent: Maybe.

Probably every author puts a bit of themselves into some characters they create, but most authors are observers of human nature and are more likely to use what they see and hear into their characters. (Observations of ETs are a bit more difficult, but they might have some human-like characteristics.)

A secondary but related question is: Which of your...

Subliminal messages?

I’m a fast reader, but I know I have to pay attention to details because I don’t waste my time reading trivia (most fantasies, romances, and cozy mysteries are in that category). That’s because, as a writer, I know an author I’m reading can add things that aren’t obvious but provide hints and clues about characters and their motivations, attitudes, and hang-ups, not to mention complexities of plot or unusual settings.

In ads, these hints and clues are often subliminal, although some think of tha...

How’d this happen?

I had a chuckle when I saw a new Prevagen commercial not long ago. (Yeah, I watch network TV, mainly because I don’t have streaming video and no streaming-video service has all the programs I want, often excluding some network TV shows I enjoy.) A woman in the commercial starts things off by saying she’s written three novels. I guess the viewer is supposed to think that the memory supplement allowed her to do that? Or, it cured her writer’s block? Not likely. Studies have shown that it’s no bett...

The horror-meister testifies…

Stephen King crawled out of his Northeast Dracula’s castle long enough to testify against the Simon & Schuster – Penguin/Random House merger. In other words, he supported the government and Simon & Schuster’s anti-trust arguments designed to prevent the Big Five publishing conglomerates becoming the Big Four, with the combined behemoth becoming the T. Rex of the industry.

Publishing is generally a gentrified and global gentlemen’s club (how’s that for alliteration?) except in cases where someone...

Origins redux…

I’ll explain the title of this article in a bit. First, let me say I’ve been meaning to write one about book banning, either for here at my author’s blog, or at pubprogressive.com, my political blog. It was going to be a general article about the dangers associated with such practices that I consider an insidious influence on authors and publishers and the antithesis of freedom of expression. It’s curious, for example, how America’s far-right rails against government intrusion when they’re all f...

Diversity…

The Brits must hate me. Despite their parasitic royal family, I’ve loved them since I read Dame Agatha’s mysteries as a young lad, but, like other writers before her and during her time, diversity, if present, was a bit skewed in her novels, to say the least. I also noticed this in the H. Rider Haggard stories. In fact, non-white men and women were often cast as either servants or villains as they were in real life in the old British Empire.

It was difficult to reconcile all that with the divers...

Origins…

No, I’m not writing about that first book in A. B. Carolan’s “The Denisovan Trilogy” (he still has to write numbers two and three). Instead, I’d like to discuss how some of my novels originated. In most of my novels, I include endnotes titled “Notes, Disclaimers, and Acknowledgements” where I often discuss the novel’s origins. For the novels I consider here, I’ll add a bit to their correponding endnotes.

More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. There’s a short sci-fi story (I forget the title—maybe...