Keith Stevenson's Blog, page 16

Breaking news - the quantum drive that shouldn't work

I'm more than a little excited by the news coming out of NASA that tests on a so-called microwave drive appear to produce thrust that is theoretically impossible.

This from the news.com.au site:

While criticism of his concept was abundant, nobody has managed to prove it wrong.

Behind it all is some pretty speculative quantum physics.

At the tiniest of all known scales, the universe does

The Lenticular - one third there

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Imagining utopia

Particularly in young adult speculative fiction, there's a current trend to represent dystopias. And it's a valid reaction when we look at our world today. One of the primary functions of science fiction is to interrogate the present and show us the potential outcomes of what we see out of our window. That's certainly true for the worldbuilding I did in Horizon.

But as well as reflecting the

Horizon and climate change

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Horizon: Starship Propulsion

In my novel, Horizon, the Explorer Ship Magellan uses a 'zero point energy' drive to accelerate to 0.95 times the speed of light on its journey to the Iota Persei star system. Here's an extract describing the ship's drive:




The drive chamber
took up the rear quarter of the ship and fully two-fifths of its volume. Most
of that was filled by the six huge plasma thrusters that channelled the

Finding Horizon: writing process

The way to Horizon (my first novel) was very different to how I approached the Lenticular Series. Horizon was conceived as a novel from the very first, mainly because I had to come up with an idea for the novel module of the Professional Writing and Editing course I did at Holmesglen TAFE.

So while the Lenticular grew out of a series of short stories and was written, at least in first draft,

#theN00bz - The Freedom of Free

In April this year I started Dimension6 the free, and DRM free, Australian electronic magazine of speculative fiction. Issue 2 is out this week on 4 July and will be free for immediate download on the www.coeurdelion.com.au website as well as a host of affiliate sites.

I've been an independent publisher since 2006 and worked for Aurealis Magazine before that, following the traditional (and

Cool science shows of the 20th century

There were a lot of very cool science shows on TV when I was growing up. Now - not so much, as we seem to be more interested in what the Kardashians or the Wives of (insert practically any city on the planet) are doing. But I credit those shows with firing my passion for what things will be like in the future...


Tomorrow's World


The show had some great presenters, the greatest of which was

Waiting in the Wings

It's easy to lose faith in a piece of writing you've produced, particularly when a fair amount of time has passed since you wrote it. We all look back in horror at those dreadfully earnest works of fiction we penned in secondary school or university and wonder, 'how on earth could I have thought that was any good?'

Horizon is a novel I wrote a number of years ago. It's a deep space exploration

The fear of writing - actual effects may differ

I don't know about other writers, but for me the act of writing is fuelled by fear - which makes it an oddly masochistic pastime.

I've talked elsewhere about the the mild anxiety that I feel every morning when I start to write. Depending on what I'm doing, the feeling either falls away when I get started or stays with me. It's more likely to hang around if I'm tussling to understand a