Kevin L. O'Brien's Blog: Songs of the Seanchaí, page 29

The Holographic Principle

There are many different ideas for how to explain the nature of the universe, but perhaps one of the strangest is the Holographic Principle. This essay explains what the principle is, and how it could prove fruitful for world building.

Read the rest of the article.

Next eBook: A Typical Friday Night

The next story in my schedule to be published through Smashwords will be:

A Typical Friday Night

Eile and Sunny love to go pub-crawling in the Dreamlands, especially when a mysterious patron offers them adventure and financial reward. However, trouble follows them like a love-starved puppy, and this Friday night will be anything but relaxing.

This will be another free ebook.

New eBook: Felis ex Machina

I have just published my latest ebook:

Felis ex Machina

January Ian Mariposa, Jaim to his friends, and his feline familiar Bastet, have acquired a device that allows them to travel back in time. One scholarly subject that has always fascinated him is the influence that the Cthulhu Mythos had on Victorian society of Great Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As such, he spends a great deal of time in London of the 1880s.

However, he needs a way to support his pretense of being a dilettante aristocrat, and what better way than to pose as a consulting detective in the manner of Sherlock Holmes? He expected most of his cases to be fairly mundane, if occasionally macabre or grotesque, but some turn out to be more eldritch than he anticipated.

Such as, the time Scotland Yard called on him to examine a body....

This ebook is free and can be downloaded from Smashwords.

Knowledge vs. Certainty

Some years ago I recorded The Ascent of Man when it was being rerun on a local PBS channel. I have been watching it again this past week. I think his most profound and powerful essay is episode 11, "Knowledge or Certainty", in which he expounds on the idea that knowledge and certainty are incompatible; that is, the more knowledge we possess, the less certain we are that we know all there is to know, or even that what we know is correct.

In our current age, when so many people are absolutely certain that what they know is The Truth and is correct, people on all sides of political and social controversies, his words are more important than ever. For while it is tempting to see our opponents as the Ones Who Are Certain, we must recognize that we and our allies can and do fall into the same trap. Not to single out one controversy above all others, but this was brought home to me when I reviewed a site dedicated to Richard Dawkins and his brand of activist militant atheism. It struck me that Dawkins and his followers were just as dogmatically certain that they knew The Truth and were right as the Fundamentalists who were the main target of their criticism. This was borne out by the fact that they consider belief in God to be delusion, even insanity, so that they condemn moderates even as the Fundamentalists do.

No person can speak for another, especially when the other is dead, but I would like to believe that if Bronowski were alive today he would criticize the dogmatic certainty of Dawkins, not just because it is intolerant, but because of its lack of humility in the face of what our knowledge tells us we do not yet know.

=====

A couple of excerpts:

"The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty."

"It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

"Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.'

"I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people."

Lighting and Fire in the Dreamlands

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the often strange relationship between time period and technology in the Dreamlands is by looking at forms lighting. While lighting is more primitive than it is in the Waking World, aspects of it are surprisingly advanced for a quasi-Medieval society.

The first thing that needs to be dispensed with, however, is the notion of magic being used to create industrial-scale lighting. Wizards and sorcerers have more important work than creating magical lighting devices, and those who consent to do so charge extremely high fees for the service. Besides, a 'permanent' light spell is anything but. The word permanent in this case refers to any lighting effect that lasts longer than an hour, and while lifetimes can be as long as weeks, months, or even years, depending upon environmental conditions, they do fade over time.

In the absence of magic, the basis for lighting technology in the Dreamworld is combustion: the liberation of light through the chemical reaction of fuel and oxygen. All other forms of technology are post-1500 and therefore unworkable. The fuel can vary widely, as can the system that contains and controls the combustion, however, some post-1500 fuels and devices are in use because mechanisms or manufacture are extremely simple.

Perhaps the most basic form of lighting is the torch. It consists of a piece of wood with a rag or some other binding soaked in pitch or some other flammable liquid wrapped around one end. Since the point of the wood is to act as a handle rather than a source of fuel, hard, dense wood such as ironwood, cherry, or oak should be used over softer wood such as pine. The length of time a torch will burn depends upon the material used as the fuel, and the amount of light produced is inversely proportional to the time it will burn.

Other simple, torch-like devices include shells or hollowed stones filled with moss or similar material soaked in animal fat or vegetable oil. The rushlight consists of the dried pith of the rush plant soaked in fat or grease. These are generally easier and quicker to make than candles, but do not burn as long, and their quality of light can vary. Nonetheless, they are common in the poorer or more remote regions.

Wax and tallow candles are probably the most common form of lighting in the Dreamlands, simply by virtual of the fact that they are mostly used by rural denizens, and there are more rural citizens than urban. Candles can be made from any form of vegetable wax as well as beeswax, paraffin, and resin gel, and can have fragrant oils and/or dyes added. Beeswax burns the cleanest, but can be more expensive than vegetable wax or paraffin. Wicks are made of cotton braided around a stiff core of paper or lead or zinc wire. The cotton must be treated with a flame-resistant material to slow its burning and is impregnated with wax to act as the initial fuel for igniting the candle. A specific formula of wax produced in the city of Creachabh can burn with such precision that it is used to create candle clocks.

Oil lamps are probably the simplest form of lighting available. Essentially they consist of a terra cotta or metal bowl filled with some form of vegetable or animal oil, though clarified cheese and butter can also be used, with a wick made from some kind of vegetation-based material such as linen or flax. The only elaboration is in the design of the bowl itself; this usually consists of a fuel chamber partially covered by a shoulder with a pouring hole and at least one nozzle into which the wick is inserted. Sometimes a handle is attached. These bowls can be sculpted into almost any form imaginable and are often decorated. Oil lamps not only serve as lighting, but also funerary and votive purposes. These are probably the second most common lighting device in the Dreamlands, being found not just in rural areas, but also villages alongside candles, in town home shrines, and in city temples.

At this point, lighting technology might appear to have reached the 1500-limit, since all known innovations beyond candles and simple oil lamps are all post-1500, specifically post-1750, which ideally should eliminate any accidental crossover. However, it is here that the vagaries of the time period/technology relationship come into play. First of all, a fuel most closely associated with 18th and 19th century lamps, naphtha, was first discovered and used at least 600 years before the 1500-limit. Naphtha is a catchall for a variety of fuels, including kerosene, mineral oil, and paraffin. It is obtained from the distillation of petroleum, coal tar, or peat. The fractionation tends to be crude compared to post-1500 industrial methods, hence the use of the catchall term, but the resulting liquid is quite pure and generally safe to use.

Also, the first practical design of a naphtha lamp was invented by al-Razi, Latinized as Rhazes, in 9th century Baghdad. Later post-1500 innovations such as a flat cotton wick, glass chimney, and wick adjustment mechanism are too simple to be restricted merely by time period. Another post-1500 innovation that is similar to the naphtha lamp is the Argand oil lamp. This uses a tubular wick and a glass chimney to enhance the air flow over the flame, thereby greatly increasing the efficiency of oil burning, creating the light equivalent of six to ten candles. Naphtha and Argand lamps are probably the third most common lighting devices in the Dreamlands, being found in cities, towns, and villages all over.

Lanterns as a group simply consist of a cage containing a lighting source, be it a candle, oil lamp, or naphtha lamp. However, the most sophisticated versions use another post-1500 innovation, the incandescent gas mantle. This is a small, fine-mesh basket woven from silk and impregnated with magnesium hydrate and magnesium acetate. When ignited, the acetate burned, decomposing the hydrate to an oxide that bound to the silk, forming a ceramic covering. Within a lantern fueled by naphtha, the flame heats the mantle until it glows, giving off a great deal of light but little heat. This greatly increases the efficiency of the naphtha combustion. The mechanism made for their use produces a characteristic hissing sound that is unmistakable. The fuel is forced into the combustion chamber using air pressure applied by a small piston pump; hence, the pressure must be reapplied at frequent intervals to keep the lantern operating. Additionally, a net of wire gauze can be used to prevent the flame from igniting flammable gases in the air.

There are also three other technologies in use that push the limits of lighting in the Dreamland. The city of Tumbutu in the Liranian Desert sits above a subsurface reservoir of petroleum with a high natural gas content. As such, it has easy access to gas, and collects and pipes it throughout the city for lighting, though it restricts its use to municipal lighting rather than providing it for household use. Meanwhile, in Celephaïs and Creachabh, the homes of the knights and the socially prominent, and the palace of King Kuranes are lighted using carbide lamps. These burn acetylene which is produced by reacting calcium carbide with water. Technically, calcium carbide cannot exist in the Dreamlands, because traditional combustion methods cannot produce the amount of heat needed to react lime with coke. In the Waking World electric arc furnaces are used, but these have not been 'invented' yet in the Dreamlands. How the people of Celephaïs accomplish this is a closely guarded secret, but most scholars assume magic is used. Finally, it is rumored that the city of Hazuth-Kleg uses a form of limelight, which involves directing an oxyhydrogen flame at a cylinder of quicklime. These rumors have not been investigated for obvious reasons, however, if they proved to be true it would be a fantastic discovery, since limelight would be even more unbelievable than calcium carbide, the fractionation of water into oxygen and hydrogen being impossible in the Dreamlands.

All of this begs the question: if lighting in the Dreamlands in based on combustion, how is the fire started in the first place?

First of all, there are no friction or safety matches. The only kind of match that exists is a stick of pine heartwood coated with sulfur. Also known as fatwood or pitchwood, pine works best because of the resin impregnating the wood. The sulfur ignites upon contact with any fire, burning hot enough to ignite the wood. The resin then feeds the flame. These pinewood matches make it possible to transfer fire from one source to another.

But a fire must already be burning for this kind of match to work. Households tend to maintain what could be called a pilot fire. Essentially it's similar to a modern pilot light: a small fire kept burning constantly to serve as a source of flame for lighting bigger fires. This can take many forms. For example, many homes have a small shrine containing an eternal flame. This not only honors the Great Ones, but also serves as the source for all other fires in the house. Those that don't have shrines usually keep a fire going in the kitchen hearth. Another option is to keep a small oil lamp burning in a protected location, while another popular solution is the use of slow matches like those for firing matchlock firearms and cannons. These consist of fuses made from cords of hemp, cotton, or flax, or even braided wood bark, chemically treated with potassium nitrate to burn slow and consistent. The idea rate is about one foot an hour; any faster would be a waste of money, while any slower and the match could go out. If tended to at regular intervals, a 15-foot coil of slow match can burn for an entire day. A similar device is a punk, essentially a smoldering stick (bamboo is best) covered in dried manure or compress sawdust; these are often left burning through the night, because they do not need regular tending. Candles, however, are unsuitable because, except for candle clocks, they burn too quickly.

However, the question remains unanswered: how is any fire, including a pilot fire, first lit? There are in fact a number of methods, which fall on either side of the 1500-limit.

Aside from co-opting natural occurrences, namely wildfires, the most basic, and primitive, is friction. Hand drills, bow drills, and pump drills all work the same way: spinning a dull-pointed wooden rod against a wooden board to generate sufficient heat to create a coal that can be placed in a pile of tinder. The only difference being whether the rod is spun by hand, using a bow, or a coil of twine wound around the rod. A fire plow and fire saw instead rely on the proverbial "rubbing two sticks together"; that is, a wooden rod is rubbed against a groove or a notch in a wooden board, using either a plowing or sawing motion to generate heat. These methods are quite common in rural, poor, and remote areas, and among travelers. However, they are somewhat impractical for household use.

Another method from deep antiquity, though not as old as friction, is the use of a hard stone to create sparks by striking it against an iron-bearing rock. Originally performed with quartz and pyrite, this method evolved into the proverbial flint and steel. When carried in the form of a tinderbox—a metal container with a flint nodule, a carbon steel fire striker, and a small quantity of tinder—it can allow anyone to start a fire faster and easier than with a typical friction method. So handy is the tinderbox in fact that people carry it around and use it like a box of matches in the Waking World. In fact, the tinderbox is so widespread it can be found in one form or another throughout the Dreamlands, even in some of the most remote areas.

With optics a well-established technology in the Dreamlands, lenses and concave mirrors and reflectors can be used to focus sunlight onto tinder to ignite it. A more unusual method is a device called the fire piston. It consists of a cylinder sealed at one end and a piston that form an air-tight seal. A bit of tinder is placed at the end of the piston, which is rapidly pushed down into the cylinder. The piston compresses the air inside the cylinder, which heats up adiabatically. If the piston is pushed fast enough, the air will get hot enough to ignite the tinder. It can then be removed and applied to more tinder to start the fire. Though the Dream-design of this device is post-1500, the device itself predates the 1500-limit by thousands of years.

One other device that is clearly post-1500 is the permanent match, also known as the everlasting match. It better qualifies as a lighter. It consists of a metal can containing naphtha with a strip of flint attached to the outside, and a carbon steel rod that screws into the top of the tank. The rod contains a wick and its tip is pointed. When the tip is submerged in the naphtha, the wick absorbs the liquid. To use, the rod is removed and the tip is struck against the flint strip, generating sparks. The sparks ignite the wick, creating a flame, which can be used to ignite a pile of tinder. The wick can then be extinguished and the rod reinserted into the can. A vulcanized natural rubber gasket is often used to reduce or eliminate naphtha evaporation between uses. The simplicity of the device and the existence of the components make its existence possible in a pre-1500 setting. It is so easy to use, even compared to a tinderbox, that it has displaced the latter in many locations, though mostly just in cities and towns.

Regardless of how the tinder is ignited, however, the reason most fires fail to catch is impatience. Care must be taken to nurture the coal or spark into a flame, and then the flame into a tiny fire. This takes time, and even then the fire must be built up slowly with every increasing sizes of tinder, kindling, and finally the main fuel before it can be pretty much left on its own.

The choice of tinder can also be an important factor. While any dry finely-shredded fibrous material can be used, the best results are achieved with charcloth and amadou. Charcloth is a swatch of vegetable-based cloth that has been treated in a manner similar to making charcoal, thereby reducing it to char. Amadou is a spongy substance prepared from bracket fungus. Both are slow burning but have a low ignition temperature, making them idea for catching friction coals or sparks. They can then be added to a pile of additional tinder that can consist of any dry, finely shredded, easily combustible material. However, tinder that burns too quickly is wasteful.

A method that can be used in conjunction with charcloth, especially when dry wood is scarce, is the feather stick. This consists of a dead branch cut from a tree, stripped of bark, and its dry heartwood shaved into attached thin strips. However, another very simple post-1500 innovation has become widespread. Called firestarter, it consists of a mixture of sawdust and wax or paraffin compressed into a block. Some formulations saturate the sawdust with naphtha as well. It can be cut to various sizes, it ignites easily, burns for long time, and gives off sufficient heat to catch larger pieces of kindling and fuel without the need for intermediate and smaller pieces of kindling and tinder.

Fuel is also a concern. In wooded areas, there is generally sufficient wood to keep a modest fire going until morning, though the degree of seasoning (dryness) may vary considerably. In places where wood is scarce, other materials can be burned, such as dried peat (emphasis on the word dried), dried manure (especially of grazing animals such as zebras, yak, and camels), dried grain, dried agricultural waste (such as husks and stalks), even domestic refuse (household trash). Otherwise fuel will have to carried for the journey. That usually isn't necessary, since most destinations are either close enough to reach in one day's travel or there are rest facilities of various sorts in between. However, in wilderness or remote areas that have no intermediate facilities travelers must journey with their own portable fuel.

Wood can be transported this way, but it's not as energy dense as other alternatives. Large deposits of bituminous coal in the Faulklyn and Dolinar Hills and anthracite in the Caucaesion Hills, along with deposits of lesser grades in other locations, make coal fairly plentiful and cheap. Bituminous coal especially is prized since it can be pyrolyzed to coke on a large scale, using ovens on site at the mines. These same ovens can also be used to create charcoal, however, easy access to plentiful quantities of coal has relegated charcoal making to small-scale local endeavors. Which no doubt has saved many trees. Coke, charcoal, and soft coal, as well as dried peat, can then be compressed into briquettes for easy transport, whereas anthracite can be shaped into small blocks like any hard stone. The nature of these fuels, however, precludes using ordinary tinder to ignite them. They would either need an accelerant, such as naphtha (the Dream-equivalent of lighter fluid), to increase the efficiency of the tinder, or a long, hot burning tinder such as firestarter. Nonetheless, more energy can be carried with a certain mass of briquettes than can be with the same mass of wood.

There is also an alternative method to lighting a fire without using firestarters or tinderboxes. This involves carry coals from a previous fire to use to start the next one. Though not always practical, it makes starting a fire easier, since the heat needed to ignite tinder is already at hand, speeding up the process as well. Similarly, a punk or slow match can be carried, but the method of transport is the same. The coal is wrapped in a bed of dry plant material which is then contained in a wooden, terra cotta, or metal carrier. As long as the bedding is replaced over long periods, a coal can be kept smoldering for a considerable length of time, often days, sometimes even weeks, though longer in dry weather than wet. For the vast majority of travelers, however, the coal only needs to be preserved long enough to make it to the end of the day, and a new one can be used for the next day, and so forth. Suitable bedding plants include birch bark, tobacco, and sage, though any plant that burns slowly would work.

Caerleon Order Explosive Ordinance

Unfortunately, there are threats that can only be dealt with effectively and efficiently by the liberal use of high explosives. To counter these kinds of creatures, the Order maintains as wide a variety of explosive ordinance as is practical.

Jump to the webpage.

Team Girl Superhero Team

Bright as Night --- Superheroes: Lumena and Scáthach

Lumena

Sonne "Sunny" Hiver is a lab assistant working for Dr. Mabuse. She volunteers to test a sunblock formula that could literally protect against the intense flash of a nuclear explosion. During the test, the ultraviolet light, x-rays, and gamma rays cause the lotion to react with the skin, turning it photosynthetic. Sunny is now able to absorb electromagnetic photons and convert them into ATP, the biological energy molecule. In fact, her body is now so dependent upon light that lack of exposure can kill her. An hour's sunbathing under a high-intensity extreme UV lamp provides her with enough energy to survive 24 hours.

However, it also triggered certain abilities. She can see, hear, and feel the whole spectrum of electromagnetic radiation except cosmic waves and the very longest of radio waves. She can manipulate external electromagnetic fields and channel body energy to create fields, everything from radio signals to lasers, including magnetic fields (aka Magneto) and lightning bolts. She can disguise her appearance by manipulating how light reflects off her body; she can create illusions by projecting holograms; she can become invisible by bending light rays around herself; she can fly by manipulating the earth's magnetic field.

However, exercising these abilities drains her energy, so that she needs to recharge. Mabuse then creates a special suit. The outside can absorb electromagnetic energy and the inside transmits it as UV light against her skin. It can also store electromagnetic energy: a one hour charge under gamma ray bombardment can supply her body with enough energy to keep her alive for a week, or to use her abilities for a 36-hour period. She also creates a number of gadgets that enhance Sunny's abilities and help her control them.

Through numerous tests, Sunny also discovers her weaknesses. Though her body can absorb x-rays and gamma rays, those photons are too energetic and can damage her without the suit. During the daytime, she can absorb enough sunlight to use the suit's energy to power her abilities, but at night she must use the suit to keep her alive as well, which drains it faster. In fact, the darker it is, the more energy she must divert from the suit. Even with a fully charged suit, she can only survive six hours in total darkness, and once the suit is drained, only six minutes on her own bodily reserves. Nonetheless, she decides to use her abilities to fight crime as a superhero, under the name of Lumena.

Scáthach

Eile Chica is a low-level administrator who works for Medb hErenn at her research institute. She is working late one night when an experiment is being performed to try to make and control dark energy. An accident unleashes a dark energy shock wave that ripples through the institute. Everyone in the lab is killed, but she is only knocked unconscious. When she awakens, she discovers that she has the ability to absorb and manipulate dark energy. As it grows stronger, it nearly destroys her, until Medb develops a nanosuit that uses the Casimir effect to contain the energy.

With continued testing and practice, Eile discovers she can use the dark energy as a shield or weapon, for camouflage or cloaks, and to teleport or fly. However, the more she uses these abilities, the more unstable the dark energy becomes, and the more difficulty the suit has in containing it. As such, she must rest for one hour each day (36 hours at the most) to allow the suit to stabilize the energy. Otherwise, the suit will fail, and the energy will be released in the form of a 100 megaton explosion. Medb uses her as a kind of enforcer under the name of Scáthach, to force people to do as she wishes. Eile obeys out of gratitude and loyalty, but she is troubled by what she does, and she is beginning to question whether she is doing the right thing.

Lumena and Scáthach eventually confront one another, at first as enemies out to destroy their rival. But when they discover that their mentors have been playing them false, they join forces as partners to fight crime and save the world from disaster.

E

Bettie Stivic is an artist and graphic designer who has a natural genius for technology. At one point she discovers the formula for a synthetic weave that is virtually indestructible. Mabuse and Medb try to kidnap her to claim it, and Lumena and Scáthach rescue her. In gratitude, she agrees to work for them as their woman-Friday. In addition to inventing gadgets and developing new suit formulations, she designs their costumes, their symbols, and their logos. The Girls call her "E" or "Elvira" to protect her identity.

Multiple Higher Dimensions

Alternate universes have long been a popular subject for speculation, but a serious problem for those who believe they exist was why no one could see them. Usually, this was explained by invoking multiple higher dimensions. It went something like this. All dimensions begin with a mathematical point, which has no dimensions. However, string an infinite number of them side by side and you get a line, which has the first dimension of length. Lay an infinite number of lines beside each other and you get a plane, which has the second dimension of width. Stack an infinite number of planes on top of each other and you get a space, which has the third dimension of depth. Finally, arrange an infinite number of spaces around each other and you get a hyperspace, which has a fourth dimension.

While each dimension may be finite in size, it contains an infinite number of lower dimensions. Hence, if we assume each three-dimensional space is a separate universe, a hyperspace would contain an infinite number of independent universes. These universes would be separated from each other across the fourth dimension, which we cannot travel or see through, hence they are invisible to us. For many years, it was thought that the fourth dimension was time, since Albert Einstein had used time as a dimension in his theory of relativity. String theory, however, predicts that our universe has eleven dimensions, ten spatial and one temporal. Time is considered to be the eleventh and highest dimension, so the fourth dimension of a hyperspace would now be an uncharacterized spatial dimension like length, width, and depth.

However, string theory also predicts that only four of the dimensions form the kind of nested hierarchy described above. These are the three spatial dimensions of length, width, and depth, plus the dimension of time. The other seven spatial dimensions are subatomic and are bound up with the strings, so they do not form "higher" dimensions containing infinite numbers of lower dimensions. The idea is that, before the Big Bang, all eleven dimensions were equal in size, strength, and character; in other words, they were symmetrical. During the Big Bang, however, the universe underwent what is called a symmetry breaking event. Seven of the dimensions collapsed in size and shed most of their energy, which was absorbed by the remaining four, causing them to expand to infinite size and turning three into spatial dimensions and one into a temporal dimension. Each Level 1 multiverse that forms in a Level 2 multiverse undergoes a similar symmetry breaking event, but quantum fluctuations cause the number of dimensions to collapse and the kind to emerge to be random.

Parallel universes are now the primary way to explain where the alternative universes exist and why we cannot see them. However, higher dimensions still play an important role in understanding how universes are ordered and arranged into larger structures.

Read the rest of the article.

Next eBook: Felis ex Machina

The next story in my schedule to be published through Smashwords will be:

Felis ex Machina

January Ian Mariposa, Jaim to his friends, and his familiar Bastet, have acquired a device that allows them to travel back in time. One scholarly subject that has always fascinated him was the influence that the Cthulhu Mythos had on Victorian society of Great Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As such, he spends a great deal of time in London of the 1880s.

However, he needs a way to support himself, and what better way than to pose as a consulting detective in the manner of Sherlock Holmes? He expected most of his cases to be fairly mundane, if occasionally macabre or grotesque, but many of them turn out to be more eldritch than he anticipated.

Such as, the time Scotland Yard called on him to examine a body for them....

This will be another free ebook.

New eBook: Rhapsody in Orange

I have just published my latest ebook:

Rhapsody in Orange

Aelfraed and the staff of the Caerleon Order are worried. Sir Differel appears to be going insane: she can't sleep, she's hearing voices and having hallucinations, and she has become paranoid of and hostile towards her own people. Nothing they can do seems to help; even Dracula cannot break through her malaise.To make matters worse, she must appear at a meeting of the Privy Council within a week, and if she has not recovered by then, there is a real danger that they will depose her as Director and appoint someone else to replace her, who most likely would defer to them rather than follow his own judgment.

In desperation, Aelfraed has turned to her best friends, Eile and Sunny of Team Girl, for help. They agree to do what they can, but they're not sure if they can do anything at all. Especially when they discover that Differel's trouble has been caused by a new enemy, one who will prove to be her most persistent, as well as her most implacable.

This ebook is free and can be downloaded from Smashwords.