Dan Thompson's Blog, page 18

Review: A Just Determination, by John Hemry

I picked this one up because it was a space opera series:

This one started weak but ended strong.

The basic tale is that a young ensign goes out on his first assignment in the space navy. While the ship is out on its tour, something happens, and it results in an investigation and trial for another officer. The stuff on board the ship and out on the patrol did not thrill me and in several cases it outright annoyed me. However, the investigation and the trial were top notch. The legal stuff was precise, engaging, and it seemed real. The space stuff, no, not really.

Apart from some physics gaffes dealing with zero gravity and how things are different in a vacuum, the two things that bothered me the most had to do with this space navy and its mission. Specifically, it was the United States space navy. I’m not necessarily and big-happy-peaceful-earth kind of guy, but having nation to nation conflict in deep space seemed a little pointless.

The other naval detail that bothered me was that the purpose of their mission, specifically to defend a US “sovereign claim” on certain regions of interplanetary space. I found this kind of ridiculous because the value of such a claim would be dependent on the location of planets. I can understand keeping a patrol around a claimed planetary body, but it was clear that this was a fixed region of interplanetary space.

But apart from the senseless of that, it’s counter to longstanding US policy. Much of what the US Navy does in today’s real-world high seas is to defend the concept of the “freedom of the seas”, which is that apart from narrow strip around the nation itself, oceans are open to all ships to travel. The only exceptions are to be for necessary international issues such as wartime trade blockades or enforcing internationally agreed upon sanctions.

Much of the 1980’s saber-rattling between the US and Libya was over Libya’s attempt to expand its territorial waters far out into the Mediterranean. It’s also the reason the US regularly sends ships into the Black Sea and other gulfs/seas that other nations view as their own personal playgrounds. So, to have the US space navy enforce a “sovereign claim” to an open track of space bugged the hell out of me.

Now, having picked at my personal nits here, the book did finish strong. The trial was a good look at the issues around specific orders vs. standing orders along with what to do with vague or contradictory orders. It also dealt with what happens when there is disagreement along the chain of command, and where your duty lies.

So, I really enjoyed the last third of the book, and I had a hard time putting it down. It was just hard to get that far in the first place. As such, I’m still iffy on whether I’m going to give the guy another shot with the second book.

(Note: the link above is to the Amazon paperback version. The e-book which I read came directly from the publisher, Baen.)

My Father’s Car

I’ve been driving my father’s care lately. Technically it belongs to my mother, and I’m the one who bought it, but to me, it will always be my father’s car. To explain why that is, I have to go back over forty years and talk about another car entirely.

I’m a little fuzzy on the date, but it would have been late 1970 or early 1971, and Dad’s old Dodge Rambler was ready to be taken out back and shot. Dad decided to give GM a shot, and we all went down to the Chevy dealer. I was only three, but I remember the trip.

Mostly, I remember sitting in the back seat of a few different cars. One in particular stood out because the seats were upholstered with white synthetic fur. Come on, fur? Who puts kids in a car with white fur? Maybe someone with a cleaning fetish, but not my father.

In the end, he settled on a 1971 Chevy Impala. It was gold, and it quickly became known as Goldie in our house. Ironically, the white car was never Whitey, but that was probably a sign of the times. But good old Goldie became not only dad’s commuting car, but we also took it on a number of vacations. It eventually gave up the vacation role to a 1976 Chevy Impala with a trailer hitch, but it remained his main commuting vehicle for more than twenty years.

In the 80’s, he bought me my first car, a used 1972 Chevy Impala. It was almost the same as his, except that mine was what they call a “hardtop”. For you classic car aficionados, no it was not the two-door collectible version, but rather the four-door. It ran well, and it had the same bit 350 cubic inch V8 that Dad’s had.

I have fond memories of that car, and I often thought it was neat… you know, me and Dad in our big roadsters. You didn’t so much drive them as you sailed them. The ride was that smooth. You didn’t feel speedbumps so much as you heard them.

But in 1995, Mom got a new car, a police package 1995 Chevy Caprice. It was in many ways the proper heir of the old 1970’s Impala. The smaller, underpowered (but more fuel efficient) Caprice of the 1980’s had been stretched, given a bigger engine, and the police package made it a peppy little car. It had the Corvette’s LT1 engine (again, a 350-V8 descendant), and the cam shaft was geared for high torque. While nothing compared to modern sports cars, it had a very respectable 0 to 60 time of 7.1 seconds.

But it had the nice, new interior, so it became Mom’s car while Dad was relegated to her old 1986 Caprice with the smaller engine. Yes, it could go nearly 600 miles on a tank of gas, but I could tell that at some level, Dad felt he’d been relegated to the kid car. He tried to hang on to old Goldie for another year, but it was old, faded, and according to Mom, “just plain ugly”. So he had to get rid of it.

I didn’t want to see him have to hand it off to the junkyard, so I bought it from him for about $200. I managed to keep it going for another year, but when the transmission went, I decided it was time to junk it. Dad understood, and I think that year had given him enough time and distance to let it go.

But he was still in that underpowered 1986 Caprice. He said he wished that he had bought a second Caprice like Mom’s, but 1996 was the last model year, and by the time he realized it, it was too late. Notably, the famed Impala SS of the 90’s was essentially the Caprice police package with a few styling changes and a slightly different suspension. The trend in the 1990’s was away from four-door sedans and towards the larger SUV’s, so the Caprice production died off early in 1996.

By now, my 1972 Impala was on its second engine and its third transmission and was showing its age. I wasn’t ready to let it go quite yet, but I decided it was time to get something newer, and I also bemoaned the untimely demise of the big Chevy Caprice. But then I noticed that they were still in steady use by police departments, and a vague memory that they retired them after a certain number of miles.

What began as a research project eventually led me to the quarterly auction of Texas’s Department of Transportation. I bought myself a 1994 Caprice in the spring of 1996, a retired DPS patrol car. It had 92,000 miles on it, but it had been expertly maintained. My research on the vehicles ahead of time let me avoid any with collisions or persistent problems. It was very bare bones, exactly like you’d expect a police car to be, but it made a great civilian car. There was that one time the mechanic found some shell casings rattling around under the hood, but that’s another story.

Eventually, I got one for my wife, and my brother came down to get one himself. Then, finally in the fall of 1998, I bought one of the last 1996’s for my father. You don’t get them in the original black and white trim. They repaint them in a solid color before putting them up for auction. This one was gold, so once again, Dad had Goldie.

He was grinning ear to ear when I presented it to him. He knew, of course, that it was in the works, but I hadn’t told him the color until he came to town to pick it up. It was smooth, roomy, and peppy — everything he had been missing from his old Goldie.

I was a little disappointed at first to discover that he was mostly keeping it in the garage while continuing to drive the old 1986 Caprice to work, but then he explained. He wanted to drive the old one into the ground, while preserving the newer one for his retirement. He still took it out and drove it for pleasure on the weekends, but he kept it otherwise pristine.

Alas, that retirement never really came. In 2003 he was diagnosed with stage four cancer, and while he got some use of it that year, his health deteriorated to the point that he could no longer safely drive.

He died seven years ago today. The car had only had another fifteen thousand miles put on it.

Eventually, Mom moved that car down to Austin so that she could have a car here when she flew in for visits. It’s technically her car at this point, but I still drive it every now and then to keep it shape.

But now all the others are dead or dying. The engine block cracked on my wife’s car two years ago. My brother’s died a few months later. In the last year, mine has started having transmission problems, and I’m still debating whether to repair it or let it go.

With that, I guess I decided it was time to pull Goldie out of reserve. Even without as many miles, it’s showing its age. So I’ve been driving it.  In some ways, it’s my last physical connection to my father, and if I could, I would try to keep it forever.

But time passes, and no matter how much these things may recall your youth and the things you’ve lost, they won’t last forever. Enjoy them now, while you still can.

Kickstarter for Mars?

I know this sound ridiculous on the surface, but have we reached the point where someone should be doing a Kickstarter project for a manned mission to Mars? The NASA budget continues to limp along at about half the inflation-adjusted size of the 1966 Apollo peak. Proposals for manned missions to Mars keep getting cancelled and reproposed, but they are always far enough down the road that it’s a future president who will have to come up with the funds. Inside Washington circles, it seems like NASA is the unloved dog that is still too cute for anyone to put down.

Yet outside of Washington, NASA and some of the private space ventures are quite popular. In national polls, NASA gets approval ratings in the 55-75% range, compared to 30% for the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, Congress has been struggling beneath 20% for over four years. Politicians would kill for NASA’s numbers – especially right now after Curiosity’s successful Mars landing – and yet the only thing they’re killing is NASA’s budget.

So, maybe it’s time to bypass the politicians altogether and raise the money privately.

Let’s talk numbers. NASA’s budget for 2012 is $17.7 billion (USD). Worldwide, government space agencies are spending about $27.5 billion, of which about $10 billion is for manned flight. That’s a lot, but it’s not much compared to the US or global economies.

That’s how much we’re spending now for a modest amount of manned activity in low Earth orbit. What about going to Mars? How much will that cost? Well, the problem is that no one really knows for sure, but estimates range from the fantastically low $4 billion to the unfundable $1 trillion. Other numbers from recent NASA estimates have put it in the $40-60 billion range, with the cost to be spread over ten years.

Which numbers should we believe? Well, past space projects (and technology projects in general) lead me to believe that it won’t cost nearly as much as the initial high-end estimates. Aerospace engineers are smart guys – like rocket-scientist smart – and they tend to figure stuff out once they put their minds to it. So, I’m willing to throw out the trillion dollar estimate as that of a pessimist who is predisposed against the idea.

But on the other hand, it’s never quite as simple as you think it’s going to be, and cost overruns add up, so whatever we think it’s going to be when we lay down the initial specs, we can count on that cost to go up by 50% to 100%. I think that pretty much blows the $4 billion estimate out of the water.

But somewhere in between, say $50-100 billion, spread over ten years… that seems quite reasonable. It’s also a number on par with what we’re currently spending on manned space missions worldwide, i.e. that earlier $10 billion. On the one hand, you could say we’re already spending that and not getting to Mars, but we are getting something for it. It’s also a measure that there is an aerospace industry ready to absorb that kind of money and do something with it.

Ok, anyone got $100 billion to spare? Well I don’t, but I’ve easily got $100 I’d throw at this. Heck, I’d throw $100 at it every year for ten years. I mean, really, $100 is about the cost of taking my wife out to dinner and a movie (plus the babysitter). To see us put people on Mars in the next decade, I’d gladly give up a date like that once per year.

But how many people are like me that way? Well, if everyone in America felt the same, that would yield a budget of $30 billion annually. Well, let’s say half that because, after all, my wife is part of that $100 date. Still, that’s $15 billion. But not everyone in America is as pro-NASA as I am. Even with a 66% approval rating, that’s a third of the people who don’t like it. So that knocks us down to $10 billion per year, which is about on target.

Of course, it’s easy to say you like NASA, but parting with Mr. Franklin may be a little harder, so perhaps it’s unrealistic of me to think that 66% of Americans would toss their hard earned cash into such an effort, but this doesn’t have to be done by NASA. With private enterprises like SpaceX building and launching their own vehicles like the Dragon capsule, this could conceivably be an entirely private venture, funded by individuals and corporations across the globe. And for that matter, while many people would only drop in their pocket change, others would pony up for more.

Logistically, it would have to be funded and engineered in stages. That would probably slow things down from ten years to fifteen or twenty, but it would be one of the best ways to build credibility. At each stage we would learn more about the shape of the problem and refine the designs for the next stages.

Certainly, we are going to learn a lot from the Curiosity mission, particularly whether or not there is accessible water in the Martian soil. That mission cost has been estimated at $2.5 billion, or about $8 per US citizen. Given how excited everyone is about it, I think we got our $8 value from just watching the landing.

And I think that kind of thing would be key to ramping up the funding momentum. With each success building towards the ultimate manned missions, excitement would build, and that would drive the funding. More rovers, sample return missions, test runs of new drive systems, all could be played for the kind of buzz we’ve seen this week, and the funding for future missions could be timed to tie into that.

Visible successes – and yes, even tragic missteps – would make us all feel like we’re part of it along the way, so when we see that first boot print on Martian soil, we could all say, “I made that happen.”

On the other hand, it might be too much to ask. The only other secular funding effort on this scale is the American political process, and $10 billion is more than is raised/spent even in a presidential election year. But I’d like to think we could get even more excited about going to Mars than prevailing over the hippie/redneck across the street.

Review: Going Interstellar, by Johnson & McDevitt

This is a collection of short stories and essays edited by Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt:

I’ve reviewed other novels by McDevitt and enjoyed them quite a bit, so when this anthology came out, I was quick to buy it. Overall, it was pretty good, but its mixed nature made it inconsistent.

I enjoyed all the essays. They were full of facts, history, and a reasonable amount of hard science. They even had a few diagrams, so I’m glad I bought it in dead-tree edition rather than e-book. Mostly the essays dealt with various proposals for real interstellar spacecraft that would plod along at slower than the speed of light. While that can make for weak fiction, it’s actually possible by our current understanding of the universe. No magic physics is required.

The fiction was hit or miss for me. I did really enjoy one of the stories by McDevitt, and it truly did make me care about the main character, an AI computer that finally got a shot at the big game. A couple of others left me flat, and one truly disappointed me. It dealt with a multi-generation colony ship, and I found it lacking compared to my own novel of a similar colony ship. That’s not really fair to this story, of course, but that’s how it hit me.

So, if you want some info on real interstellar proposals, get this for the articles, and maybe check out the fiction.

Disemvoweled Words

Some folks were recently talking about bad fantasy/SF tropes, and one in particular was dropping a made-up word in almost every sentence. For example, I awoke at the cry of the narwk, threw on a jrali, and rode out on my brother’s verxacj. The complaint is that we have no idea what these things are, and when we do finally find out, we discover that the narwk is a rooster, the jrali is a poncho, and the verxacj is a horse.

But what’s worse? How the hell are you suppose to pronounce those words? That’s when I first heard the word “disemvoweled”. I suppose those words didn’t qualify since they still have vowels, but I’ve seen other cases like grnxth or q’trnl and even the occasional xghll.

Yes, they stand out as a foreign language, but unless the native speakers have a different speaking apparatus than humans, they’re going to choke on their own vomit trying to force these guttural words out. You can throw in the occasional apostrophe in hopes of slipping in a soft schwa sound, but before long you’re trying to get away with a main character named X’gr’thnl.

I don’t really have much to say other than, please, don’t do this. They always say that you should read your own writing out loud, and if you trip over your tongue trying to sound out your own foreign words, change them.

Otherwise, I’m going to throw you and your words out the door, AND the verxacj you rode in on.

Why Mars?

I confess I wrote most of this on Sunday several hours before the Curiosity lander either landed successfully on Mars or left an SUV-sized crater. [Update: Success!] Obviously I’m hoping for the former [YAY!], but why all this effort for Mars and not, for example, Venus or Jupiter?

First, let me lay out all those legitimate scientific reasons. Mars is much more like Earth than the other planets in our solar system, and studying Mars can tell us a few new things about the Earth, its climate, and its history. Also, Mars shows signs of having once had liquid water on its surface, and that means there is the possibility that Mars might have once harbored microbial life – and it still might. Finding another sample of life would teach us a lot about the possibilities of life and organic chemistry, even if it’s to teach us that Martian life came from Earth or vice versa.

So yeah, we go to Mars in hopes of learning things to help us on Earth. Yada, yada, yada. It’s all legitimate, and it can probably justify the price tag. But that’s not why I care.

In my lifetime, Mars has gone from being a light in the sky to being a place. As corny as it sounds, it has become the new frontier, that faraway land across the sea, and I feel a definite itch to go see it. What things could I see that no one has seen before? What could I build there? Who else would I meet on such an exciting journey? What mark would I leave on such a world?

Yeah, I know… it’s a lot of romantic claptrap, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. I don’t know if it’s simply because I’m a lifelong SF geek, or if it’s some deep genetic wanderlust. Either way, it’s a tangible draw, and I find that it ranks high on the scale of things that fulfill my life.

Do I think I’m going? No. I admit I still hold out some hope that I might make it into orbit as a tourist someday, but that’s about it for me personally. However, I do hope to see a manned mission to Mars in my lifetime. It would be even better to see some kind of permanent settlement there, but I don’t see that as a realistic possibility in the next 40-50 years. I’m not saying I’d vote against it – far from it – but I don’t expect to see it.

In the long term, I’d like to think there will be a long term effort to colonize Mars and terraform it. That would teach us a lot about managing a climate – again, useful here on Earth. It would also give our species some survival insurance that the dinosaurs lacked. And finally, I think it would teach us a lot of we’ll need to know if we’re ever going to make the leap past our solar neighborhood.

Specifically, living on Mars would teach us how to keep people alive and healthy for long-duration space flight. It would teach us how to built shelter on inhospitable worlds using local materials. We would learn how to actually terraform instead of merely bandying about the notion that it should be possible. And we’ll also find out just how Earth-like we need to make a planet to successfully life there.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll find out that Mars just isn’t good enough to live on. Maybe it will be too cold. Maybe poor magnetic field will let us fry in solar radiation. Maybe its low gravity will cause us endless health problems. But maybe we can solve those issues.

But in the here and now, I’m looking forward to Curiosity’s mission and exploring Mars vicariously through it.

Curiosity sees its shadow on Mars.

Review: Real Murders, by Charlaine Harris

I thought I’d try some mysteries, and my wife recommended this one:

It was all right, but ultimately I did not find it very satisfying. It was well written, and the first-person narrator was both interesting and compelling. The crime was fairly interesting, and it was fun trying to keep track of various bits of information, hoping to track down the murderer before the narrator did, and that part was fun.

Where it failed for me was in the killer’s motivation, but that was mostly the nature of the beast for this particular crime. Someone was committing murders just for the fun of it, to commit crimes reminiscent of famous murders, from political assassination to Lizzie Borden’s famous forty whacks. So, when the killer was finally unveiled, the motivation was simply that he/she was a nut-job.

Personally, that wasn’t very satisfying to me. I wanted it to be something like, “Jane did it because she stood to inherit the family fortune,” or “Walter did it as revenge for what happened back in the war,” or something like that. There could be multiple motives for the murder, and that would be fine – even desirable. This would have filled the book with meaty motivations like jealousy, revenge, greed, and so on. Yeah, good and ugly stuff like that.

As it was, the motivation was essentially missing, and that meant it could have been any of the characters who was actually a quiet psychopath. That left me feeling like the ultimate unveiling of the killer was random. Of the dozen suspects, the dart landed on Pat, so Pat is the psychopathic killer. The evidence in support of it seemed to have been tacked on, little bits of proof sprinkled through the book to prop up the random selection.

So… it was okay, but not really good. It’s the first book in a series, and I may give another one a shot. After all, it was well written, so the author knows how to spin a yarn. I just happened to be disappointed by this particular tale.

Darn… Didn’t Finish

It’s August 1st, and I haven’t finished the draft of that next novel, Debts of My Fathers. I’m around 75,000 words, and I probably have another 15,000 words to go.

So, what happened?

Well, first of all, it’s not a disaster. I’m probably going to take a few days off and then pick up and finish it off by mid-month. However, it is a little disappointing. My previous three novels were all done as NaNoWriMo’s, and I hit the 50,000 word mark by November 30th in each case. (Plus, I did another NaNoWriMo even before those, but that novel was never completed.) So I’m used to setting a deadline and meeting it. This time I didn’t.

The deadline was to finish the novel by the end of July, and the novel felt like it was going to be around 90,000 words. So with 60 days, I set a pace of 1500 words per day. I did pretty well until mid to late July, and then I started faltering. Partly it was that I had two weekend conferences (20-22nd and 27-29th) that sucked up some of my days. They also pushed other tasks off of the weekend and into weekday time that I would have been writing. It’s also summer, and I’m dealing with the kids a lot. So, to that extent, it wasn’t so much writer’s block as much as it was having trouble making the hours in my schedule.

But it was also at least a little bit of writer’s block. I’m not a big fan of waiting for the stars to align before I can write. I put my butt in the chair and write. But still, some days I write at the pace of 1000 words per hour, and some days I write at the pace of 200 words per hour. Generally, the faster I write, the better the text, so it’s not like I’m spending hours carefully crafting those magic 200 words. The last several days of July were a lot closer to 200 words per hour than 1000 words per hour.

To some extent, I’m not that surprised. Of the three novels I completed before this, I hit a rough patch at around 70-75% of the way through on each of them. It actually caused me to set each of them aside for a while. The first one had a pause of almost two years. The second one caused a pause of about ten months. The third one was a pause of a few weeks. I’m not sure what it is about that spot, but while I won’t call it writer’s block, it might be at least a writer’s cramp. Hopefully, the pause will be even shorter this time.

So I’m going to take a few days off from the novel draft, though it probably will not be a few days off from writing. I hope to get ahead on some blog and essay writing and possibly even do a little bit of flash fiction. Then I’ll wrap this one up by mid-August.

I’ll let you know when it wraps up.

What Science is SF Missing?

I’m brazenly stealing this topic from a panel at ArmadilloCon because I thought of something after the panel was already over. The idea was to ask which sciences do we not see very often in science fiction. Some of the suggestions included medicine, neuroscience, and mathematics. The science I didn’t think of until too late was… well, I suppose I should call it communication theory.

I’m talking about the kind of science that studies the problem of communicating with someone over vast time and distance when you don’t necessarily have a language in common. There’s the classic trick of broadcasting prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11…), but what do you do beyond that? What do you put into the signal to give the key to deciphering it?

Contact by Carl Sagan delved into that. The Hercules Text by Jack McDevitt touched on it as well, and I remember an old book by James Gunn called The Listeners that played with some pictogram strategies. The most recent of these books is twenty-five years old. Other than that, I haven’t seen anything. (Though obviously, I have not read everything.)

A similar problem would exist if you wanted to leave behind a marker for an evolving race to find in a few million (or billion) years. Apart from some kind of “Kilroy was here” message, what might your monolith attempt to communicate to the poor blokes who dig it up? For that matter, what would you do to help them find it?

And even more mundane (but no less terrifying), how would you preserve our current knowledge for the survivors of some impending catastrophe? That is, if the killer asteroid or genocidal pandemic are underway, how do you leave information for the next civilization that arises from the ashes in thousands (or millions) of years. They very likely won’t share our language. They might not even be our species. If Earth is doomed to become the Planet of the Apes, it would be nice if they knew what the Statue of Liberty was about.

Anyway, I’d like to see more science fiction addressing these kinds of issues. The “Kilroy was here” marker is particularly compelling to me, but I don’t yet have a full story for it.

What sciences do you think SF is missing?

Review: Texas Gothic, by Rosemary Clement-Moore

This is a standalone ghost hunting story by the author who also did the Maggie Quinn series…

A pair of disclaimers: I’m not really the target audience of this book (since I’m not a YA girl). Perhaps countering that, though, I have something of a fan-boy crush on the author since I think she’s a fabulous panelist. If you ever get to see her at a convention, give her a listen.

I liked the book fairly well, but… since comparisons to her other work are inevitable… I didn’t like it as much as I liked her Maggie Quinn books. For some reason, I did not find this book’s Amy Goodnight to be as engaging as Maggie Quinn, and a lot of that boiled down to the narrative voice. I’ll at least grant her this much, considering that both books were written first person from the POV of an 18-19 year old girl, their narrative styles were noticeably different. I guess I just liked Maggie’s voice better.

The other thing that set me against the book from the start was the subject matter. It’s a ghost story. While Maggie is off fighting demons and closing off interdimensional portals, this story is about a ghost haunting a Texas ranch. It was well done, and the ghostly interactions were not overdone, but real life “ghost hunters” annoy the shit out of me. No offense to you personally if you’re one of them, but I have a hard time not crying bullshit on them. As such, I was not primed to enjoy a ghost story.

Now, having said that, it was well done and believable, not so much because the character believed, but because the character did not want to believe. She acknowledged that yes, it could very well be a true ghost out there causing problems, but she did not want that to be true. That was enough to quiet my inner skeptic enough to go along for the ride.

And it was a fun ride. There were heroes and villains, lust and greed, real danger, and real consequences. It was not just a scary weekend listening to stairs creak. It was a little adventure that actually got to the bottom of things.

So, I can actually recommend it to others, but given my pre-existing annoyance with things ghost-related, I probably would not have recommended it to myself.