David Lee Summers's Blog, page 47

The NASA Kepler Mission

Last September, the Institute of Physics released a volume describing the results of NASA’s Kepler Mission. The mission’s purpose was to survey a region of the galaxy to see how many planets could be found and determine their properties. I was honored that the editor, Steve Howell, asked me to contribute a short article about the appearance of real exoplanets in science fiction. In the article, I discuss how astronomy and science fiction have “grown up” together, and look at how science fiction ...

Alita Battle Angel – The Movie

Two weeks ago, I shared my thoughts about the Robert Rodriguez film, From Dusk till Dawn. This past week, I watched Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of the manga Battle Angel Alita, which I discussed here at the Web Journal back in December. There was a lot about From Dusk till Dawn that suggested Rodriguez would be a good director for this manga. He clearly had a good sense of both character and action, both of which would be essential for adapting Alita for mainstream American audiences.

T...

eSPEC EXCERPTS – BREAKING THE CODE — eSpec Books

My novella, Breaking the Code, will be released in ten days. I thought this would be a good time to share another post from my publisher, NeoParadoxa, which is an imprint of eSpec Books. In this post, you can read Chapter One in it’s entirety absolutely free. I hope it hooks you enough to want to read the whole thing!

As it turns out, I pitched this novella while taking my youngest child to college. In a normal year, I would have been exploring places around the beautiful city of Flagstaff, A...

Time Traveler with a Celery Boutonniere

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I first learned about the television series Doctor Who from an article in Starlog Magazine. The article announced that Peter Davison would take over the role of the Doctor from Tom Baker, who had played the part for seven years. I knew nothing about who any of these people were or what the show was about, but I do remember blond-haired Peter Davison in a light colored outfit standing next to the ubiquitous blue police box, which I would later learn was his machi...

COVER REVEAL – BREAKING THE CODE — eSpec Books

Happy Star Wars day! May the Fourth be with you! One of the things I’ve always loved about the Star Wars Universe were all the creatures George Lucas and his team dreamed up. Whether it be the Bith who played mean jazz in the first movie’s cantina scene, the Mon Calamari fish people who fought for the Rebel Alliance, or the Wookies, like Chewbacca who was Han Solo’s best friend, there was something about these creatures that made me want to believe they were real.

Around the same time as Star...

Lucid Dreams

Operating telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory means that I work a night shift. My working days typically start at 4pm and end in morning twilight, about a half hour before sunrise. Despite that, I often spend my off time on a day schedule. Originally this was a matter of necessity. Being on a day schedule allowed me to interact with my kids before they went to school and after they came home. I also find that I don’t do well staying on a night schedule all the time. I find I do need occ...

From Dusk till Dawn

From Dusk till Dawn, directed by Robert Rodriguez, is a movie set in the borderland region of West Texas and Northern Mexico. It’s been on my radar for some time, but it’s taken me a while to finally watch it. Released in 1996, this movie tells the story of two brothers on the run from the law. At a motel, they take a family hostage and flee across the border to Mexico. The brothers go to a strip club to wait for their contacts only to find the strip club is, in fact, home to a nest of vampi...

Guinevere and the Stranger Cover Reveal

Back in March, I teased the comic Guinevere and the Stranger that I had been working on in collaboration with artist Michael Ellis. The project is now far enough along that I can give a few more details about the release. The first people who will get to read the comic in its entirety are my Patreon supporters. I plan to present the pages of the comic over a two-week span in June, essentially sharing a page per day after I’ve finished sharing the work I’m doing on the twentieth anniversary editi...

Fury From the Deep

When I was a kid, video recorders were not a common household item. People watched whatever was on broadcast TV when it was aired. If you missed it, too bad! Being a fairly innovative kid who didn’t want to be limited to experiencing my favorite shows when they aired, I turned to the one recording device a lot of people did have. I used an audio cassette recorder to record my favorite shows so I could listen to them whenever I wanted. It was pretty amazing how well that worked. Between the dialo...

The Airship Rustlers

This week, the poem “The Airship Rustlers” that I wrote with Kurt MacPhearson appeared in the the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association’s online magazine, Eye to the Telescope. You can read it at: http://eyetothetelescope.com/archives/040issue.html. The issue’s theme is “Weird West” and the editor is Gary Every, who I’ve been pleased to work with on a number of other occasions.

A while back, Kurt MacPhearson and I collaborated on a handful of poems and a short story. The way we w...