Starting a blog.
Hi, I'm Laurence (goes by Laury) Dahners and I write science fiction. I've mostly published on Amazon since I love the Kindle. A lot of readers communicated with me and other readers on the Amazon Author's Forums, but those don't seem to be getting much support any more and there have been a lot of complaints.
So I thought I'd start a blog here on GoodReads as well as responding to "Ask the Author" questions that are posted on this site.
I'm not sure how well this will work for those of you who like to have discussions that don't necessarily involve me? Let me know if you're aware of a way for me to facilitate such discussion that I may not be aware of.
Hope this works for at least some of you who like to express your opinions!
Laury Dahners
So I thought I'd start a blog here on GoodReads as well as responding to "Ask the Author" questions that are posted on this site.
I'm not sure how well this will work for those of you who like to have discussions that don't necessarily involve me? Let me know if you're aware of a way for me to facilitate such discussion that I may not be aware of.
Hope this works for at least some of you who like to express your opinions!
Laury Dahners
First I just want to say thanks for writing your books. I have enjoyed reading them.I bought all of the Hyllis books some time ago and enjoyed them. I have notice that the book covers for the first three changed. The books I have are not associated with the new book cover versions. I admit to being a cheapskate and have taken advantage of the discounts on audio books for those I already own. Was kind of hoping to do the same for the Hyllis books I have but without an association, the normal discount is not available to me. I also wonder if any updates and fixes you make might not get to me. Do you know what happened and will they eventually be associated to your previous releases for those books? Thank you and keep up the good work.
Re: carbon 14 nuclear batteriesI just don't get them. The math just doesn't work out.
Let's say you have 1 kilogram of carbon-14 - and every single atom of that 1 kilogram decays and releases 1 electron via beta decay. That's 70e6 coulombs of charge that is released. Let's further assume that the thing that converts this to usable electricity can maintain a potential of .6 volts (i.e. it's like a silicon solar cell.) That's 41e6 joules of energy, or 11 kilowatt-hours. So to match a Tesla battery, you'd need 9 kilograms of active radioactive material (and of course the conversion circuitry, shielding etc) - and after that you're done. No more energy. You'd have to change the battery.
Now, a Tesla battery weighs 545 kilograms - but you can recharge it over and over. So at best this battery is a primary (i.e. non rechargeable battery) that has a 60x better weight ratio than a lithium ion battery. But given that a Tesla battery can be recharged at least a thousand times, over its lifetime the Tesla battery provides a lot more energy.
Am I missing something here?
Also that's assuming you can get the energy out at a decent rate. The half life of C14 is about 5000 years, which means it will take 5000 years to get half that 11 kwhr out.I have a feeling that NDB made some somewhat nebulous statements about their technology (which absolutely would be a great source of energy for low power things like smoke detectors or IoT devices) and journalists ran with it.
Billvon,I agree. It does have a high energy density but a very low rate of extraction of that energy. This means it would only be useful in very limited situations.
Laury Dahners
FYI, Amazon's "Manage Content & Devices" had an update for "Thunder of Engines" with the new cover (no updates for the other books yet).
Walter wrote: "Birchoff wrote: "So dropping this hear because I need to get this out of my head so I can sleep at night. piggy backing off of an earlier post. did some research in the books and lets assume the 1m..."This depends on where laurence goes with filling out the theory. I posited that direction because. There was not much exposition on the theory as there was in the ell donsai books. So there is a bit of wiggle room here. For example what happens if the difference between the wavelengths changes. What kind of effects do you get for larger differences versus smaller differences.
As for working with UV lasers. The money they will make from the launch industry and the nuclear industry is more than enough to order UV laser sources from the same suppliers Intel gets their UV light sources from, to support their EUV patterning to get down to the single digit nano meter sizes in their chips. If Laurence allows for this then it should open the door to gamma ray lasers.
Since your encased fission-ing core could direct all the other EM being given off in one direction; while the perfect reflectivity of the surface channels the remaining gamma waves in a different direction. This would need some research to see how well that would hang together, because with EUV you would only be able to make the interior 'electormagnetically cloaked' up to the em spectrum allowed by the size of the nano patterns you can mold into the surface. The idea for gamma ray lasers presupposes you can pattern the surface enough to selectively guide everything but gamma photons in one direction and simply focus though macroscopic shaping of the cavity the gamma photons in the other direction.
Laurence wrote: "Jason wrote: "So Mr. Dahners, the reward for doing great work, is more work. What book are you working on next? Also, any chance you will revisit your Bonesetter series?"Jason,
Working on Stasis..."
One other idea that occured to me while watching someone disassembly a Tesla electric motor. Staze could be used to build super conducting motors. where the stator is built from two halfs of staze. creat the first half, insert your HTS super conductor windings. Weld the other staze half on. inside there would be a cavity that could be filled with LN2. Given Staze's insulative properties. There would be no boil off.
The only problem with this idea I see is would Staze allow for the magnetic field to be projected through it. It is said Staze would reflect all EM waves. But what would it do to a field?
Mike wrote: "First I just want to say thanks for writing your books. I have enjoyed reading them.I bought all of the Hyllis books some time ago and enjoyed them. I have notice that the book covers for the fir..."
Mike,
It's good to hear that you like the books. Thanks!
What happened with the Hyllis Books is that a publisher, Creative Texts, picked them up and is doing audiobooks and experimenting with the covers. They're about to change the covers again. At present they've done audiobooks for the first three (#3 should come out soon) and are planning to get the rest out as the narrator finishes them. The covers will change for the rest as the audiobooks come out.
I'll forward your concern about not getting the discount on the audiobook to them, but I'm not sure what they can or will do.
I do update and re-edit my books anytime I work on other books in a series or someone points out an error, but I'm pretty sure the publisher doesn't want to do that on the Hyllis books. I had thought that having a publisher taking care of them would be a good thing (in some ways it is, in some ways it isn't) without realizing that I'd lose control of things like this.
If you want to get your books cheaply, you might want to consider Kindle Unlimited (all the books you can read for about $10 a month). I'm pretty sure that anytime you re-read them you get the most recent (updated) version. I don't know if you get a discount on audiobooks though.
Sorry not to have better answers for you.
Laury Dahners
For those of you who like Audiobooks, Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9) is out.Hope you like it.
https://www.amazon.com/Defiant-Ell-Do...
--
Laury
Wag more, bark less...
Walter,I have to say I don't know how to get updated versions. Some people seem to be able to get them. Others can't. I've asked Amazon to send out updates in the past and they've refused for fear of deleting peoples "notes."
Maybe someone on here knows how to do it?
Laury
Laurence wrote: "Mike wrote: "First I just want to say thanks for writing your books. I have enjoyed reading them.I bought all of the Hyllis books some time ago and enjoyed them. I have notice that the book cover..."
Mike,
Got the following back from Creative Texts. Hope it helps.
Laury
Apparently the discounts the reader refers to do not apply to every audio book if you own the ebook. The discounts are set by Amazon and they only apply to select books and it rotates every few months, or at least that is my understanding. They can go here to see if they can match up the originals to the new audiobooks.
https://www.amazon.com/hz/audible/mat...
I hope this helps!
Laurence wrote: "Billvon,I agree. It does have a high energy density but a very low rate of extraction of that energy. This means it would only be useful in very limited situations.
Laury Dahners"
Here's a quote from today's wired article on it
.
Conventional chemical or “galvanic” batteries, like the lithium-ion cells in a smartphone or the alkaline batteries in a remote, are great at putting out a lot of power for a short amount of time. A lithium-ion battery can only operate for a few hours without a recharge, and after a few years it will have lost a substantial fraction of its charge capacity. Nuclear batteries or betavoltaic cells, by comparison, are all about producing tiny amounts of power for a long time. They don’t put out enough juice to power a smartphone, but depending on the nuclear material they use, they can provide a steady drip of electricity to small devices for millennia.
“Can we power an electric vehicle? The answer is no,” says Morgan Boardman, Arkenlight’s CEO. To power something that energy hungry, he says, means “the mass of the battery would be significantly greater than the mass of the vehicle.” Instead, the company is looking at applications where it is either impossible or impractical to regularly change a battery, such as sensors in remote or hazardous locations at nuclear waste repositories or on satellites. Boardman also sees applications that are closer to home, like using the company’s nuclear batteries for pacemakers or wearables.
https://www.wired.com/story/are-radio...
Thanks. That makes a lot more sense.(Fun fact - hackers have been making nuclear batteries for years using tritium, phosphor and solar cells. Notes here: https://hackaday.com/2016/12/01/make-...)
I watching Top Gear on TV and was reminded that super-cars make extensive effort to reduce overall weight. Kaem could probably sell a stade car frame for a lot of money even though it wouldn't cost much to make.
Re: Updated booksI have previously contacted Amazon customer support and had them update ebooks that I owned. I am unsure of their policy to do with Kindle Unlimited books.
Jim wrote: "Re: Updated booksI have previously contacted Amazon customer support and had them update ebooks that I owned. I am unsure of their policy to do with Kindle Unlimited books."
Thanks for the suggestion. I was able to get both "A Pause in Space-Time" and "Radiation Hazard" updated ("A Thunder of Engines" was automatically updated via "Manage Contents and Devices"). I was also able to have Amazon update 6 other books by another author I have been unable to update on my own.
I think Tarc would make a marvelous blacksmith. He could combine his Ghirit and his telekinesis to make sure there are no flaws in the steel and the granularity of the steel is good (it seems that on "Forged on Fire" that is the cause of most blade break.
Re-read all of the Ell Donsaii stories recently and got to thinking that placing a high speed camera above the transporter ring would make a very fast and capable full body scan possible though it might take the computers a while to put all the images together.Also for multiple destination transporters it would be simpler to have a single multi-layer ring for the ports, a thin layer of insulation could allow a lot of different ports to be stacked yet keep them thin and thus their weight down. It would however require that ALL the array of source/destination ports be built at the same time so you'd still probably keep the number of layers rather small or have a mechanism at the factory to swap in the next desired pair of ports for each layer being added.
that scanning thing is so cool, but yet supper creepy. No more MRI using ELL revolutionary body scanner.
What to know what you are getting for Christmas -- scan your presents
Want to find out how to make ports -- scan them too.
Still cool, i remember an article years ago about flash freezing a human head so they can slice it to examine the brain. Maybe it was just the brain. but i do remember they wanted frozen as quickly after death that they could. I think they were trying to get someone on death row to volunteer.
Laurence wrote: "Laurence wrote: "Mike wrote: "First I just want to say thanks for writing your books. I have enjoyed reading them.I bought all of the Hyllis books some time ago and enjoyed them. I have notice th..."
It explains part of it. Thanks. Still not sure why my purchased books don't link back to the new book cover versions. Nice covers by the way.
Just as a curiosity question, what is you active writing schedule. I read an interview with Steven King which he stated he wrote 8 hours every day. I have attempted to write but I lose focus after about 2 hours. That explains my lack of published books. You have a lot of books. In fact you seem to jump from one series to another. From reading the books, I have not noticed any major disconnects or continuity issues.
Again thanks for your diligence in writing and creative story telling.
Walter wrote: "I think Tarc would make a marvelous blacksmith. He could combine his Ghirit and his telekinesis to make sure there are no flaws in the steel and the granularity of the steel is good (it seems that ..."John Blacksmith (from 'Hood') may already be unconsciously doing this, as he is a very good blacksmith and his daughter Gloria is known both to have Ghirit and be a teleporter.
John could think he just has a good eye for the heat of a steel and and know how to hit the steel correctly.
Mike wrote: "Laurence wrote: "Laurence wrote: "Mike wrote: "First I just want to say thanks for writing your books. I have enjoyed reading them.I bought all of the Hyllis books some time ago and enjoyed them...."
Mike,
I write as a hobby, not a profession. Therefore I only write when I don't have something else to do (there's more of that kind of time during the pandemic. I only write an average of 1500 words a day (ranging from 0 to 3,000 - though I once wrote 8k in a day) but at 1,500/day it only takes 40 days to write a 60k word novel. A new book for me usually takes about 50 days.
My advice to you would be to just keep plugging away.
If you want to send me your first 5 pages, I'll make suggestions (if you'll promise not to get mad about criticism).
Laury Dahners
For those who are interested, the fourth Stasis book "Halting the Reaper (The Stasis Stories #4)" is available for preorder on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KPNPFR7?...
Hope you like it!
--
Laury
Muehe,If you're standing on the head side of the ring, trying to look at the cross section of the foot side of the body, the head side is in your way (and vice versa).
Rather than thinking of it like a CAT scanner, I think it's better to think of it as a very short tunnel to somewhere else. You're intact as you go through, not being disassembled in one place and reassembled in another.
Would be a whole different can of technology/worms if it worked the way you're thinking!
Laury Dahners
I was thinking more of a camera looking down through the ring from above seeing the body from above as the ring drops over the person. The question is whether light shown from above would be able to illuminate what it sees and show slices of the body from each frame of the camera but if the light from above can indeed illuminate the parts of the body as the ring passes it would indicate that light is able to get "inside" and that would indicate the possibility of other things being able to be "injected" as the ring passes too so it might be best to not explore that.
I'm looking forward to getting Stasis #4 on my birthday. I have a question though. Have you ever considered writing gamelit or litrpg?
Roy,The original rule I wrote down for this issue was:
a. Q- Does each side of the port work in both directions? If you pour water through side A of a port, it comes out side A of its pair, then if you put water through side B of the first port will it come out on the B side of its pair? Can you put anything through side B is the other question?
i. Answer-Side B of port goes nowhere, though maybe Ell will find a workaround someday?
You're not cut in half while you're passing through a port (unless the port shuts down while you're going through which would be a catastrophe), so a camera can't see inside you any more than it can right now.
It's fun to think about this stuff. I do try to write out rules about how stuff works in these imaginary stories, then not break them without inventing something new to break them with.
Thanks for your interest!
Laury
Tyson,Not being a gamer at all, I wouldn't even be able to get started.
When I've read LitRPG stories I've had a hard time understanding a lot of the references.
Sorry.
Laury
Thats alright, Litrpg is cool to me but you have to know what you're writing to write.Another story I think you would write well that I like is where the MC is displaced to a fanasy world. I love it when authors combine our technology and scientific knowledge with magic in a fantasy world.
"Answer-Side B of port goes nowhere:"At first I thought you meant that it was one way. But then I realized you meant A is both ways and B is a mystery.
So if I am looking at side B, is it just a black nothingness?
Is it solid to the touch or could I accidentally put a finger thru it while holding a port in my hands.
Ok, I am overthinking this. It is a mystery.
I have to admit I was originally thinking the port contacts where. Image received in ‘A’, processed by super computer, then projected to side ‘B’. But they must be dual ports.
Muehe wrote: ""Answer-Side B of port goes nowhere:"At first I thought you meant that it was one way. But then I realized you meant A is both ways and B is a mystery.
So if I am looking at side B, is it just a ..."
It would (IMHO) have to be solid once the gate is activated. You couldn’t for example pass your finger through the b side to the a side - else when you tried to pull your finger back to the b side it would go through the a side port and end up somewhere else.
If the b side just ended up somewhere indeterminate, you would essentially have a port in both directions with the b side just ending up in some undetermined (undefined? indeterminate?) location. The math would be very ugly for that (assuming that we were able to understand the Donsai math 😉).
The most reasonable scenario would be that either both sides of the port went to the same location (mathematically messy for different reasons), or the a side goes to the linked location and the b side is impassible (i.e. solid) when the gate is activated.
My two cents, for what they are worth....
I don't know why bit I've always hated the idea of space elevators.
After staying up too late reading "Halting the Reaper" when it first came out, I thought of possible blind test of stazing people -- staze healthy people for a few seconds. Three persons would be tested: a control, one who is just stazed for a few seconds, and a third who was stazed and unstazed in a few seconds.
If there were 3 staze chambers which randomly selected one of the 3 possibilities, it would be very difficult for the tester or the patient to know which category they fall in.
This test would be just to verify that stazing is safe.
Ok so I loved the book, don't get me wrong, but it was my least favorite dahners book in a while. I'd still give it 5 stars. Maybe it was the love triangle, (or maybe its a rectangle now) which I pretty much always hate. I'm honestly not sure what it was. I usually dont like space elevators mostly because I prefer energy and propulsion technology to keep up with material technology and by the time we get stronger materials for a space elevator, in my opinion, we should already have easy and cheap access to space. Thats why I'm baised against space elevators. Amyways great book as always. Keep it up.Now for the question I always ask. Stasis #5 or something else next?
Wonderfully terrific day!Thanks for another excellent book! As usual, I both lost sleep last night and was not as productive at work as I should have been today as I had a hard time putting it down. Since I am my own boss, I will have to dock my pay for the lost work hours.
I do agree with Tyson that the romantic triangle or rectangle or whatever is hard to follow and I hope it gets resolved sooner rather than later.
I do like you version of the space elevator though. I see it as more of a space sling shot. In fact, I used to think that we could do something somewhat similar just by building rails going up a tall mountain like Mt. Shasta. The place your rocket on a sled that was accelerated at about 3g electromagnetically and then the rocket would be slung into the upper atmosphere. I figured this would significantly reduce the initial fuel load carried by the rocket, although, not nearly as much as the stade tower. Obviously, my idea has huge technical and political issues which probably make it impossible.
The medical and rescue possibilities of stazing are awesome. Ships at sea could have Stazers instead of life boats, Areas prone to natural disasters could have Stazing centers instead of evacuation shelters, etc.
As usual, the reward for a job well done is more work. So what is next on the agenda? Another Stasis would be great but so would another Hyllis, or anything else you choose to write.
Cheers,
Doug
Great book as always. Although I really look forward for your next "Bonesetter" book.Two thoughts so far. Maybe Staze shouldn't go for space launch themselves, but instead provide space elevator for other companies to use.
And where are defense contractors. Here is indestructible armor and nobody is interested in it.
Tyson, Stasis 5 of course. Still full of stasis ideas and got to finish that Space Elevator.
Unfortunately, until we get a reactionless drive (probably never, though I can dream) it'll be a lot more efficient to propel your space launch by pushing against the earth than by pushing against the mass you're sending out the back of your rocket - so if we have the tech to build an elevator it'd be way, way, way less expensive way to launch stuff.
Laury Dahners
DougVC wrote: "Wonderfully terrific day!Thanks for another excellent book! As usual, I both lost sleep last night and was not as productive at work as I should have been today as I had a hard time putting it dow..."
Hah, ships at sea! Great idea!
Farez_87 wrote: "Great book as always. Although I really look forward for your next "Bonesetter" book.Two thoughts so far. Maybe Staze shouldn't go for space launch themselves, but instead provide space elevator f..."
Yeah, I haven't figured out how to deal with the government coming in and wanting stasis for itself and for the military etc. You guys have any thoughts?
Laury Dahners
The military aspect is easy, they will do as the military always do. They will be heavy handed and a bully, they'll demand the stade and take if they can. If you refuse they will threaten and intimidate and or discredit. So kaem will have to give in or go on the run. Lol just like the vaz series in real life they government would've taken it and the public would've never seen any of his invention.
With the hospital using stazing (and other uses), I think it is too late for the government to confiscate the stazing process (having "Mr. X" being the only one who can make stazers also helps). The best they can hope for is to set up a screening process that decides who gets a stazer, but with so many people wanting to uses stazers the government may not be able to make many restrictions. However, Kaem may welcome someone else do the initial screening of all the proposed uses of stazing.
I think the government can't and shouldn't take the heavy handed approach, because, frankly its too late. If we were in a dictatorship, then they could but acting heavy handed when the technology has already been seen by the public and used in multiple industries is a good way for politicians to loose elections. And as much as people in the military can do stupid stuff, there are smart people there too. I think I'd perfer a more benign approach from the government now and cooperation on how to keep the tech safe and regulated without overregulating.
When i was reading this it reminded me of "DayWorld" by Philip José Farmer. The world was so overpopulated that people were suspended 6 days a week. And if i remember right, they suspend the garbage to build houses. (i read it 30 years ago)Entirely different stories they just both used suspended animation for people and building.
I think Kaem should modify the stazers so nobody can open them. The only reason to open a stazer is to repair it, and that increases the possibility someone will see a working circuit. Also, Kaem may redesign the stazer so that it won't work as built. Instead, the capacitor discharge in the first attempt at stazing would burn out some parts of the stazer (such as connections to added dummy circuits). Afterwards the stazer would work as designed using the same process as the initial attempt.
Thanks for the comments and suggestions!Laury Dahners
For those of you who like audiobooks:Wanted (an Ell Donsaii Story #10)
is available as an audiobook
amazon.com/Wanted-Ell-Donsaii-story-1...
Hope you like it!
--
Laury
Wag more, bark less...
I’m not an engineer, but why think so much Tech. Use the KISS principle. You don’t need to build a space elevator you already have one. Earth has two Oceans, one water the other air. Both can be traveled by using buoyancy, that almost ignores gravity. Making large Lifters out of the lightest stade and pumps to remove the air. Simply remove enough air weight to match the object you want to lift. Then you could float it to the top of Earths air. No booster rocket needed. Maneuvering rockets will be needed to kick the payload into orbit.More KISS principle. Why build space stations in orbit. Build them on Earth out of stade and lift the whole thing using buoyancy and kick it into orbit with a maneuvering rocket. Picture a doughnut shape station with a small diameter, say the length of a football field. The inter surface of the outer wall designed as the floor. Lift the whole thing into orbit and rotate the station, Wala, you got gravity!
Jon
Jon wrote: "I’m not an engineer, but why think so much Tech. Use the KISS principle. You don’t need to build a space elevator you already have one. Earth has two Oceans, one water the other air. Both can be tr..."Jon,
Those are good thoughts. I love it when readers really get into the technical aspect, so, thanks!
Two problems, the highest a helium balloon has ever taken a person is 41 kilometers. Just carrying the balloon itself, the highest would be 53 km, both quite a ways below the 100 km "edge of space." Vacuum stade, of course, should go higher (because it could be lighter than helium but helium is already very light - 0.002 grams per cc), but if you add the weight of the fuel to "kick your payload into orbit", you're going to have a big problem because fuel is heavy and to maintain a "low earth orbit" requires that your satellite be moving at 6.9-7.8 km/second (>15,434 miles per hour). Accelerating your payload to that speed takes a lot of fuel (not as much as launching it from the ground, but still a lot more than buoyancy could lift until you made a truly ginormous vacuum balloon and even your ginormous balloon wouldn't get close to space altitudes carrying a lot of weight).
Building rotating donut shaped space stations in orbit would be made a lot easier by the fact that you could staze vacuum while you're up there and wouldn't have to lift any materials except your mold up there - and the mold could be mylar balloon segments that you inflated with a tiny bit of air.
All interesting stuff for the next books, so thanks for stimulating thought!
Laury Dahners
In Radiation Hazard you note that Staze would make a lousy control rod but it's ability to reflect all radiation makes using it to contain fuel extremely valuable since the reflected neutrons means that smaller quantities of nuclear fuel can be used to create and sustain reactions as the radiation is not lost but concentrated. But as it also should provide the perfect containment vessel for fusion by removing the need for expensive and power hungry magnetic confinement the need to use it in fission would be obsoleted anyway.
Edit: LOL - Got to the Epilogue - Yep: Fusion.