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Heroes In Uniform Boxed Set
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Len
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Jun 13, 2015 12:43PM
The Unnamed Sword, my present day/Camelot novel, should be out by the end of July. It has romance, good and bad dragons and horrific Hydras. And, it has a frustrated man-at-arms who can't save the day unless and until he learns the name of his sword.
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My air-rescue drama "Roses in the Snow" (sequel to "Higher Than an Eagle") should be out some time next year. The characters include many contemporary heroes, including rescue divers, ski patrollers, medics, and a very cute rescue pilot. :-) BTW, "Heroes in Uniform" sounds like a good read to me -- "The Unnamed Sword", though, sounds stereotypical and unoriginal.
Of course, it is. That's why it acquired a Goodreads reading public in 2012, years after I brought it out in 2004. Out of the blue, royalty checks of $30 to $50 arrived from iUniverse. I had no idea why. It was only when I accessed Amazon that I found that Sword had a reading public and five of them had given it decent reviews. Currently, one of the reviews is still available on Amazon.By the way, I dumped iUniverse when they said they wanted to market it as a movie in Hollywood and asked for $10,000. Naturally, I said no. I had visions of two gropers renting a Bentley and two babes and doing Rodeo Drive on my dime.
What's coming out in two weeks is a cleaned up and improved Sword.
A couple of points on a separate issue: none of the stars in the Alpha Centauri solar system is anything but main sequence. There may not be as many planets orbiting the three stars as was thought earlier, but two have been detected as of March, this year. There now appears to be a Bc to go with Bb. Alpha Centauri continues to be one of the strongest candidates for organic life and civilization.
There really is no reason to argue. The facts we need are at our finger tips.
Sorry, both Bc and Bb are lava worlds and completely uninhabitable.
That's not the point. Both happen to be small rocky planets and when the first planets detected in a solar system are small and rocky, they tend to be accompanied by swarms of other small rocky planets. If you read the article carefully, you will see that those searching for living planets are encouraged by the detection of Bc. If there's two, there will be more.The Astronomy establishment has much to answer for. If you want to read something interesting, there are numerous articles about the paper war between the Establishment and Perceval Lowell. Lowell was an interesting individual. Wealthy and connected, he became enraptured by Giovanni Schaparelli's description of "canal" on Mars. To Lowell, "canali" meant civilization on Mars and he set out promoting the idea. He was wildly successful, especially at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and at the St. Louis exposition in 2004. America had another frontier to conquer.
The astronomy establishment was not amused. The letter war began. When in 1910, Lowell began promoting the idea of "Planet X", the establishment blew a gasket. They refused to believe anything he said. As a group, they breathed a sigh of relief when Lowell died in 1916. He was gone and so were his ideas.
Out of the blue in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh used Lowell's 40 inch telescope to find Planet X, better known as Pluto. The American public cheered Tombaugh as a hero and Disney named Mickey Mouse's dog Pluto. The astronomy establishment had apoplexy and they resolved to refute any and all notions of planets, especially living ones, beyond our solar system.
In retrospect, the astronomy establishment became a pack of idiots. One could say that technology wasn't ready to detect planets but that was disproven in 2010 when an amateur astronomer detected a planet with his home telescope using the transit method and patience.
The instance when a doctoral candidate got his degree in the 1980's by claiming there were no planets beyond our solar system and offering as proof that none had ever been detected shows how arrogant and idiotic the establishment had become. In the matter of planets beyond the solar system, they really resembled the Vatican that for 400 years rejected Copernicus view that the sun was the center of the solar system.
If you don't believe me, read up on Lowell, his Planet X, and the aftermath. It's all there at your finger tips.
In this case, Lowell was to blame -- he took a completely unproven hypothesis about the canals and spun it into a full-blown fairytale which we now know is COMPLETELY false, so he was the one who blew his own credibility! And after his unwitting deception of pretty much the whole world, it's only logical that the other astronomers would be extra cautious in making bold claims regarding other planets, don't you think?Oh, BTW: Pluto is technically not considered a planet, but a "dwarf planet", and there are zillions more in the same area -- Pluto just happens to be the most easily observable.
Not only do we now know that Mars isn't Lowell's new frontier didn't exist. We also know now that Lowell was dead right about Planet X. The Astronomy establishment backed themselves into a foolish corner. Denying Planet X led them to denying the existence of life and civilization elsewhere, and mocking and bullying anyone who thought otherwise, I met a woman from Poland who was part of a team that claimed they had detected a planet orbiting a main sequence star and found themselves rudely rejected. The team were treated so badly that she left Poland with no intention of ever returning to her first love, astronomy. There were others.
And, of course, since the Establishment refused to allow anyone to think about planets elsewhere, the military was politically unable to say what they really believed about UFO's: that they were real.
What the Establishment did was delay any Human response to the UFO situation by 70 years. By ten years from now, we will have a much better idea of what that delay cost us. I think we'll survive the experience, but it might only be by the skin of our teeth.
The REAL reason the military was not allowed to say that flying saucers are real is because this is classified information -- and that, in turn, is because many of these flying saucers (like the SR-71, the F-117, the B-2, etc.) are in active military service, and others are still in prototype stage! And why, may I ask, would the UFO situation "cost us" -- unless, of course, these are Chinese or Iranian UFOs bent on attacking us, and we somehow don't have our own UFOs to shoot them down (which in fact we do)?
Whatever... Didn't that flying saucer at Roswell turn out to be nothing more than a weather balloon?
