I'm not quite sure what I'm doing with this column yet. Here are a couple of books I've had papers published in.
Disclaimer
NB This site is not affiliated in any way with Jim Baen's Universe, but I do recommend that you visit it.
Books mentioned
Pyramid Scheme, by Dave Freer and Eric Flint
If you buy books through the Amazon links on these pages, I get a tiny percentage. That helps pay for the site and justify my time spent on it. Thanks.
I'm trying to strike a balance with these links, informative without being obnoxious. If you have an opinion one way or the other, please let me know.
Welcome
Okay, I'll admit that "Alastair Mayer's Universe" may sound a bit presumptuous. First, there's no way to fit an entire universe on a web site (well, unless it was very small), and second, why would you care about my universe? Okay, so scratch "universe" and substitute "playground". What's here is a mix of stuff about the real universe we all share (so it's mine as in "my country" or "my planet"), as well as stories, snippets and background from the universe(s) I write about. For aspiring writers, there's discussion and links to some of the things I've learned or found useful along the way. Come on in.
This page started as a placeholder, with some links to older stuff from an earlier site. It's starting to come together now. Please bear with me during the transition.
NEWS
News items of interest.
8 March 2008:Experiment over
Well, that was interesting. A few days ago I took off the "turing test" from my comments page -- it's something a lot of websites have to filter out automated spambots without requiring everyone to register. I removed it to see if it was the reason for the low volume of comments I've received to date (although I suspected it was just the newness of the site, hardly anyone has heard of it yet, and there's not a lot of content here yet.) Well, I did get a lot more comments -- all of them spam. Everything from just one-line URLs to huge lists of non-sequitor phrases. Sigh. I've put the test back in a somewhat simpler form. Meanwhile I'm looking at Wordpress and some other blogsite software, which already has mechanisms for this (including registration, etc) built-in.
18 Feb 2008:Essays
The Chocolate Fusion essay is up. Well, more a piece of flash fiction with a couple of paragraphs of context.
9 Feb 2008:Mars
Speaking of Mars and the Great Martian Novel (see the item below), I've just posted an essay that talks a bit about how Jim Baen got me started on that, and where it's at now.
8 Feb 2008:Feedback Page is Up
Visitors can now post feedback to this site here, or use the "Post Comment" link in the header. I don't have the site yet set up to automatically post those comments back to a public page -- I'm working on that -- but they are logged and I'll read them. I'm looking into software (possibly WordPress) to automate all this, please bear with me in the meantime. Thanks.
6 Feb 2008:Mars in 3D
| Astrobiology Magazine reports that high resolution 3D Mars maps are now available thanks to data from the Mars Express Hi Res Stereo Camera (HRSC). This data has already been used to produce some wonderful topographic maps (click image for better view). If I ever get back to working on my Great Martian Novel (about building the Aresian Well), these will come in handy. | 
|
COSine
I'm off to the COSine science fiction convention in Colorado Springs this weekend. Mike Resnick is the Guest of Honor, and I expect the usual crowd of Colorado F&SF authors will be there, weather and schedules permitting. It's a small con, but fun.
Later this year (a couple of weeks before the Democratic National Convention), Colorado will be hosting WorldCon at Denvention 3, and in October the 40th annual MileHiCon (in the Denver Tech Center).
COMPUTERS/SOFTWARE
Computers are a source of endless fascination for me, to say nothing of most of my income. Some papers and articles I've had published are here. The software I've developed I'll leave for elsewhere; most of it's getting pretty crufty by now anyway.
SPACE
Another big interest of mine is space exploration and development, I was even a candidate for the Canadian Astronaut Program at one time, although my interests are a little further out than what NASA has been doing. Like Lunar colonization, and building some serious megaprojects on Mars. Here are some papers I've had published on those subjects.
WRITING
The first science fiction story I wrote was I think in second grade,
something about a spaceman landing on a planet in the "pink with purple spots universe"
and being chased by a critter with a hundred arms and legs, ultimately escaping because
said critter tripped over its own feet. I think my work has improved since then.
I've sold articles to Byte Magazine and to Final Frontier, both alas now defunct in paper form.
I've also had papers published in various conference proceedings and academic journals,
some of which are mentioned on the Papers page.
As for the numerous design documents, specifications, and in-house software manuals I've written
or worked on, well, that's not my favorite kind of writing.
The Venaticorum Artifact is a novel I'm in final edit on. The working title was originally "Pyramid Scheme" but Dave Freer and Eric Flint already have an
SF novel
out with that title. Not that titles can't be reused, but I don't want to confuse things,
and if I sell it to Baen (whom I had in mind while writing it), they'd change the title anyway.
An exoarchaeologist working on a dig gets bushwhacked by artifact smugglers.
An undercover agent of the Homeworld Security Agency is murdered, but manages to
pass on a sketch of an alien artifact the terrorist cell he was infiltrating has
hold of.
That artifact is the key to an ancient spacefarer trove, possibly an arsenal.
The exoarchaeologist thinks he's seen something like that before.
Okay, the blurb needs work. I have several other stories in the works, including how a young British soldier in the Boer War and Nikola Tesla team up to turn H.G. Wells's Martians' weapons against them; and the secret Apollo 18 mission to recover Soviet technology (and perhaps something else) from the Moon.
(How do you keep a Saturn V launch secret? Ask David Copperfield...or wait for the book.)
PERSONAL
You want a bio? Pictures of the wife (Jill) and kids (three,
including twin boys)? Perhaps real soon now.
Capsule version: Born in London, England just after the Killer Smog of '52, moved
with my family to Toronto, Canada on my seventh birthday.
Took typing in high school, served in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves in
the Signal Corps where they taught me teletype, and learned to operate a keypunch
to encode tax returns for Revenue Canada.
(Do I know my way around a QWERTY keyboard or what?)
Switched my major from Life Sciences (call it pre-med, I was thinking of going into
medicine) to Computer Science in third year at college, worked a number of computer-
related jobs including stints on staff at two universities. Moved to Denver Colorado
to marry Jill in 1989. I've also worked as a chef's assistant, in a print shop, as a
farm hand, and on a couple of commercial dive jobs.
Somewhere along the way I found time to go skydiving a few times, SCUBA diving a few
hundred times (including under ice, in caves, at night, and on shipwrecks, including
the ocean liner Empress of Ireland), earn my private pilot's license, and take
archery and fencing lessons. I've visited every continent except Antarctica, although
the stop in Africa was just a couple of hours in Cairo airport, and never left Leningrad (it changed
its name back to St. Petersburg while I was there.)
I won't explain here just why, but Larry Niven signed my copy of his Neutron Star
with the inscription "for Al Mayer, for saving civilization".