Alastair Mayer's T-Space

I’ve been prepping my space horror story “Poetic Justice” for Kindle, Nook and other ebook readers or reader software (like Kindle for PC).

You may remember this as the lead story in the Full Throttle Space Tales volume Space Horrors (edited by David Lee Summers) which came out last year shortly before Halloween. That book is still available if you want hardcopy, and contains many other fine stories besides. (Although I will likely be submitting “Poetic Justice” to Anthology Builder soon, too.)

I will be making some other changes to what’s already available. I think I will drop “Light Conversation” as a stand-alone (it’s only 1000 words — two pages in Analog) and include it in a collection, although I may offer it as a free sample from time to time. I’ll probably do the same thing with “Poetic Justice” (another short-short). I’ll keep you posted.

No, nothing to do with Rocky Horror, sorry “Time Warp” fans. It seems that colliding black holes can severely warp space and time too, according to this article at Astrobiology Magazine. . The warped space vortex and tendex lines (read the paper referenced in the linked article) spiral out from the hole.

This is interesting enough in its own right (if you’re into that sort of thing), but it touches on something I’ve been pondering in my T-space universe: what happens if a ship in a warp bubble flies into a black hole? There’d be some similar effects, the edge of a warp bubble is highly curved space, like a black hole. Perhaps if you do it right, and the wormhole is rotating, you can create a “closed time-like curve”, i.e., travel in time. (Loosely based on the theory Tipler proposed in his paper “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation” — see also Larry Niven’s story of the same name.) It’s an idea I’ve been toying with for some stories. Guess I’d better start writing them.

Image credit: The Caltech/Cornell SXS Collaboration

I finally bought myself a real Kindle. I’ve been using Kindle-for-PC software on my laptop for about a year, but the actual device is much more portable. Also, I want to be able to see how my e-books and e-stories look on the actual device. (I’ll get a Nook, too, at some point. Meanwhile there’s a Nook reader for PC.)

How do I like it so far? Great, with some reservations. I bought the wi-fi only model, because (a) I’m cheap (the Kindle 3 with built-in G3 wireless access is $50 extra) and (b) having truly instant access to Amazon’s Kindle store is a little too tempting for me. (But not for you; of course you want instant access to buy any (all) of my e-books). Public wi-fi access isn’t quite as ubiquitous as one might hope, but then I don’t really need to be download while driving. Most coffee shops and fast-food places have wi-fi these days, so it isn’t really a problem. The included web browser (in the latest software) takes some getting used to — a gray-scale image, and no mouse or touchscreen means you have to move the cursor around with the “5-way” pointer key — but I could easily read my favorite blog sites.

The built-in text-to-speech software can read your e-books to you, if the publisher has activated that feature (I do with all of my books/stories). It sounds rather robotic, and occasionally messes up pronunciation, but it’s great, especially for non-fiction where dramatic reading and voice inflection isn’t so important. However, it doesn’t handle section headings or bullet-lists well. If the heading or list item doesn’t have a comma or period at the end, the Kindle software just keeps reading without taking a virtual breath, which can be a bit disconcerting.

These pronunciation issues are probably easily fixed with some tweaks to the text-to-speech algorithms. On the other hand, Amazon earlier had a dispute authors and publishers who (with some justification) claimed that this infringed on the audio performance rights. The current state seems a happy medium between providing for the visually impaired (as does the Kindle’s adjustable font size) and the improved quality of performance that a human reader could provide. (Amazon also provides for publishers to opt in or out of enabling text-to-speech when the Kindle version is prepared.)

For the tinkerers among you, the Kindle is easily “rooted”. Dropping the right files into the Kindle when it’s attached to a computer (via its USB cable) will update the OS to allow access to the Linux-based operating system using that same USB cable as a network connection. Mind, if you don’t know what you’re doing you could really mess up your reader that way. Details can be found at www.mobileread.com and looking for “usbnetwork” and “jailbreak”. Consider those vague instructions as the equivalent of a childproof-cap; if you can’t find it from that, you probably shouldn’t be messing with trying to root your Kindle.

I’ll always have a soft spot for paper copies of books, but I find I’m using my Kindle more and more.

It was fifty years ago today,
Major Yuri taught man how to play,
We’ve been going up and down for a while,
And it’s guaranteed to raise a smile…

Okay, Lennon & McCartney I am not, and Major Yuri Gagarin was no Sergeant Pepper. But on April 12, 1961, the USSR launched Yuri Gagarin to become the first person in space and the first person to orbit the Earth — a feat that the US, in the person of John Glenn, would not duplicate until February 20, 1962. (The US did launch two manned but sub-orbital flights before that, Shepard on May 5, 1961 and Grissom on July 21, 1961.)

It kicked the Space Race into high gear. President Kennedy would make his “before this decade is out” speech on May 25, three weeks after Shepard’s flight. (His “we choose to go to the Moon…not because it is easy, but because it is hard” speech came later, and we seem to have lost much of that spirit.)

A lot has happened in that fifty years. We sent men around the Moon less than eight years later, landing them on there just eight years, three months and eight days after Gagarin’s flight. (Question: does anyone here realistically think we could land men on the Moon eight years from today? Granted, the Apollo program (in different form) was already on the books back then, but we still had to invent most of the technology.)

On the upside, we’ve had people living and working in orbit almost continuously since the early 1980s, with Salyut 7, then Mir, and then ISS. Recently SpaceX, a private space company, successfully demonstrated a space capsule (Dragon) far superior to Gagarin’s Vostok or Glenn’s (and Shepard’s) Mercury, more the equivalent of a souped-up Apollo Command Module or Salyut. It was an unmanned flight, but it was pressurized (and, in an irreverent tribute to Monty Python, contained a wheel of cheese as the “passenger”) and survived reentry.

Could we get back to the Moon in eight years? Maybe, if somebody offered the contract to SpaceX, or perhaps China.

RETRO
My friend and fellow author Brad Torgersen is putting together an anthology of original stories, RETRO, themed around different directions the space program could have taken if things had gone a little differently. Russia on the Moon first? Mars by the 1980s? A base on the Moon? I’m contributing both a story and a non-fiction article, and I’m looking forward to reading what the other invitees come up with. Stay tuned for a announcement of the, ahem, launch date.

I trust everyone survived April Fools Day? Personally I think it’s getting a little out of hand, you can’t trust anything you read on the web on April first. Okay, I’ll grant you that could also be said of just about every other day of the year, but still.

Anyway, it’s no joke that the June issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact is now on the news stands. The next (July/August) issue goes on sale May 10, so you have until then to buy a copy if you want to read “Stone Age”.

The latest (June, 2011) issue of Analog just arrived and it includes my story “Stone Age,” my first Analog story that’s not a Probability Zero flash piece. Not that I have anything against PZ of course. They’re great fun (and a challenge!) to write as well as to read. But the length “Stone Age” gives me a chance to set up some real character and world building. It stands on its own (else Stan Schmidt wouldn’t have bought it), but in a slightly different form it kicks off my novel (pending publication) The Chara Talisman.

If you’re not a subscriber, the June issue of Analog should be on the stands around April 5th. (See the cover image over there on the right.) It’s also available electronically for Nook and Kindle. I’d be interested to hear what you think, good or bad.

I recently discovered Anthology Builder (www.anthologybuilder.com), a website and business which started with a brilliant idea, one which remains so even in these uncertain times for traditional publishing (perhaps especially now).

It comprises a vast and growing repository of short stories in various genres by many authors (both classic and contemporary). You build your own custom anthology by selecting the stories, selecting a cover, and then customizing (if you want) with an intro. Through the magic of Print-On-Demand (POD), you’ll have a printed and bound copy of that anthology delivered to you for no more than the cost of a traditional trade (large size) paperback. The authors whose stories are in the anthology then each get a cut of the sale price.

Quality of the stories is high: all have been previously published in professionally edited, paying venues, and are reviewed before being accepted into the Anthology Builder repository. (Disclosure: I have stories available for sale via Anthology Builder, but only because I think it’s a cool idea and it’s a good outfit to work with.)

Check them out.

At a reader’s request, I’ve added a bibliography page (link in the banner above). This lists most of my published work (the exceptions are old, irrelevant, and non-fiction) and I’ll keep it updated. The next update will be soon; there are projects in the works that I can’t announce yet, but one involves several rising stars in the SF world.

It has been a crazy two weeks since my last post. When I posted that I had just gotten over what was “probably flu”, several days of fever and sleeping 20 hours a day. I had tax paperwork to catch up on and a couple of job interviews scheduled for the following week. So what happens Monday? I start the uncontrollable shivering and rapid temperature rise that began my earlier round of ‘flu. I was not happy, for multiple reasons.

As my temperature hit 104F my doctor directed me to the hospital emergency room, where they started pumping me full of fluids and ran a CT scan of my lungs. The (again, somewhat uncertain) diagnosis was pneumonia, with some other test results that were just odd enough that they wanted to keep an eye on me, so they checked me in for observation. So much for the job interview Tuesday, and — since they kept me in two nights — the other one on Wednesday. Fortunately both parties were understanding about rescheduling. Of course by Tuesday morning (thanks to IV fluids and antibiotics) I felt fine, but they didn’t want to send me home just then.

As it turned out, Tuesday’s interview — rescheduled to Thursday — went just fine. So well, in fact, that they called me late that afternoon with an offer and wanting me to start the following Monday.
This past week, then, has been my first week on the new job (Unix/Linux systems admin). Of course it’s hurry up and wait — I had to go through mandatory security training (again – we had to do it annually at H-P), fill out the usual ton of paperwork that goes with a new job, and wait for my background check to clear before they could give me access to the systems. All of which took most of the week. On top of all that, it was a busy extracurricular week for the kids: orchestra concert, high school sneak peak (Arthur and Robert start next year), school book fair, karate, and Girl Scouts. So here it is, two weeks later.

There’s been some interesting stuff happening. A couple of physicists show that wormholes could connect pairs of stars (I’m reminded of Pournelle’s “tramlines”), the Indian lunar probe Chandrayaan-1 has discovered a mile-long lava tube cave on the Moon, and I got a nice non-rejection for a story that may yet turn into a sale.

But more about that in a few days. In the meantime a reader has made some excellent suggestions for additions to this site, which I need to get working on.

Sorry about the delay between posts — I was wiped out for most of a week with the flu. Fortunately the only symptoms were high fever and extreme fatigue (to the point of sleeping 20+ hours a day), but it pretty much precluded me from doing anything else. Except perhaps dreaming a few weird fever-dreams, which may be where the rest of this post came from…

In elementary school, at least in the three English-speaking countries I’ve lived in, we’re taught that the vowels are “A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y”. That’s drummed into us. Y has only second-, maybe even third-class status as a vowel. It’s not a real vowel. But, why the frack not?

Recently I used the word “syzygy” — it’s an astronomy term meaning that three or more bodies are in a line, like the Sun, Earth and Moon when the latter is new or full — in a discussion about the effect of multiple moons on tides. There aren’t many other places to use a word like that – even Scrabble doesn’t have enough Y tiles, you’d have to use a wild card. But look at the word: S Y Z Y G Y. By the strange classification of the letter Y as only “sometimes” a vowel, that word only sometimes has vowels in it.

Technically that’s not correct, of course, all the Y’s in syzygy are all vowel all the time. The vowel-ness of the letter is like the alive/dead-ness of Schroedinger’s cat; in the abstract it is neither a live vowel nor a dead consonant, it is only until it is observed in a word that the wave function collapses and it resolves to one or the other.

Or such, it would seem, is the thinking of whoever came up with the “and sometimes Y” in the list of vowels, and all those who believe and teach this particular dogma.

But, just at the moment, with probably neither enough sleep or caffeine in the wake of my Schroedinger’s-cat-like flu-induced zombie state, I’m having difficulty thinking of a word in which Y is ever unarguably not a vowel. So why the second- (or third-) class status?

(And don’t get me started on W. It should be twice the vowel that U is. But perhaps there’s some Welsh in me.)