Because Not Everyone Can Get To Cons

I did a mini-reading from Araña and recorded it.

There you go - if you're interested in my work but don't live in this area and/or can't afford to go to the cons I'm at.

It's just a teaser, but...

The Saga "Ends" - Reactions to Rise of Skywalker

Okay, so, first of all? I liked it.

I liked it.

But I understand why some people didn't, because oh my gods the fanservice.

I liked the overall storyline. I liked the bickering between Finn and Poe. Everything else is spoilers, so I'm going to, ya know...blank line some here.

Is Betelgeuse About to go "Kaboom"?

You may or may not have noticed there's something a bit off about Orion lately.

His shoulder's missing.

Betelgeuse, otherwise known as Alpha Orionis, has dimmed dramatically of late. Now, Betelgeuse is a variable star - not entirely stable, the star's brightness does differ over time. However, we've never seen it drop by a full magnitude over the space of no more than two months. Most likely, Betelgeuse will spring back to life in a few weeks...

...but there's also an outside chance the red giant is about to go supernova. The star has the right level and kind of mass to explode, and scientists know it will at some point...but it could be thousands of years in the future.

Or it could already have happened – Betelgeuse is 640 light years away, so we're seeing the star as it was a few hundred years ago.

So, what happens if Betelgeuse becomes a supernova?

The star will become, for a while, a hundred times brighter than Venus, easily visible in the daytime if you know where to look.

We'll be close enough to get some interesting data about supernovae, but far enough away that any gamma ray burst from Betelgeuse won't reach us (the estimate for that is about 50 light years).

Mostly, we'll just get to say we actually saw a supernova. And that will be cool...but unlikely. More likely, Betelgeuse will return to "normal" soon enough...

Happy Holidays

This blog is going to go dark from tomorrow until December 27.

In the meantime, a couple of updates.

The first draft of The Secret History of Victor Prince is now finished and on the shelf to "rest," as it were.

When I get back I plan on pulling out a secondary world fantasy I wrote a few years ago, polishing it off, and sending it to betas.

(If there are any writers who would like to do a beta trade on a secondary world fantasy that involves dragons, a pretty non-traditional world, and a very lesbian MC...please let me know).

Planet Hunting

The CHEOPS satellite was successfully launched (after they had to reboot the entire mission due to a software error).

The satellite will focus on systems where we have already located exoplanets with a focus on large exoplanets (gas giants). The idea will be to determine more about them, especially their density.

The satellite has now made contact with its ground station in Antarctica.

Which is called Troll.

What Scandinavian named this?

She Dropped Her Gum...

...and as a result we know what she looked like.

Nicknamed, "Lola," the woman lived about 5,700 years ago in what is now Denmark. They were able to sequence her genome from birch pitch, which she may have been chewing to prepare for use in making tools...or she may just have been chewing gum.

She was of eastern European, not Scandinavian ancestry, likely indicating that people were moving around a fair bit.

And she looked like this:

You can see what she, well, isn't. (The gene for fair skin was around in Europe at the time but had not yet become dominant, and didn't until after we made the full transition to agriculture. The likely reason: A diet with less vitamin D in it).

She's shown with a duck, probably her dinner, hazelnuts, and a fish trap. We don't know anything about her, but we know that face. It's the face of one of our ancestors.

Who dropped her chewing gum.

(Picture source: Gizmodo)

RIP Rene Auberjonois

This one's late because of the launch.

René Auberjonois was, of course, best known as our very own Odo (to the point where I can't quite envision his face without the makeup). he was also Peter Mulcahy in the MASH movie, Hugo Miller in Warehouse 13 (I miss that show so much) and Paul Lewiston in the hilarious Boston Legal. He also did a lot of voice work and had a gorgeous singing voice.

Auberjonois had a long career across a variety of genres, and I don't have time to list everything. He will definitely be missed.

Araña Countdown Post: It's Tomorrow!

Official launch is tomorrow! I'll be posting links to my website possibly as soon as right after midnight EST (depending on how tired I am).

Free Netgalley e-ARCs (uncorrected proofs) will continue to be available until December 31. If you take one and write a review, please follow the instructions here to share your review on retail sites. As usual, the book may not show up on Apple or Barnes & Noble for a couple of weeks. Remember that reviews are one of the most important ways you can both support authors and help out your fellow readers.

I'll be answering questions about the book on my Facebook page tomorrow evening.

The first opportunity to get physical, signed copies from me will be Farpoint Convention at the Book Fair on Friday night. If you can't be there on Friday, just corner me at the con and I'll find you a copy.

Araña Countdown Post: The Light Barrier

FTL is one of those things which is acceptable even in fully hard science fiction, because our stories don't work without it.

So, what are our chances of cracking it in reality, by the laws of our presumably non-fictional universe (presumably, because we can't actually prove we aren't all living in a computer simulation...)?

The very short answer is: Probably not.

The longer answer is, well...we don't actually know yet. The more we learn, the more the loopholes (wormholes?) seem to close.

The big problem with faster-than-light is that as you approach it, you need ever more energy to increase speed. Theoretically, going faster than light speed (a bit under 300,000km/s in a vacuum) requires infinite energy.

The most promising idea is the Alcubierre warp drive, which works pretty much...like the warp drive in Star Trek. It creates a space-time bubble that squashes in front of the spacecraft to pull it, and then one which expands behind. The problem is that to start the process you would need to...

...convert the entire mass of Jupiter into energy. Maybe if we had a dyson sphere...

And then you would have to keep producing that much energy. In other words, the warp drive is not impossible, merely impractical.

There's also the possibility of wormholes, but they just aren't big enough to drive a spaceship through. We have no idea what it would take to build a stargate (a controlled wormhole large enough to fly through).

The system I use in Araña is even less likely, but more fun. The idea of crossing into a layer of space in which the light speed barrier is higher and then back is pure science fiction. I mean, it's what they use in Star Wars, which probably crosses the line into fantasy.

But it's the only trick that allows for some of the events in the plot to happen. Sometimes the science just has to bow to the plot...

Araña Countdown Post: Starships and Probes

So, space exploration.

In reality, it's mostly done by robots. But that's no fun, so in fiction we tend to have starships. Will we?

It's an open question. We have yet to send a true interstellar probe. The Voyagers have entered interstellar space, but it took them a long time to get there and they certainly aren't expected to reach another solar system.

The Interstellar Probe concept mission has been presented to NASA, but it has a major downside: It will take at least 15 years to get to its planned distance of 200 AU. That's outside the solar system, but it's not...ya know.

Not actually going anywhere. The point of the mission would be to study the heliosphere, which doesn't work the way we thought it did. We have a much more solid bow wave than we thought, which may protect our solar system (and others) from higher levels of radiation in true interstellar space.

We're a long way from creating a probe that can go to Proxima Centauri, unless we crack FTL any time soon. Given FTL may or may not be possible...

But for science fiction, we want human exploration. In Transpecial and Araña, the complicated flow patterns in hyperspace are easier for an organic mind to handle than an AI, which makes human explorers more necessary. This is unlikely to actually be true (in fact, it's probably more likely that interstellar ships will be robots that fly themselves. Even the ones carrying humans). It's just a lot less fun that way.

I'll talk about FTL and possibilities tomorrow, but right now I'm still daydreaming of some drive that will get a probe to another system within my own lifespan. And I'm not getting any younger...

Araña Countdown Post: Heinlein

Ah, Heinlein.

I don't think I have a more ambiguous relationship with any writer, living or dead.

Robert Heinlein is one of the greats of our genre. He also couldn't write women to save his life and had some seriously strange ideas about sexuality (I'm not at all averse to healthy polyamory, but if you're a fan do I have to say more than "Wake her up the best way"?)

The Transpecial universe started with an unpublished and honestly not very good story entitled "The Veteran," which was written for (and soundly rejected by) a Heinlein tribute anthology. It was meant to engage with Starship Troopers. Because of that I made the main character Latino, like Johnny Rico.

That character eventually became José Marin, although most of the original story was ditched in the creation  of Araña (the ship was originally more of a colony ship with families on board).

So, there's a lot of influence of Heinlein here, but hopefully none of the creepy stuff ;).

Araña Countdown Post: Star Trek

I've been thinking a lot about my Star Trek influences this week, mostly because of the loss of D.C. Fontana.

Araña is, as the author's note (which is at the end) says, in conversation with Star Trek. Openly so. Characters refer to the show, it's in the ship's database. I made this as a conscious decision.

Star Trek is more than just 'that science fiction show,' it's part of our popular culture. Which means some of its tropes and assumptions are in our head. The Prime Directive, the way starships work. Araña engages with those tropes.

So I'm hoping it will appeal to Star Trek fans. And I'm hoping that it will in some ways touch on that milieu.

After all.

We all have that strong desire to go "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

Friday Update

Okay, so...not much news. (It's December, and pretty soon publishing kind of shuts down).

Araña is on track for a December 14 release, but if you want a copy early, have a NetGalley account and are willing to do a review, you can go here.

The book I'm currently drafting, The Secret History of Victor Prince is at 35,000 words. I'm aiming for somewhere between 75 and 80k. This is a prequel to the Lost Guardians series.

That's everything I can actually talk about for now.

Domestication

This article explains something I've long suspected.

The oldest domesticated animal is: Man.

Domestication syndrome is, in animals, a series of physical changes that are related to distinct changes in neural cell migration. These changes reduce fear and improve the desire to cooperate. For example, the first person to ride a horse was almost certainly also the first person to fall off a horse. Through breeding for these neural change migrations we bred horses who had enough of a desire to cooperate that they don't mind carrying us around. (With a few exceptions that generally end up working at rodeos).

Side effects of domestication syndrome include floppy ears (There are very few floppy eared horses due to the negative impact on their social lives and floppy ears in cats are associated with cartilage disorders), patched coats, and neoteny - childhood features surviving into adulthood.

By mapping the genes involved in domestication syndrome we've discovered that...yup. Modern humans have domestication syndrome.

We've domesticated ourselves.

We've selected for higher levels of cooperation, for reduced fear of the other (although not enough, yet). And the side effects appear to be things like smaller teeth, our lack of brow ridges, and both physical and mental neoteny.

Oh, and still being here, unlike the "wild" Neanderthals and Denosivans. (It was most likely our diseases, but did domestication play a role?).

Being domesticated allows us to live together in cities, it allows us to cooperate on huge projects from the pyramids to the space race to...what comes next.

So, it's not really a bad thing.

Not at all.

A Small Part of her Katra is in All of Us - R.I.P. D.C. Fontana, 1939-2019

The news broke yesterday after I posted. Dorothy Catherine "D.C." Fontana passed away after a "brief illness" on Monday night.

Fontana was part of what shaped Star Trek. This remarkable woman was trusted by Gene Roddenberry with something very important: The planet Vulcan.

Her worldbuilding and writing skills, combined with the brilliance of Leonard Nimoy, brought the character of Spock alive. She created the characters of Sarek and Amanda, she was the one who established why Spock is half-Vulcan.

Roddenberry first hired Fontana to work on The Lieutenant - as his secretary. She already had writing credits at this point. He invited her to write Charlie X, the second episode of Star Trek. This was when Spock started to "speak to" her.

She proceeded to write eleven episodes of the original series including "Journey to Babel," and "The Enterprise Incident." She also wrote one episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series. She wrote or cowrote five episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

She was the "story editor" for Logan's Run and also wrote episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, War of the Worlds, The Legend of Prince Valiant, Babylon 5, Captain Simian & The Space Monkeys, ReBoot, Earth: Final Conflict, Silver Surfer and Beast Wars: Transformers.

She worked as a lecturer. And she may have completed one last work we haven't seen. According to IMDB she was working on the pilot for a TV show based off of Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang. (This is somehow the first I've heard of its existence. I really hope she finished it and the show goes forward as one last piece of her legacy).

It's no exaggeration to say that without D.C. Fontana, Star Trek would not be the cultural phenomenon it is. She was a major part of what makes it more than just a TV show.

And if Star Trek was not what it was I would not be who I am. Not only has Star Trek...and most especially Fontana's work on the Vulcans and the way it inspired Diane Duane's work on the Romulans...been a major influence on my writing.

It's also how I met my husband.

I am not exaggerating when I say that without Dorothy Catherine Fontana I would never have met the man with whom I have spent more than twenty years and whom I call by the Romulan endearment "sahe."

I have never met her, but she had an impact on my life that many people I have met could not understand.

The correct words are, I believe, "I grieve with thee."

But the voice I can hear in my head says "Live long and prosper."

Asteroid Pool

The target has been finalized for the DART mission, which will be a test of concept to see if we can actually redirect an asteroid.

The method is simple: We're going to fly a robot into it.

The ESA has taken on the role of launching a probe, Hera, which will examine what the DART mission did, verify whether it worked, etc.

If this works we may have a plan to deflect the next citykiller (or planetkiller) before it hits Earth. Of course, we still have to track them all.

Farside Observatory

Those who know me know that one of the things I hope humanity builds at some point is an observatory on the far side of the moon.

The moon is tidally locked to Earth, meaning anything constructed on its far side has the bulk of the moon between it and our planet. This bulk blocks radio signals from Earth, making the lunar farside the perfect place for radio astronomy.

We now have our first radio observatory on the far side of the moon. As part of the Chang'e mission, the Netherlands-China Low Frequency Explorer (NCLE) will spend the lunar night sitting on the far side of the moon doing radio astronomy.

Obviously this is not the permanent facility I might envision as a science fiction writer, but it's a proof of concept that should give us useful science...and perhaps pave the way to such.

In Araña I called the first lunar farside settlement Chang'e City. Perhaps...