While I don’t normally discuss politics in this blog, the politics of the world are impinging on me and my writing very directly. Specifically, the current trade war the United States is waging against Canada. And I’m Canadian, and proud of it, and anyone who is a threat to my…
Leave a CommentIn a project I’m working on, I’m looking at what the characters imprisoned in a space habitat can do with old technology. That habitat is a Prisoner of War camp. Their captors don’t want them have weapons. Picky, picky. Said captors have blasters, high-tech energy weapons. Our heroes need an…
Leave a CommentBelated holiday greetings to all. I’ve neglected this blog for a while, but I’m back. New Years Resolutions, and all that. The cultural shift from over population being the doom to under-population being the problem is slowly but surely gaining traction. In the 70’s and 80’s the fashionable doom was…
Leave a CommentIn writing, world building is a very necessary preliminary to the actual telling of the story. The characters need a stage and scenery where they can play their parts. Especially in science fiction, it is common for the writer to apply the Rule of Cool. Things are done this way…
Leave a CommentMost of my ancestors were Irish. A lot of them saw that sign when they hit the streets of the New World looking for work. I subscribe to the Authors Publish regular email, which is a very valuable source of publishers and publishing opportunities. Obviously, not all of them are…
Leave a CommentConflict is, of course the backbone of fiction, so I’m always on the lookout for new sources of it. Recently I was reading “The Code Breaker” by Walter Isaacson, the biography of Jennifer Doudna, one of the key players in the discovery of CRISPR, the biological tool by which we…
Leave a CommentI’m writing this as I wait for the launch of Starship IFT-4. I watched the launch of the Boeing Starliner yesterday, and today there is another launch, and here we have a stark contrast between the old paradigm and the new. The Starliner was four years late and the launch…
Leave a CommentThe Great Silence, the lack of any evidence of alien races in other star systems, has spawned many hypotheses as to why this might be so, with some of them being on the paranoid side. I’m not going to enumerate them here. You can check out Isaac Arthur’s SFIA channel…
Leave a CommentTrust and control are key issues in pretty well every situation involving the interaction of human beings, be they real-world or fictional. They are also sources of conflict. Control is imposed, trust is granted. These threads run through almost every human interaction at some level, and how a scene, or…
Leave a CommentI’ve just watched the launch of the SpaceX Starship, cheering like any sports fan at the big game of his favourite team. The fight for the future goes on, between the old paradigm of government controlled space agencies and the new one of private companies who are in it for…
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