Apocalyptica: Book One of Ran

That's the cover for Apocalyptica, the first volume of what I intend to be my main series once I finish The Fall with book six. It's exclusive to Kindle and Kindle Unlimited, and it's the most fun I've ever had writing a book.

I don't want to spoil anything, but I do want to say a little something about it, the genesis of the book, and why I love it so much.

Before I wrote Victim Zero back in 2013, I had this idea for an end-of-the-world scenario where the lines between living and undead were much more blurry. In the middle of this situation was a woman. She came to my mind not fully formed, but I knew the broad outlines of her. I didn't have to construct her the way I have many of my other characters. I knew how she'd react and the sort of things she'd say, even if I didn't yet know the specifics.

Turns out her name was Ran Lawson, because she thinks her legal name, Randie, should be reserved for strippers.

Ran is the sort of leading lady I've always wanted to see in a post-apocalyptic novel but never run across. She has a Mysterious Past™ that gets explained throughout the course of the book. She's part pastiche and part homage to the many women in my life who have inspired me, from my friend Sarah's indomitably stubborn will, to my mom's brilliant ability to absorb and connect facts, to my wife Jessica's almost suicidal work ethic.

Ran is smart and flawed and funny and honestly a little weird. It even came as a surprise to me as I was writing her that she could be simultaneously outspoken and deeply insecure.

And with this series, named for her, I'm leaving behind the constraints of the genre. I'm exploring at least half a dozen ways the virus affects people, from creating your standard zombies to leaving people alive but fundamentally altered into something less (or more) than human. I've written a lot of survival stuff, and there will be elements of that. I've written a lot of fights and battles, and there will certainly be more of those.

But Ran will touch a lot of new territory for me. One book in the series will be a heist book, just one set with the zombie apocalypse as its background. Another will be a kidnap thriller. I'm leaving it as an open-ended series because the overall story, the larger arc, is Ran herself. I look forward to the freedom to expand on the many small things I've included in this first book as potential stories of their own. I've laced a lot them into the narrative to give them space to grow.

I hope you pick it up here, if you haven't already, and I hope you like it. If you do, leave a review and totally feel free to rave about it to your friends. Without your support, I don't have the privilege of doing this job.

I think you'll like it. In fact, I think if you've enjoyed Living With the Dead or The Fall, you'll love it to pieces.

Only one way to find out.

Why Space Matters, Part 2

Depending on who you ask, the Earth is either fine, potentially in trouble, probably in trouble, or definitely fucked.

This is why space really matters to us as a species. Let's pretend for a moment that climate change isn't a problem, though it absolutely is. There's a titanic volume of rigorously checked and repeatably provable evidence supporting it, but even if there weren't space would still be our best means of survival.

I don't mean in the next ten, fifty, or even a hundred years. I mean long-term. Centuries. Millennia.

Let's please remember that the Solar system, our happy little home, plays host to many asteroids. The Oort cloud, a collection of debris orbiting the Solar system itself, is the leftover material from its formation. Estimates indicate the matter there is at a minimum three times the mass of Earth, spread out over at least a trillion objects each more than a kilometer in diameter.

That's a lot of potential death. One interstellar object smashing into one orbiting piece of flotsam at just the right angle, and we could be facing an extinction-level event. Or a star goes supernova within the galactic neighborhood: the resulting gamma ray burst, if pointed at our planet, would scour all life from it in a blast of radiation.

These are but two ways our species could die. They're big, unlikely examples. But think of how obsessed we are with global pandemics, war, the slow erosion of the ecosystem. Earth is, for the moment, all we have. It's our only home.

Space can and should change that.

Colonizing beyond the borders of our atmosphere shouldn't be considered an extravagance, but a necessity. We have to bend ourselves into thinking in new ways. One interesting branch of technology Nasa and other space agencies and companies have long considered vital to this effort is in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU.

The idea is to design technologies that can take advantage of the raw materials encountered off of Earth for use in everything from solar cells to rocket fuel. SpaceX revolutionizing rocketry means serious efforts in this direction, and that's good. Because ISRU is how we'll build long-term colonies.

I know, I know, all of this sounds crazy and so far out of what we can manage now that it might as well be magic. But it really, really isn't. Along with being able to manufacture technology from junk we mine from asteroids or the surface of a planetary body, people have also been working on emerging technologies like vat-grown food, which would be a powerful solution to one of the larger problems for colonies.

Cost is always the concern, but the great irony in all of this is that with even a marginal increase in the investment we as a country (and we as a species) already put in, we could easily see huge advancements in very short periods of time. I should also clarify that these budding technologies, should they be given the nutrients they need to grow, wouldn't just be for space exploration. Imagine a world where a small indoor factory can produce several tons of edible, nutritious food without the need for months of growth and huge tracts of land. That's not even the tip of the iceberg, really, as much as just the top few molecules of its potential.

Science fiction has long predicted these things, and that's because science fiction has historically been pushed forward by men and women who were actual scientists and engineers. This stuff has been in the works for a long time, unfunded ideas tinkered with by people as educated as they are passionate.

We need to spread out. There's no way around it. Colonizing Mars, or the moon, or the moons of other planets--even floating cities in the Venusian atmosphere!--isn't something we could do, it's something we must do. In the long run, we have to leave this lovely rock to ensure the human race continues. To do that, we need to make investments right now.

If we don't, we're playing a long game of Russian roulette, and no one wins.

Why Space Matters, Part 1

I thought about titling this post Why Science Matters but that way is fraught with political landmines. It's not that I'm at all silent about my political philosophy or how I arrived at my core beliefs. I'm not, nor am I ashamed. The calculation involved in the way I view politics and policy is a simple one:

Does this belief or policy do good for the largest number of people?

Do research.

Make conclusion.

Yeah, we might differ on what qualifies as good, but at that basic a level of disagreement there's really no way to change a person's mind.

So instead of talking about why science matters--and it does, clearly, as human civilization to this point wouldn't exist without it--I'm going to move forward under the assumption you agree with that premise. If you don't, that's fine. You can stop reading. Avoiding politics here means I'm not interested in being convinced that the scientific method is invalid. Chances are pretty good that if you believe, say, that the world is 6,000 years old, you're probably not reading any more.

So. Onward.

Space matters. In ways as vast as space itself and as small and mundane as everyday concerns like wanting a comfortable mattress, it matters. My goal with this series of posts is to explain in my wandering, often tangential way exactly why this is true and why we as a society should value the technologies and investments needed to make space exploration of all kinds an integral part of our cultural psyche.

Space=Technology

One thing that never ceases to confound me is how, in one breath, people will praise the technological breakthroughs made by space programs while damning the idea of space exploration as a priority.

You can see some Nasa spinoff technologies on Wikipedia or Nasa's own website at these links, but the benefits span everything from the enrichment of baby food to chemical detection. The simple truth is that you don't work for Nasa or any space agency to get rich. You don't spend years learning mechanical engineering or astrophysics because it's going to make you a rock star. 

I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson aside. 

People get into space--even private space companies--because they love space. Or rockets. Maybe they have a lifelong jones for making some obscure mechanical process more efficient. I'm not judging. The point is that there is also a simple formula for near-certain breakthroughs across the entire spectrum of the scientific field.

Take a large group of passionate, educated nerds. 

Give them resources. 

Give them a problem. 

Wait. 

In fairness, this is less true in any of the biological sciences, since biology and medicine deal with much less predictable systems of much greater complexity. They take longer to have breakthroughs, but when they do, as Albus Dumbledore would say, they're correspondingly huger. 

If you need a good example of what I'm talking about, let's look at SpaceX, the private space exploration company founded by real-life Tony Stark/potential Bond villain Elon Musk. 

There are plenty of excellent resources out there where you can (and should) find everything you need to know about Musk and SpaceX, so I'll skip the details. 

Musk started his company after posing himself a question: why is space exploration so expensive? After doing some research and figuring out the math, Musk realized that the actual cost of the materials that make up a rocket capable of reaching orbit are about 2% of the total. That leaves a lot of room for making rockets more cost effective. Which is exactly what he did. 

Musk and company looked at rocket technology and, funded by Musk himself and some investors, decided to do something no one had really done since the 1960's: build their own damn rocket from the ground up. By doing this, they were able to utilize half a century of experience and practical data to create the most efficient booster in the world for a fraction of the cost ULA (United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed-Martin that has been mercilessly bilking Nasa for years) could manage. 

It should be noted here that ULA has been using Russian rocket engines made in the 1960's for their Nasa contracts. Not designed in the decade Kennedy was still alive, actually fucking manufactured in it. 

As a result of SpaceX being provided resources, they were given contracts that provided even more resources, which allowed SpaceX to do something that changed the world. 

They created a rocket that can land. 

Yeah, I know. Doesn't sound like too big a deal. But consider the cost of a Falcon 9 rocket, which is the workhorse of the SpaceX fleet: about 90 million dollars. That's about the cost of a jumbo jet. Imagine if jets could only go one flight, and were then scrapped. That's how space exploration has worked until now. 

With the advent of a booster that can land and be reused, the face of space exploration and as a consequence humanity's place in the solar system has changed forever. The cost of sending rockets into space will drop by staggering margins, allowing cheaper and cheaper flights. 

This means we'll have the ability to create large orbital structures in a cost-effective way for the first time. Space stations are within our grasp, as are larger spacecraft capable of exploring and exploiting the resources of the solar system. This is not an exaggeration or science fiction, but rather the critical point much science fiction has hinged on before possibly becoming science fact. 

Had Nasa been given the sort of funding they enjoyed during the space race in the 60's and 70's (wherein the exploration of space was a national contest with the Soviet Union, a sort of proxy war using scientific achievement as its ammunition), we'd have seen these advances long ago. 

Yes, if we had kept giving Nasa the budget it once had, commercial space travel would be so normal by now we'd all be bored of it. But the budget cuts over the years meant Nasa couldn't build its own rockets, which meant whatever advances were made at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (or anywhere inside the organization) were at best passed on to private third-party vendors like ULA, who were operating on contracts and looking to squeeze every penny or profit they could. 

Nasa could have been SpaceX. Would have been, if the money had been there. 

Even so, things are working out. We're on the edge of a boom in space travel. Successful demonstration of what we can accomplish with the increase in space travel brought on by the decrease in its cost will be vital to perpetuating the use of space as a resource for humankind. On the large scale, this will mean mining asteroids, dwarf planets, comets, even the gas giants. The things we could do with enough raw materials in orbit and the fuel (water, basically) we could collect from the solar system are almost endless. 

But that's not what this section is about. Just think of what sorts of technology we'll see as a consequence!

Right now we have dozens of spinoff technologies working for us every day. That's just from a space program that's public, severely underfunded, and only able to focus in very narrow directions. Think for a second about the possibilities we'll see once we as a society are looking down the barrel of mining asteroids or building a base on the moon. Those are both immensely difficult prospects, with countless problems that will need to be solved. 

The solving of them will produce technologies, both intentional and accidental, in numbers and variety we can scarcely imagine. That's totally ignoring what sorts of fantastic things we might learn to manufacture in microgravity. 

People complain about the expense of Nasa, and they say it's money down the drain. No return. 

Well, first of all: horseshit. Beyond the very real and very material return that is the growth of our understanding of the universe, physics, and a hundred other things, the technologies resulting from our investment in Nasa (and thus space) have a subtle but large economic benefit. Hell, the space program gave us memory foam, and you can't swing a dead cat in this country without it having its weight evenly distributed across some damn thing or another made of the stuff. 

Second of all: so what? Even if space exploration costs this country $18 billion dollars a year, which is less than Americans spend on pizza, and made zero money back, so what? The non-economic benefits are still hugely important. Space exploration and the attendant discoveries which come with it have vastly increased our understanding of physics to the point where we have things like GPS and tons of other non-commercial benefits. 

Now we've covered the basics on why space exploration isn't an economic waste of time, which has hopefully created some nice squishy feelings toward the idea of paying for rockets, or increased them if you already had them. 

Which is good, because next time I'm going to explain why having a positive attitude toward space is the only way humanity can survive in the long term. 

See you then. 

Resolute

I generally don't make resolutions for the new year, and this year isn't any different. Rather than set myself a goal that creates some arbitrary condition I have to meet in order to feel like I've achieved something, I'm just going to work on, you know, achieving things.

I haven't put out a post on this blog in almost two years. I'm resolving to change that. It's something I need to do, both because it gives me another connection to my readers and because it serves as an outlet that isn't facebook. Not that I have a problem with facebook at all--it has been instrumental in giving me a career I love--but it doesn't lend itself to longer posts. Also, people kind of make a choice to come here, and judging by my hit counter they've been doing it a surprising amount considering I've been ignoring this place for so long.

So this year I find myself resolute. I'm already more productive than I have been, and I feel like I can keep that up. This year is going to be make or break for me. I need to make more money than last year. I need to build up another nest egg in case I ever need another surgery and find myself unable to get much writing done like I did at the end of 2014. To do that I need to get back in the swing of things and put out work more regularly.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Most authors I read only put out a book a year. Maybe two. I always put out two at the least, and this year I'm planning on at least three, maybe as many as five.

Earthfall, my first foray into straight-up science fiction, is well on its way to being done. I'm quite far along. Then I'll take a crack at Book Five of The Fall. After that it's a toss-up between Dark Flow, which is book 3 of The Next Chronicle, or Devil's Due, the first book in a new series called The Hellbreakers.

That list is subject to change based on my financial needs, reader demands, or my whims. Writing is a thing that requires some inspiration and desire to do well, and it's not always there when I reach for it.

I'm probably going to be posting here more often, so make yourself a bookmark or a speed dial link on your browser if you want to check back more than once in a blue moon. I can't promise it'll be as often as you want, but I'll do my best to be entertaining.