What Happened to the Night?

09 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in Musing

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Macbrian Mun - DepositPhotos.com

Macbrian Mun – DepositPhotos.com

Last year, I visited a small National Monument called Pipe Springs in Utah, the site of the Piute, Native American reservation.  It wasn’t the museum of native artifacts dating back thousands of years, amazing in its own right, that struck with me awe.  Nights crisp cold, the sky blazed with an unencumbered view of the Milky Way against a backdrop of pure onyx.  It had been long time since I seen such cosmic majesty with my own eyes and not from Hubble satellite pictures.  A recent weekend newspaper suggested exotic places to visit with National Geographic views of the heavens.  I’m usually looking for light in the darkness, but it saddened me that we must now travel off the beaten track to experience a sky uncluttered by luminous pollution.

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What’s On Your Plate In Two Hundred Years?

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Future Trends

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Lightsource – DepositPhotos.com

Lightsource – DepositPhotos.com

I’m a bit of a foodie, and own a sizable collection of eclectic cookbooks.  My favorite cocktail hour pastime is to peruse one of many food magazine subscriptions, reading the latest recipes. The cocktail stimulates my virtual tasting acumen. I’m at a point where I can imagine how something tastes by reading the ingredients, but it’s a limited window, disproportional to the quantity of alcohol consumed.

While sifting through past issues, I stumbled across an article in the March 2013 issue of Food &Wine, The Plate Project: What We’ll Be Eating in 35 Years.  What made this article unique was not gastronomical guessing by famous chefs.  The project was more of a lighthearted prediction that had to be drawn, or displayed, on a paper plate.  The results were as unique and original as the personalities of world famous cooks, artists, and designers. As a writer of sci-fi, it had me pondering what influences would decide what’s on our plate two-hundred years from now.

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A Bleak Place

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in Writing Dystopian Themes

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Photos: DT Krippene

Photos: DT Krippene

Dystopian and apocalyptic stories are often set in bleak places.  James Dashner’s Maze Runner series, or Frank Herbert’s legendary Dune series, are great examples.  We don’t have to go far to find models. Our planet’s diverse topography has no shortage of places that qualify as bleak.  South Pole comes to mind, or the mountainous wasteland bordering Afghanistan.  My pick for the perfect post apocalyptic setting … Death Valley … 3000 square miles of extreme nothingness.  It holds the record for highest reliably recorded temperature, 134 degrees F.  Hard to imagine it used be part of an inland sea during the Pleistocene age.

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The Face of Future Man

10 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Future Trends

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Sergiy Tryapitsyn – DepositPhoto.com

Sergiy Tryapitsyn – DepositPhoto.com

For those of us who read and write science fiction, we’re curious how humans might look in the future.  What has puzzled me for a long time is how that curiosity often trends toward a theory in which we all look the same.  Is it possible, that in several thousand years, the vitality of human diversity, will meld to a singular mold?

Anthropological circles generally agree that Africa is the cradle of modern man, but a lot happened since common ancestors migrated to different continents 60,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand.  Eons of environmental influence, and tight knit communities that stayed in one place, determined whether skin was light or dark, or you had eyes of blue.  As geographic boundaries shrink or become non-existent, intermingling becomes more prevalent.  It isn’t hard to accept that much of man’s physical diversity may shrink as well.

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Survival of Simplicity

25 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Writing Dystopian Themes

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Photo: DT Krippene

Photo: DT Krippene

We recently took a daytrip to Amish country near Lancaster, PA.  It’s a great time of year to observe a friendly, humble people who resist the temptations of a modern life.   They bear it well, but living in a fishbowl where the English “observe them” as anomalies of society, has to be somewhat nerve wracking.  Shunning electricity and other modern conveniences, the Amish have carved a unique niche in a country gone amok with technological advances.  When I think of the possibility for catastrophic loss of today’s modern life, one has to wonder if the Amish simplicity will survive.

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Need a Few Good Men in YA Fiction

13 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by in On Writing

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Avgustino - DepositPhoto.com

Avgustino – DepositPhoto.com

Where teen guys have drifted to sports and gaming, teen girls still like to curl up with a good book.  It’s all in the numbers.  The stats claim females make up over 80% of YA readership, most of which is penned by female authors.  Did you think the popularity of the romance novel was a fluke?    Does it surprise anyone that the majority of YA fiction has female protags and heavily lilted with romantic nuances?  I almost titled this article, Have Romance Writers taken over YA Fiction, but I didn’t want to alienate my good friends who write romance, yet took the time to nurture my fledgling writing career.   Besides, you can’t argue with reality.   It’s a marketing thing.   That said, we need to up the stats for male protags written by authors who have a Y chromosome.

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Beware the Grim Reaper of Unplanned Obsolescence

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

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Rudislav - DepositPhotos.com

Rudislav – DepositPhotos.com

We live in a time when everyday tools have a short life expectancy.  The list includes appliances, HVAC systems, mechanical yard implements, and of course, the computer, to name the more popular.   When appliances or the AC goes down, it is inconvenient, often expensive, but we move on to replacement mode with a modicum of swearing, then acceptance. For writers, when the desktop or laptop goes to its heavenly motherboard, all hell breaks loose.

Such was the case when my trusty, Vista speaking, Dell desktop died from the cyber equivalent of advanced age and MRSA.  I give the old bean credit for surviving this long.  Once the darling of House Gates, eyesight failure hampered its ability to translate internet banner ads that have become the web’s version of LED highway billboards.  Its shuffling gait between screens should have warned me the end is near.  I was in denial, like any loving family whose geriatric parent started forgetting things.

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Transit Station to New Beginnings

23 Thursday May 2013

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Andy Dean - DepositPhoto.com

Andy Dean – DepositPhoto.com

A few weeks ago I posted an article about Going Off the Grid. My first international trip since 2008, it wasn’t so much not wanting to travel after living in Asia for a decade, it was more a desire to enjoy home and family after being away for so long.

Once the owner of three airline platinum cards and a passport the thickness of a small bible, I’d forgotten how to travel.  Still had the passport, but I was relegated to boarding zone 8 and seats designed for hobbits. Add insult to injury, I neglected to properly fill out the required landing papers (I was a little out of practice). The immigration officer in Managua thumbed through my thick passport, looked at me and said, “Have you not gotten used to this by now?”  Apparently not.

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Darkness Got a Bad Rap.

13 Monday May 2013

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Source: Wikipedia Dark Matter and Energy DMPie_2013_svg

Source: Wikipedia Dark Matter and Energy DMPie_2013_svg

Have you ever wondered why most of us are afraid of the dark?  Were you one of those kids who never looked under the bed at night?  Maybe needed a light on until you were older?  As children, we are naturally fearful of dark places, where unseen things go bump.  Dark is everywhere, and there is so much of it.

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Our Love Affair with All Things Dystopian

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Dystopian Subjects, Writing Dystopian Themes

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Tolokonov -DepositPhoto.com

Tolokonov -DepositPhoto.com

Judging by the number of dystopian and apocalyptic movies hitting theaters, interest in the genre continues to hit new highs. I’ve been a fan of the genre for many years, starting with the incomparable H.G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. Stephen King’s, The Stand, is one of my top ten of all time. It got me to wondering what’s fueling this trend, especially with YA books. A quick search of articles that weighed in on the subject yielded a plethora of opinion and commentary, thanks in part to the movie, Hunger Games, based on Suzanne Collin’s YA story.  I thought I’d reference a few that caught my eye, and worth revisiting.

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