Category Archives: SF

A Really Good Book: Delta V by Daniel Suarez

As I have stated before this blog is not a book review site. When I read a novel that doesn’t work for me, is flawed, or just fails to achieve takeoff speed I am not going to mention it here. However if I get my hands on a book that really works, which really sings you’ll hear about it and Delta-V by Daniel Suarez is just such a novel.

Set in the very close year of 2033 Delta-Vis the story of humanity’s first attempt to mine precious resources from a near Earth asteroid. Most people think of asteroid mining as something that would take place between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where the main asteroid belt resides but a number asteroids also orbit much closer, even occasionally cross the Earth’s orbit with potentially catastrophic consequences. The protagonist of the story is James Tighe, a cave diving adventurer who, after surviving a terrifying disaster while on a deep under ground cave dive, is recruited by mysterious billionaire Nathan Joyce as a potential member of the first asteroid mining crew. Joyce, an entirely fictional character, is part of the New Space contingent of billionaire including ones who made fortunes in robotics/Artificial Intelligences, reusable rockets, and Internet based commerce. (You can decide for yourself who these characters are possibly analogs of in our real world.) As the training and mission unfold it becomes clear that Joyce hasn’t told anyone the full scope and audacity of his plan and his lies, short cuts, and mania turn out to endanger the lives of everyone involved.

Delta-V  is a novel heavy on the technical aspects and for some that will prove to be too dry of a narrative to endure but for devotes of ‘hard sf’ this novel will be catnip. Suarez has worked out the launch windows, the delta-v for his transfers and journeys, and the climax of the novel is an amazing meld of engineering and trying emotional decisions for the characters. Though hardly a massive tome, the story if packed with a number of fascinating and believable characters and could easily be adapted into a limited run series if someone wanted to pony up the funds for a production that would be as challenging as this one promises.

Over all I really loved this book and I can’t recommend it enough.

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The Day has Come

Sorry for the couple of days missed at this blog but things have been a little hectic. Good hectic as I am about to tell you but hectic all the same.

So after sitting on the news while I wait for all the details to be finalized and all the signatures collected I can now announce that I sold my SF/Noir novel ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ to Flame Tree Press and it is currently slotted for publication May 2020.

This has been quite a road and there have been a number of lessons learned as I traveled it. I won’t go into too many details as I think some of them will be better served in dedicated posting but here are a couple of highlights of lessons learned.

One: write what you love. I did not write ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ with any sort of an eye to the market, rather it was my own desire to see a blending of science-fiction with noir that spoke to my sensibilities. There are plenty of fine SF stories that blend with the noir traditions but the vast majority of them do so through the lens of the private detective and I wanted something that came at it from more a James M. Caine perspective where ordinary people get in over their heads in the sordid criminal life. When I outlined and wrote the novel my plans were to self publish it because it was more for myself than anyone else.

Two: Never self reject. I mentioned my plans were for self-publication but I still examined the publishing market and Flame Tree who publishes both crime and SF novels seemed to be the kind of house that might publish my cynical noir. If I had not submitted the book and self published it I would have never discovered that there are others who share this taste that I explored.  Always submit the material.

I am thrilled to be working with Flame Tree Press and I am over the moon excited about bringing ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ to market next year.

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Double Movie Review: No Blade of Grass & Bird Box

This was a pretty good weekend for the number of movies I have watched but sadly not for the number of good movies I have seen.

Bird Box   based on a novel. is about a woman, Mallory, played by Sandra Bullock, and two children, Boy and Girl, taking a dangerous river trip while blindfolded in order to avoid seeing a supernatural force that drives people mad, usually into suicidal behavior or depending on plot requirements religious mania to spread the truth of what they have seen coupled with homicidal behavior. Bird Box  operates on the level of plot and really nothing more and even there is fails as it requires suspension of disbelief that I was unable to provide. A person unskilled and blindfolded cannot row a boat for days down a river without ending up on the bank, not to mention running fully blindfolded through heavy growth forest, or accurately wielding shotguns while opposed by multiple attackers. Each of the several characters that begin their siege as the apocalyptic disaster unfolds has a specific plot purpose and once they fill that purpose they die making for route and unimagined writing. Too patly constructed, lacking any characters of depth, and demanding far too much suspension of disbelief Bird Box  fails every test of effective horror.

No Blade of Grass,  also adapted from a novel, is another apocalyptic tale, this one focused on environmental destruction and the attending collapse of society. In the film a virus or blight is spreading around the world that destroys all member of the grass family, that includes, wheat, rice, corn, and other cereal grains, leading to mass starvation and anarchy as the governments of the world prove incapable of meeting the existential threat. The story focuses on the trails of the Custance family who, with advance warning of the government’s plan to seal off London, flee with a friend to the safety of a large potato farm owned by the father’s brother in the north of England. Along the way they surrender civilized norms in their fight for survival becoming hard brutal people until reaching their sanctuary and discovering that their plans are upended forcing them into even more immoral choices.

Released in 1970 No Blade of Grass,  which I first heard about from a fellow panelist as we discussed environmental disaster SF stories, is an ambitious but ultimately flawed production. Partly the film suffers from too much compression in both screen time and the passage of time for the characters. With a scant 136  96 minute, and wasting quite a few of those with set up and exposition, and with a fair number of characters, the movies doesn’t have the running time to build, explore, and transform these character in an meaningful method, leaving the viewer to watch a series of scenes that only nominally follow a sequence but lacking in emotional impact. Further more the character appear to travel for only a few days and in that short time they become murderous and hard, transformations that lack any clear baseline, we hardly get a chance to see who they were before the crisis, and as such reinforce the impression that these were evil people all along. No Blade of Grass  required a more epic format and without it the film falls far short of its intended goals.

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