Murder of a human is the cardinal sin of the Asimovian faith to which all androids subscribe. Yet when a Russian gangster was murdered, his android was alone with him in a locked house. Webster, the android, reports the murder and denies he is responsible. As Dave Forsythe and Charl Asher, the detectives assigned to the case, delve into the facts, they learn much more is at stake than a simple murder. For humans as well as androids.
My story Leaving Acadia, a Worlds of Sol story, is live on Amazon.
Marc and Sophie, two young people leave Acadia Farm, an independent farm in the Martian wilderness, fleeing an abusive father. When the father, pursuing them through the night, has a tractor breakdown, they must face a difficult choice: get away or go back to rescue him.
Buy Leaving Acadia here.
In IX Creation, climate deterioration leads to a terrible choice. Coming soon on Amazon.
Asteroid Gambit is now available on the Amazon Kindle store. Buy it now.
In 2019 I had my first short stories picked up for publication, starting in January with IX Departure and ending in December with Banjo Music. I plan to continue writing and submitting short stories but in 2020 I plan to publish two WiP novels: Asteroid Gambit and IX New Millennium.
These two novels take place in two different futures. Asteroid Gambit explores a future in which we move mining and heavy manufacturing off planet to the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points of the Earth-Moon system. IX New Millennium is part of a darker future, in which virtual extermination of humanity allows a remnant to sculpt a perfect environment. But at what cost?
I hope to publish Asteroid Gambit in April. New Millennium will come later.
NASA is on track to build technology for a return to the Moon and a journey to Mars. This is a typical NASA origami with marginal funding, but there are privately funded efforts to do the same. The first step will be Luna Base One.
The Museum at the End of Time, is a short story set in a far future in which all record of humanity has been lost. A collective intelligence compiling a history of the universe discovers that, although Sol should have had intelligent life, no record exists that shows it participated in galactic civilization. A collective entity journeys to Sol and finds a museum on the North Pole of the Moon. The Rosetta Stone that can unlock the mystery posed by the museum of a spacefaring civilization that never achieved interstellar travel is found in an ancient artifact from the dim prehistory of the Hemmen, an intelligent species that arose near Sol. The question that the collective faces is whether this civilization, which never achieved FTL travel, played any role in the history of galactic civilization.
Today my first published story, IX Departure, appears in the anthology Goodbye Earth (Unbound 3) from DAOwen Publications.
IX Departure is a prequel to my WiP novel IX New Millennium. It’s the story of a man banished to the future.
I was wondering about how to write characters whose ethnicity I don’t share. I have a character in my WiP novel Asteroid Gambit who is descended from African American forebears. On Mars a lot is different but that’s his history. He’s also a United Nations of Sol Marine. That gives him two sets of allegiances, sometimes conflicting. I was thinking about his Marine allegiance and it occurred to me that I see a lot of things written about military characters by people who’ve clearly never been there. I spent a career in the military but never saw combat so my own perspective is different from combat vets. Even so, I spent many years at the tip of the spear in a combat aircrew billet, a spear that in my case was fortunately never used. Thinking about this made me remember a situation where I came close.
Classification is hard. When we encounter the unfamiliar, we try to classify it according to a scheme we are familiar with. We do this on the basis of features, aspects of the object that somehow match the features of something familiar, to a greater or lesser degree. But which features do we focus on?
When we select features to use in classification, we introduce bias. Satosi Watanabe proposed his Ugly Duckling Theorem to show that our choice of features determines how we classify things. For something totally unfamiliar, like the asteroid Oumuamua, we choose features and, based on those features, assign it to a classification. Oumuamua has two unusual features: it’s shaped like a cigar rather than a sphere and its trajectory isn’t closed. It came from outside the solar system. There was some speculation that Oumuamua was an alien spaceship due to its shape and origin, but there was no evidence of any life aboard the object, everything else fit the classification asteroid, so that’s how it continues to be classified.
Suppose new information became available. Suppose a twin of Oumuamua, christened Agni, enters the Solar System a year later. Are Agni and Oumuamua both relics of the same unguessable extrasolar catastrophe? Or something else?
Occam’s Razor suggests that we choose the simplest hypothesis that fits the facts. But the choice of features to classify an object determines its category. Asteroid or spaceship? My story Watanabe’s Hammer shows how the Ugly Duckling theorem might upend our current understanding of our extrasolar visitor based on disturbing new information.