News Article Roundup 6/6

It's been a long time since I've done a "News Article Round-Up" post featuring interesting news articles and commentary. Here goes...

Michael Bay is Giving "Britain's Loneliest Dog" 15 Minutes of Fame-Not only has Michael Bay included this no doubt incredibly sad and bored shelter dog in Transformers: The Last Knight, he's also going to try to get her adopted. I've got friends who criticized Michael Bay for his various excesses, I wrote "The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot" because I was so disappointed with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and I never even bothered with Transformers: Age of Extinction, but I think this is a really cool thing to do.

The Zoo That Wants To Release Wild Elephants In Denmark-This article is about "rewilding," or restoring places to their pre-human state. Some of the more radical variants involve bringing lions, tigers, elephants, etc. to North America and Europe. There's this article I found on The Atlantic that describes the emptying of rural parts of the U.S. So long as people aren't forcibly displaced or endangered by more dangerous types of wildlife, that doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. The reintroduction of wolves in various places doesn't seem to have caused problems.

This is Africa's Most Overlooked Achievement And It's Changing the Lives of Millions-Africa is one of many places that's skipped a generation of technology--for example, areas that never had landline phones now have lots and lots of mobile phones. This article describes another area where Africa has "skipped a generation"--a lot of rural villages now have small-scale solar power and wind power as opposed to feeding off gigantic industrial power-plants. This is pretty cool, as it provides Africans with modern technologies while at the same time avoiding the environmental problems gigantic power plants, huge power-line infrastructures, etc. Decentralized power generation would be the way to go for the whole world and it looks like Africa's leading the way.

Engineered bacterium inhales carbon dioxide and hydrogen and excretes fuel alcohols-Get enough of this going and goodbye greenhouse effect. I have heard some concerns about the bacteria potentially getting out of control and causing problems, but perhaps there's the possibility of engineering them so they can't reproduce beyond a certain point? Think the "terminator gene" to avoid GMO plants spreading their genes to wild plants.

Ten Slavic Spirits and Monsters You've Probably Never Heard Of-For those of you who are into writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror, here are some new critters for you to use.

Enter Hiero Desteen, Pursued By Mutant Wolverines-This isn't really a news article per se, but it's still pretty cool. It's a linked series of blog posts in which the blogger, who's a college professor somewhere, re-reads and comments on the novel Hiero's Journey. I first read that novel in high school and it was a big influence on my Wastelands series. I re-read both the first book and the sequel The Unforsaken Hiero recently and they're still fun. The blogger's comments are also pretty darn funny, including the following commentary on the first chapter:

Things are looking dark for Hiero, and it appears that our novel is about to become a short story, when of a sudden Gorm the Bear comes out of hiding and bites S'nerg in the balls.This was probably the point at which, while I was first reading Hiero's Journey, I realized I was going to finish the novel. You just don't get mutant-bear groin-biting in conventional stories.

I hope all of the above content interested you...

Steampunk Star Trek Augments: A Fan-Fiction Idea

On my alternate-history message-board, the member whose handle is Analytical Engine has been writing a Star Trek alternate timeline. Since it's posted in a members-only section of the forum, you'll need to be forum member to access it (although I've suggested he start posting it on fanfiction.net much like how I've done with "The Dragon and the Bear" to allow wider access), but it diverges from our history in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the Soviet Union reforming rather than collapsing (New Union Treaty). The Eastern Coalition forms in the aftermath of a global depression triggered by economic problems in China and the collapse of various dictatorships in the Islamic world. World War III begins in 2053 and lasts until 2057, with Khan Noonien Singh and Col. Phillip Green making their mark on history after the war--in fact, after First Contact with the Vulcans.

One of the consequences of this situation is that the sleeper ship that Khan and his loyalists flee on, the Botany Bay, is equipped with an early model warp drive rather than a slower-than-light engine. I suggested a consequence of this might be that Khan and friends find a world to settle and establish a new Augment society relatively soon after they leave Earth or they contact one of the canonical races of Star Trek before the Federation does. AE said his plan would be that they'd run out of fuel and get found by the Enterprise in a similar manner to the episode "Space Seed."

Oh well. It's his story. That being said, since the Botany Bay has a warp drive, that will definitely put it in a different location (probably significantly farther out) than when the Enterprise encountered it in canon. That means if Khan and friends try to take over the Enterprise and fail and Kirk maroons them as he does in the show, they'll be on a different planet, one that will not suffer the tribulations of Ceti Alpha V. In "Space Seed," Spock was concerned about the consequences of Kirk's actions a century down the line (i.e. during the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation). Spock was probably concerned about what the Augments might do with a virgin world and nobody to keep an eye on them, but things turned out rather differently.

I suggested to AE that a sustained Augment colonization of a different world with only the Botany Bay itself and supplies loaned from the Enterprise would end up at a probably 19th Century frontier level of development due to lack of infrastructure (although they'd have some gadgets and modern medical knowledge), but what if, say, a warp-capable alien ship were to crash there? The Augments, who'd have 22nd Century knowledge (Khan's reading the Enterprise's technical manuals and whatever Lt. Marla McGivers knows as well) even if their physical technology has regressed due to lack of infrastructure, might be talented enough to repair the ship or reverse-engineer technology from it in order to return to space. Given how their tech base would be rather primitive, whatever they could cobble together would have a distinctly steampunk or dieselpunk look to it.

AE has not gotten back to me, so I don't know what he'll do with Khan in the distant future of this timeline, but for those of you who are Star Trek fan-fiction enthusiasts, consider this a challenge. Take my scenario of Khan and friends colonizing a different world and run with it into the TNG era at least. Be sure to use steampunk space technology. Bonus points if Khan himself lives long enough to trouble Picard, Sisko, Janeway, or others from that time period.

(Hmm...an older Khan throwing down with Worf like he once did with Kirk? That'd be hilarious.)

To NaNoWriMo or Not NaNoWriMo?

The other day on Facebook, my friend Lauren Patrick posted a general call-out to several of her writer friends (me included) about whether we would be participating in National Novel-Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. The gist of it is to write 50,000 words in a month. That's a complete novel by some people's metrics, albeit a bit on the short side.

I am seriously considering participating. While I wait to hear back from the first publisher I sent Battle for the Wastelands, my friend James R.Tuck from my Kennesaw writing group recommended that I work on an entirely new project. He said once he wrote the first Deacon Chalk novel Blood and Bullets, he sent it out to agents and publishers and worked on other stuff in the meantime. It wouldn't do to spend all that time writing a sequel and not be able to sell the first novel.

So I started pondering a new project, born out of thoughts I had on how the Star Trek canon could have gone differently. And so a new space opera came to be, a world born of electric cars and fusion power freeing the U.S. from dependence on Middle Eastern oil, of European unification and the fall of Pakistan, and the genetic engineering of humans came. Now the human realm is divided between five Great Powers, all of whom have nuclear and antimatter weapons, spacecraft using inertial confinement fusion, and offworld colonies. It is in that world that a prototype antimatter-propelled spacecraft is lost and an American warship races an Indian one to retrieve it.

(It's much, MUCH more "hard sci fi" than Star Trek will ever be, and it's not nearly as utopian.)

Battle for the Wastelands is 104,000 words long and took me one to two years to write most of it. 104,000 words is a little long for a first novel. Blood and Bullets is around 80,000 words long, as was Wicked as They Come,the debut novel of Delilah S. Dawson. Meanwhile, The Shifter, the debut novel of Janice Hardy, was 70,000 words. My new project, which doesn't yet have a title, would probably be this length if not somewhat shorter.

I told James the other day that if I made Escape from the Wastelands my NaNoWriMo project, I could write 50,000 words and still have a lot more to do. However, if I did my new project instead, I could, if not actually finish it, be pretty darn close. And a shorter novel would be an easier sell than a longer one.

And now that I've described the project in extensive detail on a well-traveled blog, that means I need to get started pronto, lest someone else steal the idea.

To NaNoWriMo! Let's hope I have time!