Q&A With ROSETTA Author Stephen Patterson

Today author Stephen Patterson, who in the interest of full disclosure is a former member of my writing group and came to my first The Thing in the Woods book signing and bought a copy, will be holding a book signing of his own at Posman Books in Atlanta. Here's a Q&A about him and his new novel Rosetta.

What inspired you to start writing Rosetta? 

I have always loved science fiction since I was ten and my older cousin gave me a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land. I’m the type of fellow that makes his own knives, even though I can buy really good ones at the store, I still make my own anyway. It was only a matter of time before I made my own science fiction. Rosetta is my first completed novel-sized work.

How long did it take you to write the book? 

Well, I’m something of a perfectionist. I had to teach myself to write novels in the process of writing a novel. It took me more than five years.

Once it was done, how did you go about getting it published? 

I own a publishing company.

What kind of reception has Rosetta received since publication? 

So far the reviews have been favorable. It’s a bit of a cyberpunk, so people who like that genre seem to like it. It’s complex in some ways and I find people like that in a story. I do. A novel should be about more than just the events it describes.

What are some major literary influences on Rosetta? 

Ursula LeGuin, Robert Heinlein, Ben Bova, and Arthur C. Clark have all been a big influence on me. Plus, I’m a huge fan of Richard Morgan and Lois McMaster Bujold.

What does the future hold for you writing-wise? 

I’m hooked! I have a very atypical vampire epic swirling around in my cerebrum. Not a magical sparkling vampire, but a gritty noir thriller. Ex-roman legionnaire, still alive after 2000 years . . . and can lift a truck, if the need arises . . .

What was your favorite part of Rosetta to write? 

The fight scenes were fun for sure, but I think the verbal ‘fencing’ scenes are my favorite. Think about the verbal sparing that happens in The Godfather, always with the undercurrent of violence in the immediate background.

What was your least favorite part? 

I had to learn about the nuts and bolts of linguistics, a lot more than I ended up putting in the book. It’s enjoyable to learn new things, but fight scenes are much more fun!

Do you anticipate writing any sequels or works set in the same world? 

Yes. I am working on a prequel to Rosetta, and I have a sequel planned as well. So much writing!

So there it is, folks. I'm already reading it on my Kindle, but if I can, I'll swing by Posman Books today and see if I can snag a signed copy of Rosetta. You should too. :)

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Lost In Space (1998)

Last night I went over to my friend Nick's for another movie screening for the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. That night's entree was Lost in Space,the 1998 television adaptation of the classic TV show in which the Robinson family, thanks to the treacherous saboteur Dr. Smith, ends up, well...look at the title. Here's the actual podcast.

So how did it hold up?

The Good

*As I said on the podcast, they tried to make a much more coherent space-opera universe. I remember the original series featured the Robinson family going on a "five year vacation," although some fact-checking online indicates that they actually were part of a serious colonization mission. Instead we have a dying, resource-depleted Earth and different political factions (the Western-dominated United Global Space Force and the Global Sedition, which comes off as some kind of Third World group) trying to take control of the Earth-like world intended as humanity's second home.

*There are some good callbacks to the original series, including the robot being voiced by the same actor and Dr. Smith getting Will Robinson's attention by tapping out "Danger Will Robinson" in Morse code. Several actors from the original show play different roles in the movie--mother June Lockhart plays the young Will Robinson's school principal, for example, while the original Major West plays the commanding officer of the new one.

*Although it took awhile to actually get into space, once the mission actually begins things are entertaining for awhile. The robot, sabotaged by Dr. Smith, goes on a rampage and wrecks the ship, and in order to avoid being pulled into the gravity of the sun, Professor Robinson and West have to trigger the hyperdrive even though, without the hypergate, they could end up anywhere. Well, alive in the middle of nowhere with a slim chance of getting home is better than being incinerated by the sun, so off we go...

*The Robinsons seem a lot more Genre Savvy than they were in the TV show. Professor Robinson can't bring himself to shoot the man who'd tried to kill them in front of his children, so they keep him locked up and only let him out when they explore a derelict ship (more on that later) because leaving him aboard the ship without supervision is more dangerous.

*I liked the depiction of middle daughter Penny as a rebellious semi-Goth who resents having to abandon her life on Earth to go on a decades-long space mission. Will apparently acts out in school (albeit in nerdy ways like hacking school computers for his own projects, not by being violent or obnoxious) due to his father never being around. This does deconstruct the whole "family gives their all for the species" angle because, let's be blunt, most people aren't that noble and self-sacrificing. Mother Maureen, although being more mature about the situation, makes her dislike clear in two scenes with her husband.

The Bad

*The movie is, simply put, incredibly boring. It's not as aggravatingly dull as Spawn was the other night, but it's still pretty darn slow. Nick said it's a "chamber drama" and given the amount of family issues they all have to work through, that is somewhat appropriate. However, the way it's done is booooring...

*The CGI has not held up very well for the most part. The opening space battle between the United Global Space Force and Global Sedition looks like a video game. Things get better when the lost Jupiter 2 encounters a derelict human ship with more advanced technology that's got a cute obvious toy tie-in monkey-like creature and a swarm of space-dwelling spiders (that presumably came off an alien ship found alongside the derelict that nobody really comments on), but they still don't look that good.

*The science doesn't make a lot of sense. The Jupiter 2 has a faster-than-light drive of some kind, but apparently without a completed hypergate the drive transports the ship to a random location. It seems rather hard to swallow that humanity at this point has figured out how breach the light-speed barrier but can't actually guide the ship anywhere. The end of the film implies that with the star-maps retrieved from the Proteus (the derelict ship apparently from the future) the Jupiter 2 will get to Alpha Prime well ahead of schedule, but that doesn't really make a lot of sense. We already have star-maps! Figuring out how to travel faster than light is the hard part!

It would've been better if the Jupiter 2 had an FTL drive that works as advertised and the robot's rampage caused them to jump to a random location before crapping out completely (if it uses space-folding, which the time-travel story later in the movie implies) or drop out of hyperspace someplace random (if it moves them in and out of some kind of parallel dimension).

*The acting is, as a general rule, not very good. The most egregious offender is Jared Harris, who plays the future adult Will Robinson. I liked him as Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, so I'm guessing he got better. Matt LeBlanc--yes, Joey from Friends plays West--also has some issues with his delivery as well.

*Dr. Smith has a lot of wasted potential. He starts out as a mole who programs the robot to destroy the Jupiter 2 for Global Sedition for money and then is nearly killed by a rigged communicator now that he's served his purpose. He's knocked unconscious long enough for the ship to blast off and when the robot goes on its rampage, he's forced to awaken the Robinson family to save his own skin. He talks about how it's in his self-interest in help Our Heroes because he wants to survive to return home, but he's pointlessly treacherous in two different scenes (trying to persuade West to help him take control of the ship, playing on their shared military backgrounds, and later taking several characters hostage). He's also a massive downer claiming they're doomed all the time, which in a situation like this is outright dangerous, not just annoying. He'd have been better as a Token Evil Teammate who's useful (and actually does useful things rather than being The Load) because it's in his interest but definitely not trustworthy.

*The story is too complicated. I'd have dumped the time-travel issue and had them simply forced to fight the aliens to salvage the derelict human ship to repair their own. Of course, the only reason said human ship is there is because of the time-travel plot, so maybe they come across the wreckage of a previous expedition or some Global Sedition explorers in the same boat. The latter could be really interesting--they either have to fight them for the parts to repair their ship or they have to team up like how the Federation and Maquis did in Star Trek Voyager to make it back home or fight off aliens. Given how Global Sedition tried to kill Dr. Smith after he wasn't useful to them anymore, there could be hostility from that quarter, which given how in the show Smith's various shenanigans made life more difficult that makes sense. Plus, if one of the Sedition men gets older daughter Judy's Bad Boy Syndrome going (she apparently sacrificed a lot of her personal life to the project and might resent that, even if she's not as vocal as her siblings), we could have some kind of love triangle involving him, her, and the flirtatious West. A Global Sedition true believer might also give some back-story as to what the group actually believes--the only time their ideology is discussed is that they apparently are planning to build their own hypergate and leave the "Western devils" on Earth to die.

*The friendship between Will Robinson and the ship's robot that plays a critical role later is really, really sappy.

The Verdict

Not as abysmal as Spawn, but still pretty darn bad. So much potential wasted by a mediocre script that, as was pointed out in the podcast, needed some major rewrites. 5 out of 10.

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.)

First NaNoWriMo Update

Now begins Day Five of National Novel-Writing Month and I will update you with my progress, or lack thereof.

In the first four days, I wrote a grand total of 1,956 words. In and of itself, that's not a bad thing--except in order to meet the "50,000 words in a month" challenge of NaNoWriMo, I would need to write just under 1,700 words per day. This means I should have written 6,700 words so far. In order to be on-track for five days in, I would need to write in the neighborhood of 8,400 words today.

(I have some legitimate justifications here, but excuses buy no yams. I'm still very behind. Meanwhile, I have a friend who is not only meeting his goals, he is actually exceeding them.)

At this rate, I do not think I will be able to make the 50,000 word count. I am not giving up five days into the project--I will still try to write a lot more on what will hopefully be my second completed original novel (and an easier sale, since it will probably be shorter than my first). However, I am being realistic.

On the bright side, those 1,956 words have been rather useful. The first chapter is now complete and I've made significant progress on the second and third. I have committed to bring something to my Lawrenceville writing group for the 11/18 meeting. Since the deadline to submit something is 11/11, I might be able to bring the first three "real" chapters (as opposed to the prologue, which consists of a bunch of future news articles for world-building purposes) before the writing group.

Do novel titles count toward the word count goal? Several thousand words in, and I still don't have a title.

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!

Book Review: "Earth Unaware: The First Formic War" (NO SPOILERS)

Just got done reading Earth Unaware: The First Formic War,the prequel to Ender's Gameby Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. Here goes...

Overall, it's a pretty good book. It begins with a bang--the Formic starship is discovered in the first chapter. No slow buildup there. The initial battles between the asteroid miners and the Formics are entertaining. In particular a daring mission to the Formic ship realistically has things go wrong. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy after all.

The opening of the book also shows some of the limitations on personal freedom that would exist in a deep-space mining environment. In my opinion this wouldn't be enough to justify imposing legal limits on who can colonize space or claiming space colonization is fraught with ethical issues--I kid you not, some members of my alternate-history message board believe this--but it contrasts nicely with overly-idealistic frontier depictions.

I did like the character of Lem Jukes, son and heir of one of the solar system's richest men and the commander of a corporate expedition testing out a prototype "glaser" (gravity laser). He seems decent enough deep down--and there are several, in TVTropes terms, "pet the dog" moments that show this--but his desire to prove himself to his father leads him to do some downright nasty things. And much of his inner monologue seems to devoted to finding ways to blame other people for what happened.

I liked how they made the mining ship El Cavador and its crew Venezuelan. That's pretty creative. I've never read anything centered around a group of Venezuelans in deep space, facing an alien invasion.

Finally, after a character goes to all kinds of trouble to get from the Kuiper Belt to the lunar colonies with information on the coming alien invasion, he promptly gets arrested for his highly-illegal method of arrival. The way it's handled is actually kind of amusing.

However, there are some problems. When Lem has to manipulate one of his employees into doing some underhanded but necessary (for him) task, he and another character hash out just how they're going to get him to do the job, then they call him in and it pretty much goes exactly according to plan. Exactly. It would have been better to have something throw Lem and friends for a loop, or skip Lem hashing out the plan. The text could have Lem saying something like, "I've got an idea..." and then we cut to the idea actually being implemented.

Also, when we first meet Lem, how they're going to interfere with the crew of El Cavador is pretty obviously foreshadowed. That's better than it not being foreshadowed at all, but was rather predictable.

Finally, we briefly meet Mazer Rackham, who will play a major role in Ender's Game. However, the focus is taken off him to follow a character who will probably play a major role in shaping Rackham into the man he will be later. It would have been better for Rackham to play a much larger role in the story than he does. There's setting up stuff for the sequel, and then there's pushing forward something that would be really interesting now into the sequel.

Still, it's an entertaining book and it sets up the trilogy depicting the first war very nicely. 8 out of 10. Here's to a trilogy covering the First Formic War and the Second Formic War.

"Iron Sky" Trailer Music That Isn't In The Movie...

I saw Iron Sky in Atlanta last night and will probably blog about it later.  However, here's something I noticed that I was rather disappointed in. 

The trailer I posted here months ago has some really awesome orchestral music made even more awesome by the overlay of marching feet as the Nazi invaders board their flying saucers to invade Earth.  That music isn't actually in the movie.

However, thanks to TVTropes, I found the music on YouTube.  It actually predates Iron Sky, but it has very appropriate lyrics--it's about space travel and colonization in a very "WE WILL CONQUER THE UNIVERSE" type of way.  It's called B Mashina by the Slovenian band Laibach, which apparently also created the soundtrack to the film.

For some reason I am having trouble copying the embed HTML to post it here, but here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgqjnzkYPnA

Enjoy!

Tickets for American "Iron Sky" Screenings!

I was at my friend Will's birthday party yesterday and a friend of his e-mailed me a link to where I could purchase tickets for a screening of the movie Iron Sky--the Moon-Nazi movie--in Atlanta Wednesday.


This is going to be awesome.  I'll be sure to review it here and for my friend Nick's blog The Dudeletter.

My friend Sean C.W. Korsgaard said he has been waiting for the movie for years.  I remembered seeing on Tugg.com other Iron Sky showings, so I looked to see if there were any other screenings near him in Virginia.  There were a couple in the Washington D.C. area, about an hour to an hour and a half drive from him.  Hopefully he'll be able to see it.

Here's the link to all the upcoming screenings of Iron Sky that Tugg.com is managing in the United States.

http://www.tugg.com/titles/iron-sky?region=global&state=upcoming#.UB5w9KDoaSo

Before I joined Tugg.com, I checked it out to see how it works.  It's actually really interesting.  I'm thinking this would be a good option for independent filmmakers (or others) who've got a movie in the can and are looking for a way to distribute it.  Find a theater, promote the screening through Tugg, etc.  If the resulting screening(s) are a success, that might go a long way to snagging a distribution deal.

If I ever decide to go indie with a film based on my short story "Coil Gun" (I'm working on the screenplay now), this might be a really good idea.  Especially if it's animated, as I've discussed earlier.  In the United States, animation is seen as something for children and a dark, violent adult SF animated movie might have trouble finding a distributor or a mass audience.  A successful independent screening might show a distributor the movie has legs, or it could serve to build buzz for an online or DVD launch.

I'm putting the cart massively before the horse here, but it's worth a thought...

Newt's Space Comments and the Military-Industrial Complex

While campaigning in Florida, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been a vocal proponent of space exploration, to the point of promising a permanent American moon base by the end of his second term.  Here is one article describring what he's been doing.

I'm not one of those people who thinks we cannot have space exploration because we have poor people at home, home being our own nation or other countries on Earth.  There are enough places where there's wasteful spending already to cut to free up money for space-related stuff without reducing funds for things like literacy, AIDS prevention, etc.  Farm subsidies come to mind, while the government could take the "weed is illegal but enforcing marijuana laws are not a priority" route that wouldn't save as much as full-blown legalizing it would but would cut some costs.

However, the U.S. financial situation is so dire with the debt and deficit being as huge as they are that the amount of spending needed to build a lunar colony, even a small one like the research stations in Antarctica, would be massively unjustified.  The American Colonies weren't founded "just because," but for economic or ideological reasons.  The Puritan colonies in the north were founded by people who wanted to create a godly society far away from the Church of England, Georgia to give debtors a new start, Maryland as a refuge for persecuted Catholics, South Carolina as a slave-based agrarian center, the French colonies in Canada to buy furs from the Indians, etc..

Much has been made of the Moon as a possible source for He3 to feed fusion reactors (the film Moon depicts an oil-rig-like colony mining He3 for this purpose), but we don't have that type of fusion yet and might not for quite while.  Viable fusion always seems to be 40-50 years away and although I'm an optimist where scientific progress is concerned, one must be realistic.  Fusion occurs in nature in the stars, but that doesn't mean it would be easy or cheap to do here on Earth.

And I'm not aware of any religious or cultural groups that want to establish their own ideal society far away from everyone else who've got the scientific training and resources needed to actually do it.  Let's remember how dangerous this will be, especially given the recent laming of the American space program.  One thing goes wrong in an attempt to establish a new Zion on the Moon (say a meteor smashes the greenhouse or the cosmic-ray shielding isn't thick enough) and the people back on Earth will be watching everyone up there die and be unable to do anything about it.

So not right now, Newt, however awesome it would be to do it.

However, thinking about the whole "space versus the poor" scenario has got me thinking.  Many areas in the United States are poor due to industrial decline.  The decline of the automobile industry is one of the reasons why Detroit is so awful.  Georgia's political representatives have pushed for continued production of the F-22 fighter, despite us already having nearly 200 of them and very little that can face us in the skies, due to Lockheed being a major employer in my neck of the woods.

Some more left-wing people have claimed the U.S. government uses military spending as a kind of Keynesianism, to create jobs and keep the economy going.  I admit being ideologically prejudiced against that kind of argument (it smacks of the U.S. being unable to sustain itself without an artificially-large war machine and international responsibilities to justify it), but given the defense of the F-22 program by Georgian politicians, I really can't argue against that being true in at least some cases.

So here's a thought for the long run.  Instead of a military-industrial complex that with the defeat of fascism and Communism is no longer as necessary, how about orienting as much of it as possible to a space-industrial complex?

Lockheed, for example, was experimenting with a single-stage-to-orbit called the VentureStar that was canceled after running into some problems.  If there was more demand for such technology, I imagine they wouldn't abandon it so easily.  After all, it's (potentially) jobs and money that might not be so readily available if there are more defense cuts.

And then there's the space elevator, which would cause launch costs to drastically decline.  If you're going to have space-Keynesianism instead of war-Keynesianism, this could lead to jobs in and around centers where materials research is conducted.  The LiftPort Group, for example, managed a smaller-scale elevator test on Earth before deciding to focus on a lunar elevator for the time being.  They're also engaged in other materials-science research that will bring immediate profits while allowing them to focus on their long-term goals.

Gingrich suggested prizes to provide incentives for private entities to work on this rather than simply increasing federal spending.  This makes sense, given the financial constraints everyone is operating under these days and the slowness of many government agencies.  The Ansari X Prize has shown promise.  However, let's not forget that the Manhattan Project and the goodies that have emerged from the National Labs were government programs as well.

Iron Sky: A Movie Funded By Subscription

I was hanging out with my friend David after I visited the fossil show a few weeks ago and we found this gem online:



The alternate history stuff isn't all that plausible--if the Nazis had the resources needed to colonize the moon, chances are they wouldn't have lost the war on Earth--but despite this, it simply looks awesome.  And it's got a really cool soundtrack, especially the music playing when you see the swarm of Nazi flying saucers approaching Earth.

Another aspect of it that's interesting is that they're relying on donations to fund part of the production of the film.

http://www.ironsky.net/site/support/finance/

That's pretty clever.  It seems they got most of their resources through traditional filmmaking channels, but "crowd-financing" could be useful for someone interested in producing a film that the banks don't think is going to be profitable (and thus won't underwite) or the "Hollywood set" would not be interested in producing (say an adaptation of Starship Troopers that doesn't deform Heinlein's belief system into something resembling Nazism and actually includes powered armor).

It would need to be something with a pretty big existing fan-base to have a good chance of working--funding "Starship Troopers as it should be" might be doable this way because there are masses of ST/Heinlein fans who were disappointed by the actual film, but something like Hiero's Journey, which is relatively unknown, would need to rely on the fundraising talents of the producer and not an existing fan-base that can fork over the cash.

I'd send the producers of the movie some cash to help finance the project, but they're only accepting a limited amount of funding outside of the European Union and apparently there are various rules to invest in it.  However, this blog has gotten a fair number of hits from Europe, so I might have some readers who would have an easier time chipping in some cash.

Another News Article Round-Up

Got a bit behind blogging because I've been chatting on the Starcraft 2 section of the Battle.net forums, workling on my planned pitch to Blizzard, reading Windmaster's Bane and Liberty's Crusade, and working on my book, so I'll post all the interesting news articles I've found over the last few days:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/685071

The imam who wants to expand the mosque two blocks from the World Trade Center has apparently been very helpful in U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.  This is one reason why I've been a big defender of allowing the Muslims of Lower Manhattan to expand their facility--needlessly irritating American Muslims is going to make them less likely to cooperate in anti-terrorism efforts and might encourage cultural separatism rather than assimilation.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/wind-power-industry/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

This is very interesting.  Although I'm a staunch free-trader, I recognize the usefulness of an industrial base.  Widespread adoption of wind-power is something that would keep factory jobs here (and maybe even expand them) because they're difficult to outsource due to the transportation costs.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/mars-farming/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

On my alternate-history forum, we had a big debate about the morality and practicality of space colonization.  This is something that's really interesting, as the ability to farm on another world is important for long-term viability.