The Big Idea

Playing a computer game in which you can perform upgrades on space military hardware and fight other space empires with them--Galactic Civilizations, quite an old game--inspired a new story idea for me. Imagine an old robot, designed for combat, intelligent, assigned the inglorious task of guarding the home planet--which feeling resonates with how I felt during Desert Storm, when I was an enlisted military medical technician in a hospital unit that essentially got held in reserve and did only a little to contribute to the war effort.  This imaginary robot would feel like I did, burning with a desire to contribute to the war, eager to show his worth. The robot gets his chance when his model is discontinued.  Since spare parts will no longer kept for him...er, it...this robot will no longer be maintained for guard duty and instead is sent to the front lines to make room for newer models, with the expectation that even though this robot is too obsolete to contribute much, sen...

This post will get a little gruesome.  If reading about anatomical details in the context of a vampire consuming human beings makes you sick, please stop reading. Today in my pre-deployment training, in a class called "Combat Lifesaver's Course," our medic instructor mentioned in his medical training that cerebrospinal fluid is sweet.  He wondered out loud why he had been told that in training, as he were going to taste it--something he'd never do. And at that moment launched in me an idea for story vampires that perhaps constitutes something altogether new.  Imagine a vampire that has no interest in sucking blood, but longs for cerebrospinal fluid. Cerebrospinal fluid (a.k.a. CSF) is, by the way, the clear or slightly greenish fluid that bathes the brain and spinal column, providing protection and nourishment.  When it leaks from the ears or nose, it's an indicator of a serious skull fracture, which is why we were discussing it our class. If CSF really i...

I'm at Fort Dix, New Jersey, preparing for yet another deployment with the Army Reserve.  Fort Dix has a Federal Penitentiary on its grounds and in the process of moving from one point to another on my first day here, I found I had accidentally wandered up a service road for the prison. I was surrounded by barracks buildings much like the rest of Fort Dix but encircled by tall fences topped by concertina wire.  A voice blared over a loudspeaker in a rumble of words I could barely understand, but eventually said something about "Last call for chow line."  I realized with a shock that I wasn't near  the prison as I first thought, but actually on   the grounds of the penitentiary (please note that tall fences and concertina wire is all it seemed to take to transform Army barracks into prison barracks).  With further horror, I realized the people I'd seen working out in a ball field I'd passed, who wore gray uniforms I first had thought must be some kind of ...

How about a story showing a gold rush on a near-future colony of Mars? Terri Main  publishes a paper called " Science news for Sci-Fi writers ," in which today I saw a link leading to an  article from Io9  that shows a photo I'm including below: This photo shows dry ice pits common in the southern hemisphere of Mars, a planet cold enough to fill these pits every Martian-southern-hemisphere-winter with frozen solid carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere. Every summer, some of the frozen CO2 (a.k.a. dry ice) melts away, revealing these pits with curious shiny gold rims. (For scale, the small one in the center is about 200 feet across.) It so happens that as of now, no Earthly scientist knows what the causes the gold-coloring around these pits.  What if it so happens that it's actual gold, that the process of forming and sublimating dry ice somehow brings subsoil gold up to the surface and deposits it along the rims of these pits? If it should happen in ...

The title of this post was meant to be attention-grabbing.  Bear with me, please. The book of Revelation talks about four beasts around the throne of God, one with the face of a man, one like an eagle, one like a cow, one like a lion (Rev 4:6-8).  These same creatures are also mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, notably in Isaiah 6, where they are called "Seraphim," which is Hebrew for "burning ones."  Ezekiel 1 gives more description of these angels, stating that each one of the four creatures has four faces, each face pointing one of four directions, like the cardinal directions of the compass. Please note that I'm not maintaining these four creatures designated for special service of God are anything but angels.  They seem to constitute a special type of angel, naturally, but I hold to the Biblically orthodox view that they were directly created by God, just as all the other heavenly beings in God's service were created.  I don't hold the (nut...

This past year while I was deployed to Afghanistan, I ran into a copy of Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos, a book designed to explain issues in modern Physics in layman's terms.  It was worth reading, not just because it inspired a few story ideas in my mind. In discussing  string theory , a hypothetical attempt to combine all forces of energy and types of matter into a common theory which imagines the universe to be composed of various types of vibrating strings, Dr. Greene revealed that this theory cannot possibly work unless there are dimensions beyond length, width, height, and time.  Most versions of string theory (there are many versions) imagine at least ten dimensions, where the other dimensions are so tiny we can't perceive them. I've seen this compared to looking at a garden hose from a distance.  From a distance, a hose looks looks like it only contains one dimension, length.  Up close, of course, it has width and depth as well, and has ...

An exotic setting or technology is usually the first thing that crosses my mind when I have a new story idea, which I populate with characters after the fact.  But today a character popped into my head and the setting followed afterward. Elmer Quincy inhabits a future world where interstellar commerce is common, as is contact with alien races.  Under the principle of "one man's trash is another man's treasure," Quincy makes his living collecting biological waste and trash from certain alien cultures and trading them to others. Dirty in every sense of the word (physically I imagine him obese, in stained and greasy overalls, with a stubbly face; in business I imagine him a tough haggler and quick to make a profit even when not strictly legal), he distinguishes himself by what he refuses to do:  join a criminal syndicate involved in alien slave smuggling.  Disliked by the law, pursued by criminals trying to kill him, perhaps befriended by an odd religious sect, Quin...

I once began to write a story from the point of view of single-celled organisms, several years ago.  I imagined parameciums as intelligent and conceived a story about three  paramecium  knights who had to fight a horrifying beast. The beast I picked was a rotifer, something I'd seen in a high school biology class, under a slide that was supposed to show paramecium cells.  My biology teacher speculated the rotifer I saw had eaten all the parameciums that were supposed to be there.  Which proved to be the spark for a story idea that came up years later... In the story I gave the knights three personalities and accents: one French, one Spanish, one German.  My intent was to have all of them fail in their quest, only to be rescued by a "simpler" cell--the equivalent of a shepherd boy in the single-celled world I imagined... The story wasn't working right, plus it started seeming weirder than anyone other than me would probably enjoy, so I abandoned it. ...

Jurassic Park  imagined a fictional scientific method to bring dinosaurs back to life, for the purpose of inhabiting a for-profit amusement park. You could imagine the same sort of thing with a "Fantasy Park"--genetic engineering being used to deliberately create dinosaurs, griffins, ents, trolls, and other fantasy creatures of all kinds, specifically for a for-profit park.  Humans on salary could, via surgery or genetic engineering, volunteer to take roles as demi-human elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. This story could be written as a minor variation on Jurassic Park  itself:  Several experts visit the park before opening with some innocent children along for the ride, everything goes horribly wrong as fantasy creatures escape because somehow they're too real and too malevolent to ever be caged in.  I would rate that a fairly interesting story plot, even though an obvious copy.  I'd actually prefer something more original, though. An improvement would be t...

Yesterday I had a book signing event for my novel, The Crystal Portal .  At one point a church friend (Larry Schmetzer) asked me what the story basically was about.  I found myself struggling to answer concisely. I suppose that's because the words for my story flowed more from my subconscious self than my planning mind.  I created characters and a setting and to a certain extent let them interact according to the natures I gave them and voila--a story formed.  While I did have certain specific plot events in mind when I started writing, events I steered the characters toward, I did not know what the story would wind up becoming when I first began to write it. I hadn't begun with a full understanding of the reasons I wrote what I did, nor had I after writing completely analyzed the tale in order to sum it up quickly.  I'm trying to fix that here. You see, of familiar stories, my story is most like The Wizard of Oz .  In that classic tale, four main cha...

Superheroes are often viewed as a subset of science fiction.  I'd say they're more fantasy, because the ordinary laws of physics that limit you and me usually get ignored in superhero stories. Take the Law of Conservation of Matter--when Bruce Banner transforms into the Incredible Hulk, the cells of his body are supposed to expand to a massive size as he becomes the giant green monster.  The problem is that according to conservation of matter, he'd have the same amount of total mass in his body even as his cells expanded--the Hulk would then weigh the same as Banner himself, though being a lot bigger, his density would have to be significantly lower.  If Conservation of Matter were obeyed, the Hulk's physique be a lot more like the Stay Puft Marshmellowman's than like, well, the Hulk... You can see I take the fundamental distinction between science fiction and fantasy as resting in attempting to obey the known physical laws of the universe.  Sci fi to be prop...

In the two months of this blog I've talked more about zombies than anything else.  You might think that resulted from me having seen the current cable TV series on zombies, AMC's "The Walking Dead." But in fact I hadn't watched it until this past week. Having seen the series now, which by the way does show zombies eating about anything they can get their hands on, including wild animals (which seem immune to the disease), I'm asking myself what should be an obvious question:  Where is the military in all this? The show is set in the Atlanta region and more than once shows a single abandoned tank in a defensive position, apparently having been overrun by zombies.  Hey, I recognize this is just a story with a certain defined premise and is more interested in looking at the human characters going through the zombie apocalypse than the zombies themselves, but I found the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy any story severely strained by seeing an tank ab...

A story setting in which aliens invade planet Earth much as the United States invaded Iraq or Afghanistan is hardly ironic in and of itself.  What I mean by "as the US invaded" is in using the same sort of method--aliens hitting us with technology and precise strikes so advanced we can't counter them, specifically targeting people from far enough away (say high Earth orbit) that there's nothing we can do about it before they destroy our capacity to resist.  The aliens would also be the same in trying to avoid hurting the general populace, eliminating our leaders, and establishing new leaders under new rules.  Alien troops could work side by side with human troops for the purposed of training them to "take over" while they simultaneously work to rebuild our shattered industries along their lines.  Alien forces would continue to fight a human counterinsurgency, as humanity as whole adopts Afghan and Iraqi style tactics of suicide bombings and intimidation. T...

Genesis 10:8-10 mentions a "Nimrod" as a founder of cities in Shinar (Sumeria) and Assyria, who is also called a "Mighty Hunter Before the Lord."  Yesterday, reading a classical historical work on the history of "Chaldea" by George Rawlinson, a set of story ideas about Nimrod crossed my mind. Rawlinson mentioned he believed the early Mesopotamians had worshipped Nimrod after his death and that as a god, his worship supplanted that of the original creator god, called Il in Akkadian, which is like the El or Elohim of Hebrew, the God of the Bible.  I thought, "What if Nimrod, a heroic figure no doubt, had set himself up to be worshipped during his lifetime, like the Roman emperors?"  So perhaps some of his friends and companions also became worshipped as gods, creating the first truly polytheistic system.  I'm of course taking the Biblical point of view that all humans once knew the one creator God--so polytheism would have to be a later inven...

As reported in this  MSNBC science link , scientists in at CERN in Geneva have conducted an experiment that appears to have sent neutrinos faster than the speed of light.  "Appears to" isn't quite right.  They repeated this experiment something like 1500 times and got the same result every time.  They know the neutrinos went faster than light. But to be absolutely certain of accuracy, they want confirmation from other scientists, of course.  If it should be that other scientists confirm this discovery, this could lead to a revolution in physics, because ever since Einstein the speed of light has been understood to be the fastest any particle of matter could ever go.  What the new laws of physics turn out to be that would account for the experiment results, no human being knows right now. This situation could become a big deal for science fiction.  The speed of light as the absolute limit that matter can travel is a major restriction in stories that...

On Monday my son Mik and I went out shooting and wound up having a conversation about killing monsters.  I have to admit that when it comes to firearms instruction, I've been rather negligent with my kids.  We've only shot guns a few times and I also trained them in basic safety rules, including how to unload and clear a weapon.  This has to do with the cost of ammo being high when you're on a tight budget, not to mention the time required to get out to a range. But Mik is enlisting in the Marine Corps (Mik is short for "Mikhail," by the way) and so I thought it would be a good thing to prepare him for what's to come by imparting to him what relatively little shooting skill I possess.  We shot for several hours and Mik did well with the .22 rifle, putting so many rounds in one spot just off the center of the target that it looked almost like it had been hit once by a .50 caliber bullet. I remarked, "That's good enough for zombie killing" (zom...

As I child of about 5, I'd been asked the question by a Sunday School teacher, "Who is Jesus?"  My five-year old answer? "He's the guy...who killed the dragon who killed Cinderella."  When asked who the Devil was, I answered, "Oh he's a cowboy!" These highly unorthodox answers wound up being something that adults in my life, especially my mother, mentioned for years to follow.  If you were put it in a box, it would go under the label "Crazy Things Travis did (or said) When Little."  These were stories my mother enjoyed repeating well into my teenage years (the box was far from empty), and without such repetitions I perhaps would have forgotten the entire incident. I do have a fragment of my own memory of my answers...I remember feeling a bit of goofy pride in myself when adults around me laughed and repeated the story.  But years later, I found myself wondering, "What in the world had I been thinking?" The Devil answer...

Last weekend I had a discussion on my Zombie Ecology post with Aaron Dickey, longtime friend of my eldest son Karston and hardcore zombie film fan.  So we're going to indulge in some more zombie story idea-play. From my previous post, it so happens that one of the ideas I thought was original was not.  Zombie animals have been done before, though they became so from eating infected humans and/or general splatter rather than the way I proposed it.  But my question, "What do zombies eat? (when not eating humans)" was one Aaron hadn't encountered before.  So let's continue with that for a bit. What zombies eat depends on the type of zombie we are imagining:  1.  Supernatural black-magic zombies:  These don't need to eat anything, but they don't spread any zombie "disease" either, so their numbers don't automatically grow--so not even in often-inconsistent fiction will these guys be likely to take over the world.  2.  Infectious dumb zombies:...

This morning, on what's for me a very long run (10 miles), a story idea popped into my head.  It was a highly unusual occurrence. Not that having a story idea pop in my head is unusual--no, that can happen almost any time for me, but not so much when running.  While running, I kind of space out and focus on breathing.  On occasion I pray, as in: "Please, please, God let me survive the next mile!" Ahem.  Anyway, the idea is based on the way I've heard some handymen-type-guys describe themselves: "I'm a jack of all trades, the master of none." Once this phrase popped into my head, I thought to myself, Wouldn't it be cool if there were a multi-world universe, like The Crystal Portal, with a main character who felt fairly comfortable in all of the worlds, but not truly at home in any one of them?  His name could be "Jack" and the books could be entitled, "Jack of all Worlds, Book 1, Book 2, etc."  That might make a good set of b...

I've got friends that don't quite get science fiction and fantasy and don't really understand why I write it.  I recently deployed to Afghanistan and wrote some emails about my experiences there, emails I forwarded on to friends and family, who as a general group gave me positive feedback about my ability to write about the experience of being a soldier at war and who praised me for doing a good job capturing what Afghanistan is like (and Iraq, when I wrote about it in 2008).  A few of these friends suggested that if I want to write fiction, I should be writing military thriller genre, something like what Tom Clancy does. Truth is I could and maybe will someday.  I'm interested in military stuff and certain non-fiction, too, but writing about unreal worlds in general interests me more--and I think there's a positive reason why this is so, beyond the fact that I enjoy exercising my imagination.  You see, writing science fiction and fantasy is serious business. Th...

A Facebook friend, Kyla Fournier, placed as her status the observation that "Even the monsters under the bed have nightmares."  The comment lit a spark of imagination in my mind. Another of Kyla's friends commented that the monsters have nightmares about the people on top of the bed, which would be ironic.  Of course, when we imagine creatures actually dwelling below the bed frame, we enter the world of the surreal.  But even a surreal story should have a certain internal consistency, IMHO. A monster afraid of the person on top of the bed is consistent in a way.  After all, if it's a monster, a powerful brute of some kind, in theory it should be able to come out any time it likes.  But no, it goes under the bed and stays there--perhaps because of a terror of those who dwell on the mattress up above... But a creature dwelling under the bed terrified of us rather ceases to be a monster, doesn't it? After all, the creatures of Monsters Inc  feared conta...

According to Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanite ), the word "nanite" is just one of several words used to describe very small machines.  Research is underway to create such machines, continually making operating devices smaller and smaller. Of course, as of now, nanites are nowhere near as small as they can be in theory.  In theory and in the realm of science fiction, a fully-functioning machine could be so small as to be tinier than the smallest bacterium.  And these tiny machines could be designed to reproduce themselves automatically, which over time would allow enough of them to form to accomplish almost any purpose. A machine that small would be an ideal candidate for interstellar space travel.  Why? That's because the most straightforward approach to travel to other stars is to simply go through space as fast as possible, the closer to the speed of light, the better.  Light in a vacuum moves at around 186,000 miles per second, roughly 6 tri...

Zombies were originally conceived of as being dead bodies brought to life by black magic as I understand things. As such, zombies were immortal.  You could only really stop one by hacking it to bits, so the individual parts would no longer be able to move as a unit.  And even so, the separated bits would still be animated by a mindless desire to eat human flesh...at least in one conception of "zombie." But more modern stories have brought new ideas of what it means to be walking dead.  The viral explanation is popular now.  Humans get twisted by a-rabies-on-steroids type infection, leaving them mindless, with infinite pain tolerance, and hungry for homo sapiens.   Any bite that does not kill will very quickly spread the disease--clearly zombie saliva is swarming with the pathogen.  The only guaranteed way to kill one of the beasts is to put a bullet in its brain. In these latter stories, it stands to reason that the zombies would still need to eat, r...

I've heard that millions of people blog...so why would I think my voice would have anything distinctive to add to the general uproar? I don't actually know that I do.  To tell the truth, the thing that got me thinking about blogging was the publisher of my only novel assuring me that I'm the only one of her writers who DOESN'T have any connection to a blog--strongly suggesting I should do something to change that.  It seems a blog is useful in promoting one's writings... Believe it or not, I have no trouble going left when everyone else goes right.  In fact, you could say at times I've stubbornly preferred   going against the crowd...but I guess I've gotten wise enough over the years to see a knee-jerk reaction against all convention isn't smart.  The time I've spent in the Army may have contributed to that change of mindset on my part.  At least a bit. But there was no way I was going to agree to start my own blog if I had nothing to say.  The...