The Big Idea

I happened to see Star Wars, The Last Jedi yesterday in a very clean and inexpensive theater in Monterrey, Mexico (just here for a short time this trip). Watching a moving in the United States increasingly seems like a waste of money, but I digress from my point...which is commentary on the movie itself. While I am going to commit some SPOILERS they will be of a general nature. I am not going to reveal how the story ends or some of the key bits of information the tale gives out. I do share some story details, but deliberately out of context. And while this is also a general review, I am going to focus on one aspect of the story that caught my attention that may not be the first thing most people think of with this movie. Note that I had several problems with Episode Seven that I hoped this movie would not repeat. I felt The Force Awakens 1) copied far too much from the Star Wars A New Hope, 2) presented an insufficiently powerful villain in Kylo Ren, 3) an over-powered new chara...

Last week I traveled to the Guadalajara Book Fair, one of the largest book fairs in the world and the largest in Latin America from what I've heard. I attended a number of events and looked around the entire grounds, but only in Guadalajara for four out of nine days of the fair. I did this with a specific purpose in mind. As an Evangelical Christian who writes science fiction and fantasy, who speaks Spanish and French proficiently and who has a Mexican wife, I was looking at the prospects of selling Christian-themed speculative fiction in Latin America. Some things I wanted to know included: 1. Are any Christian publishers already selling speculative fiction in Latin America? 2. Is any speculative fiction being sold at all at the fair? And if so, by which authors? Published by whom? 3. Factor X. What might I learn at the fair that I don't even know could be possible? Probably I spent the most time on point number 2 . I don't know how many books were on sale at the fair...

I'm  coming to the end of what proved to be a month-long ordeal, JRTC (Joint Readiness Training Center), at Fort Polk, Louisiana. I am here with my Army Reserve unit, naturally, where we spent a week on orders prior to going to Louisiana, a week preparing to go to our field training in Louisiana, and then two weeks “in the box,” i.e. in the midst of our particular war scenario. I'd  like to write a post about the war scenario itself, but a particular incident that happened coming out of the field yesterday gave me something to write about first. My fellow civil affairs troops were looking for a good meal after a week of eating field rations (both MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—and “First Strike” rations) and were talking pizza, but I wanted to save money and instead of cough up money for pizza, trudged over to the military dining facility at the rather primitive location we wound up being billeted in, “FOB Warrior.” Military dining isn’t usually bad. The modern Army ...

Doing something boring for the Army (waiting for Reserve Soldiers to check into a building), I happened to find out something really interesting via reading an old magazine lying around, something worthy of a blog post. A scientific study conducted interviews with WWII veterans--the group including veterans who had been highly decorated for valor. The purpose was specifically to determine what the relationship was between leadership traits and heroism, with the presumption that the WWII survey results would be broadly applicable to heroes in all wars (which makes sense, but may not actually be true). The study did find, as I imagined the people who created it expected, that veterans who described themselves as “strong leaders” were more likely to have received a reward for valor than those who did not describe themselves that way. That particular factoid didn’t really interest me. What  did  catch my eye is the fact the study found there were two differen...

Alara's Call is a fantasy novel whose cover I've included at the top of this post. I must say that I didn't think when I first saw this cover that it was the best one possible, because to my eye it does not suggest the story is set in a fantasy world. It appears, rather, to be a cover of some form of historical romance. However, the world of Alara's Call does have romance elements and parts of the story resonate with the historical past. So the cover isn't as out of genre as it appears at first glance. (Though please note, there really ARE fantasy elements to this story--more on that in a bit.) By saying the story resonates with the historical past, I mean a lot of story elements have a very familiar ring to them. You will hear characters talk of trade agreements; there's a mention of a clearly Trinitarian religion with some kind of church structure; you will find written scriptures, familiar prayers, professors of theology, recognizable kings (but not w...

The cartoon I included to start off this post comes from "The Universes of Max Tegmark" and has the purpose here of illustrating the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, or MWI. It shows that because of a single decision, in one universe a couple is married with two stick-figure kids, while on the other they live on opposite sides of the globe. In short, like the cartoon, MWI says some of the weird things found in quantum mechanics like an electron interfering with itself (apparently by being in multiple different places at the same time) happen because there are multiple worlds, multiple universes, laid on top of one another accounting for an electron or other quantum appearing to be in multiple places at once. Once something happens that forces a decision (like a measurement), then all the possibilities remain true--but do so by universes splitting off in different directions.  We then live in a universe where only one possibility took place--all...

I remember as a kid watching the Black Sheep Squadron television series, about Marine Corps fighter pilots in World War II somewhere in the South Pacific. While I saw other shows set in war like MASH and Hogan’s Heroes, Black Sheep Squadron was the first series I watched that featured combat prominently (mostly from stock footage of airplanes zooming and sounds of machine gun fire).  By the way, let me apologize for the length of this post up front—it’s not a quick read, which I don’t say to scare anyone away. But be aware. I’d had other ideas about fighting before that, largely from Disney movies like Sleeping Beauty , in which Prince Phillip battles Maleficent-turned-dragon. That scene made a deep impression on me and as a kid I often imagined myself as the dragon-slaying knight, the warrior for goodness and truth. But with Black Sheep Squadron , I imagined myself a fighter pilot, the personality of the knight riding in an aircraft cockpit. I also saw some classic ...