Here we begin snippeting Castaway Odyssey; expect release of the eARC in July! CASTAWAY ODYSSEY By Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor PART I: ADRIFT Chapter 1 "Franky, get strapped in now!" Xander Bird said. "You're not my mama!" the red-haired little boy snapped back in a frightened tone. "You can't tell me what to do! And I'm not Franky! I'm Francisco Alejandro Coronel!" Xander closed his eyes for a moment, ignoring the lifeboat drill alerts, and took a deep breath, running his fingers through his slightly-too-long curly [ Continue reading... ]
Axanar, CBS, and Intellectual Property: My View
May 17, 2016 By 2 Comments
Unless you've been living under a metaphorical rock – or don't care at all about IP issues, which is admittedly a fairly large number of people – you've probably heard of the Axanar-CBS lawsuit. Axanar is the title of a fan-produced Star Trek-based film, intended to show a portion of the TOS (The Original Series) universe history which was only alluded to in the actual series – the Battle of Axanar. The team producing Axanar had produced an extremely high-quality short as a sort of proof-of-concept, titled Prelude to Axanar. A Kickstarter for [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Captain America: Civil War
May 10, 2016 By 1 Comment
Shortest review: Damn good Marvel movie. If you've liked the other Marvel movies, this is one of the best. Still short, no spoilers: While drawing basic inspiration from the comic-book "Civil War" storyline, this movie makes the conflict more personal for the characters, in all directions. As others have noted, while it's titled "Captain America", to a great extent this is the third Avengers movie, picking up a relatively short time after "Age of Ultron". The trailers haven't been too deceptive, though as usual there's a [ Continue reading... ]
Just For Fun: My Favorite Moments, Part 3
April 21, 2016 By Leave a Comment
Continuing answering the question of what my favorite moments in my own works are! Polychrome: My only self-published work to date, Polychrome is a grown-up readership-targeted Oz novel. It is also the only story I've ever had that FORCED me to write it – literally shutting off my ability to write in my contracted novels unless I wrote at least a chapter in Polychrome per week. As such, one can guess that there are a lot of moments in Polychrome that resonate strongly with me; still, I have to pick three, so here we [ Continue reading... ]
Just For Fun: My Favorite Moments, Part 2
April 19, 2016 By Leave a Comment
Continuing the discussion of the things I've liked most in my works... Castaway Planet: Eric and I ended Portal fairly certain that this was the last of the series, but not necessarily the universe. The main cast of Boundary had gotten pretty old to be gallivanting around the Solar System. However, when we thought about doing a space-based version of Swiss Family Robinson or Mysterious Island, the Boundaryverse suggested itself strongly as a candidate. So fast forward a century or two, let the humans learn the interstellar [ Continue reading... ]
Just For Fun: My Favorite Moments Part 1
April 14, 2016 By 1 Comment
I have often been asked what my favorite events, lines, or moments in my own books are. These favorites tend to shift some depending on my mood, and it's certainly hard in many cases to choose just ONE such for any given work. So I thought it might be interesting to describe and talk about up to three from any given work. Paradigms Lost: The first, and probably still my favorite of all, comes at the climax of the section titled "Lawyers, Ghouls, and Mummies", that ends with the simple line: Verne Domingo had come [ Continue reading... ]
Just For Fun: Superheroes Who Should Not Be Dark
April 5, 2016 By Leave a Comment
The recent release of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice has created a huge amount of controversy, a large amount of it centering on the almost unrelentingly grim imagery of the movie, and most specifically on the depiction of Superman. Throughout my life, there have been several times in which people dealing with the superheroic have decided – in various media – that a superhero can't be done for a modern audience and retain the four-color brightness of their origins. The arguments vary but tend to boil down to a perceived, [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Mutineer’s Moon
March 29, 2016 By 1 Comment
David Weber is probably best known for his Honor Harrington space opera series, but this is my favorite of his books. Colin MacIntyre is pilot of a NASA experimental moon vessel sometime in the not-too-distant future, with a simple-seeming mission: use a new "gravitonic" probe to map the mass distribution of the moon in detail. Unlike prior gravity surveys that merely use the slight variations in mass to give a very general idea of the mass distribution, the gravitonic probe should provide fine detail of structure and composition. But the [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark
March 24, 2016 By Leave a Comment
Marley Jacob is a wealthy old woman, known for her charity and eccentricity, a lawyer who no longer needs to practice but who has various unusual clients. She also has a nephew whom everyone – even, with sadness and regret, Marley – dislikes. Aloysius is the classic self-centered, unconsciously arrogant man who has literally never looked at himself in the mirror of the soul. Or rather, Aloysius was that sort of man, and Marley Jacob had such a nephew. Aloysius was murdered, found drained of his blood over a storm grate, and Marley suspects [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
March 22, 2016 By Leave a Comment
What do you get when you have a Japanese who's a fan of Western horror movies and pop music and who's been involved in – and come to despise – the fashion industry? No, no, not Kill La Kill, although there's certainly aspects of commonality. What you get is Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. A manga by Hirohiko Araki which began its run waaaay back in 1987, it had a few sporadic one-off OVA/movie animations many years later, but only in 2012 did it begin its run as an anime (which is primarily what I know it from; I've seen pieces of the [ Continue reading... ]
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