Home of the Devil There is a character - big time character - in Reluctant God who lives in a warm and cozy brown dwarf star.  Like this one. Orange Brown Dwarf with Clouds* Go on, Get  A Reluctant God freeGo on, Get  A Reluctant God free e-BOOK HERE For general mind bending, check out SeniorJunior, by much of the same author ..read more

Kindred Propulsion Systems In my soon-to-be published OldGuySci-Fi book of short stories titled GUT (it's about conscious micro biomes, of all things) there is a propulsion system that can accelerate and decelerate at huge G-forces.* The Cube, a perfect geometric object, was at the center of a hairball of cilia waving around it. It approached the system, decelerating furiously from the edge of the speed of light. Ordinary visual observation of the Cube would not see the cilia.  They were displaced fractionally from the spacetime of the Cube, invisible except as a shadow in very hard x-r ..read more

Why Some Men Don’t Work: Video Games Have Gotten Really Good NYTimes piece, July 3, 2017 Millennials - mostly male millennials - are working fewer hours and playing video games more hours. Big story, that.  ... Go on, take it to another level, whip in a little sci-fi: The Dream Game: The common citizens of the Empire of Earth, those billions who populated the twenty terraformed planets and Mother Earth herself, led lives of great diversity, almost totally in the virtual worlds of shared dreams. The Dream Game. Approximately 99% of humanity spent most of their lives in the Dream Game ..read more

Lotta Smart People Think It’s Going to Get Dangerous Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephan Hawkings, among the Earth’s smartest people, are warning that A.I. has the potential to eat its creators. Sci-fi types (I admit guilt there) have been saying it for decades. Remember HAL-9000’s, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”  Then give the A.I. weapons and we have SkyNet, killing off the vermin humans in all the Terminator movies. Grandmaster Isaac Asimov was the center of a cluster of sci-fi authors who recognized the threat back in the ‘40s and before. (Ahead of our time, we are.) Back ..read more

"Food" as an Alien Concept * In this excerpt, the sixth Emperor of the Empire of Earth ("E VI") is being briefed for the first time by the alien ally "Tay" and Bobby.  Tay's race evolved on a gas giant planet not unlike Jupiter. Bobby is the human "Reluctant God" of book title fame. N'Gai Toledo is E VI's genius toady. “Perhaps I should continue the briefing,” said Bobby. “I don’t think so,” said the emperor. Every eye in the room snapped into focus on his face. Bobby raised one eyebrow but said nothing. “I need to know a few things first. I need to know a bit more about our allies ..read more

Intelligent life on a turbulent gas giant? One of the main characters in A Reluctant God is "Tay," a composite intelligence reflecting the combined consciousness of billions of very advanced individuals from an empire of gas giants. Raising the question, of course, "Could intelligent life - or life at all - actually evolve on a gas giant like Jupiter?" Now that NASA's Juno spacecraft is returning stunning data on Jupiter as it swings in and out of Jupiter space, showing an incredibly turbulent upper atmosphere, the question gets ever more complicated. Clearly I believe life can develop - in ..read more

Teaser, TEASER!! Scooter's (my) new book is "going to press" shortly.  Here's a hint. * TBA. * pix credit ..read more

The "Quantum Statistical Network" Up & Running? One of the assumptions in the book is that an instantaneous form of communications has been developed.  It has essentially infinite range, huge bandwidth, is totally secure and error free. Pretty good, eh?  Way sci-fi. Nobody I know seems aware that the Chinese put up a quantum communications satellite last August. I just found out myself. Here is a report from January this year saying it's working fine! Eeeeek! So, NASA, DARPA, Prez Trump.... where's the U S of A's response? In A Reluctant God, the "Quantum Statistical Net ..read more

Being Specific I decided that if I was going to use a "do over" for human civilization - as I clearly do in A Reluctant god - I had better do a full commitment to The Apocalypse, dates and all. Especially I should define how my do-over heroes survived the thing. So I did.  The first mention is early in the book ... like this: The Do Over: After the Climax Battles, 2056 - 2060, the Apocalypse, the surviving bits of humanity were scattered over the planet in desperately defended pockets of livable space, most of which had been designed explicitly for survivability under wartime condi ..read more

Games, Games, Games Sci-Fi can tackle the humongousest of topics. Today, we are seeing the early phases of an employment sea change. "Jobs" as they have evolved from man-pulled plows and sweating forge workers to coders and designers, are beginning to be assumed by our creations. AI and all its progeny will do the work, thank you. Even art and intuitive invention will be done for us, perhaps better than we can do it, a potentially discouraging state of things. So how will humanity deal with this? We will be unshackled in a sense. So we must move to a different reality.  Below is how thi ..read more