Interstellar Earth

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There have been many books and movies illustrating the idea that the Earth is part of an ecosystem of asteroids and comets, moons and planets that all spin around our sun.

What hasn’t been explored as much is the effect of an ecosystem on a much larger scale—the effect exerted on the Earth by objects in our interstellar and even intergalactic neighborhood.

How’s that possible? 

Sitting and reading this, you might think you’re not moving--but you are.

Let’s start with the Earth rotating around its axis like a spinning top. Our planet is eight thousand miles in diameter, or about twenty-four thousand miles around its equator, and one rotation each twenty-four hours means you’re moving at a thousand miles per hour as you speed around the Earth’s axis.

And we’re not stopping there.

The Earth itself is orbiting the sun at a speed of about 67,000 mph. The sun is rotating around the Milky Way’s galactic core at about 518,000 mph, the Milky Way moving around the center of gravity of our Local Group of galaxies at 90,000 mph and the Local Group is moving relative to our Super Cluster at a speed of about 1.35 million mph.

So how fast are you moving while sitting still?

As best as we can estimate, you’re moving at about 540 miles per second. If you went back in time by a year, you would need to travel more than twice the distance to Pluto to get back to the same physical spot in space you are now.

Over time, spaceship Earth travels a lot of distance.

And all that “space” out there isn’t empty, but kinda cloudy. As in, giant molecular cloudy. There are upwards of 8000 giant molecular clouds in our galaxy, ranging from twenty to two-hundred light years across, and as the Earth and sun orbit the Milky Way, we tend to run into “cloudy” galactic weather every few hundred millions years.

The effect can be dramatic, depending on the density and composition of the cloud, leading to kinematic heating and seeding of our atmosphere to form clouds, probably leading to “snowball Earth” scenarios where ice extends all the way to the equator--which scientists now think has happened at least once or twice. The timeline might seem impossibly huge, but in the time that complex life has existed on Earth, about a half billion years, we have completed two complete orbits around Sagittarius A (the supermassive black hole at the center).

In fact, many of the events we’d attributed previously to chance, like the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, might not be random at all, but the direct result of the interstellar interactions the Earth has with passing stars or giant molecular clouds. In school, we’re taught that the closest star, apart from the Sun, is Proxima Centuri, at just over four light years away. It may seem like the interstellar neighborhood is static. 

But it’s not.

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In February of 2015, researchers were amazed to realize that just 70,000 years ago, near enough in time that our direct ancestors would looked up in the sky and seen it, Scholz’s star, a red dwarf, passed about a half light year from us. 

This led to a flurry of data crunching, leading scientists to discover that, for instance, four million years ago, a giant star, more than twice the mass of the sun, passed less than a third of a light year from us, and in just over a million years from now, another star will pass at just over a hundredth (yes, a hundredth) of a light year from our sun, grazing the solar system itself and affecting the orbits of the planets.

Scientists are now speculating that Sedna, the 10th planetoid of the Sun, the one after Pluto, isn’t even an original planet of our Sun. It was captured from a passing star over a billion years ago, when our solar system collided with an alien star’s planetary system. Hundreds of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the collection of planetoids past Uranus, are believed to have been captured from passing stars. 

And, of course, we had our the first interstellar visitor, ‘Oumuamua, which transited the solar system in 2017, followed close on its heels by the second, 2I/Borisov, in 2019. Which leads to the realization that we’re literally floating amongst interstellar debris, some of which is settling onto the Earth as we flash through space.

So we are continually mixing together with others stars and interstellar objects, and not on a time scale of billions of years, but on a regular basis every few million years—some scientists now even think that alien stars transit our solar system’s Oort cloud as often as every few hundred thousand years.

The gravitation effects of passing stars change the orbits of the planets over the course of millions of years. A change in Earth’s orbit might have triggered one of the biggest global warming events in its history. A massive ice age, started 35 million years ago, might have also been caused by another shift in Earth’s orbit, and that this same event disturbed the asteroid belt enough to precipitate several large asteroid impacts, one of which formed the Chesapeake Bay. 

And we haven’t even talked about the 95% of “stuff” floating around us, dark matter, that we can’t see or detect, other than knowing it’s there from its gravitational signature. With upgraded sensors and increased power in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2015, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, many scientists had hoped to see evidence of dark matter.

But they’ve found nothing so far. 

Despite all of our technology and hundreds of years of peering into the cosmos, we still have no idea what makes up the vast majority of our universe. 

It was Stephen Hawking who first proposed that the missing dark matter may be in the form of invisible “primordial” black holes that were formed when our universe itself was created in the Big Bang.

Primordial black holes might have formed when the Big Bang created a super-dense soup of particles, with densities high enough to spontaneously form black holes. Recent research results using the Kepler satellite have restricted the size range of possible “black hole dark matter” candidates, but it is still a viable theory. 

Some theorists think it’s possible that these intermediate-sized primordial black holes coalesced into the super-giant black holes that form the cores of galaxies, with the left over matter of the universe cooling around them to form stars. If so, some of these primordial black holes might still be wandering the cosmos, ejected at high speeds from galactic cores during the process of merger by something called gravitational recoil.

Which leads back to one of my books.

If you want to read more, my series Nomad details the effects of a close encounter with a primordial black hole, and you can read the whole series in a discounted box set that was just released this week. Click here to check it out.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this little spin!

Matthew Mather

Matthew Mather
With over a million copies of his books sold, translated into eighteen languages, with 20th Century Fox now developing his second novel, CyberStorm, for a major film release, Matthew Mather’s books are sold worldwide.

He began his career at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines, then started several high-tech ventures in everything from computational nanotechnology to electronic health records, weather prediction systems to genomics, and even designed an award-winning brain-training video game. He now works as a full-time author of speculative fiction.

You can follow Matt on Facebook, Twitter and his website.

Review—Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

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Bobby’s Rating - 3 out of 10

Currently playing at a theater near you.

I know 3 out of 10 is a terrible rating, so go ahead, let the hating begin. I thought Star Wars, episode 993 (or whatever number we’re on now), sucked a hairy ball sack. On the other hand, the special effects were impressive.

Before you Google my home address and come to my house to defile my dog, let me say this: When I was 16, way back in 1977 (yes, I’m that old), I saw the first Star Wars movie in one of those giant pre-multiplex theaters on a big-ass 200-foot-wide screen—lightsabers, tie fighters, star destroyers—OMG! The special effects were revolutionary, for the time. I don’t exaggerate when I say, at that point in my life, Star Wars was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.

Mind you, at 16, I’d experienced no carnal activity with a woman. That wouldn’t come until a few years later, when a spectacularly beautiful girl seemed to have tumbled out of the pages of a Playboy magazine and onto the fold-down backseat of my Mustang fastback. That night was as wonderful as it was awkward, with lots of nervous fumbling in between, but it ended well. Of course, that event made it directly to the top of my Best Things That Ever Happened to Bobby list, but in the long run, the first Star Wars held onto a respectable ranking, and the loss of my virtue slipped slowly down.

So why do I tell you all this? Because I want to demonstrate how big of a Star Wars fan I was.

I know that puts me in the camp of curmudgeons who say things like, the old movies are better than the new ones, that band’s first album is better than their latest crap, they don’t make <any consumer product> like they used to, and get off my lawn, you whippersnapper!

And I’ll be honest, if the first Star Wars movie came out today, for the first time, I don’t know that I’d be such a devotee. 

Because one thing you learn as you age, is that your tastes change through the years. But it’s more than that. Each of us, whether we can see it or not, is a product of our culture, everything we’ve lived through, and everything we’re currently experiencing.

Back when the first Star Wars movie came out, the culture I’d spent my entire life in was in turmoil – the Vietnam war, demonstrations, riots, assassinations, the Arab oil embargo, Watergate, rising inflation and unemployment, not to mention the continual threat of nuclear annihilation. It seems to me, that many of the big movies in the early to mid-1970s were a reflection of us. They were introspective, and at times, brutally dark. I was part of a culture that had lost its understanding of its identity and was trying to figure itself out. In the early ’60s, I think all Americans believed we were the good guys, the cowboys in the white hats. By the mid-’70s, we weren’t sure anymore. We didn’t trust our government, our police, or our parents. In my lifetime, we’d gone from certitude about who we were as a people, to questioning whether we were even good.

And then Star Wars came out.​

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I’m not going to claim that it totally changed the direction of our culture, but it did give us a story about a hero we could all believe in who fought against a villain who was 100% evil (at least in the first movie he was.) 

Pure good, versus absolute evil, set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It was the kind of story all of us were starving for, though we barely knew we had a hunger until we saw it in the theater. And for me, a kid who’d taken to spending most of his spare time reading SciFi books to escape a very ugly world, Star Wars was magical, fantastic, and pure, a reflection of all the crazy stuff I was reading about in those books, and quite literally, the best thing that had ever happened to me.

So maybe, what I’m really saying about the latest Star Wars, is that it didn’t make me feel the same way the first Star Wars made me feel.

In fact, ever since the first trilogy ended, I’ve watched each Star Wars movie with the highest expectations, but until I sat down and attempted to write this review, I don’t think I truly understood what those expectations were—I wanted that 1977 feeling again, what I felt when that screen flashed the giant Star Wars text and the fanfare blasted me out of my seat, and Luke overcame his obstacles and blew up the death star, and they all lived happily ever after—until the Empire Struck Back.

So, I guess what I should have said to start this review, was—my expectations are so colored by my history with these movies, that there’s no way I can give the latest Star Wars any kind of unbiased review. You might like it. My daughter, who watched it with me, fuckin’ loved it. Me, not so much.

But the special effects were pretty fan-fuckin’-tastic.

Bobby Adair

* If you feel like I’ve been unnecessarily harsh on a masterpiece, or too easy on a terrible POS, please read my Disclaimers, Caveats, and Excuses page before you flame me.

​Bobby Adair is a former programmer, with a long-lived passion - and only recently fulfilled desire - for writing.  He is the author of the Freedom Fire series, the Slow Burn series and the Ebola K series.

One of Bobby's favorite quotes:

“It’s not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It’s about all of us...Michael, we don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.”
- Peter Gibbons, Office Space

You can follow Bobby on Facebook, Twitter and his website.

What’s your favorite doomsday scenario?

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Post-apocalyptic and doomsday fiction and non-fiction has been popular since the first written words. Today, it’s one of the hottest sub-genres in publishing. Some might argue it has become a genre of its own.

I’m one of those people, although I’m biased—apocalyptic fiction is my bread and butter. For the past decade I’ve written all sorts of end of the world scenarios. Alien invasions, viral outbreaks, EMPs, civil-wars, and now I’m about to embark on a new scenario, and I want to know—what’s your favorite apocalypse to read about? 

For me, I think the best stories are those that are the most realistic, the kind that scares the reader and inspires them to prepare to survive such an event. 

Natural disasters, a viral outbreak, terrorism, nuclear war are all scenarios that have happened on some level or another. Wide-scale events that could potentially wipe out the entire human race. 

There are also doomsday stories that are complete science fiction. 

Think Doom, the video game that has inspired novels and movies. In the scenario, scientists on Mars open a gate to Hell that disgorges demons and horrendous beasts that eventually make it to Earth and kill off a majority of humanity. World War Z and the Walking Dead are popular modern day zombie stories that have the same premise. While there is some science in these stories, there is almost zero chance either of them could ever happen. 

But there are science fiction ideas like artificial intelligence that could transform into reality. AI, in my opinion, is one of the biggest threats to the human race aside from a virus or asteroid.

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In my four-book series Trackers, the end of the world comes from a North Korean nuclear and EMP attack. In my four-book Orbs series, natural resource thirsty aliens arrive on Earth to take one of our most valuable resources.

These stories were two ways I believed the world could end, but there are plenty of ways humanity could meet its doom. 

So what do you think? What’s your favorite type of doomsday story? Let me know in the comments.

Nicholas Sansbury Smith is the USA Today bestselling author of the Hell Divers series, the Orbs series, the Trackers series, and the Extinction Cycle series.

He worked for Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management in disaster mitigation before switching careers to focus on his one true passion—writing.

When he isn't writing or daydreaming about the apocalypse, he enjoys running, biking, spending time with his family, and traveling the world.

He is an Ironman triathlete and lives in Iowa with his wife, their dogs, and a house full of books.

You can follow Nicholas on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Goodreads, Tumblr, and his website.

Are we living in the Matrix?

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Are we living in the Matrix?

​I don’t mean the actual Matrix, run by maniacal robots using humans as batteries while we live out a simulacrum of life on Earth. But rather, the concept that our reality isn’t really ‘real.’

This concept is a provocative one on so many levels, and the truth is that there is just so much of science that has been leading us in this direction lately.

A significant group of futurists and renowned scientists firmly believe that we are living in a simulation: Elon Musk, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and even myself, but that’s not really a good reason for you to buy into the theory, nor am I necessarily proselytizing, but let’s take an objective look at some of the evidence:

The Mandela Effect

This was incorporated into a few popular books and movies, but if you’ve never heard of it, the Mandela Effect is the phenomenon where a collective group of people misremember events in history. The classic example is that a lot of people claim to remember Nelson Mandela dying in the 80s when in fact he died in 2013. Some people claim that this is evidence that our simulators are actively traveling back in time and altering history, or at least, evidence that there are parallel universes, which itself is a concept with strong ties to a simulated reality. A quantum computer simulation would likely simulate multiple variations of events in order to arrive at a desirable outcome. The question is what is considered desirable, and to whom?

The Fermi Paradox: Where Are All The Aliens?

Maybe there aren’t any—in this simulation. We might be the only civilization in what only looks like a vast universe. What about those points of light you see in the sky that we call stars? They could just be part of the backdrop of the simulation, a way to fool us into thinking we’re a part of something much bigger than we actually are. Simulating the rest of the universe at a great distance from us is actually relatively easy. There isn’t a lot of detail that we can see with telescopes. It’s not like we can actually travel to Alpha Centauri and go walk around on its planets. The sheer vastness of space and the difficulty we have in crossing those distances might just be an element of the simulation that’s designed to keep us contained in a manageable space, one that doesn’t overtax the resources of whatever supercomputer is running it all.

The Double-slit Experiment

Photons fired at a screen through two slits in a copper plate produce an interference pattern on the screen, behaving like a wave and passing through both slits at the same time. But if we conduct the same experiment under observation (remote, human, mechanical—doesn’t matter who or what is observing the photons): the photons behave like particles, and only pass through one of the slits, leaving no interference pattern on the screen. Electrons exhibit the same strange behavior. So what’s happening? Some say that this effect is the code of the simulation conserving resources by only simulating what it needs to. Video games today do this to great effect, only rendering what you can see at any given moment.

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Computers and Video Games Are Advancing Rapidly

In just a few short decades, we’ve gone from 2D games like Space Invaders, Pong, and Pac-Man to this:

theHunter: Call of the Wild

Given another 50 or 100 years, video games will become indistinguishable from reality. Seeing this trend in 2003, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher from the University of Oxford, put forth a compelling argument for the idea that we might all be living in a simulation. He used the principles of statistics and logic to support his argument, but the basic gist of it was that it’s easy to imagine how members of an advanced civilization would have the ability to create a simulated world like ours, but not just one such world—they would be able to create many, many simulated worlds like this one.

Nick Bostrom, therefore, argued that the vast majority of realities would be artificial ones, simply because there is only one ‘real’ world, and it cannot be multiplied or used to spawn new ones. But advanced civilizations can certainly create thousands or even millions of simulated universes within one real universe. So, statistically speaking, it becomes more likely that we are living in a simulated reality rather than a real one. Bostrom suggested that perhaps we are living in an ancestor simulation created by a far future version of humanity.

There Are Error-Correcting Codes in the Fundamental Equations of String Theory

Theoretical Physicist James Gates thinks he’s found error-correcting computer codes in the equations of string theory. These types of codes are common in web browsers, and in the error-correcting memory of computer servers, but what is error-correcting code doing in the base code of our universe?

Conclusion

I could go on and on about this, but I won’t bore you with endless speculations and implications based on scraps of evidence. I’ll write a book about it, instead ;). But whether you believe we could be living in a simulation or not, I encourage you to think about the bigger questions behind that idea. Ironically, they’re the same questions we’ve been asking since the dawn of time: why are we here? What is the possible purpose of it all? Is there a God? I’ve come up with a few disturbing possibilities as to the why of it below:

  1. We’re prisoners from a far future society of humanity. We’re being rehabilitated in a relatively short-term (insert your hypothetical lifespan here) simulation, or else we’re just here to separate us from the ‘real’ reality and the ‘real’ people in a humane way that doesn’t allow us to hurt anyone. Our degree of suffering down here might even be commensurate with some type of sentence or eye-for-an-eye justice system.
  2. We’re bored immortal post-humans (humans who have uploaded their consciousness to android bodies, or to a supercomputer) living in a metaverse of countless different simulations. So why all the pain and struggle in this particular simulation? Maybe we got bored of having it easy. Think about it: if you never had to struggle, never felt pain, never suffered, would you appreciate anything anymore? A simulation like this one might be the equivalent of thrill-seeking for an immortal intelligence. That said, I don’t think anyone would choose to be a starving child in Africa. It’s possible that some of the people on Earth are the equivalent of NPCs in a game (non-player characters), which means that they only appear to suffer and aren’t really real, but that’s a dangerous line of thinking to incorporate into an actual philosophy of life. You don’t know who might be real and who isn’t, so you can’t make any assumptions without committing grave errors in judgment. Plus, this is just a wacky theory, so yeah. There’s that.
  3. Humans digitize and become immortal machines. Then what? How do you have kids? You can’t. You could program them, but they would have no notion of what it’s like to be a human. It’s likely that you would find them and their worldview utterly alien to your own (having once been a human yourself, you have that context as a base level of programming that underlies your decisions and personality). So this simulation could be a way to train and educate the ‘children’ of a race of post-human androids in matters of empathy, humanity, mortality, etc.

And finally, you may or may not be religious, but if what we think is reality is actually simulated, then there is a creator behind it all. And if this is a simulation, then any version of supernatural events becomes quite possible. Not only that, there could be a super intelligence behind it all, an AI that created the simulation and governs it. That AI would be God by all of our classical definitions. And if that AI also runs the ‘real’ world / base reality as some kind of benevolent ruler, then it would be a kind of God in that reality, too. Of course, there could be an evil AI as well. Maybe some rebels who didn’t like how things were being run in the metaverse programmed their own super-intelligent AI to run things differently. Sounds familiar somehow… I’m not saying that’s what’s going on behind the curtains, but the fact is that anything is possible.

​Unfortunately, there’s no way to find out for sure without dying first. Don’t worry, I promise I won’t say I told you so when we’re all back in the base reality again.

Until then, my advice is to be the best version of yourself that you can, because one of the more frightening possibilities is that we are all prisoners in here, and if that’s so, then proving our successful rehabilitation might be the only way we’re ever getting out.

​Jasper Scott is a USA Today bestselling author of more than 20 sci-fi novels including the best selling First Encounter, The New Frontiers trilogy and Dark Space series. With over a million books sold, Jasper's work has been translated into various languages and published around the world.

Jasper writes fast-paced books with unexpected twists and flawed characters. He was born and raised in Canada by South African parents, with a British heritage on his mother's side and German on his father's. He now lives in an exotic locale with his wife, their two kids, and two chihuahuas.

You can follow Jasper on Facebook, Twitter and his website.

The Top 10 Best Sci-Fi TV Series (Of the Last Two Decades) and Books That Are Similar

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You can easily find the top 10 TV series in science fiction according to various review sites. 

This is my personal top 10 out of the top 100 highest-rated sci-fi series on Rotten Tomatoes. I have curated this list with one small limitation: it has to be less than 20 years old. I promise I won’t spoil anything if you haven’t already watched these series, and I’ll also be proposing some similar books that you can read, because well, we all know books are better than TV ;).

#10 Wayward Pines (Rotten Tomatoes #??)

This entry bumped Dark Matter off my top 10 (another good series to look into). Wayward Pines doesn’t have as many sci-fi elements as I typically like, but it is fantastic for two simple reasons: the twists in the plot, and the mystery that’s woven throughout the story. This series has it all: great characters, an amazing plot, and a unique setup. I really, really loved this series, and it would be topping my list if there were more Sci-Fi elements involved. I can’t say much about it that wouldn’t spoil the series for you, so just take my word for it: watch this, or better yet, read it, because it started out as a book series by Blake Crouch.

Similar Books: Wayward Pines, Broken Worlds: The Awakening​

#9 The Hundred (Rotten Tomatoes #23)

The world ended in a nuclear war. The only survivors are on a space station orbiting Earth. Strict population controls drive these survivors to send 100 juvenile delinquents down to Earth to fend for themselves. They discover that the surface is habitable, and there are other survivors down there with them—ruthless tribes of humans who would sooner kill them than help them. The earlier seasons are the best, but season six actually takes a unique turn as well. A highly enjoyable sci-fi / post-apocalyptic series, but grim and bloody (in case you’re squeamish). The only negative, and it still sticks out in my mind, is that this is definitely YA sci-fi, so you’ll be continually amazed that teenagers / young adults are calling the shots when more capable / knowledgeable adults would make much more sense.

Similar Books: The 100, Hell Divers

#8 Colony (Rotten Tomatoes #38)

This series is about an alien occupation of Earth. It follows the resistance to the occupation and how we struggle to break free. There are plenty of post-apocalyptic themes here as well as sci-fi. I particularly enjoyed this series, to the point that it actually inspired one of my recent books. See below for something similar to read.

Similar Books: Occupied Earth, Occupation

#7 Stranger Things (Rotten Tomatoes #2)

This series is more of a fantasy than actual sci-fi, but it is still fantastic. Full of otherworldly monsters slipping through from another dimension known as the upside down, this series follows the lives of a group of kids in the 1980s, as well as a few of their parents. Despite the main characters being children, they’re all extremely relatable for adults, and the entire series is a nostalgic trip back to one’s own childhood. It’s hard not to love the characters, and the terrifying horror elements introduced by interdimensional monsters really make this series easy to binge.

Similar Books: It (Stephen King)

#6 The Expanse (Rotten Tomatoes #10)

This is a military sci-fi / political series with elements of space opera as well as space exploration. The special effects are fantastic, and the universe is a compelling one with more realistic science than you typically find in the sci-fi genre. This series is set in a near future of Earth where Mars, Earth, and The Belt (miners who mine the asteroid belt and live in space) are all vying for dominance in our solar system. There’s plenty of friction between the three, and open war looks to be inevitable. The story is told from multiple points of view, and there is an evolving mystery at the heart of it. This series is particularly impressive because it manages to capture both the macroscopic Space Opera elements of sweeping, epic stories as well as the down-to-earth plot lines of everyday people caught up in the middle of it all.

Similar Books: Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse Book 1)

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#5 The Orville (Rotten Tomatoes #100)

I can’t say enough good things about The Orville. This is clearly a Star Trek rip-off, but don’t let that turn you away. It actually captures the spirit of Star Trek far better than Star Trek Discovery. This series is also about space exploration, and it’s not all action-driven, which reminds me a lot of the older Star Trek series. The only possible negative, is that this series is a spoof. If you’re looking for something grim or serious, keep looking, but if you don’t mind busting a gut while exploring the universe, you won’t find a better series anywhere than The Orville.

Similar Books: All Systems Red, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

#4 Stargate Universe (Rotten Tomatoes #58)

This is an extension of the Stargate franchise, and as far as I’m concerned it is by far the best entry into that universe. The original SG-1 is now dated, and I always found it to be highly cheesy. Stargate Atlantis was good in its day, but dated by today’s standards. By contrast, this series is more recent and definitely takes itself seriously. It truly captures the spirit of space exploration. Apart from a few boring flashback sequences, this story is all about moving forward, exploring new planets and new sci-fi concepts. If you like stories about space exploration, this is about as good as it gets.

Similar Books: Dark Space Universe (Book 1)

#3 Lost in Space (Rotten Tomatoes #63)

This is a PG-rated space adventure available on Netflix. It’s actually a remake of the older version. An interstellar colony ship gets lost in space. The colonists are forced to abandon the ship, and they crash land on a strange planet where they are faced with an ongoing set of challenges to their survival. The plot is very similar to a sci-fi version of the Swiss family Robinson, which it unashamedly mimics, even in the fact that the main characters’ last name is Robinson. But everything has a sci-fi slant to it, so I’ll let that go. This particular series is better in the first season than the second, but it still rates highly on my list, because I have seen so few space adventures, as opposed to Space Operas or Military Sci-Fi epics.

Similar Books: Into the Unknown

#2 The Mandalorian (2019) (Rotten Tomatoes #??)

I signed up for Disney+ just so that I could watch this series, and I suspect I’m not the only one. This is a Star Wars TV series (live action, not animated) about a bounty hunter who travels the galaxy making money by capturing or killing criminals. The series takes a sharp left turn from there as the main character is hired to kill an unknown target for an officer of the now-defeated Galactic Empire. The story is actually surprisingly good, and involves far fewer fantasy elements than we’re used to with Star Wars. I can’t recommend this series highly enough for fans of Star Wars and Sci-Fi alike.

Similar Books: The Mandalorian Armor

#1 Battlestar Galactica (2005) (Rotten Tomatoes #1)

This is a slightly older TV series (2005), but by far the best that I’ve ever watched. It’s about a far future of humanity in which we have colonized 13 different planets. We were forced to leave Earth behind a long time ago, but no one can remember why, or even where it is. A race of exiled androids that we created known as Cylons hatches a violent plot to wipe us out early on in this series, and the survivors are left to flee the colonies aboard an aging warship called the Galactica. With the ship being hounded relentlessly by Cylons, the main characters must flee to safety, ultimately searching for our long-lost homeworld, Earth, in the process.

This series is what I would call realistic sci-fi. With very few fantasy elements, excellent action sequences, unforgettable characters, and plenty of plot twists. Battlestar Galactica is to Sci-Fi what Game of Thrones is to Fantasy.

Similar Books: Dark Space, The Legacy Fleet Series

​Jasper Scott is a USA Today bestselling author of more than 20 sci-fi novels including the best selling First Encounter, The New Frontiers trilogy and Dark Space series. With over a million books sold, Jasper's work has been translated into various languages and published around the world.

Jasper writes fast-paced books with unexpected twists and flawed characters. He was born and raised in Canada by South African parents, with a British heritage on his mother's side and German on his father's. He now lives in an exotic locale with his wife, their two kids, and two chihuahuas.

You can follow Jasper on Facebook, Twitter and his website.

Aliens, crop circles, and objects in space: First contact settings in literature

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It’s nighttime, and the smell of the corn field is overpowering as you walk through the thick stalks. Your friend carelessly ran ahead, and now she’s vanished from your sight. You hear a noise and peer at the dark sky, certain you’ve never seen so many stars before in your life. The moon is a sliver tonight, not helping much to guide your steps. 

“Jane! This isn’t funny!” you shout, but your voice falls flat, like you’ve screamed into a pillow. And it hits you. The smell of ozone fills your nostrils, the flashing lights threaten to unravel your mind… You spot Jane before you hear her cries for help. Her arms are limp, her expression twisted in fear as the beam of light lifts her from the soil.

The UFO blocks the stars above, the light dying against its smooth surface rather than reflecting. Jane is carried away, the beam vanishes, and you’re left alone, trying to process what you just saw. Your hand feels something dripping over your lip, and you run your fingers over it, tasting blood.

Aliens. The concept is familiar, yet terrifying. Whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, the truth is out there. We just haven’t found it yet.

They’ve been a topic of interest for centuries, with sightings dating back as far as ancient Egypt. There are references to strange creatures “visiting in their vessel with wheels within wheels” in the Bible in Ezekiel 1, and Peter Cawdron even wrote a great book, 3zekiel, about this very topic, using remote Africa as the setting for the alien contact novel.

Fast forward to a time where HG Wells wrote War of the Worlds in the late 1800s, changing the way we thought about aliens and potential earthly invasion, and we were ushered into a new era of literature. Rumors of UFO and extraterrestrial sightings grew in popularity in the 1960s, making more people look to the stars for answers amidst lunar space travel and the Cold War.

So what makes a great UFO or alien contact story? 

For me, there are so many interesting concepts and ways to go about the topic. Personally, there’s something intriguing about the small-town crop circles, the recollection of abductions along a lakeshore, and the flashing lights in the night sky that offer no explanation of a definitive source.

I tackled the subject of alien abduction, and what would happen to someone if they’d possibly experienced it as a child, in my novel Lights over Cloud Lake. Not everyone who’s been through something traumatic like that should be deemed mentally ill, and I do think it was a unique take on the genre, blending mystery into a science fiction topic.

Another setting or trope I gravitate towards is the mysterious object in space. 

We see this done well by AG Riddle recently in Winter World, where an object is blocking the sun from reaching Earth. Books like Rendezvous with Rama, by the great Arthur C. Clarke, show us one of the most intriguing cases yet, with a giant empty ship rotating through our solar system, about to be flung around the sun. Others take a different approach, like Felix R. Savage’s Freefall, where an unfamiliar vessel is orbiting Europa, and we follow a team on Earth as they prepare a flight to investigate. Each of these involves strange distant beings, but they are not the forefront of the story; instead, the setting and obstacle they create is. 

In books like Contact by Carl Sagan, we have instructions given to create a portal to another location, and in Douglas E. Richards’ brand new novel, Enigma Cube, we learn of a device left by aliens on Earth, and once we are advanced enough, only then will we have the means to uncover the truth. 

All of these stories are fascinating and thrilling, regardless of whether you actually see the aliens, or if their existence stays a mystery. 

The setting in an alien contact book is as important as any other aspect, and done well, it can create a tone and have as large of an impact as a main character.

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I tackled alien contact with my debut novel The Event, where we realize we’ve been living among them for years. My hero was an accountant who teamed up with a cocker spaniel as he set out to stop the invasion, and it’s what kicked off my career as a full-time author. I’m planning a new series with the mystery of alien life at the forefront, and when I’m preparing it, the setting is at the top of my list.

We’ve engaged in numerous discussions regarding the theory of aliens over the decades, but one thing remains constant. We still have no idea if they exist, but if they do, there’s one thing I’m confident of. They’re aware of us.

Keep looking to the stars, because you never know when we’ll make contact.

What’s your favorite type of alien contact story? Let me know in the comments, or hop on over to the DSF Reader Group on Facebook to add your 2¢ to the discussion we've got going there.

Nathan Hystad is the best-selling author of The Event. He writes about alien invasion, first contact, colonization, and everything else he devoured growing up. He's had hundreds of thousands of copies sold and read, and loves the fact he's been able to reach so many amazing readers with his stories.

Nathan's written over twenty novels, including The Survivors, Baldwin's Legacy, and The Resistance.

Nathan's also done mystery/thrillers with Red Creek, Return to Red Creek, and Lights Over Cloud Lake.

You can follow Nathan on Facebook, Twitter and his website.

Have Series Taken Over Fiction?

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Series to the left of me, series to the right.  Every book seems to be part of a series today. Readers who prefer standalone novels are faced with what must seem like endless series books, from trilogies to never-ending sagas with 20, 30, or more volumes. I’ve contributed to this trend myself, with the nine books of my Crimson Worlds series and the fifteen (on the way to eighteen) for my Blood on the Stars series.

Why so many series?  

Well, there are a couple reasons. We’ll hit the obvious one first. Series make more sense for a writer from a business perspective. From built-in readership for subsequent installments to the ability to promote multiple books at once, authors find it far easier to build true careers writing series.

That’s a little mercenary, perhaps, but it’s far from the only reason. Series wouldn’t be more lucrative without one unavoidable fact: Most readers love them. There are a lot of advantages to longer stories, narratives that unfold gradually over a larger number of books. The ability to more deeply develop characters and storylines is vastly increased over a longer series. It’s hard to imagine if Game of Thrones would have become the cultural phenomenon it did if it had been a single book and one two-hour movie that came and went.

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Readers become attached to characters, and they want to see their stories completed.  

They want to learn more about settings and fictional universes. It’s a lot easier to dive right into a new story that also has some familiarity, some understanding in place when the eyes settle on page one.

Series are nothing new, of course. From the early days with things like the Lensman series through the years to Poul Anderson’s Technic series (and its James Bond in space hero, Dominic Flandry) and beyond to David Weber and the lengthy and beloved Honor Harrington epic, series have always been with us. The move in recent years to faster publication and reduced wait times for new books has enhanced the appeal of these longer tales, eliminating in many cases the wait of a year or more between volumes.

Many stories go on because readers still want more, even years after an author believed a series was finished, and in some cases, even after the original creator has passed away.  

Classic stories like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Frank Herbert’s Dune have continued decades after the original books were written.

The series juggernaut isn’t going away anytime soon, so dig through the books that cross your path, find a story that grabs your attention, and settle in for a long and wild ride.

Jay Allan

Jay Allan is a USA Today bestselling author of roughly 30 science fiction and fantasy books, including the bestselling Blood on the Stars series, Crimson Worlds series and the Far Stars trilogy published by HarperCollins Voyager.

A lifetime northeasterner, Jay currently lives in New York City, where he writes from his apartment…and continues to fill small notebooks with ideas for future books.

He has been a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy for many years, a writer of the same far more recently. His tastes are varied and eclectic, but most often he will be found reading military and dystopian science fiction, space opera, alternate history, and epic fantasy. He is also an avid historian, and is as likely to be reading non-fiction as a novel.

Jay writes a lot of science fiction with military themes, but also other SF and some fantasy as well. His works tend to feature complex characters and lots of backstory and action, always with an emphasis on world-building and extensive detail.

Join Jay's reader group on Facebook to keep up with the latest in his work.

What does a post-MCU sci-fi landscape look like?

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Yes, yes… I realize that the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) is still ongoing. 

I suppose a more accurate way of saying it would be; "what does a post-Avengers cinematic landscape look like?" Marvel/Disney is obviously still going to be producing movies within the MCU, but after Avengers: Endgame I feel like interest will begin to wane now that the story arc that began with Iron Man waaay back in 2008 has concluded.

While many would (rightly) argue that Marvel's cinematic juggernaut wasn't really science fiction, it's impossible to ignore that the series of superhero movies completely dominated a space where science fiction would normally reside. The MCU sucked so much oxygen out of the room that, other than Star Wars, there wasn't a lot of room left to talk about anything else. The new Star Wars may have sold a lot of tickets, but it seems to have as many people who loathed it than people who adored and obsessed over it. So, for the sake of this argument, let's assume that the MCU is firmly within the science fiction spectrum… what do audiences have to look forward to next?

Looking past the big boys of LucasFilm and Marvel, the sci-fi movie scene is pretty bleak. 

The Star Trek reboot seems to have lost steam and nobody wants to take the chance on new, untested properties. Sci-fi is expensive to make. It's hard to get studios to commit to something that isn't guaranteed to make a profit in a time when ALL movies are struggling to get funding. But the sci-fi market globally is enormous and hungry. How do you service that need if you're not willing to take risks on new projects?

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Could the indie filmmakers fill that void? 

We've all seen low-budget sci-fi movies on deep-cable. The more popular ones have their own drinking games attached to them. In other words: they're entertaining because we point and laugh at them, not because they're good films. I realize that some of that is deliberate on the part of the filmmaker… at least I hope it is. If the guy who made Sharknado was trying to make a serious movie then that's a whole other problem. So is there any good news? Yes. Things are changing within the industry for the better. Technology is becoming cheaper and more prevalent and filmmakers are no longer beholden to the big studio dinosaurs to get their movies made.

Check out the work of director/producer Hasraf "Haz" Dulull (HazFilm.com). Haz is able to make compelling films and he's doing it without the backing of huge studio bucks. His shorts have a real "big movie" sensibility about them and you honestly feel like his work is something you'd see in the theater after paying $14 for a ticket and $2,500 for concessions. He's able to create a lot of what we expect to see from big-budget sci-fi using the leading edge of visual tech… and, of course, no small amount of talent and skill.

Can filmmakers like Haz change the sci-fi cinema landscape and steal back some of the momentum from the monolithic companies like Disney and Paramount? 

With some help from distributors willing to play the movie in theaters, I'd like to think so. The mega-studio movies will continue to have top billing… but I, for one, would like to see indies begin to do for movies what they did for books: provide more options and a quality alternative to what the gatekeepers say we must watch.

JOSHUA DALZELLE
Joshua Dalzelle grew up in a small, rural town and joined the US Air Force as a teenager to see the world and work in aviation, one of his enduring passions. 

After his first enlistment as an avionics technician on B-1B bombers, he left the military and worked in the aerospace industry in various capacities while earning a master’s degree in aeronautical science.

During this time, he continued to write as a hobby, occasionally submitting a short story or novel for publication.

In 2012 he discovered indie publishing so he dusted off the dream of being a writer one more time and in 2013 released his first published novel.

He is a USA Today bestselling author, an Amazon Top Ten Bestselling Science Fiction author, and creator of the hugely popular Omega Force series.

You can follow Joshua on Facebook & Twitter.​

Steven Konkoly on Predicting the Covid-19 Pandemic

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I arrived at a rather unenviable and hopefully “once in a lifetime” position recently—having accurately predicted the novel coronavirus now sweeping the globe. 

It’s an inexplicably eerie feeling. A pandemic is not something you ever hope to be “right about.” You hope it never happens. Unfortunately, one of my greatest fears has come true. A fear with its roots firmly planted in my first novel, The Jakarta Pandemic (TJP for short), published ten years ago.

The idea for TJP sprang from an already unhealthy obsession with viral outbreaks. Captain Trips from Stephen King’s epic, The Stand, was burned into my psyche from an early age. I burned through The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton in a single sitting. The book Hot Zone by Richard Preston and movie Outbreak was like a one-two punch, released a year apart in 1994-95. The movie 28 Days Later in 2002. Max Brooks brilliant novel, World War Z a few years after that. I couldn’t get enough of these stories. And then the Swine Flu pandemic hit in 2008! Looking back, it should have come as no surprise to anyone, especially me, that my first stab at writing a novel would center around a pandemic. 

However, despite my initial enthusiasm—the project barely got off the ground. The usual first time, part time writer challenges applied. Didn’t know what I was doing and wasn’t sure it would be worth the effort. Limited time to write. Busy with two young kids. Everything got in the way, but the biggest delay came from what turned out to be the novel’s greatest strength.

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I spent at least six months researching past pandemics, virology, disease epidemiology, U.S. and world pandemic response protocols and detection capabilities, vaccine production, the U.S. healthcare and medical infrastructure, U.S essential services infrastructure, supply chain dynamics.

I consumed every article or paper publicly available that could help me understand the various impacts of a pandemic on society. I had hit what writers call “research paralysis,” where I was obsessed with collecting and digesting more information than I truly needed to write the novel.

When I finally broke through to the other side, I decided to tell the story differently. I steered away from the heroic CDC scientist hopping from one jet to another to reach the next hot zone or the critical response team fighting against all odds to stay one step ahead of the pandemic. Instead, I focused on a single family’s tense and claustrophobic struggle to stay alive during the most lethal pandemic in recorded human history. Of course, I threw way more at them than an unseen virus. Society collapses in my novel (along with nearly all essential services), pitting neighbor against neighbor in a vicious struggle to survive.

What does this have to do with me predicting the COVID19 Pandemic? 

Fast forward ten years from the publication of The Jakarta Pandemic to January of this year. Without going into exhaustive detail (I’ve already taken up enough of your time)—YOU DON’T LOCKDOWN AN ENTIRE CITY OF 11 MILLION PEOPLE FOR THE SEASONAL FLU. I had been watching the virus news closely when Wuhan was locked down by Chinese authorities, noting that the first case detected in the U.S. a few days earlier, had recently returned from a trip to Wuhan. That was all I needed to know.

Interested in going deeper into Steve's thoughts about the current Covid-19 situation? You can read about the rest of his Paul Revere ride through the coronavirus pandemic on his personal blog HERE. 

Steven Konkoly is the USA Today bestselling author of over twenty novels and novellas.

His canon of THRILLERS includes: the FRACTURED STATE books, a “24-style,” near future conspiracy series set in the southwest United States; the BLACK FLAGGED books, a gritty, no-holds barred covert operations and espionage saga; and the ALEX FLETCHER books, a tense, thriller epic, chronicling the aftermath of an inconceivable attack on the United States. He recently released HOT ZONE, the first book in a thriller series chronicling the events surrounding a bioweapons attack against the United States.

You can contact Steven directly by email or through his blog.

Review—Gemini Man

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​​​Bobby’s Rating - 6 out of 10

Currently available on the streaming services.

​Gemini Man, not a great movie, but not a bad one either.

It starts with the frequently used thriller trope of the rogue operative who gets crosswise with the shadowy government agency he works for, and then the agency decides to kill him. Throw in an unexplained and much younger version of the hero, and suddenly you’ve got a clone in the movie, and voila, it’s SciFi.

BFD? Maybe.

But let’s be real for a sec’. Any of us who likes these kinds of flicks knows how the trope works. We’ve watched it a thousand times, and we always come back for more. In a world where most of us are just trying to keep out of trouble at work over the missing TPS cover sheets, indulging the fantasy for a few hours that we’re the haunted hero who must reluctantly shwack the boss to make the world right again, is pretty appealing. I mean, I’m no psych professor, but is this really the whole point of these movies—cathartic indulgence of the boss-killing fantasy? Thankfully, only the most whacked among us ever Goes Postal in the real world.

Anyway, I’m getting off the subject of the movie… kind of.

I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t watch these movies because I want to leave the theater (get off the couch for us who watch a streaming vid in the living room) and feel inspired to contemplate my place in my family/world/relationship. I want escapism and fun. Gemini Man does a decent job with that.
​

Pros:

The action scenes were good, not great, but good. I did, however, dig the chase/shoot-em-up scene through Cartagena. It felt like watching a T-1000 in a Will Smith mask chase an old Will Smith through a 1052-count box of HDR crayons. The colors—WOW!

Young, CGI-face Will Smith looked 100% real in almost every scene. The technology that does this is maturing quickly, and it leads me to speculate what the future of the movie biz will look like when the stars never have to age, never get fat, in fact, are never less than perfect. And how does that turn into unrealistic self-perceptions out here in the real world?

Oops, I’m off the topic again. Back to the movie…

In the big climax battle, when the URT© (Urban Riot Tank) shows up with its spiffy-fast missiles and shreds a convenience store with its mini-gun and laser-like tracer rounds, I was double-dawg-diggin’ it. I liked the proto-robocop super-soldiers who were just fodder for Will and his sidekick-chick to shoot with perfectly aimed shots.

Will Smith in the lead—well, I’ve always liked Will Smith, but he’s a likable guy. I think for most movies, he just shows up on set and says, “Hey ya’ll, I’m feeling kinda lazy, so I’m just gonna act like me in this this time around,” and the director says, “Cool, dude. Action.” For the most part, Gemini Man felt that way.

Overall, though, the movie does an excellent job at being what it is. 

But of course, we have to look at the cons too.

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Cons:

After I watch a movie like this, I sometimes wonder if the producers were sitting around saying, “Hey man, we’ve got a big budget for special effects, we signed Will-Fucking-Smith to star, and we’ve got a gold-plated formula/trope and an interesting premise. That’s good, right? I mean, Jimmy’s nephew can write the script. I heard he got a C+ on his spelling test, so the kid is literate. What more do we need?”

Some of the dialogue was silly. But I’m not going to judge too harshly there. I mean, I’m a writer, too. Lots of silly shit sounds good in my head when I’m in the heat of the story, but doesn’t sound actual-silly until I re-read it six months later. You know, after I’ve published. So it goes.

Most of the stuff that happens in the movie seems to happen as an excuse to set up an action scene or a trip from Georgia, to Cartagena, or Budapest, or any other exotic locale the budget can stand, because we audience members expect that from the trope. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t really support any of it. It all just sorta happens, ‘cause.

The movie starts a little slow as it gives us a chance to get to know the character and the situation, so we can bond with the hero before the shit hits the fan. I can or can’t be okay with this sort of thing, depending on how well it's done. Maybe for me, I just saw Will Smith being Will Smith, so I figured I already knew him, and I didn’t need to get to know the character he was ‘playing.’ So, this time around, it seemed a little like wasted time.

And while we’re talking about Will Smith, I think he’s played some outstanding roles. He’s demonstrated in numerous films that he is a talented actor. If he’d brought some of that depth to this role (necessarily coupled with a better script), this could have been a GFM© (Great Fuckin’ Movie – you know, like the Bourne Identity, also made with the same trope but different premise). Instead, it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad. It was worth an evening on the couch, escaping the rigors of my day—you know, the time I spend trying to come up with non-silly dialogue for the characters in the story I’m writing, trying to meet my dogs’ expectations to let them in and out of the house every three minutes, and trying to remember the cover sheet on my TPS reports.

​* If you feel like I’ve been unnecessarily harsh on a masterpiece, or too easy on a terrible POS, please read my Disclaimers, Caveats, and Excuses page before you flame me.

Bobby Adair is a former programmer, with a long-lived passion - and only recently fulfilled desire - for writing.  He is the author of the Freedom Fire series, the Slow Burn series and the Ebola K series.

One of Bobby's favorite quotes:

“It’s not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It’s about all of us...Michael, we don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.”
- Peter Gibbons, Office Space

You can follow Bobby on Facebook, Twitter and his website.