It’s All About Light

March 19, 2016/1 Comment/in Insider /by Discover Sci-Fi

In just three years from now, we will mark the fifty-year anniversary of man’s first setting foot on the moon. Fifty years! It’s gone fast. Too fast. The 70’s and 80’s were full of visionaries projecting that we would have bases on the moon and burgeoning tourism by now. Alas man hasn’t set foot on the moon again since our last Apollo mission in 1972. Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon and that was almost 44 years ago!

For those of us who grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars, our effort in getting off the planet and into space has been agonizingly slow. Instead, we watch as NASA sends rover after rover to investigate nearby bodies, while mumbling amongst ourselves “how hard can it be?”

But as it turns out, it’s pretty hard. Physics is the most obvious problem, especially for technologies that haven’t been invented yet. And the more we learn about space, the more obstacles we discover. Problems like radiation. Or lack of gravity. Or social isolation. The problems continue to grow based on the most fundamental human traits imaginable. And things we’ve taken for granted for millions of years.

Even with today’s technologies, we only have “ideas” on how to solve some of these problems. And it can be a very long time between initial concepts and working models. Which paints a pretty stark picture. The unfortunate reality is that it may be a very long time before we have a ship capable of going anywhere.

So the question then is…do we even have to? We all know the fastest speed possible (that we know of) is the speed of light. And while we’d love to venture out and see other places and new planets, it all really boils down to just one reason. After all, if you’ve seen one sun, you’ve pretty much seen them all. And I don’t think anyone is all that excited about seeing a planet comprised of nothing but barren rock or clouds of deadly methane.

No, most of us prefer to venture through space with one single, monumental goal in mind. To find life! Any kind of life. Sure, a friendly alien waving back at us, waiting to share their knowledge would be great. But even just seeing plant life on another planet would be incredible. Or knowing that life “exists” beyond our own Earth would change everything. Not just textbooks, but it would validate so much of our beliefs. Even the Drake Equation, as simple and realistic as it is, is little more than scientific “faith”. And knowing that our assumptions and extrapolations were right would fill so many of us with a profound sense of eternal satisfaction.

But we have no ship. And we won’t have one that can help us make these discoveries for a very long time. Most likely after the vast majority of us have long since been laid to rest. Although there is one way.

There is one way that is within our grasp. And it’s possible right now. It doesn’t require huge leaps in technology, or exotic solutions that we can only imagine in diagrams or books. A way that may just be able to answer the question as to whether we’re alone, long before we pass on still clinging to our scientific faith.

I’m talking about planet hunting. The search for distant Earth-like planets, visible to us now thanks to the wonders of light. You see, instead of us having to figure out a way to make the trip, light has already done that for us. And when that light has bounced off a distant planet, it carries with it signatures of the elements that it bounced against.

In other words, by examining the faint rays of this light, even using today’s technology, we can see what molecules are in that planet’s atmosphere. Which means we can determine what caused it. Things like methane and carbon dioxide can be caused by many things, but one thing that is a sure signature of life is oxygen. Oxygen, in large quantities, is unquestionably the result, or byproduct, of a living organism.

This all means that we can potentially answer the biggest question of all, without ever having to leave our planet. At least for now. Because while a plant or forest may not sound interesting, we simply need to remember that those are complex organisms. And to find complex life out there means we will eventually find more complex and potentially intelligent life.

Light is the key. Light doesn’t just provide illumination. It provides information. Like nature’s fiber optic cables, with bits of data that has already traversed the universe, it can help us verify that we are not alone. And that as Frank Drake posited many years ago, there are likely thousands of other civilizations out there.

This is why we all love science fiction. Because deep in our hearts we know we’re right.

And with any luck…simple photons are about to prove it.

Michael C. Grumley lives in Northern California with his wife and two young daughters where he works in the Information Technology field. He's an avid reader, runner and most of all father. He dotes on his girls every chance he gets. His website is https://www.michaelgrumley.com

Lift-Off

“It isn't all over; everything has not been invented; the human adventure is just beginning”

– Gene Rodenberry

Antares rocket at sunrise (NASA)

I’d been waiting to fly the Antares all summer.

The first rocket I’d ever launched, it stood over a foot tall, an inch in diameter, red fins swept back at its base like red fletching on an arrow.

I’d selected, instead of an A8-3 first-flight engine, a C6-5 solid-propellant engine. The C6-5 was a single-stage engine, its propellant, delay charge and ejection charge held in a cylindrical tube by a clay retainer cap and shaped nozzle—much like the A8-3, but more powerful.

With luck, this baby would lift-off to over 1000 feet.

Antares model rocket kit (Estes)

Next to Star Trek, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, Estes Rockets were my hero. They came to prominence by inventing a process for reliably manufacturing small, solid-propellant engines for model rockets.

Estes manufactured a huge variety of kits, ranging from small first-flight model rockets to ones which could house a small camera, designed to take photographs during flight and descent. The fuselages were usually of paperboard, with nose cones and fins of balsa.

Antares model rocket (Estes)

It was not just simplicity in design, not just cost consciousness—the construction was calculated to lighten the load under launch, addressing the same issues faced by the main engines propelling NASA’s Space Shuttle orbiters.

The first of these Space Shuttle orbiters, the OV101, was intended to be named the Constitution; it was changed, after an intense letter-writing campaign by fans of the television series, like I was, to Enterprise.

Space Shuttle Enterprise at Vandenburg Air Force Base (NASA)

The Enterprise was flight tested atop a modified Boeing 747 aircraft at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, and made its first free flight test at Dryden, beginning the cycle that would see humans begin to first use spacecraft that did not have to be discarded after a single flight.

The beginnings, as it were, of a star fleet.

That same year, I stood in a field, electrical line uncoiling from where I was across to the launch pad, where a guide-rod held the Antares vertically, facing the sky.

Model rockets at Moffett Field (Findery/John Fox)

When I threw the switch, the current would race through the line, across the micro-igniter clips to the ignition wire, and the engine would fire with an impulse of 10 Newton-seconds, ramping to a maximum 15 Newtons of thrust in 0.2 seconds, over a total burn-time of 1.6 seconds.

Countdown.

I held my breath.

Now.

Launch of Antares Rocket With Cygnus Spacecraft (NASA)

SAMUEL PERALTA is a physicist and storyteller. An Amazon bestselling author, he is also the creator and driving force behind the Future Chronicles series of speculative fiction anthologies, with 14 consecutive titles ranking at the top of the Amazon SF Bestseller lists, several hitting the overall Amazon Top 10 Bestsellers list. His own work has been recognized in Best American Science Fiction and included in the author community anthology for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer.

Samuel Peralta, creator of The Future Chronicles

This article was first published as the Foreword to The Galaxy Chronicles

The Galaxy Chronicles – part of The Future Chronicles anthology series

Worldbuilding in Science Fiction and Fantasy

March 2, 2016/2 Comments/in Books, Insider /by Jay Allan

Worldbuilding. It’s a term that gets bandied about quite a bit when discussing fiction, especially in genres like science fiction and fantasy, but for all the endless times it is repeated, I think sometimes the importance is overlooked.

It’s very fashionable to say things like, “character development is the important thing,” or “it’s the story that matters.” And, of course, those things are absolutely essential. But they’re not the whole story. Not by a longshot. Not in science fiction or fantasy.

A work of historical fiction set, say, during the American Civil War doesn’t need worldbuilding…it’s world is the world, and beyond pointing out some historical facts the reader might not know, the author can focus almost solely on characters and storyline. But science fiction and fantasy demand more. These stories take place in worlds that are the creations of their authors. They may be set in the near future, based heavily on the real world, or they may be wildly different (a galaxy far, far away), but either way, the reader needs to understand this setting, and the only way that’s going to happen is if the author fleshes it out.

Imagine a work like Dune, without the immense detail of the empire, stripped of the customs, institutions, and history so carefully laid out by the author. What is left? A good story, some well-developed characters? Yes, perhaps. But an enduring classic of the genre? Doubtful.

Or Asimov’s Foundation series…with its galactic empire and its ‘world as one giant city’ capital. The characters come and go in what is mostly a series of short novellas, but the overall plot of the fall of empire ties them all together.

On the fantasy side, could there be a better example than the Lord of the Rings? The three books cover little more than a single year’s activity, yet Tolkien’s work wouldn’t be the classic it is without the massive worldbuilding that gives us thousands of years of fictional history interspersed with a few months of real time action.

In science fiction and fantasy, the setting is like a character itself, often as much a part of the story as any hero and villain. When I think of the books that have resonated with me in my forty-odd years of reading science fiction and fantasy, it is those that offered rich worlds in which I could lose myself that became the favorites I pull out every couple years to reread.

Writers pursuing effective worldbuilding sometimes get blindsided by terms like “infodump,” and efforts to show the reader the true vision of a fictional universe often falter on such endless attempts to oversimplify good writing into arbitrary ‘rules’ and nonsensical little blurbs like, ‘show, don’t tell.’ Should a book start with an encyclopedia-like multi-page blast of pure background information. No, not usually at least. But is it important to share the true scope and vision of a fictional universe? Absolutely. Do readers want to know about these worlds their favorite authors create? Definitely.

There is no question that worldbuilding has to be done well, subtly, and not like a tank smashing through the wall. Information needs to be doled out slowly, steadily, not in one massive torrent. In a series it can come over several books. But when it is done, and done well, the rewards are enormous, both to the author and to the reader. The best fictional universes take on lives of their own, and they begin to feel real, at least to the readers who become ever more immersed in the escape they offer.

As an author, more often as not, I’ll begin a new project with a clearer idea of the setting and the realities of the universe than the characters themselves. I want my heroes—and my villains and bystanders too—to feel like they’re from that setting, and not some generic creations I cooked up and dropped in…which is why worldbuilding remains the core of my writing process, and always will.

I’d like to add a note on another kind of worldbuilding, the kind that is behind this web site. This is my first blog post for DiscoverSciFi, and I’m very excited to continue to share ideas and motivations with all of you. I’ve got a long list of topics for future posts, and I know my co-author partners here do as well.

One of the things I love about participating in something like DiscoverSciFi is the chance to create another way to reach readers. Authors today have the opportunity to be closer to their readers than ever before, and I think this is a great thing for publishing in general. I get a lot of emails from fans, and I answer them all. There is no substitute for input from those who read and enjoy your books, and no better source for new ideas where to take a story than those from fans. I’m excited to see where this DiscoverSciFi journey takes us. I’m sure it will be a great ride!

Jay Allan

jay@jayallanbooks.com

Prophecies and Science Fiction

February 19, 2016/2 Comments/in Insider /by Matthew Mather

It’s an amazing experience when a prediction from a science fiction writer’s book comes true. I had this happen to me last week when gravitational waves were discovered, in almost exactly the way I predicted in my book Nomad (when two colliding black holes were discovered).

How did it feel? Surreal would be the best word. Frightening. Then surreal.

Dozens of fans sent me copies of articles describing the use of LIGO, a laser interferometry device, to find the black holes—which was exactly the plot device I’d used in Nomad. It felt like I was reading something from my own book when I read online about real scientists. And not only that, but the size of the black holes were almost exactly as I’d described as well. The critical difference was that these black holes weren’t on a collision course with Earth. (ed. note: Now THAT would have been frightening! And that was the point of Nomad.)

To be fair, much of the credit for this goes to the long list of astrophysicists that I consulted with as I constructed the plot (and I credit them right at the start of the book, thank you very much, gentle-men and -women). Still, it felt like I’d done my own little part in the rich history of science fiction writers making predictions about the future.

Reading Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, first published in 1865, really provided my inspiration in wanting to write books like this. If you're a fan of science fiction, I'd recommend reading it. Amazing. Of course, he made predictions about a manned space flight to the moon almost 100 years before the Apollo program, but I wonder how many of the engineers involved in Apollo might have been inspired by reading science fiction to do what they did?

And the term “robot” was first coined in science fiction (originally appeared in a play called Rossum’s Universal Robots in 1921 by Czech writer Karel Čapek, and popularized by Isaac Asimov in his Robot series, which if you haven't read, please stop reading now and go do your homework), which is an interesting example of fiction creating reality—but the list goes on and on, from space travel to submarines, sliding doors, laser guns, invisibility cloaks and more. All of these were once the realm of science fiction, and are now reality. So what's next?

And that’s one of the reasons I became a science fiction writer in the first place. To do something like that. To become a part of the tradition.

Each of my books makes an attempt at this, to educate as well as entertain. In CyberStorm, I took readers on a realistic journey into what a major cyberattack might look like. In Darknet, I explored the merger of modern financial networks with artificial intelligence–and within a year after publishing Darknet, I got a flood of emails from fans talking about the announcement of an AI program at the world’s biggest hedge fund.

With Nomad, the idea I wanted to explore was how the earth wasn’t separate from our interstellar environment, and just after I finished writing it a year and a half ago, I had another surprise in the news.

In February of 2015, researchers were amazed to discover that just 70,000 years ago, near enough in time that our direct ancestors would have seen it, Scholz’s star passed about a half light year from the Earth (in comparison, the star currently closest to the Sun is Proxima Centuri at 4.2 light years).

This led to a flurry of data crunching last year, 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 possibly affecting the orbits of the planets.

Now scientists are saying that Sedna, the 10th planetoid of the Sun, the one after Pluto, might not even be an original planet of our Sun. New data suggests it was probably captured from a passing star about 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, might have been captured from passing stars.

A change in Earth’s orbit 55 million years ago might have even triggered one of the biggest global warming events in its history. And a massive ice age, started 35 million years ago, might have been also been caused by another shift in Earth’s orbit, and this same event might have disturbed the asteroid belt enough to precipitate several large asteroid impacts, one of which formed the Chesapeake Bay. Some now believe these sorts of events might have been caused by the gravitational effect of a passing star, now we know that they're literally swarming around us.

And that is exactly the kind of event that I described happening in Nomad–which is free today on Amazon.

All my best and thanks for joining us on our journey to Discover Sci-Fi!

Introducing DSF: Rising Above the Noise

January 29, 2016/16 Comments/in Insider /by Nick Webb

Many long ages ago, before I was a full time science fiction author (in other words, in 2015), I was a senior scientist at Dynetics in Huntsville, Alabama. As a medium-sized technology company, it mainly does defense contracting, but recently it's been winning quite a few NASA contracts (including one last year that I wrote!) and moving aggressively into the space industry.

Writing proposals for NASA funding is a bit like writing science fiction novels. Not in the sense that you're making stuff up, shooting up large alien spaceships with full phasers and burning through a (metric, not standard) ton of tax dollars, but in the sense that, in both situations, you need to set aside how things are done now, and imagine the possible. You need to get your mind in the future and think, what if?

Welcome to Discover Sci Fi

January 20, 2016/7 Comments/in Insider /by Discover Sci-Fi

Welcome to DiscoverSciFi's Insider blog!

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The DiscoverSciFi mailing list offers subscribers a chance to learn about new and upcoming releases and discounts by some of the biggest-selling names in science fiction today…and to get a free bestselling book just for signing up.

The Inside Sci Fi feature will be offering ongoing articles, excerpts of upcoming stories, and interviews with some of your favorite authors. It is the place to get the earliest look at new and upcoming releases from the authors who are shaping science fiction today, so be sure to stop by and check out each week's update.

Who are the authors behind DiscoverSciFi? We're a group that has collectively sold more than 5,000,000 books over the past several years. We sell over 2,000,000 books a year, and a number of our titles have been optioned for film and TV rights. Our books have been put out by some of the largest names in publishing, and we also self-publish dozens of titles a year. And we love our readers. Which is why we created DiscoverSciFi…to bring us closer to all of you, to give us a way to communicate, to offer discounted books, and to let you all know what is coming up from us. And to give stuff away! We're starting with a blast, with our $100,000 giveaway. The grand prize is a library of 40 signed print copies of our books. Plus, 2,500 participants will receive a collection of ebooks, one from each of us.

Who are we? We're Matthew Mather, Nick Webb, Samuel Peralta, Nicholas Sansbury Smith, Michael Grumley, Evan Currie, Autumn Kalquist, Jay Allan, Darren Wearmouth, and Joshua Dalzelle. Many of you know some of us, but we'll be introducing ourselves to all of you in the weeks to come. This is the place to get the latest information on upcoming books and series…and an inside look at what is happening to some of your favorite characters. So, remember to stop by each week for the leading edge of science fiction today.

Welcome to DiscoverSciFi's Insider blog!

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