Archer Season 6 Trailer

archer-fxIf, like me, you’re a fan of the show Archer, you’ve been wondering when the hell Season 6 is going to premiere. Luckily, FX released the first season 6 trailer a few weeks ago, and indicated that new episodes will be on the air starting in January. That’s good news, for those of us who’ve been waiting since April to find out what’s coming next and when.

Who do you think you are, you Archer producers, Game of Thrones?

To be fair, a couple of hints have been leaked over the past few months as to what will be happening in the new season. For starters, it’s been made clear that after events in the last season, the spy agency will be back at work. Only this time around, they’ve dropped the name ISIS thanks to a certain group of terrorists scumbags who’ve been roving around Iraq and Syria of late.

Second, Lana is busy raising her and Archer’s daughter, Pam is off the wagon as far as binge-eating goes (at least she kicked her massive cocaine habit), and everybody else is pretty much the same. Cheryl is a pyromaniac, Cyril is a boring accountant, Ray is a champion skier, Krieger is still trying to master YYZ, and Malory is still a horrible shrew.

Just a few more months, people!

Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens Trailer!

star-wars-episode-vii-force-awakensIt finally happened, Lucasarts and J.J. Abrams have released the very first trailer for the upcoming Star Wars sequel. For months, tidbits of news has been trickling out of the studio – casting info, tentative info on the plot, official posters; and of course, the name. But otherwise, everyone involved in the movie’s production has been pretty tight-lipped about it.

Word is, the studio even ordered a “drone shield” to protect their sets from anyone trying to obtain aerial footage of the production. Pretty neat huh? In any case, the trailer is pretty good at giving us drops that will only make us thirsty for more!

Star-WarsVIIThese include the familiar locale of Tatooine, actor John Boyega in the role of a Stormtrooper, a Sith with a newfangled lightsaber (above), actress Daisy Ridley riding a bulky speeder on Tatooine, actor Oscar Isaac flying a squad of X-wings across open water, Stormtroopers preparing for an assault, and the good ol’ Millennium Falcon dog fighting with TIE fighters above Tatooine’s surface.

All the while, we hear a baritone voice asking us if we can feel it, and by “it”, he means the Force! I tell you, this puts me in mind of the days when trailers for Star Wars Episode I were first coming out. I remember how us Wars geeks were all atwitter and couldn’t wait to see it. Perhaps it’s because I’m older now, or that the prequels have left me a bit jaded and cynical, but I do wish I could recapture that feeling.

star-wars-episode-vii-force-awakens(1)Basically, I think that like many childhood fans, I’m hoping that these sequels will be what the prequels should have been – an exciting and awesome return to the Star Wars universe we all knew and loved. Before the dark times… before Jar-Jar and midechlorians!

For f*** sakes, MIDECHLORIANS!

Check out the trailer below:

Busy, But Getting Back to ‘er!

Mindfulness-and-Living-a-Busy-LifeHey folks. As you may have noticed, I’ve been pretty absent in recent weeks. And as always, it’s because life intervened. Nothing bad, just a busy schedule with all the new writing assignments. At the same time, I’ve been busy with Tae kwon-Do since the Grand Master was coming for a visit. And on top of that, the wife and I have been house-hunting lately and that’s taken up a lot of our attention.

As you can imagine, this has not left much time for personal writing or blogging. But in and around all that stuff, I have managed to make a bit of time for my works-in-progress. For instance, I finally started making some progress on Oscar Mike the other day. I left that story in the midst of a cliffhanger chapter, so stopping short of completing it was a bit silly on my part.

Oscar MikeAlso, I got back to editing Flash Forward, which I also stalled on, and managed to get a few more stories polished and ready for publication. I was really hoping to have of these stories ready for publication by now, but professional writing and my preoccupation with one other story kind of put a hold on that plan. That would Reciprocity, which I went into some detail about a little while ago.

Ever since I decided to redo that idea this past summer, I’ve been pretty much obsessed with it. This is typical of me, always hopping from idea to idea and becoming fixated the latest one. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that I suffer from a peculiar condition when it comes to writing. It’s known as Literary-Attention-Deficit-Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorder (or LADOCD, for short).

Yuva_coverOr at least it would be, if it were recognized by any medical authority on the planet. But I digress! The point is, I’ve managed to shake myself loose from that story long enough to commit to work that needs my attention more. And I really, REALLY need to get back to my writing group and get the boll rolling again on the Yuva anthology. People are working, and waiting for direction. I cannot abandon them!

Well, that it’s for me right now. What’s up will all you fine folks? What’s new and interesting? Or, failing that, what’s just new? Any plans for the holiday season? And to my American cousins, how’s Thanksgiving treating you?

Universe Today – Total Views for October

internet_trafficGood day all! Recently, I got some good news. It seems that one of the perks of writing for a major website is that they keep tallies on how your articles did. And in addition to getting paid for all the submissions I wrote for the month of October, I was also sent a list with the official numbers.

Here’s what it looked like:

10/13/2014 Bigelow Inflatable Module to be Added to Space Station in 2015 3913
10/16/2014 NASA Investigating Deep-Space Hibernation Technology 7032
10/20/2014 Water On The Moon Was Blown in by Solar Wind 1811
10/21/2014 How NASA and SpaceX are Working Together to Land on Mars 3871
10/22/2014 Is Dark Matter Coming From The Sun? 6857
10/23/2014 The Physics Behind “Interstellar’s” Visual Effects Was So Good, it Led to a Scientific Discovery 14318
10/27/2014 Small Spacecraft Ejected from Space Station Airlock Will Provide Same-Day, On-Demand Parcel Delivery 2303
10/27/2014 Make a Deal for Land on the Moon 1420
10/28/2014 100,000 Ice Blocks Mapped Out at the South Pole … of Enceladus 3124
10/28/2014 Just In Time for Halloween: Jupiter Gets a Giant Cyclops Eye! 4386
10/29/2014 Cassini Probe Spots Methane Ice Crystals In Titan’s Atmosphere 1009
Total Views 50044

Judging from this table, it seems that far more people will pay attention to you when you write about space news – instead of a combination of zombies, guns, star wars and gynoids. Who knew?

ESA’s Rosetta Mission Lands on Comet!

Rosetta_and_Philae_at_comet_node_full_imageOne hundred years ago, Europeans were engaged in the most brutal, inhuman struggle in history – one that saw millions of people killed and entire countrysides devastated. Today, Europeans stood together, hand in hand, to witness the momentous occasion of the Philae Lander setting down on the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet. Not only was history made in this one act, it put a whole lot of history into perspective.

And my good friends over at Universe Today have been covering this news in a very as-it-happens fashion. So have countless other news sources all over the planet, and for good reason. This is the first time human beings have ever landed a robotic rover on a comet’s surface. Due to the high-speed, transitory nature of these celestial bodies, we’ve been forced to sit back and watch up until now.

Mars_comet_flybyIn fact, comets have been around for billions of years and date back to a time when the Solar System was still in its early stages of formation. For human beings, the sight of a comet in the night sky was often seen as a bad omen. For example, the presence of Halley’s Comet in the Inner Solar System is still believed by many to be a bringer of doom. During it’s last appearance in 1986, it became the first comet be observed in detail by spacecraft.

But with the Rosetta space mission, we finally have the opportunity to study the surface of a comet in detail, and up close! Who knows what mysteries lie beneath that icy surface. Most likely, there’s a whole lot of dust that is billions of years old and can tell us things about what our Solar System looked like way back when. But you never know…

Nice to know that humanity has made some progress in the past century.

Are You a Writer-in-Waiting?

sb10067155f-001A little while ago, I was having a conversation with a colleague about my writing. I found myself trying to describe what I was before I made the decision to go the indie route. And the term that came to me was “writing-in-waiting”. At the time, it was just something I came up with in an attempt to be cheeky. But it actually summed up what my problem was for all the years that I toiled away in anonymity.

And truth be told, it applies to a whole lot of aspiring writers I’ve talked to over the years. What do you call yourself when you’re a writer who has a manuscript, but is stuck in the “what do I do now” phase? These are not the same people have an idea in their head and are undecided on what to do about it. Those people are “aspiring writers”, people who haven’t made the big leap yet.

novels“Writer’s-in-waiting”, on the other hand, describes the people who have taken that leap, put the pen to paper and given their idea life, but aren’t sure what to do next.  I do believe every independent writer has gone through this phase at one point or another. Somehow, the concept of publishing your own works just doesn’t come naturally. We all still believe that there’s a publisher out there who will give us our “big break”.

You know what I’m talking about, right? The cash advance, the contract, the royalties, and all kinds of promotion and publicity. But alas, this is a very hard thing to come by, and it seems to be getting harder all the time. Lucky for us, the very things that are making it harder to get a publishing deal are also providing us with the tool to publish, promote and publicize ourselves.

But I digress. Does this description, a “writer-in-waiting” describe you? If so, the good news is that there are plenty of people who’ve taken that next step and can let you know how and where to make it. And even though there is no such thing as a “big break” anymore, or at least a very slim chance of one, there’s plenty of opportunity for people with an idea and the will to take it public.

Reciprocity – The Deets

self-aware-colonyHey again, all. I find myself with some spare time for the first time in awhile. So I thought I might take a moment to share an idea I’ve been working with, in a bit more detail. Last post I made, I talked about the bare bones of a story I am working on known as Reciprocity, the successor to the story known as Apocrypha. But as it turns out, there are a lot of details to that story idea that I still want to share and get people’s opinion on.

You might say this is a story that I am particularly serious about. Should it work out, it would be my break from both space-opera sci-fi and zombie fiction. A foray into the world of hard-hitting social commentary and speculative science fiction.

The Story:
So the year is 2030. The world is reeling from the effects of widespread drought, wildfires, coastal storms, flooding, and population displacement. At the same time, a revolution is taking place in terms of computing, robotics, biomachinery, and artificial intelligence. As a result, the world’s population finds itself being pulled in two different directions – between a future of scarcity and the promise of plenty.

space-solar-headSpace exploration continues as private aerospace and space agencies all race to put boots on Mars, a settlement on the Moon, and lay claim to the resources of the Solar System. India, China, the US, the EU, Russia, Argentina, Brazil, and Iran are all taking part now – using robotic probes and rovers to telexplore the System and prospect asteroids. Humanity’s future as an interplanetary species seems all but guaranteed at this point.

Meanwhile, a new global balance of power is shaping up. While the US and the EU struggle with food and fuel shortages, Russia remains firmly in the grips of quasi-fascist interests, having spurned the idea of globalization and amicable relations with NATO and the EU in favor of its Collective Security Treaty, which in recent years has expanded to include Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

shanghai_towerMeanwhile, China is going through a period of transition. After the fall of Communism in 2023, the Chinese state is lurching between the forces of reform and ultra-nationalism, and no one is sure which side it will fall on. The economy has largely recovered, but the divide between rich and poor is all too apparent. And given the sense of listless frustration and angst, there is fear that a skilled politician could exploit it all too well.

It’s an era of uncertainty, high hopes and renewed Cold War.

The MacGuffin:
The central item of the story is a cybervirus known as Baoying, a quantum-decryption algorithm that was designed by Unit 61398 in the early 2020’s to take down America’s quantum networks in the event of open war. When the Party fell from power, the Unit was dissolved and the virus itself was destroyed. However, rumors persisted that one or more copies still exist…

MatrixBackgroundNotable Characters:
For this ensemble to work, it had to represent a good cross-section of the world that will be, with all its national, social and economic boundaries represented. And so I came up with the following people, individuals who find themselves on different sides of what’s right, and are all their own mix of good, bad, and ambiguous.

William Harding: A privileged high school senior with an big of a drug problem who lives in Port Coquitlam, just outside of the Pacific Northwest megalopolis of Cascadia. Like many people his age, he carries all his personal computing in the form of implants. However, a kidnapping and a close brush with death suddenly expand his worldview. Being at the mercy of others and deprived of his hardware, he realizes that his lifestyle have shielded him from the real world.

Amy Dixon: A young refugee who has moved to Cascadia from the American South. Her socioeconomic status places her and her family at the fringes of society, and she is determined to change their fortunes by plying her talents and being the first in her family to get a comprehensive education.

Climate_ChangeFernie Dixon: Amy’s brother, a twenty-something year-old man who lives away from her and claims to be a software developer. In reality, he is a member of the local Aryan Brotherhood, one of many gangs that run rampant in the outlying districts of the city. Not a true believer like his “brothers”, he seeks money and power so he can give his sister the opportunities he knows she deserves.

Shen Zhou: A former Lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army and member of Unit 61398 during the Cyberwars of the late teens. After the fall of Communism, he did not ingratiate himself to the new government and was accused of spying for foreign interests. As  result, he left the country to pursue his own agenda, which places him in the cross hairs of both the new regime and western governments.

artificial-intelligenceArthur Banks: A major industrialist and part-owner of Harding Enterprises, a high-tech multinational that specializes in quantum computing and the development of artificial intelligence. For years, Banks and his associates have been working on a project known as QuaSI – a Quantum-based Sentient Intelligence that would revolutionize the world and usher in the Technological Singularity.

Rhianna Sanchez: Commander of Joint Task Force 2, an elite unit attached to National Security Agency’s Cyberwarfare Division. For years, she and her task force have been charged with locating terror cells that are engaged in private cyberwarfare with the US and its allies. And Shen Zhou, a suspected terrorist with many troubling connections, gets on their radar after a mysterious kidnapping and high-profile cyberintrusion coincide.

And that about covers the particulars. Naturally, there are a lot of other details, but I haven’t got all day and neither do you fine folks 😉 In any case, the idea is in the queue and its getting updated regularly. But I don’t plan to have it finished until I’ve polished off Oscar Mike, Arrivals, and a bunch of other projects first!

Aerospace Travel: Los Angeles to Tokyo in One Hour

spaceshiptwo_flightGiven my busy schedule of late, some stories have been sitting in my stack for some time and I haven’t been able to write about them. But one’s like this are too cool to pass up, so here’s a belated acknowledgement. It seems that Virgin Galactic, having now demonstrated its ability to conduct aerospace tourism, has decided to enter into phase two of its plans for the future: aerospace travel!

In the scenario they are proposing, their planes would fly customers from Los Angeles to Tokyo, and the transit would take one hour. The takeoff system would be similar to the midair launch the company uses now with the SpaceShipTwo. Basically, a large plane flies the spacecraft off the ground, drops it in midair, a hybrid rocket engine ignites, and the spacecraft ascends into lower orbit.

spaceshiptwo-2nd-flight-2A system like this would allow patrons to fly from the West Coast to Japan in an hour, or from the United Kingdom to Australia in two hours. This is according to statements made by Virgin Galactic’s CEO, George Whitesides, back in September at a company event at New York City’s Museum of Natural History:

You can imagine a SpaceShipThree or a SpaceShipFour going outside the atmosphere, then coming back down outside an urban area and landing. We don’t have to accept the status quo. We can imagine a vehicle using liquid oxygen or liquid hydrogen to get us across the Pacific in an hour. You could do that.

For those following Branson’s exploits, this announcement should come as no surprise. For years, he has been attempting to create a supersonic airline of his own. But when a paradigm-shifting idea like “point-to-point suborbital space transportation” becomes possible, he began to sets his sights a little higher (so to speak).

Spaceshiptwo-580x256Naturally, there are a few things that need to be worked out and tested before that’s possible, but it’s entirely within the realm of possibility. In fact, the European Space Agency has been researching the idea and claimed that SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo are the most promising space launch mechanisms they’ve seen to date.

Naturally, there is the nagging question of cost. If aerospace travel does become feasible, who exactly will be able to afford it? So far, Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceflight have attracted hundreds of customers, but at a cost of $250,000 per head. It seems unlikely that these same people would pay a quarter of a million dollars just to travel halfway around the world. And some experts maintain that the industry will fail strictly because of the costs involved.

space-trip-klmDerek Webber, is one such person. As the executive director of Spaceport Associates, he wrote a paper in 2008 that explored the idea:

Credible market studies have not been done, or at least published. The optimum technical design has not been established. The ground infrastructure is not in place… Price levels are uncertain. It is not even clear whether such flights are best characterized as tourism or as transportation; whether the passengers would be primarily tourists or business persons on urgent trips.

Nevertheless, these doubts are doing nothing to stem the flow of investment and research being made by aerospace organizations and companies. For years, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines – the national air carrier of the Netherlands – has been developing a rocket-powered sub-orbital craft of its own. California-based XCOR Aerospace also has the Lynx – a hypersonic plane that could fly between New York and Tokyo in just 90 minutes.

XCORReaction Engines Limited is also developing the Skylon hypersonic engine for commercial spacecraft, much in the same way that Boeing and NASA are  developing the X-37B space plane. While these efforts are aimed at creating reusable spacecraft that could deploy satellites and deliver crew and supplies into orbit, they are also laying the groundwork for commercial transportation that takes people into orbit.

Meanwhile, DARPA and the US Marine Corps have been working on developing their own point-to-point rockets for delivering supplies and people for roughly a decade now and the Federal Aviation Administration’s 2010 report noted that:

[the] potential for the rapid global transport of passengers and the fast distribution of goods and services make point-to-point transportation an attractive space technology concept worth exploiting.

So while a price breakdown may be lacking, and the expected costs limiting, the technology is still in its infancy and it seems likely that the future of transportation lies in space. Beyond rapid transit and space tourism, it may very well be how airlines ferry people to and from their destinations in the not-too-distant future.

Source: motherboard.vice.com

Rebooting An Idea – Reciprocity

future-city3For awhile now, I’ve been tinkering with a story idea known as Apocrypha. It first came to me back in 2009 when I decided to move away from space opera and into more hard science fiction. I even decided to relaunch the idea a few months back, which would be the second time I decided to reboot the idea. And now, I’m rebooting it yet again, but with one major change.

Basically, I’ve re-conceived the plot to focus on a world set in 2030, where China’s Communist system has collapsed, Russia continues to exist as a semi-fascist state, the internet of things is in full swing, and several different forces are competing for control over which direction the future takes. Some want to rehash old rivalries, while others want to bring about a revolution in computing that will dissolve all boundaries.

shanghai_towerThe name of the new story is Reciprocity, which is taken from the Chinese concept of Bao Ying. I chose this as a name because while researching Chinese ancestral religion, I came across a central theme which states that the fate of all human beings is determined by cosmic reciprocity.

The concept of Bao Ying is also expressed as follows in various Zhou-Dynasty texts:

On the doer of good, heaven sends down all blessings, and on the doer of evil, he sends down all calamities.

This belief incorporates two separate elements:

  1. Ming yun: which loosely translated, means personal destiny. Whereas ming is “life” or “right”, the word yun defines “circumstance” and “individual choice”. In the Chinese ancestral faith, it is perceived as something both fixed (bound by fate) and flexible (implying choice and free will).
  2. Yuan fen: which means “fateful coincidence”, describing good and bad possibilities and potential relationships. Here too, the elements of fate and choice intersect, with good and bad casualties being assigned usually to one or the other.

Both concepts are linked, because what appears on the surface to be chance events (for better or worse), are part of the deeper rhythm that shapes personal life based on how destiny is directed. Given the fact that I thought the story should focus on China, this concept spoke to me.

cyber_virusOriginally, Apocrypha was all about a group of apocalyptic terrorists who have ties to various anti-modernist, anti-western groups who try to use a Chinese cyber-virus named Hǔnluàn (Chinese for chaos) to accomplish their goals. However, this idea wasn’t panning out in a few ways. Mainly, the antagonists didn’t seem believable to me, especially where their motivations are concerned.

But after talking it over with a friend and neighbor, I came to realize that the real focus of the story was China – or rather, how the aftermath of Maoism would affect the country and the global balance of power. In this sense, the antagonists were much more believable if they themselves were Chinese ex-pats, people who were unhappy with the current world order and wanted to change it.

Unit-61398-Chinese-Army-Hacking-Jobs-With-Great-BenefitsBorrowing from Russia’s post-Communist experience, I basically foresee China going through many of the same problems in the near future. First, the state would find itself under a great deal of pressure due to ongoing demands for reform, pro-democracy protests, and the memory of Tienanmen Square. And I also imagine the health effects of air pollution and cancer farms would also add to the resistance.

But by the 2020s, I expect that the country will also be reeling from the effects of drought, famine, and the destruction of water tables. And then there would be the collapse of the economy caused by the implosion of the real estate bubble – a very likely possibility – which would end the Party’s long history of buying loyalty with economic growth. At that point, the Party would officially fall under the weight of its own corruption, bankruptcy and failure.

phoenix-towers-worlds-tallest-wuhan-china-designboom-01Ten years later, China would find itself in a state of serious change and facing an ambiguous future. On the one hand, it would remain a major power economically and militarily, but would still be suffering from lingering environmental damage and uneven development. As a result, it would find itself vulnerable to quasi-fascist politicians looking to exploit people’s uncertainty and funnel it towards a revisionist agenda.

I think you’ll agree, this idea makes way more sense than its predecessor. What’s more, it would give me a chance to cover a big angle I was looking at, which was the involvement of former members of the People’s Liberation Army Cyberwarfare Division (aka. Unit 61398). Assuming that said people were out a job in the not-too-distant future, they would be seriously upset and willing to help in a malicious plot.

What do you think? Too political? Or does it have potential?

New Articles and Apologies

solar1Let’s start with the apologies. I’m very sorry for the prolonged absence of late, and I trust that people actually noticed I haven’t been around 😉 But both my day and my side job have both been very busy and have left me mentally and physically taxed by the end of the day. However, I do have things to show for it, mainly in the form of a new list of articles that were recently published on both Universe Today and HeroX.

I’ve taken to posting the new entries on their respective pages (over on the right there). However, if you’re like me, you don’t bother to check these out much and would rather be notified if something new is happening. And the way I see it, a post now and again that contains the links to all the latest is something people won’t mind hearing about (as opposed to being notified every time one does!)

So here they are, in order of publication:

  • Small Spacecraft Ejected from ISS Will Provide Same-Day, On-Demand Delivery – Basically, the ISS is getting a small fleet of return vehicles that will allow them to deliver samples back to Earth in less than 24 hours. This will help research and experiments quite a bit, and could also open the way for commercial use of the ISS’s National Lab.
  • Make a Deal for Land on the Moon – This one was not only fun to write, it contains a cautionary tale worth sharing. No matter what some realtors may tell you, there’s absolutely no way to buy land on the Moon… yet! However, given the way that commercial aerospace and space industries are heating up, this may soon change.
  • HeroX News: The Promise of Solar Power – This is probably the longest article I’ve written for either publication of late. It deals with recent innovations that are causing solar power to break its own the efficiency limits and usher in an age of renewable energy. And none too soon either!