Upcoming

Was hoping to write more part 3, including a battle sequence, but decided I really did need to do more research on what a military base was like - I went to an airfield once as a young kid to see one of the last performances by the Blue Angels, but that's about as close as my experience gets.

That's the thing with living in america, at least - your knowledge of locations and settings are largely stereotype and hardly accurate.  My mental conception of a military base is something like open air fields, hangars, jeeps, tanks, and a barracks or three.  I know from talking to a very few enlisted individuals I've had the opportunity to meet and chat with that this is not accurate at all.

When I think about news and heavily biased reports on foreign lands, I find that this is true too: my mental picture of a place like Iraq or Afghanistan is bomb craters and sand.  This is not only insulting and arrogant, but certainly incorrect.  It's something that needs to change, and I don't want to add to it.

Something else I've thought about more recently: a lot of science fiction novels simply create a technology (or a name for something) and we, as readers, just accept it.  Maybe that's just the nature of the genre.  I've been trying to work more reality into my technology - I'm not saying I know how to make superconducting material or cold fusion, but rather, I want to use cutting edge and theoretical technologies and sciences as a starting point, and then extrapolate or imagine what developments could occur; what the missing steps would lead to.

Fundamentally, science fiction is more fiction than science - it's an entertaining "lie" of "what if."  But any lie is more compelling if there is a grain of truth buried at the core.  I also feel that otherwise, you may as well just write anything you want, at which point you have the "Superman dilemma" - if something is so powerful, how does anything oppose it?  What story results?  Conflict becomes irrational and unbelievable.  For the same reason, every superhero has a weakness of some sort - but the question is whether it simply becomes a literary device that becomes difficult for the reader to buy into.

A planet blows up, and out of all the directions debris can go in (and over such a great distance), so much kryptonite (an unknown substance) conveniently lands on earth? and it travels at the same speed roughly, due to the explosion, as a thruster-escape capsule?  And survives atmospheric entry in hand portable form?  And every bad guy just happens to have some when they most need it?