A few comments about why novels don’t get finished

I remember a couple of the rules for writers Robert A. Heinlein had, and two of them were:

You must finish what you write, and

You must keep it out there until it is sold.

(I hope I recall those correctly. I confess I’m too lazy to go look ‘em up right now. If it wasn’t RAH, it was either Jerry Pournelle or Larry Niven. The second one sounds like Niven.)

Still, my point: none of that rearranging of electrons or scribbling on paper means anything unless you finish it. Okay, sure, you might learn some things from abandoning a project or two – if the idea wasn’t good enough, dump it and find another.

But I’ve been writing the marching band arranging book for a year now, and it’s out for first reading by some band director friends of mine, so I can start looking at something else. I have commitments to write two marching band shows for clients but I can’t write music all day every day. I have to assemble some ideas in the back of my head and then get them committed to notation.

The first novel I wrote takes place in S.M. Stirling’s Drakaverse. It is titled The Righteous Stuff, and as I was writing it bits and pieces appeared on this blog, a few years ago. I finished it three years ago,  I think, submitted it to Baen (who published Stirling’s Draka novels back in the 1990s) and waited for it to be rejected.

Which it was. I wasn’t surprised. I started writing it around 2000 or so, when the Draka novels were still fairly well known. Stirling hadn’t written the Nantucket series yet, or Dies The Fire and the rest of that series, and the concepts in the Draka novels were so unsettling that it was still bouncing around the internet a bit. I got about 50K words done and then didn’t touch it for years. Once I pulled it out I had it finished in about a year, writing off and on. I have two more books in the back of my head in that series.

Besides, I knew that the Draka novels always made Jim Baen uncomfortable, because SPOILER ALERT! the bad guys, essentially, won in the end. I didn’t submit it until after Jim Baen had passed, but even if the story was good enough, and I don’t know if it was, it would have required Stirling’s approval. His books are now published by Tor, I think, so maybe that would have been an issue as well.

Once it was officially rejected, I submitted it to the main Stirling fanfiction site. It’s run by a friend of Stirling’s, one of his first readers, and she handed it off to two other folks who were more familiar with the Draka. They provided me with a couple of pages of great notes on how I could make the book more consistent with the Drakaverse.

And…I’ve not touched it since. I should, since the changes aren’t that big, and it would only take me a month or so to get it finished so at least the book would see the electronic light of day. I toyed with the idea of “Fifty Shades of Gray”-ing it; no, not sexing it up, you dirty-minded readers – but taking out the Draka references and converting it into a stand-alone alternate history novel.

But the Draka are just such damned fine villains! I couldn’t figure out how to take them out and still make the book work. All the alternate universe US people and events are influenced by the presence of the Draka, past and present.

So maybe I will make the changes and submit it to the fanfic site. At least that way people could read the thing. I learned a lot writing it, but I don’t know that it would be worth my while right now to write the sequels. And the bad guys do win in the end, dammit.

My second novel, not related in any way to the Draka book, is about half done and I got stalled. Not for lack of a plot line, or because I was unhappy with the characters, or any of the usual reasons writers stall out on a book. It’s because the physics keeps changing.

See, there’s a major plot point that involves the creation of, and control of, a micro-sized black hole. I was going to have it created in the Large Hadron Collider, and confined and carried off. Now I’m not even sure the LHC can make micro black holes, or if it can, if they exist long enough to capture them. This long-term search for the Higgs boson has caused several reevaluations of quantum physics, apparently. I’m no particle physicist, that’s for sure, but I’ve tried to read all the relevant polarizations of the concepts of a reality with at least eleven dimensions, how some could be “rolled up” and therefore not perceived, how string theory works, and a lot of associated stuff.

And my major plot idea is dissolving because of the physics. I could do some hand-waving and ignore the last couple of years of research that’s gone on since I started the book. I could do the science-fictiony thing and postulate some new force or discovery that would make my story work. I could ignore logic and go ahead anyway. I’d still like to make it sound at least a little bit plausible.

See, the story is really about a crisis and how a group of people handle a potentially dangerous situation that no one understands. There will be no cable-company employee who quickly writes a virus that will drop the defensive shields on an alien ship, and do it in twenty minutes on an old Macbook. There’s no one super-smart person who is the only one who sees the answer while everyone else acts like fools and gets in the way. There are super-smart people, because those are the ones you need when you are dealing with the real unknown, but in this case they have to work together, use each other’s strengths, and behave like adults should.

In other words, a completely implausibly situation, right?

I’m happy with the character mix, and their backstories. I liked where the plot was going, and how quickly it was getting there. I wasn’t having to pad anything to stretch out the dramatic tension.

But I don’t believe my own physics. Part of it involves “force fields.”

Force fields have been used in skiffy for nearly a hundred years. Call them what you will, but tractor beams, repulsor fields, defensive shields, containment shields, all of these things have one thing in common: so far as I know, we don’t know how to project any of them.

Electromagnetic fields, sure. But to do so, we usually need some kind of conductors, and those are physical structures. A magnetic field requires something to shape and contain it. Nobody can project a directed magnetic field over a long distance, in a confined beam, except Magneto.

If I’m wrong about this, for God’s sake tell me! I admit my physics training is severely lacking, but I just couldn’t bring myself to write space opera, where nobody worries about such things.

I need a confinement field for gravity. Nobody really understand gravity, except maybe Roger Penrose or Misner, Thorne and Wheeler. If Penrose understands it, then the rest of us don’t; he has a completely different view of how the universe is put together. But the little I understand of twistor theory doesn’t help with what I need.

Not to reveal too much, I need to be able to control a “beam” of gravity, from a micro black hole, and have the ability to point it in one direction, so it attracts to a specific point, but not omnidirectionally. I’m faking it by confining it in a sort of makeshift Faraday cage right now, but that won’t work as the story develops.

Maybe I should do the hand-waving, finish the book, and then figure out the physics. But I could miss a completely good plot device or seven if I don’t understand the physics first.

So – you see why novels don’t get finished. It’s not laziness, or lack of inspiration. The universe gets in the way!

“Atlas Shrugs Part II” opens Friday!

With a new cast, the second installment of the “Atlas Shrugged” trilogy, based on the Ayn Rand novel, opens in theaters this Friday. It will be interesting how the whole “Galt’s motor” thing will be handled in the near-future setting of the movie series. (The book gives no particular date, but there is a lot of speculation that was to be set in the – at the time of the book’s publication – near future of the mid-1970s.) It will probably not be in theaters for a long time, so check it out right away. It’s important to see before the election. And if you haven’t purchased the first installment, it is available here and is on the Amazon video-on-demand service as well as  on Netflix.

https://www.facebook.com/AtlasShruggedMovie

The most awesome thing you will see today!

Yep. Ronald Reagan, riding a freakin’ velociraptor!

Credit, and where you can get copies.

Yeah, where is it, anyway?

reference for the uninitiated

Where’s my flyin’ car, again?

What we should be flyin’ in now, circa 1955.

The Apple iPhone 5, circa 1920.

The flying car of 2012, from a century ago. I like the driver. And the hats!

Check out Paleofuture for more cool stuff!

How to write an account of a hospital stay.

Mike Flynn, statistician and hard science-fiction author, recently went through having a kidney stone and the resulting infection.  I had a kidney stone last August, but it didn’t turn into anything so bad, thank God.

The difference here is that Mike Flynn is an excellent writer, and he posted a short narrative of his difficulties on his blog. He is a more than excellent writer, actually. His most recent books are difficult to describe – space opera with a decidedly Irish twist – if you can call it that. It’s complicated. Read The January Dancer. It takes a bit of persistence, at first, then it grows on you. His earlier works, especially the Firestar series, are near-future SF and are not difficult to get into at all. Eifelheim is a very odd book. It deals with an alien landing in 14th-century Germany. Yep. That’s what I said. Fourteenth century Germany. Aliens.

Anyway, my hope for a very swift recovery, Mike! I’m glad Old Nick didn’t get you!

New rocket-powered vehicle duplicates 1995 takeoff and landing

Xombie

Masten Space Systems, which builds reusable suborbital rockets, recently tested a vehicle that took off, flew to 50 meters altitude, flew 50 meters horizontally downrange, and then landed softly on another concrete landing pad. It did so using new software called the Guidance Embedded Navigator Integration Environment (GENIE), which was developed by the nonprofit Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This is pretty cool, but…the DC-X did the same thing in 1995.

DC-X

To be fair, the DC-X was controlled at the time, not flying completely autonomously. (Usually, that control was former astronaut Pete Conrad, if I remember correctly.) It did have automatic flying control systems, and in particular used the automatic landing mode several times. On its next to last flight, it flew to an altitude of over 3,000 meters.

Built by McDonnell-Douglas, the DC-X was a 1/3 scale demonstrator for a follow-on vehicle called the Delta Clipper, or DC-Y. The DC-Y was to be a manned, single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) reusable spaceship. It was originally funded through the Strategic Defense Initiative. It flew eight test flights in 1993-1995 but the aeroshell was cracked upon landing on the last flight. The vehicle was sent back to MacDac in Huntington Beach for repair. It was fitted with a new lithium-aluminum LOX tank  and a graphite-composite fuel tank that substantially decreased airframe weight. It was christened the DC-XA and flew four more flights from White Sands in 1996. On the fourth flight, on July 31, one of the retractable landing legs failed to extend on landing and the vehicle fell over. It suffered considerable damage, and it was decided there was not enough money left to fund repairs.

Turnaround time between the second and third flights in 1996 was 26 hours; the vehicle successfully validated a rotation of the vehicle prior to landing – the most difficult part of a tail-first soft landing – as well as a number of software and hardware innovations.

I’m not dissing the work of Masten with the Xombie. It was funded partially by NASA, and it is validating control systems and software that could be used on Earth, on the Moon, or even on Mars. It just bothers me that we could be flying reusable spaceships today that would be the third or fourth generation descendants of the DC-Y today. For a fictional look at how the world could have been if such vehicles were in common use, see the Firestar series of novels by Michael F. Flynn.

Early concept of the DC-Y

The SSTO vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle idea has been around since the 1950s; the Luna in the landmark film Destination Moon was such a vehicle, even if it did use a parachute for final landing back on Earth.

Luna, which took off and landed vertically, "as God and Robert Heinlein intended"

In the 1960s and 1970s a wide range of designs were promoted by such visionaries as Gary Hudson, Max Hunter (who designed the Mercury capsule) and Phillip Bono. Plug nozzles, drop tanks – all kinds of vehicles were designed. Some very large ships were designed to take off from a body of water!

Gary Hudson's Phoenix C

Even using very light airframes utilizing “solid smoke” (a silica aerogel), composite fuel tanks and honeycomb aluminum structures, the numbers just never came out in favor of successfully flying a single-stage rocket directly from Earth into orbit and back again. Liquid hydrogen and LOX (liquid oxygen) as fuel and oxidizer are the rocket fuel combination that produces the most energy per pound, but liquid hydrogen isn’t dense enough – the fuel tank has to be so large that a significant amount of the performance of the fuel is lost due to increased airframe weight. Improved engines or even nuclear engines are probably required to make this concept work. That’s why most of the SSTO designs since that time have taken off and/or landed like aircraft. (For a detailed discussion of the DC-X and SSTO, see Halfway to Anywhere by G. Harry Stine.)

Xombie isn’t designed to fly into orbit; in fact, Masten seems to be focusing on suborbital rockets. I have to hope, though, that the knowledge gained through these tests will help to lead to a viable SSTO someday once the propulsion technology is available to make it possible. If nothing else, it might help SpaceX as it tries to build the Grasshopper reusable suborbital rocket and the fully-reusable version of the Dragon capsule and the Falcon 9 launch vehicle. I wouldn’t usually expect such a technology transfer from one company to another, but the GENIE software was written by a nonprofit lab. They may be persuaded to license it to multiple users.

SpaceX Falcon 9 - reusable version soft-lands vertically

I have JFK riding a robot unicorn on the Moon…your argument is invalid.

Keeping Luna safe for Americans!

Artist Jason Heuser has a somewhat different view of history than most of the rest of us. He has done a series of pieces revising the history of various American Presidents, including Teddy Roosevelt shooting a sasquach, George Washington fighting zombies, and Abraham Lincoln riding a grizzly bear. My favorite is the one shown above, depicting the real facts behind the JFK conspiracy. See, he was sent to the Moon in 1963 to fight aliens to keep us safe. Heuser’s artwork is available on Etsy. You know you need a print of this. Get it for a friend for, oh, Presidents’ Day…

Retro-space imagery of what might have been

The novel I wrote two years ago that takes place in the alternate universe of the Domination of the Draka will be available on the interweebs soon. It’s sort of an alternate-universe take on the early days of the US experimental jet and space vehicles that flew out of Edwards Air Force Base in the 1950s and 1960s – sort of an alternate “The Right Stuff.”

It needs a cover, like all novels. About a year ago I acquired a resin limited-run model kit from Fantastic Plastic that was a speculative look at what might have been if the X-15 rocket plane program had continued into the late 1960s. The kit of the X-15-D was mastered by Scott Lowther, editor/publisher and primary author of the Aerospace Projects Review and one of the authorities on concept aircraft and spacecraft. It was cast by BLAP Models and included decals by JBOT, both legends in the garage-kit space model kit business.

The kit was beautifully done, both in design and in execution. It was pretty a pretty simple build, especially because I didn’t want to include landing gear. Instead, I filled in the landing gear wells before painting.

I had in mind that the “real” concept spaceplane of 1967, the X-15-D, could become my X-14 Demon of 1953 in my book. The Demon was described as a single-seat suborbital spaceplane, sort of a super-X-15 with a scramjet chamber as well as rocket engines. The look of the X-15-D fit the description pretty well, even though I had originally envisioned the Demon about six or seven years ago without knowing about the design for an X-15 follow-on. (This is not that surprising. In The Stone Dogs, the third Draka novel, author S.M. Stirling sets forth a timeline of technological development and history that has the US and the Draka both getting men into orbit in the late 1950s – but using spaceplanes, not disintegrating totem poles.)

I had to make a couple of changes. First, the X-15 was covered in Iconel-X, a very temperature-resistant nickel-based alloy, and it was usually painted black. (On one flight it was coated in a heat-shedding ablative coating that was bright pink; the pilots refused to fly a pink airplane so white paint was applied over the coating before flight.) The Demon’s skin was made of a cermet, a ceramic-metallic composite material that had a rather unusual origin – you’ll have to read the book! Anyway, the cermet wouldn’t look purely metallic, or purely flat black, so I painted it black and dusted it with silver and blue shades to give it a hint of a different color.

I left off the NASA markings and a few of the others that I felt were out of scale with what I imagined the plane to be. (There is no NASA in the Drakaverse.) Otherwise, it’s Lowther’s airplane – I made no changes in the design. I ended up with this:

I hope I did Scott and the folks justice in building this model. It’s a cool design. I can’t just put the plane on the cover like this, though – I wanted to make it look realistic, as if it was in flight. I have very little of a real artistic hand, but I started fooling with a few tools and came up with a few possibilities. These are probably not what will eventually make the cover, but they are a start as I learn the software.  I used a masking plug-in for Photoshop called Topaz ReMask to clip the plane out of the image, then composited with various images taken from high-altitude aircraft and balloons. Then I used a nifty little tool called Neatberry PhotoStyler to create some “vintage” photos of the plane in flight.

Over California

At apogee

Black and white is stylish, right?

Over a certain place in Nevada that doesn't exist

I don’t quite have it to the point where the model doesn’t look like a model, yet. A couple of these backgrounds were shot from orbital altitude, and the Demon wasn’t supposed to be able to go into orbit…that wouldn’t be for a few years yet. I’m working on it, and it’s been great fun. I highly recommend these tools, along with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, as software even an untrained person like me can use.

You can say you saw the Demon first!

(And by the way, the Demon was flown in the book by Jack Ridley, a test pilot and engineer who was a real person and a great pilot. He’s the guy who gave Chuck Yeager the stick of Beeman’s gum (and the broom handle) before Yeager broke the sound barrier in the X-1 in real life! Check out Yeager’s autobiography for more information.)

“Everything Old Is New Again…”

It's been around for a while...

Now don’t be thinkin’ this is about politics or something. It’s about the announcement today that the US Air Force has thrown some money – $ 2 million – at Lockheed Martin to begin to develop a reusable flyback space booster.

This is not a new idea. Most ideas being studied in the space business have been around for a while. Mostly what they take is money to actually build prototypes and test them and then fix the bugs and build some more, unlike our current way of building space vehicles: build one and BY GOD NOTHING BETTER GO WRONG OR WE’LL NEVER GIVE YOU ANOTHER DAMN DIME YOU LAZY ROCKET SCIENTISTS! (That’s not me, that’s Congress and the Administration; pick a political party in power. Both have looked at it the same way. We can spend millions of extra money trying to get the bugs out of the F-35, which should probably never work right, but not one more penny for extra space vehicles. In fact, NASA is hoarding the last of the Shuttle Main Engines to use for the heavy lifter.

But back to LockMart’s new RSB Pathfinder. RBS is for…wait for it…Reusable Booster System. It will be proof-of-concept, not operational. What a concept? Boeing quietly built those X-37Bs for the USAF and nobody really knew much about them, and now one has been in orbit, doing God knows what, for over six months.

Flyback boosters have been designed since the 1950s. There is a great deal of information on many of these designs available in Aerospace Projects Review, an e-journal Scott Lowther has helmed for years. I highly recommend it for anybody who is interested in the history of space and aircraft projects that never flew. Nobody does research on this stuff like Scott! His regular site, with a lot of drawings of historical aerospace projects, is here.

One of the most important of the flyback booster designs was presented about a decade ago by a company called Starcraft Boosters, headed by moonwalker Buzz Aldrin.

Buzz's Starbooster

Aldrin’s company came up with a whole family of reusable flyback vehicles:

It was a great idea. Buzz even presented it in a science fiction novel called The Return, co-authored with John Barnes. One version was based on an Atlas 5 launcher with wings and jet engines. All of them would be remotely controlled.

So maybe this is the time. The Air Force is not as fickle as NASA, and can afford not to be. Two million bucks isn’t much to start with, but it will show the brass some pretty computer graphics and some PowerPoints. Eventually they will have to throw in some more money.

However, like the X-37, which started out as a NASA project that never got past drop tests, the Air Force actually intends to buy stuff that works. You see, they have reasons to buy stuff. NASA still does a good job setting missions for unmanned planetary probes. Well, actually, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and some universities set some good missions and companies like Orbital Sciences build some good hardware. But the Air Force can think in the long term, and can resist the pull of Congresscritters better than NASA. Maybe what we needed to do, way back in the 1950s, was to turn the whole space program over to the Navy. (There was this retired Annapolis graduate, invalided out because of tuberculosis with a rank of only lieutenant j.g., who probably should have been in charge of it. Although Admiral Heinlein of the U.S. Space Navy sounds better, doesn’t it?)  I think this is a topic for another day.

Although maybe it’s already been going on…