Thirty-five years ago today, Mariner-10 — the first spacecraft to visit Mercury — was launched. According to this NASA page, it was the seventh spacecraft in the Mariner series, and the first spacecraft to use the gravitational “slingshot” method to change course: it swung by Venus on its way to Mercury.
Just last month the MESSENGER spacecraft sent back vivid images that revealed parts of Mercury never seen before. With that in mind, it seems fitting to remember its predecessor today.
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On November 1, 1993, the Space Shuttle Columbia landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, at the end of mission STS-58. The crew had spent 14 days aboard the orbiter.
At the time, we were still new to Vandenberg AFB on the California coast, and I was in the middle of the first project I would manage for the Titan System Program Office: finding and retrieving from the ocean floor pieces of a failed rocket. That was a fascinating project, and I have a piece of the rocket that they gave me as a going-away present.
In more recent news, I think I figured a way to tie in part of that search and salvage operation with the novel I’m writing. We’ll see how that works out.
by Carrying on civil discourse is difficult in this day of heated exchanges and vile rhetoric, and a conversation with a friend on a writing forum reminded me of this Robert A. Heinlein quote (from his novel FRIDAY):
Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms … but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.
Given the excesses of this very medium, I wonder if we can rein in the invective and stop our disagreements from becoming unbridgeable divides. Mud-slinging used to be the purview of a select few; now, everyone seems to want to take a turn. As a result, we’re all a lot dirtier than ever before.
On that somewhat somber note, Happy All Hallow’s Eve!
by I don’t know if anyone else is enjoying my ongoing series of space anniversaries, but I am.
Ten years ago today — October 29th, 1998 — the Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-95. Aboard were seven astronauts, including one from Spain and one from Japan, who would conduct experiments in the SPACEHAB module and deploy and retrieve the “Spartan” free-flyer.
The crew were Curtis L. Brown, Steven W. Lindsey, Scott E. Parazynski, Stephen K. Robinson, Pedro Duque (Spain), Chiaki Mukai (Japan), and — making the triumphant return mentioned in the title — John H. Glenn. Thirty-six years, eight months and nine days after becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, Senator Glenn returned to space.
The mission also:
The mission lasted a few hours shy of nine days, making it a much longer stay in space than the first time for Senator Glenn. And longer than I’m likely ever to stay in space, despite my most fervent wishes. I suppose there’s still hope for my ashes, but hopefully that day won’t come for a long time.
by It feels good to get some writing done, and be a little closer to completion on MARE NUBIUM. Since my unanticipated hiatus, I’ve pushed my self-imposed deadline back from Halloween to the first of December — and if I make it, I will meet my goal of completing the novel this year.
And as of today, the thing is a little over 75,000 words long. I still think this draft is going to run over my planned 100,000 words, and therefore will need some trimming in the edit, but so far I feel pretty good about it. Hopefully other people will feel good about it, too!
by Announcing Edmund R. Schubert’s first novel, DREAMING CREEK, now available from Amazon.com.
High school teacher Danny Wakeman has spent sixteen years believing that his childhood friend, Marcus Gaines, saved his life after an accident. But Danny’s perspective on the world gets turned inside-out when he and the woman he wants to marry, Sara McBride, drink from the mystical waters of Dreaming Creek, trade bodies, and get stuck that way… Trapped in each others’ bodies, struggling to fit in to each others’ lives, Danny and Sara will have to pull together to overcome a perplexing lawsuit, a plot to defraud Danny out of his recently deceased parent’s farm, and an attempted rape—all of which ultimately prove to bear Marcus’s sinister fingerprints. And before it’s over, Danny will discover that this pattern of treachery and violence goes all the way back to his supposed accident, which Marcus designed to cover up an even blacker secret…
Who is Edmund Schubert, and why am I plugging his novel? That’s simple:
Edmund R. Schubert is the award-winning author of over thirty short stories, having been published in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain. In addition to writing, Schubert has held a range of editorial positions, including serving as fiction editor of the online magazine, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show. An anthology of IGMS stories, co-edited by Schubert and Card, was published by Tor (August, 2008).
In the interest of full disclosure, Ed Schubert is also one of my buddies from Orson Scott Card’s 2004 Literary Boot Camp, and he let me read parts of DREAMING CREEK as he got them ready for his publisher. And, in my not-so-humble opinion, it’s very well done.
DREAMING CREEK can be ordered from Amazon, as mentioned, or directly from the publisher, LBF Books.
by It’s always refreshing to learn that others think you’re mentally ill. Not mentally deficient, which would imply that if I learned enough I would be better, but sick in the head.
And I’m not talking about the standard “brain-damaged male” motif that I learned about so long ago; i.e., that male babies, bathed in testosterone in utero, emerge with damaged brains. Male brains. Same thing, apparently.
Guilty as charged.
But this is different: this has to do with those of us who consider ourselves to be conservative versus those who are liberal. The contention, expressed in the opening of “What Makes People Vote Republican?” by Jonathan Haidt, is that being a conservative, much less a Republican, is a mental illness:
… now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity” — a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.
So Republicans do not respond to reason, while Democrats do not respond to references to good and evil. I love the assertion of intellectual superiority on the part of the author and the author’s peers, but the point seems sound that one side of the aisle operates under a moral relativism while the other prefers a clearer, more concrete morality.
The author examines this by considering morality and social contracts, primarily contrasting a hypothetical society based on John Stuart Mill’s assertions with one based on Emile Durkheim’s. This leads him to present the following distinctions between conservatives and liberals:
… people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations [of morality], and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally…. We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.
So rational Democrats use only a fraction of the “moral spectrum,” rejecting other parts that irrational Republicans include in their approach to the world. And being Republican is a mark of mental illness, as implied above. Isn’t it at least possible that the author has it backward, that liberals and Democrats, however intellectual, are morally stunted?
If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves.
If my damaged brain is why I am more of a conservative than a liberal (in modern terms), I wonder if it also explains why I feel I need a relationship with God to anchor my life. That’s part of the Anti-Candidate position on FAITH & FAMILY, recently posted over in the forum:
It took us awhile to accede to the faith of our parents — we thought we were too intellectual and sophisticated when we were younger — but having accepted it we did our best to pass it on to our children. And for one key reason: because faith provides an anchor in troubled times, and lifts our vision beyond our current situation and limited circumstances to consider the wider world and our proper place in it.
But that’s just me, and I’m brain-damaged. So don’t take my word for it: give it a try yourself. And let me know how it goes.
by If I’d had my wits about me, I would’ve posted this review four days ago, on Alfred Nobel’s birthday.* Since he invented dynamite, of course. But my wits are often everywhere except about me.
Not so with Alethea and her collection of essays, BEAUTY AND DYNAMITE. Her wits never seem to leave her, and the result is delightful.
(Full disclosure: Alethea is a most charming young lady whom I count as a friend as well as a colleague. If you think my review may be biased as a result, I can only say: you may be right. After all, she actually included the gibberish I contributed, giving me probably my only opportunity to be listed in the same table of contents as John Ringo.)
BEAUTY AND DYNAMITE is primarily a collection of Alethea’s essays for Apex Digest, with a smattering of poetry, blog entries, and “How I Met Alethea”-type entries from a few of the many, many friends she has made as a “genre chick.”
I could relate quite well to Alethea’s notes about Orson Scott Card’s Literary Bootcamp, since I went through the bootcamp experience a year after she did. My interview subject wasn’t nearly as interesting as hers: That lady felt free to share her remarkable story with Alethea, no doubt because she knew Alethea would appreciate the story she had to tell. That quality is one thing that makes Alethea such a perfect fit in the publishing world: she appreciates the stories and the act of story-telling itself.
And she tells good stories, even when she’s not the star. She was able, for instance, to shine the spotlight on Sherrilyn Kenyon as she wrote about their time together at a convention, and on the grand dame of science fiction, Andre Norton, as she wrote about visiting her home and library.
Some of the essays, because they deal with more heartache and hurt than happiness, are harder to read than others. But they all share a singular virtue: they express truth as the real world presents it to us, and growth as we deal with the world on our own terms. They are beauty, and they are dynamite.
To order a copy of BEAUTY AND DYNAMITE, visit Apex Books.
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*Actually, if I’d had my wits about me, I’d have posted this review right after Labor Day. I finished the book while I was at Dragon*Con, after all — holding it up in front of me where a thousand or so people walked by and saw it. Oh, and Alfred Nobel was born October 21, 1833, in Stockholm, Sweden.
by I cast my vote yesterday, and when I noticed there were several write-in spots on my Wake County ballot I made sure to write in the Anti-Candidate. (For those who missed it, the Anti-Campaign is alive and on life support, and will continue that way indefinitely.)
Bonus points to anyone who can identify, before all the results are posted, what race for which I wrote-in the Anti-Candidate.
As for the other races, in the best tradition of SF author Robert A. Heinlein I cast my vote less for any particular candidates — it seemed a poor slate overall — than against the candidates whom I think will do the most damage.
by Wow, three posts in less than two weeks that mention NASA test pilot Bill Dana — I didn’t see that coming. (The others were yesterday and October 15th.)
As you probably guessed, Mr. Dana piloted the last X-15 flight — number 199 — forty years ago today. He was dropped from the wing of the same B-52 that, years later, would drop the Pegasus launch vehicle during its first flights. When we were on the Pegasus Flight Readiness Review Panel in the late 1980s, I never thought I’d be blogging about him later … but then again, none of us knew what a blog was because they hadn’t been invented yet.
But here’s to you, Mr. Dana, and all those like you who have “danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.” May we follow, ever upward.
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