www.jamesrstrickland.com

In light of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a team of chemists led by Dr. George John at CCNY, has developed a new, nontoxic, biodegradable, renewable, etc etc oil recovery agent.

More details here: http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/CCNY_Led_Team_Develops_Non_Toxic_Oil_Recovery_Agent_999.html

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. And disasters on this scale put money in the development.

-JRS

I have to be honest. I've been struggling with Einstein's Blues for a while. Trying to find the voice of the novel and more, trying to figure out its plot. It's been frustrating. So I took a break.

For the last month, I've been busy writing. First, I've finished the first draft of a novella set in Jeff Duntemann's Drumlin world, tentatively titled On Gossamer Wings. It still needs much editing and refinement, but I'm pleased with the first draft. It's about 1/3 the length of a novel, and while there were times when I had to wrestle with it, it came a lot easier than work on Einstein's Blues was coming.

On Gossamer Wings started out to be a short story - primarily an exercise in third person writing and in writing characters without lengthy introspective inner dialogues, and finally, in harming my main characters, something I've found more difficult to do while working on Einstein's Blues.

Right now I'm working on a short story to submit to an anthology. It's a bit of a departure for me, being more Steampunk-horror-western than cyberpunk/scifi. But I've written steampunk before. The very first novel I ever wrote was called Codename: Mata Hari, and was set in a steampunk universe around 1905. This one's set in the late 1800s in a town I'm calling Perdition, Nevada. Horrors lurk there. It's going to be a very dark story.

So the upshot? I'm doing a lot of work refining my writing, and figuring out where my writing is now, as opposed to 2006, when I started work on Einstein's Blues. There will probably be a heavy rewrite of Blues coming when I'm done with these two projects.

As far as publication of these two pieces, nothing's definite on either one. Jeff and I are talking about rolling On Gossamer Wings and his forthcoming Drumlin novella called Drumlin Circus together in something like an old Ace Double, which would be a ton of fun. Jeff's a great writer, and it would be an honor to share the book with him as much as it has been to use his world.

The other is for an anthology I was invited to submit work for. I've never done this before, so I have no idea whatever if they'll like the story I'm writing, so it's all very much up in the air.

Even if neither piece ever sees the light of day the work on my writing has been worth every second. I'll probably post more about them once my editing passes are done on both. I'm always loathe to say "it's a story about foo" only to discover that "bar" turns out to be more important as I edit.

I'll keep y'all posted.

-JRS

XKCD again. Life is a balance between this moment and the hopes and dreams of the next. Somehow, we have to do both.

-JRS

Copperwood Press has just released Jeff Duntemann's second anthology of short stories called Cold Hands and Other Stories on Lulu. Where his first anthology, Souls in Silicon, which I reviewed on GoodReads, deals with Jeff's AI fiction, Cold Hands and Other Stories collects what he describes as "everything else" - Spaceflight, aliens, religion, calculus, witchcraft, and Steam Locomotives. Particularly steam locomotives cobbled together from parts made by alien maker machines that were intended to be something else entirely.

To expand a little on that last bit, there are two stories set in Jeff's Drumlin world. I've read both the Drumlin stories included in this book (though Drumlin Wheel may well have been an earlier edit than the final one in the book). The Drumlin world is a planet nobody actually intended to colonize. Nobody even knew it existed, for that matter. Through a severe malfunction of their starship, however, a group of colonists did wind up marooned there, and they found it passing strange. Most notably, besides being extremely similar to Pleistocene era Earth, there are these alien artifacts called thingmakers that will make objects if you tap patterns into their drums…

It's an interesting world, and the more I delve into it (to say nothing of pestering the hell out of Jeff with questions and extrapolations on it) the more it's intriguing me. More on that later. Meantime, I've already ordered my copy of Cold Hands and Other Stories. and I have no qualms about recommending it on the strength of the two stories I've read, and of his other work. Jeff can Write. I'll post a review when the book gets here.

-JRS

One of the big problems science fiction (to say nothing of actual medical science) has had a problem with is how do you power all these cool cybernetic gismos you, the author, want to put in someone's body. Going back to the Six Million Dollar Man (and Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels upon which the series was based), the most common power source seems to be nuclear, robably Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators. They certainly have the longevity for the job, with endurances measured in decades. Indeed, these devices were used in pacemakers in years past, and according to the Wikipedia article, some ninety of these are still in service.

Realistically, though, equipping j random cyborg with plutonium pellets seems problematic on a number of levels.

This is a problem I've wrestled with before, and my solution, as it appeared in a brief mention in Irreconcilable Differences was the glucose fuel cell. I reasoned, positing it, that since fuel cells can extract hydrogen from hydrocarbon fuels such as alcohol or gasoline, it seemed reasonable they could extract it from carbohydrates like glucose, which the body conveniently supplies from food energy. As long as one didn't get carried away with them and exceed the fuel supply the body could deliver, it seemed like a nice solution.

Using these gadgets gave my cyborgs a different feel from the brute force cybernetics of yesteryear. It meant that they were predominantly meat with hormonal implants and small, low power cybernetics.

It also appears to be practical. Via Singularity Hub, comes the news that scientists in France have not only built such a thing, but implanted them in rats and had them function. The scientific paper is here.

Interestingly, the paper also discusses using urea as one of the fuels, though not with this particular fuel cell. If practical, such a fuel cell would be even better, as it would use metabolic waste as its fuel. This, by contrast, had not occurred to me, and it's a great addition. The body can afford to be far more generous with its waste products than its primary fuel chemistry.

The future just keeps arriving, doesn't it? :)

-JRS

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