SciFi & Fantasy recommendations

 It’s not just you. SciFi and Fantasy died in the 1980’s, and was buried under a mountain of dreck in the 1990’s. However – There are a few bright spots in the market these days.

The “Garrett, P.I.” fantasy gumshoe detective series (complete at 14 books) by Glen Cook is very good. You can read any individual novel with no background, but you get more by starting at the beginning (Sweet Silver Blues). Things that happen stay happened, and the world around Garrett changes along with him. Especially after the great war (having lasted three generations) abruptly ends.

If you have any interest in fantasy humor, then please read the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. They’re the finest works in English since Kipling. Each one stands by itself, by they run in series by main character. Again, things that happen stay happened, so you’ll get more by following along. A couple were turned into pretty decent made-for-TV short serials in England – “The Color of Magic” (based on the first 2 books in the setting) and “Going Postal” (a much later and less farcical novel).

I will recommend without reservation anything published by Raconteur Press (headed by LawDog). They started up three years ago or so, and have published dozens of anthologies and novels. They proudly publish pulp fiction (in various genres) for men and boys.

If you want some light SciFi, try starting with the “Quarter Share” series by Nathan Lowell (a Coast Guard veteran). There are no battles, no aliens, no galaxy changing events. These are novels about a young man (“Call me Ishmael.”) pulling himself up by his bootstraps on a Solar Clipper cargo ship. Ishmael can make a good cup of coffee, so he is not without skills. (There are 15 books written as 5 trilogies, plus another trilogy, a stand-alone novel, and a short story that all tie-in as background.) Nathan has novels in other series, as well. “The Wizard’s Butler” is an excellent stand-alone story. (Now with a sequel that isn’t as good. He had a stroke and his daughter is “helping” him write.)

I am quite partial to the “tactically correct romance” (anything beyond kissing happens off-screen, but the blood is all on-screen) novels by Dorothy Grant. Her husband Peter Grant (a South Africa bush wars vet) writes really good action in SciFi and Western genres. I’ve enjoyed everything J. L. Curtis has written (SciFi, Western, and modern SpecOps/Western). I immediately purchase and read everything Alma Boykin and Cedar Sanderson publish. (These folks, along with LawDog, are “the North Texas Troublemakers, a shooting club with a writing problem”, are friends or co-conspirators with Raconteur Press, and have their own blogs.)

For cozy humor, try “The Chronicles of Luna City” by Celia Hayes and Jeanne Hayden. Richard Astor-Hall, a celebrity chef on the run from a very public disaster, wakes up with a hangover in a tiny Texas town full of history, personality, and personalities. Now complete as a 12 volume series, you really do have to start at the beginning.

What sort of maniac makes fries a dairy product?

I, like billions of others, am lactose intolerant. I’m used to it. It’s usually not a big deal. I avoid foods containing dairy products, including the less obvious ones like mashed potatoes.  The penalty for making a mistake is 36-48 hours of agony.

I was peeved ten years ago when Big Chip (you do know the production of potato chips is concentrated in just a few factories, don’t you?) ruined my beloved Salt & Vinegar potato chips by adding lactose as a sweetener. You don’t expect “Salt & Vinegar” chips to be a freaking dairy product. Their only ingredients should be potato, salt, vinegar, and oil.

Boy, wasn’t it fun discovering that change.

But now, McDick’s has changed the formulation of their french fries. They added milk derivatives for some bizarre reason. So McDick’s fries are now a dairy product.

Boy, wasn’t it fun discovering that change.

It had been a few years since I went to a McDick’s for anything other then breakfast crack (AKA the McGriddle®). I feel no need to ever return.

Confidence will get you almost anywhere

 Absolute truth.  Tested and verified.

Gravitational time dilation

Oh, how this has vexed me. For the last year, this has vexed me. That just goes to show how dim and stubborn I can be. Discovery takes time. Acceptance takes time. So, I finally accepted what was there all along.

Gravitational Time Dilation. The final, hardest step along this journey. It’s right there in the diagram. It always was, had I but the wit and willingness to see it.

Our standard particle: mass 1 and motionless.

The field is not the coordinate line at the top. That’s what a distant observer would perceive as space. No, the red curve is the the surface of the field. The surface of the field is “curved spacetime”.

But where in the diagram is gravitational time dilation? Why does light travel more slowly near a massive object like the sun? It doesn’t. Time isn’t part of the diagram. Time travels along at the universal tick, uncaring of your private perception of time.

Light doesn’t travel more slowly. It always travels at the same rate of one unit distance per one unit time - along the curve. Not along the coordinate grid. And the curve is always longer than the grid. The difference is usually minuscule. But when your near a massive object, the curvature becomes enough to notice. The red line is longer than its projection onto the coordinate grid above. Just barely. By how much?

That’s really not much. At 10 units from the mass, it’s 1.0000414. At 50 units from the mass, it’s 1.0000001. Further than that, my calculator just gives up and says it’s one.

It’s enough to make the time it takes a radar signal to pass the sun twice on its way to and from Mercury to take about 200 microseconds longer.1 It’s enough to make light bend twice as much towards the sun as Newtonian gravity would allow.2 It’s enough to accelerate the orbit of Mercury.3 It’s enough to make the GPS satellites have to update their clocks every pass.4

Wait - If there is more “distance” in the space near a massive object, then how does Mercury’s orbit accelerate near the sun? Shouldn’t it slow down like light?

Remember how every particle has a fixed and finite radius of one unit? That’s not measured against the coordinate grid. It’s measured against the field - the curvature caused by everything else.

Image recycled from another project. Shrinkage not shown. Use your imagination. Red is the baseline for the two particles. Green is the two adjusted for acceleration. Purple is the combined field.

That shrinks the base of the particle (length contraction). That, in turn, increases the angle formed by the energy differential inside the particle. That increases the velocity (and decreases the perceived time) of the particle. Without increasing the particle’s energy. That’s the effect of spacetime “flowing” towards the massive object.

We are now operating entirely outside the imagination of Newton. And we’re still looking at the same picture.

This is why the math of General Relativity is so famously difficult. Everything depends upon everything else, and it’s all varying all the time.

1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_time_delay

2

https://www.einstein-online.info/en/spotlight/light_deflection/

3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Classical_tests

4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation#Experimental_confirmation