We celebrated with some chocolate liqueur, and collapsed to watch SUPERNOVA 2012. It’s a disaster film in every sense of the word. Next time we’ll head over to Tyler’s on the Beach.
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I’ve finally finished Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. It took me awhile, simply because of a lack of time. Excellent book, with portraits of the candidates that do not come through so well on cable news, and a back room description of the campaigns. I’m also about halfway through Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets. This one is the ultimate book for conspiracy theorists. But somehow it’s convincing. And scary.
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I came across Keith Olbermann Friday evening, seated, relaxed, reading a piece that I immediately recognized. It was James Thurber’s “The Greatest Man in the World.“ I read it in college, loved it, and proceeded to read all the Thurber I could get my hands on. If I were given the gift of being able to claim ownership of one piece of short fiction, “The Greatest Man” would be it.
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I’ve agreed to co-edit an as-yet untitled book with Les Johnson, Deputy Manager of the Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The book, to be published by Baen, will consist of seven essays, each describing a technique for mounting a flight to a nearby star, and seven original stories on the same topic.
Les has just finished a collaboration with Travis Taylor for his first novel. It’s Back to the Moon, which will be released in January, also by Baen.
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I’ll be giving the keynote address and participating in a panel at the Polish to Publish writers’ retreat Oct 1-3, at Honey Creek in Waverly, GA.
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Some real time travel: Forty-five years ago, I was an English teacher and theater director at Woodrow Wilson High School in Levittown, PA. The Class of ’65 is having a reunion and they’ve invited me. Probably to give me some reading assignments. The event will happen the evening of September 25 at the Lambertville Station Inn in Lambertville, NJ. You know you’ve been around a while when you have students who are in their sixties.
It was nice to find out that they haven’t forgotten me.
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A new Mike Resnick collection, Blasphemy, has arrived from Golden Gryphon. The stories have, of course, a religious dimension. And they are typical of Mike’s work, which is to say, they are both thought-provoking and entertaining. I should add, as they like to say on Cable News these days, that, in the interests of transparency, I wrote the intro.
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And finally, a confession: I’d always hoped to live long enough to find out that there’s something else alive somewhere off world. In the late fifties, when we were beginning to talk about a space program, we’d thought to be on Mars by now, and have a real space station, and probably have sent somebody out into the Jovian system. None of it’s happened, of course. And now the government has announced the inevitable cutbacks on the back-to-the-moon project. It’s what happens when you spend lots of money on wars, I guess.
Well, maybe we can do something else. Maybe a long range analysis of the atmosphere of a world orbiting, say, Sirius, where we’ll find evidence that something is breathing. Meanwhile, good bye, Buck Rogers.