For a long time, I’ve had something of a love/hate relationship with the Space Shuttle program. Over the years, I’ve cranked out my share of letters to the editor defending it from those would-be budget cutters who think our tax dollars would be better spent on something with more tangible benefits (like how to quell the pungent pigs in Iowa). However, after the loss of Columbia back in 2003, I began to wonder if the Shuttle itself was just too damned complex to operate as a reliable space transportation system. Mind you, I never lost my enthusiasm for manned space flight–I just thought that the time had well passed to move on to something new. That’s why I was so jazzed about the Constellation Program, and felt my heart skip a beat when the last administration announced that NASA should focus its efforts toward getting us back to the moon, and eventually Mars. Finally! After forty long years, once again we were going to venture out past Earth orbit!

Not so fast.

To put an even bigger cap on the bummer that has been the last year, we’re now faced with the news that Constellation is all but dead. Sorry folks, no more manned space flight for you–just can’t afford it, what with all the bailouts and budget deficits we’ve been running. Even worse, with the Shuttle program retiring, we will have no capability of launching Americans into orbit after 2010. How pathetic is that? The country that sent men to the moon will now have to hitch a ride with the Russians if we want to visit the International Space Station.

Now I realize that times are tough, and that even tougher decisions need to be made. But putting a singular source of American pride and ingenuity on the chopping block? That ain’t like canceling a bridge to nowhere.  Set aside the spinoffs from Apollo that laid the foundation for today’s technology;  the cold truth is that a nation that doesn’t set new frontiers for itself will instead chart a course for stagnation and decay.  America’s manned spaceflight program has always represented the best of what humanity can be:  bold, adventurous, and peaceful in pursuit of a noble goal.  Now, with one swift stroke of a pen, all of that is on hold–all so NASA can focus on “climate science” and other such uninspiring tasks.

To say such a decision is shortsighted is an understatement worthy of an English playwright.  I have had many reasons to fear for the future of this nation, and now I have another.

Our long march to publication continues…and nothing says it quite like the final cover art, rendered in all its glory (and living color) for all to see! It’s already been posted on Amazon, but I thought you might like to get up close and personal right here on Hammerjack.net. Go ahead–click and enlarge, if you dare…

There’s an old saying that your story is only as good as your villain. If that’s indeed the case, then SEVEN DEADLY SINS will be a real treat. Nothing but baddies as far as the eye can see, with lots of great mayhem to keep you turning pages well past your bedtime. With any luck, my fellow authors and I will even give you a few nightmares–or at least a reason to look over your shoulder the next time you take a walk down a dark, foggy Argelian street.

When you write as much as I have, you develop a real fascination with language.  Most people take their own for granted, having spoken it all their lives;  but try and explain your native tongue to someone unfamiliar with it, such as a visitor from a foreign land–or better yet, a small child.  I’ve found that English can be a real mind bender, what with all those homonyms and homophones, hard and soft consonants, “i” before “e” except after “c”–it goes on and on.

What’s even more interesting, though, is the evolution of the language.  Back in the day, bad was bad.  Then bad was good.  Now bad can be bad or good, depending on the context.  Words have been distilled into their text-messaging equivalents, so that terms like LOL are now part of the cultural lexicon.  I know people who communicate almost exclusively using movie quotes.  Pretty amazing stuff, really.  And it only gets worse if you have a teenager.

There are, however, lines that shouldn’t be crossed.  Take, for instance, the psych professor at Bennington College–in Vermont, natch–who thinks that the words “nerd” and “geek” should be banned from polite conversation.  According to him, what the world needs now is tech, sweet tech, and that saddling people with those terms only promotes stereotypes that chase people away from those professions.

Ah, where to begin?

In the first place,  the kind professor has the whole cause/effect relationship backwards.  People don’t end up as nerds because they get into tech–they get into tech because they’re nerds.  It’s in their genes, man!  I went to an engineering school, and believe me–the guys spending their nights in the aerospace lab weren’t missing out on any frat parties to be there.  You can’t just stop being a nerd or a geek.  It’s an integral part of your identity, no matter what you do for a living.  Tall ain’t short and fat ain’t skinny.  Refusing to call out the obvious doesn’t change a thing.

Besides, are we really so far gone  that we can’t see that geek and nerd are actually terms of endearment?  That geek is chic and nerds set the new standard for badassery?  Hell, I’m a geek and I’m damned proud of it.  I saw The Final Countdown fifty–count ‘em, fifty–times as a kid.  I programmed my own Zork-like fantasy quest on my Commodore 64 back in the day.   I even have a souvenir commemorative plate from the Franklin Mint with Spock on it.  Not Zachary Quinto Spock, but Leonard Nimoy Spock.  My wife won’t let me display it in our house, but I still have it.  So there!

Let’s stop being so concerned with labels and just accept ourselves for who we are.  As Gilbert said to the Betas in Revenge of the Nerds, “There are a lot more of us than there are of you!”  So come on, people–embrace your inner geek.  And don’t ever be afraid to wear that badge with pride.  After all, we run the world now.  Just ask Bill Gates and Steve Jobs…

I just finished up the first pass edits for REVENANT and sent them off to my new editor at Pocket Books, which means we’re now officially in the home stretch for publication next March.  For the technically curious, the first pass is the actual typeset copy of a book as it will appear in its final form–kind of like a sneak preview.  I’m always jazzed at this stage of the game, because it means the book is really coming together.  All that’s left is to get a look at the cover art, which should be appearing shortly.

The first time I went through this, way back during the editing phase for HAMMERJACK, I was most surprised by how old-fashioned the process really is.  I just assumed that most of it got done electronically and that I’d be e-mailing all the changes back and forth.  Believe it or not, though, it still involves a lot of paper.  First of all, there’s the all-too-painful marked-up copy that you get after the initial edit (you know, the one with the red ink that points out all the screw-ups, clumsy passages and continuity goofs).  After that, the line editor gets a whack at it, combing out whatever spelling and grammar errors might remain.  Line editors are like the drill instructors of the publishing business:  rarely do they get much glory, but nothing would work without them.  Also like a DI, they can really get in your grill about doing things their way (which, in my case, usually involves the creative use of punctuation).  Fortunately, authors get to strike back with the all-powerful stet–which I’ve used to save the lives of helpless commas on many an occasion.

The line edit is a very important copy, because from that point on the paper manuscript becomes the publishing master, containing all the marks for the typesetter for things like italics, dashes and scene breaks.  At this point, the author’s job is to check the line edits, stet out the stuff he doesn’t want changed, and make whatever last-minute changes come to mind–all on the paper, so there isn’t a lot of room for monkeying around.  Once the publisher gets this copy back, it gets released to production, where a typesetter actually goes in and retypes every word of the manuscript and formats it into the first pass.   And here I thought it was tough doing it the first time around.  I don’t know who you are, valiant typesetter, but I salute you!

So as you can see, getting a book to market involves a lot more than cocktail parties and press junkets–although those are kinda fun too.  By the time it hits the shelf, a lot of people have worked very hard to get it there.  Let’s all give them a hand, shall we?

Even though the major networks have done a rather conspicuous job of not covering the story, if John Stewart has his teeth around Climategate then I can safely assume that most of you have heard of it by now.  In a nutshell, it seems as though those wacky cut-ups at East Anglia University in Great Britain–which happens to be the one-stop shop for global warming information–was caught fudging its data, thanks to some leaked e-mails that illustrated the shenanigans in rather graphic detail.  We also found out that the source code used to create their climate models is hopelessly buggy–not that it makes much of a difference, as the University somehow deleted most of the raw data used to track temperature changes over the last 150 years.

In military parlance, this is what’s known as a Charlie Foxtrot.

It’s also what happens when science intersects with politics:  what’s supposed to be a dispassionate collection and analysis of hard numbers instead turns into some ham-handed manipulation of statistics designed to create a panic about something which may or may not be real.  Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought that science was about what you could prove.  That’s the reason that peer review journals exist:  to present data and findings so that other scientists can reproduce the results under the same conditions.  In that respect, science invites skepticism.  More than that, science thrives on it.  Without others doing their best to poke holes in your theory, you could easily work off assumptions that are dead wrong.

Unless you work at East Anglia.  Apparently those guys are all avid readers of Science Made Stupid (which has a disturbingly prescient breakdown of the modern scientific method)–that, or most of them got their degrees from the Bernie Madoff School of Climate Studies (Motto:  “As long as people keep buying in, what’s the big deal?”).  Problem is, eventually you have to square what you’re selling with what people can see with their own eyes–namely, that there ain’t been a lot of warming for the last ten years or so.  Talk about your inconvenient truths.

So what’s the bottom line?  Well, honest enviornmentalists should be pissed for one.  I don’t know about you, but if mankind really is causing the planet to roast, I’d like to know about it.  Thanks to the East Anglia’s data massage parlor, though, we may never find out–because now they’ve cast doubt over the entire study, not to mention a scientific community that was so anxious to hop on the climate change bandwagon that they didn’t bother to ask the tough questions.  Trust us, they said.  We’re scientists.  We don’t have an agenda.  As it turns out, they don’t have much of a basis for their climate models, either.  That’s a hell of a thing to take on faith, guys–particularly when you’re talking about remaking the entire world economy to combat CO2 emissions.  After this episode, don’t be surprised if people won’t just take your word for it.

Even if there is a consensus.