Peter Hodges

The Vampire Suicides
Part One
By Peter Hodges 

I have intentionally laden several layers of cliché into the text. See if you can pick them out.

Continue Reading »

This video follows the last four years of the Cassini mission and is what I would describe as incredible. If only we could see this stuff with our own eyes through space travel and exploration.

You may have noticed that I’m reading the follow-up to David Weber’s Off Armageddon Reef, but that’s hardly the extent of the sheer number of great science fiction novels that are hitting the bookshelves right now.

John Scalzi’s new novel, Zoe’s Tale, is a continuation of the story in the Old Man’s War universe. It is available as of yesterday in most bookstores. As the title implies, the novel features the precocious daughter of the main characters, telling the events of the The Last Colony through her eyes. I wasn’t a terrific fan of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow (which covered the events in Ender’s Game as told by Bean), so I’m hoping that this one showcases Scalzi channeling Heinlein’s writing karma. I’m expecting a story similar to Podkayne of Mars here.

S. M. Stirling’s Scourge of God is also in stores now. This is a continuation of his Emberverse series. The Sunrise Lands, the previous novel in the series, was one of my personal favorite novels of last year. I have every reason to expect that this one will live up to Stirling’s high standards. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Stirling is likely one of the most underrated science fiction authors of the modern age.

John Ringo’s new novel, The Last Centurion, is a post-apocalyptic novel written blog style. From my perusal in the local bookstore, I saw that Ringo has pulled no punches in his indictment of liberal progressivism, but the writing seemed a bit scattered and heavy-handed at first glance. Still, it’s John Ringo. How can you really go wrong?

Sly Mongoose, Tobias Buckell’s latest novel, fills me with some excitement. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was initially reluctant to read his fiction, but his great sense of adventure and plotting make his novels some of the best diversionary reading I’ve had in a long time. Toby is talking about the world he created for Sly Mongoose over on the Whatever right now. Click through and give it a look.

What are you guys looking forward to?

Seriously.

Why is this genre so popular on the market? Why is vampirism such a key fixture in the dark fantasy/horror/science fiction genre? We see a genetic vampire in Peter Watts’ Blindsight. There are three different types of vampires in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. Stephanie Myers is making big news with her teen girl focused vampire novels. During this rise of fiction, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on television for seven seasons. Laurell K. Hamilton has been writing book after book featuring Vampires. Her work (among others) has penetrated almost every facet of the geek mainstream, even making an appearance in the popular web comic Penny Arcade. What gives?

Even I’m not immune to it. I recently finished Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, which is an excellent, suspenseful thriller about three generations of historians and their quest to uncover the truth of (you guessed it) the Dracula legend. Despite myself, I found myself drawn into the moody atmosphere of the book. It was written in a very literary fashion (reminiscent of British Literature at the turn of the twentieth century) and packaged in such a way that I didn’t mind that it was a(nother) story about Vampires. (Yes, yes, “OMG! You read lit fic!” Get over it, already.)

What makes us so fascinated with the act of sucking blood? Why do we want to believe both the best and the worst of the walking undead?

Personally, I think that the whole idea of vampirism lends the dark side in all of us to desire two things–immortality and sin without consequence. (I use the term “sin” loosely here, not necessarily in a religious sense,  but in the sense that the possession of living, breathing humans through the act of vampirism can be classified as the basest sort of evil. I’m sure many of you can give me fictional examples of “good” vampires who must “convert” their victims to “save” them, but the end result is the same.) Who wouldn’t want to live forever? Who wouldn’t want to indulge in the sort of rampant sensuality that seems to be the vampiric inheritance? For some, even the admission price of eternal undeath isn’t enough of a barrier.

And that’s where we’ve been headed in the fictional world. 

Unless I somehow can re-imagine the whole concept (not likely), this is territory that I am unlikely to tread. No one wants to pay me stupid amounts of money (if you do, email me) to write such a story, and I can’t imagine crawling around in the head of the undead (haha) long enough to make a coherent novel.

Obama in January.

Obama in August.

In January, it was kosher to pull money from the space program to fund schools in the inner city. After all, he had to distinguish himself from his fellow Democrats by appealing to the one demographic most likely to give him an edge in the elections–inner cities.

Quoted from the January position paper:

Obama will support the development of this vital new platform to ensure that the United States’ reliance on foreign space capabilities is limited to the minimum possible time period.

In the wake of nationalistic pride generated by the Chinese hosting the Olympics, the issue of the space race has once again come to the forefront. China’s spoken intent is to put a man back on the moon by 2020. The USA performed the same feat with less advanced technology, going from space in 1959 to a moon landing in 1969. With China’s resource and technology base, isn’t it fair to assume a moon landing within twelve years?

Quote from the August position paper:

Speeding the Next-Generation Vehicle: Obama will expedite the development of the Shuttle’s successor systems for carrying Americans to space so we can minimize the gap. This will be difficult; underfunding by the Bush administration has left NASA with limited flexibility to accelerate the development of the new systems.

Obama accuses the Bush administration of underfunding the space program. To make that statement truly accurate, say: “Bush and the Democratically controlled Congress have hamstrung the space program with successive budget cuts.” I find it odd that Obama accuses Bush of that, when he was going to do the same thing, as illustrated in this education plan [emphasis mine]:

Barack Obama’s early education and K-12 plan package costs about $18 billion per year.  He will maintain fiscal responsibility and prevent an increase in the deficit by offsetting cuts and revenue sources in other parts of the government.  The early education plan will be paid for by delaying the NASA Constellation Program for five years, using purchase cards and negotiating power of the government to reduce costs of standardized procurement, auctioning surplus federal property, and reducing the erroneous payments identified by the Government Accountability Office, and closing the CEO pay deductibility loophole.  The rest of the plan will be funded using a small portion of the savings associated with fighting the war in Iraq.

Which is it? Are we expediting the new crew vehicle for the space program, or are we delaying it five years in the name of an education program?

Now that Obama is mainstream, language that touches even tangentially on Welfare is going to be a sore sport for swing voters in typically red states. Obama must do something to counter the Chinese ambitions for their own space program, so he releases a slightly modified position paper. 

Neither one of these position papers amounts to anything more than arm waving. How is Mr. Obama going to expedite the new crew vehicle? Can he promise the American public that our space infrastructure won’t rot away while we funnel money into enabling the poor to stay poor? What will he say when our skilled aeronautical engineers and technicians are laid off from NASA, and they find themselves paid high salaries in China, Japan, and Russia?

Quite frankly, our lack of manned space delivery systems couldn’t come at a worse time.  Who knew that we would be hitch hiking to LEO in a Russian space capsule that uses forty year old technology?

I have a new pretty for range excursions and the Turtle Bluff trips.

It shoots better (for me) than a Glock, but not quite as well as a Sig. (Disclaimer: I have small hands, so most who like the Glock will level the “girl hands” criticism at me.) My groups are all in the eight ring on a silhouette the first time I put rounds through it. After some tweaking to my grip/stance, I tightened up the group quite a bit (although I was still about half in the eight ring). With practice, I imagine that this will be my new go-to sidearm when I want a full-size carry. 

The real reason why I like this handgun is that the magazines are interchangeable with my CX4 Storm carbine. One load out lets me carry ammo for both.

I saw this with my father last night.

It is worth every penny. And for those who loved the movie the first time, a second viewing shows a whole bunch of little details that you might have missed the first time. The opening scenes of the movie and several of the larger action set pieces are filmed in IMAX. Other than that, most of the outdoor camera shots are also IMAX.

If you have an IMAX theater in your area, go see it.