Burning down a brick-and-mortar science fiction bookstore was not good enough for the modern book burners; now they’re going after publishers who publish wrongthink in order to prevent those books from getting printed in the first place. In this case, Baen Books which has the temerity to publish some authors who are libertarians and even GASP conservatives.
Books that I can confidently state should be owned (because I own them):
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Books that look promising, but that I don’t have firsthand experience with:
And then… there’s this:
Looks good. But then comes the authors bio: “Martin’s interest in the Paranormal, Spirituality, and much more goes back to his childhood. He has had many paranormal experiences and has been a student of Eastern Philosophies and Meditation for 35 years. Seeking Enlightenment; he knows that we are already all Enlightened. We just have to realize this deeply. His books are expressions of his creativity to help others understand what he has internalized through study, experience, and membership in different societies.” Ummmm……
I communicated with Dennis Jenkins today. “Space Shuttle: Developing an Icon 1972-2013” had one single printing, there will be no more… and that one printing is finally nearly sold out. It is still available at the original retail price of $170. But once it’s sold out, the secondary market will be the only place to get it and the price will skyrocket… it’s already $228 to $448 on abebooks, a single $364 copy on ebay. Hell it might even be a good investment for resale. This three-volume set is a remarkable work and is worth every penny. Make sure to get a copy before the Green New Deal kicks in and it becomes difficult to ship things!
The UK’s Royal Mint commissioned an American artist to design a coin to celebrate author H.G. Wells. His design references “The Invisible Man,” “The Time Machine” and “War of the Worlds.” All fine and dandy. Except… ummmmmmmm…………..
Sigh. Really?
Bad enough the artist did this. Worse is that it got this far without being corrected.
Some years back the “Haynes Owners Manuals” publishing company branched out into books about airplanes and NASA missions and Death Stars. All kinds of stuff, normally running in the twenty to thirty dollar range. Some very clearly fluff, some quite interesting. There are a few I’ve looked at, and having once looked at them, Amazon feels the need to keep reminding me “hey… hey… lookit this…”
Haynes published a book on the WWII-era British aircraft the Westland “Lysander.” While I’m interested, I don’t think I’ll buy it. See if you can guess why:
Books are worth having. Consequently, I have from time to time spent insane and unwise sums of money to procure a book that I really wanted. This… is not that time.
Amazon sorta randomly suggested a book to me:
I’m not generally an architecture aficionado, but somehow this does seem to kinda appeal to me. I suspect it’s the black and white diagrams, the sort of thing that has *always* appealed to me:
It sure looks interesting and well produced. but then you read the customer reviews and, man, some of them are brutal. It seems that for a lot of people the choice of silver ink on a black background was disastrous. Something that looks great in the photos apparently comes off as difficult to see in real life. This would not be the first time that a neato book project was damaged by a Cool Idea that turned out to not work as well as hoped.
Still… kinda interested.
2020 strikes again.
FYI: his first novel, “The Star Conquerors,” is available to read online HERE.
An interesting interview with a sci-fi author who decided to go against the political grain.
I’ve not read his stuff, but he seems like he’s on the right track. He has produced fiction that shocks the modern conscience by being non-woke. Might be worth a look. Conservative and libertarian science fiction is basically what science fiction was in the days of Heinlein and Leinster and Anderson, back when Men Were Real Men and Capable Men saved the day against space emperors and bug-eyed monsters. You know, when science fiction was *good.* To contrast with THIS RUBBISH.
His most recent books on Amazon:
The Amazon description of “Hazardous Imaginings:”
Science fiction is NOT a safe space!
Two short novels and three stories by the author of Fat White Vampire Blues push the boundaries of taboo in science fiction. An English archeologist who yearns for the love of a young Jewish refugee sets out to convince a majority of the world’s population that the Holocaust never happened — hoping to not only wipe it from the annals of history, but also from reality. The Martian colony Bradbury sends an investigator to pursue a gay Uyghur murderer in a future Australian city where members of each ethnic and grievance group are invisible to all those who don’t belong to their tribe. A far-future academic treatise describes a rediscovered Fusionist liturgical text that combines the writings of radical feminist Joanna Russ and female slavery fantasist John Norman. An aggressively therapeutic State of Florida lovingly wraps its bureaucratic tentacles around those it deems unenlightened. A born-again Christian cafeteria worker in a small Texas college town becomes the only friend of an insectoid alien come to evacuate humanity from a doomed Earth. These stories leave no sacred cows unprodded.
In the long long ago this blog focused far more on “unbuilt aerospace projects.” Last few years it has become far more about the culture war/war on western civilization/The Crazy Years. This is not how I would have it… but then if it were up to me society wouldn’t be going crazy either, cities would not be getting trashed, Antifa and their violence and criminality promotion would be the stuff of alternate realities, the likely next President and the likely next *next* President would not be promising to toss me, my friends and family into federal prison. This sort of thing can kinda come to dominate a discussion.
All that said, aerospace is never far from my mind or my efforts. The thing is, though, my efforts have been devoted to a few books that I’ve got contracts to produce. This is a new sort of thing, and it is unsurprisingly a substantial time-sink. And since the publisher has not gone public with the books (they won’t until after the manuscripts are turned in next year), there’s not a lot I can say about them publicly.
*THAT* said, below is a render of a little CAD model I’ve recently made. The model is not the subject of the book; but it has been made for the purposes of making *one* diagram of a vehicle that incorporates this. One might argue that this is going a bit far for a small part of a diagram; this part of the diagram might be only an inch or so long. But while it is possible that these books might see a Second Edition, at this point I’m working under the assumption that I’m only doing this once, so I want to do it right.
So I still spend a whole lot of time with aerospace. It just doesn’t translate to blog postings right now.
