Category Archives: A Writing Life

256. The Space Station That Never Was

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 275px-mol_usafI love conspiracy theories. I don’t believe them, but they’re fun.

We do know that much is hidden from us. The SR-71 Blackbird was a myth, sworn not to exist, for most of it’s operational life, so why not believe in the Aurora, or at least wish it were real and dream up stories that use it.

The problem with actually believing in conspiracies is that most conspirators are too dumb to pull them off. Still, occasionally . . .

In 2005 two spacesuits of unknown origin were found in a locked room in a NASA museum. They were not connected with any known program, and presented a mystery to be solved. The story of chasing that mystery was well told by NOVA in its 2008 episode Astrospies. A decade after the discovery, and seven years after the NOVA program, files and photos were declassified and the secrets of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory were fully revealed.

The Air Force has long had a hand in spaceflight. As early as 1957, it funded development of a spaceplane, the X-20 Dyna-Soar. Ultimately that project was scrapped because of the success of the Mercury and Gemini programs, but USAF shifted goals to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory and continued.

The existence Manned Orbiting Laboratory project was not secret. It was announced in 1963 but most of what went on was not revealed to the public. Essentially, it was an orbiting spy station designed to take pictures of military interest. MOL was a single use vehicle. It was designed to be launched, used for a forty day mission, then abandoned. At that time the crew would return via a Gemini B capsule which was launched with the MOL.

MOL was designed for a stacked launch. The launch vehicle was to carry the MOL with the manned Gemini B in place at the top. Once in polar orbit, the Gemini B would be powered down and the two astronauts would move into the MOL where they would spend their mission taking pictures of the Earth through advanced camera system called KH-10. At the end of the mission, the astronauts would reactivate the Gemini B and return to Earth in it, abandoning the MOL.220px-titan-3c_mol-gemini-b-test_3

The Gemini B was virtually identical to the Gemini used by NASA, except for a hatch through the heat shield that allowed astronauts to move between it and the MOL.

The initial launch took place on Nov. 3, 1966 from Cape Canaveral. The MOL launched was a boilerplate mockup made from a Titan propellant tank, and the Gemini B was the prototype, and unmanned. The capsule returned to Earth safely, proving the modified heat shield, and is on display today at the Air Force Space and Missile Museum.

In June 1969, the project was cancelled. No manned and functioning flight was made. By the time of its cancellation, progress had outrun the program, and unmanned reconnaissance satellites had proved that they could do the job more cheaply than the MOL.

In all seventeen astronauts trained to fly MOL missions. One was Robert Lawrence, the first black astronaut, who died in training in 1967. (see 167. On the Brink of Glory) When the program was cancelled, all the astronauts who were under 35 years old were offered jobs at NASA. The seven who were eligible all accepted and became NASA Astronaut Group 7. All flew on the space shuttle.

255. Fire

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dscn2539For writers – or anyone who is leading a thoughtful life – every day brings experiences that add to our understanding of the world around us. For the last half decade, my tutor has been fire.

I took the photo at the top of this post a few years ago, while standing in my front yard. The smoke was only about three miles away and my first thought was, this is finally it. Fortunately, it was on the other side of a lake that lies in the valley between my house and its location. We drove to a vantage point and spent an hour watching a scoop-equipped helicopter dropping down to the lake for loads of water, and dropping them on the fire. It took several days to put it out, so for a week we could not open any windows because of the smell of burning.

There have been weeks in late summer almost every year recently, when the smell of burning kept us indoors. You could blame our long-running drought, but that isn’t it. When there is little winter rain, things become unnaturally dry, and there is fire. When there is abundant winter rain, the grass and weeds grow tall and lush, and there is more fuel for the fires that still come.

Arthur Clarke wrote a story called Report on Planet Three, in which Martians, observing Earth through telescopes, concluded that life could not survive here because the atmosphere was so rich in oxygen that Earth might have open fires as a natural phenomenon! When I first read the story as a youth in Oklahoma, I found it humorous. Now that I live in the foothills of California, I say, “Yep, Arthur, you got another one dead right.”

A few years ago, a target shooter started a fire that burned into Yosemite. Three years ago, north of here, an illegal campfire was the spark. Two years ago, east of a foothill town I visit frequently, it was untrimmed trees rubbing against a power line. This year, someone pulled off the road into dry grass and his hot muffler started a thousand acre burn just a few miles from my home. That was the fire that caused me to write this post.

dscn4753Here is one of my favorite places. It is a vernal pond; man made, but fleeting. Right now it is probably filling with water, as it does every fall. It will look this beautiful until spring – maybe.

In the coverage of the fire this year, a newscast showed a reporter standing on a black top road. One side was untouched; the other was fire blackened. It was the point at which the fire had started, and I recognized it as the place I park when I go to the pond. I couldn’t tell whether the reporter was facing north or south, so I don’t know if my favorite place was saved, or destroyed. I haven’t yet had the heart to drive up and find out.

In my writing, I have brought nuclear war to Earth in two different fictional universes. It’s easy. I don’t see many movies, but everyone sees their trailers on TV. Massive, ubiquitous destruction prevails. A kid with his own camera and computer could illegally produce his own apocalyptic vision, using FX stolen from Blue-ray. Washington and New York have each gone up a dozen times in the last few years. He would have an abundance of destruction to call upon.

Bringing massive destruction over there is easy and cathartic. Dealing with even small destructions right here is another matter. I had no problem blowing up the Earth, twice, but I dread driving up to see if my favorite pond is still there.

254. Legal at Last

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Roughly a week ago, California legalized recreational marijuana, having legalized medical marijuana twenty years previously.

It was so much of a no brainer, that (time-travel-spoiler-alert) I am writing this post a week before it happens, with reasonable certainty that I would-will-did not have to eat my words before post date.

So why even bother to talk about it? For one thing, it is a tie in with Raven’s Run, now being presented over in Serial. In my fictional 1989, California State Senator Cabral has been trying for years to bring about legalization because he thinks prosecution itself is what has made marijuana profitable. Oddly enough, that is also my opinion; I came to that belief back in the sixties.

Ah, the sixties. There is a smoky haze of nostalgia about the era, and the smoke smells like pot. I remember it well, and one reason I remember so well is that I wasn’t partaking. It wasn’t a moral stance. I was going to college on a scholarship, and I was determined that nothing was going to stand between me and graduation. Most of the people I knew were smoking weed and popping various multicolored pills which promised multicolored results. Those were the early days when the law hadn’t caught up to the pharmacopeia. In Michigan, where I was going to school, possession of marijuana was a felony, but possession of LSD was still a misdemeanor.

My friends were reading Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan as enlightenment and popping peyote. I read Don Juan as fantasy – second rate fantasy, by the way – and skipped the medicine.

They were also taking LSD. At least their supplier said it was LSD, but on the black market, who knows. I wasn’t interested. I already knew about LSD from my time as a Fleming Fellow, during high school. One of the doctors I encountered at the OMRF that summer had used LSD in an attempt to induce musth (a frenzied sexual state – think pon farr) in an elephant. It didn’t go well for the elephant, and I was in no mood to engage in unsupervised medical research in a college apartment.

I came away from the sixties disliking the idea of mind altering substances. Then someone very close to me, with a debilitating ailment, became hooked on prescription pain killers. That reinforced my feelings. Now I try to hold my intake to coffee and aspirin.

This does not give me reason to tell anyone else what to do, and the idea of a whiskey fueled police force jailing ragged people for smoking pot is beyond my comprehension. I have voted for legalization every chance I’ve had, even though I wouldn’t touch the stuff myself. It has taken the rest of society fifty years to catch up to that position.

To be fair, a lot of people have been part way there for some time. As one of my kindest, gentlest, most Christian and conservative friends said two decades ago, when the question of medical marijuana was on the ballot, “Doctors can prescribe codeine, cocaine, and heroin, but not marijuana. That’s just dumb.” I would have said it more forcefully, but I couldn’t have said it more accurately.

So, when it came time to write Raven’s Run, I made the mastermind in the background (not yet revealed in Serial, so you’ll just have to keep reading) a purveyor of pot with interests in keeping up the anti-pot laws that make his enterprise profitable. And waiting in the wings, also related to Raven’s Run, is another novel, not yet written, about the sixties drug culture and the role played by the CIA in making LSD America’s favorite abbreviation.

253. Handgun Accuracy

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2-gunsOver in Serial, the chapter Raven’s Run 42 came out yesterday. This post was supposed to stand across from it, but Leonard Cohen’s death caused me to push Handgun Accuracy back a day to make room for an appreciation of what he meant to me.

Everything in the night drive through Martigues and the Barre Lagoon in yesterday’s post is from research. I was never there. But I was in Marseille and everything there is from experience. You have to have some first hand knowledge, mixed with research, if you want to look like you know everything.

The bit with the .45 automatic is also accurate, and from experience. I only fired an M1911A1 once in the Navy, in boot camp, but years later I acquainted myself with it and a large variety of other handguns at a firing range near my home. I spent an hour a week there, every Tuesday for a year, and became proficient with the two dozen styles and calibers they had for rent. That was partly for writing research, and partly because we live in a dangerous world.

You have to be able to describe handgun usage accurately for the kind of fiction I write. And yes, this post title has that double meaning, like the NRA bumper sticker that says Gun Control Means Using Both Hands. I could never resist a bad joke.

Accuracy is important in science fiction weaponry as well. In Jandrax, Jan’s “express pistol” was a technologically advanced weapon that was fairly fully explained, while the other weapons were nineteenth century technology because they were meant to be repairable on a frontier world.

In Cyan, due out soon, the explorers are operating in the near future. I decided to give them handguns only slightly advanced over the present day for their initial exploration, as in:

“Gus carried a comped 12mm magnum semi-automatic in a cross draw holster.“

This led the proofreader at EDGE to highlight comped and write “?”. (See 134. The Long Road to Cyan (2) for details on proofreading in the modern era.)

Comped actually refers to mid-twentieth century technology. I replied:

Comped, pronounced compt, not comp-ed, is a standard term. It comes from compensated, and refers to a series of slits on either side of the front sight of a heavy handgun, which redirects some of the expanding gasses upward, counteracting muzzle flip. Gun nerds will know the term; others will just be puzzled.

The cross draw holster is reasonable, but it is mentioned early because it sets up a plot point I would need about forty pages later.  And 12mm magnum will certainly ruffle the hackles of purists, but again, it is so named for a reason. The largest caliber presently designated in millimeters is 10mm and magnum is applied to a new, more powerful version of an old caliber. This means the 12mm magnum is two generations away – which is what I was looking for, a near-future version of present day technology.

I made these automatics obsolete during the colonization phase by introducing a handgun called a fletcher which was, in essence, a hand held rocket launcher. If you need a powerful, hand held weapon with little recoil, replacing bullets with mini-rockets is the simplest way forward.

You can only use phasers in Star Trek novels and no self respecting science fiction author will ever say “ray gun” again, but fletchers – certainly under a different name – will probably be available within a decade or so. High caliber handguns have just about reached the limits of human hand strength, even though all of them are comped today.

Keep your eye on future issues of Field and Stream for new developments.

252. Leonard Cohen, an appreciation

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A day or so ago, Leonard Cohen’s death was announced on a trailer at the bottom of a newscast about Trump. It was not much notice for one of the finest artists of the last century.

I went online to find a few articles, New York Times and Rolling Stone mostly, but they didn’t tell me much that I didn’t know. I’m not going to add anything to his bio in this post. If you want to know about Leonard Cohen, listen to his songs.

To sum up, briefly and without equivocation, Leonard Cohen meant more to my moral and ethical life, more to my writing, and expressed my personal feelings better than any writer of fiction ever did.

I don’t mean that I learned about life from him. I learned about life from life, and a harsh one at that. I was fully formed when I discovered him, but he spoke to me. Leonard Cohen had the ability to say in music what I was trying to say in text. In almost every song, there was someplace where, the first time I heard it, I shouted, “Yes, dammit. Yes!”

I discovered Cohen when I was in college, in the sixties. Then I graduated, got drafted, spent four years working in a military hospital, went back for an MA, and in 1975, settled down to write novels. I wrote more or less full time for most of the following decade.

My wife would leave for work, and I would sit down at the typewriter with music on the stereo. At that time, I needed emotionally charged music to set the mood and drown out other sounds – today I could write through a hurricane. I wore the grooves deeper in a lot of LPs, and nothing played as often as Leonard Cohen.

HIs music was like a drug, compounded of depression and hope. It was rich, complex, filled with both thought and emotion, but it was an acquired taste. Except for Susanne and Hallelujah, not many people took to him. He doesn’t come easily; you have to listen with both ears and your whole heart.

Leonard Cohen’s music suffuses everything I have written. I never met him, outside of his records, but I count him as a mentor.

If you want to go beyond Hallelujah, I have a suggestion. Find a copy of Alexandra Leaving ( from Ten New Songs) and listen to it repeatedly, asking yourself, “Who is speaking? Who is this man, and what is the woman to him?” Make it your personal koan.

If, after repeatedly listenings, you decide Leonard Cohen isn’t for you, fair enough. You will have saved yourself a lot of heart ache.

And missed a lot of joy.

251. Night at the Movies

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Over in Raven’s Run in Serial today, Ian Gunn is reminiscing about:

The feeling in a night drive —- the humming of tires; the warm heaviness of the air, the darkness beyond the car —- when you were a child in the back seat —- and the thick air slid in and out of your throat like oil.

That description is pure memory.

Oklahoma is the edge of the South, with thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hot, humid summers. Air conditioner country – but I lived there before people has air conditioners. Days over a hundred were common, and the nights brought thick, moist, warm air. There were scraggly trees in the creek beds and flattish land between that was half native grass pastures and half grain fields.

Was. Now it grows houses, and people live indoors with the AC running, but in the fifties people were sparse on the ground and they spent most of their time outdoors.

I spent my summer days driving a tractor. There were no air conditioned cabs – no cabs at all, actually – but it wasn’t bad. There was an umbrella clamped to the seat, and as long as I was moving, which was at least ten hours a day, there was a breeze.

Nevertheless, nights were a pleasure by contrast. After the cows were milked, we sat in the living room with the west windows open to the wind. My parents watched TV (black and white, two channels). I joined them, or read a book. Once or twice a year, we would all go see a movie.

Those same years, my wife-to-be lived in Saginaw, Michigan. She used to walk to Saturday matinees. It’s a common reminiscence, but my nearest theatre was twenty miles away, so going to a movie was a family expedition.

After the day’s work, and milking the cows, and supper, and cleaning up, we would drive to Collinsville as the sun was going down. When we arrived, we went right in. There was only one theatre with one screen, and it changed movies every three days, so you went on the day your movie of choice was there. It didn’t matter what time the movie started; we went in, sat down, and started watching. Then we watched the coming attractions and the cartoon, and pretty soon the next showing started. We watched until my dad said, “Okay, this is where we came in.” Then we left, with no wasted time, because four AM was coming all too soon, and the cows weren’t going to milk themselves.

What I remember best about movie nights, is the ride home – especially when I was ten or so. Twenty miles on a two lane blacktop, lying stretched out on the back seat, reliving the movie, and the coming attractions which were pretty exciting for a ten year old in the fifties. Imitation of Life previews were disturbing, largely because I didn’t understand the premise of the picture (see 95. Literature of Passing). Then there was a scene of a girl wearing only a towel in a cowboy movie preview that revisited my libido for months. Mostly though, I remember a science fiction movie – something I would never have seen outside of previews – with animated pterosaurs and dinosaurs chasing people as they fled in their cars. Tame stuff for the Jurassic Park generation, but scary to me.

Outside the car, the night dampness amplified the smell of grass and weeds. The soundtrack of the night was the humming of tires and the unending churr of cicadas. The air swirling in through the open windows was syrup thick, damp and cool. The vibrations from the road, softened by the seat and transmitted through to my spine, was electric, and the little shocks from potholes were like tiny bursts of pleasure.

All this comfort was balanced by the emotional rush of hearing those imaginary dinosaurs in pursuit, along with the scree of giant pterosaurs flashing overhead.

I’ve forgotten most of the movies we saw, but I will never forget what the night felt like.

250. 2020: the vote

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I’m writing this on the third of September. Here in the foothills of the Sierras, the temperature has dropped to the eighties, but the relief is temporary. Heat will return. There is still a lot of hot air ahead in the Presidential race as well.

By the time you read this, it will all be over. Take a deep breath; the 2020 campaign will begin before the day is out.

By now you know who won this time around – hopefully. The possibility of a tie throwing the election into Congress still exists as of today, but seems unlikely. As of today, Hillary’s win seems certain if she doesn’t stumble, but she stumbles a lot. It could still be Donald. You know the outcome. So do I, but I didn’t when I wrote this.

Here is what I do know, now, September third. Whoever was elected yesterday will be a one-term president.

You’ve heard every talking head for the last year say that no two candidates in history have been so hated and feared as Donald and Hillary. Almost everyone dislikes one or the other; a sad majority dislikes them both.

So the question arises:  who will win the Presidency in 2020? You can be sure it won’t be Donald or Hillary, no matter who won yesterday.

If your candidate lost yesterday, take heart. Whoever your party chooses in 2020 will win – barring another match-up of turkeys, and what are the chances of that happening again?

If your candidate won yesterday, tough luck.

I’ve been registered independent since I was 21 (eighteen year olds couldn’t vote back in the pre-Cambrian). I’m willing to vote for either party in 2020, if one of them gives me a non-turkey to vote for.

You Democrats and Republicans could even give us two non-turkeys and let us choose the better man or woman. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?

So go out and find yourself a candidate who has both a brain and morals. It doesn’t much matter to me which party he – or she – comes from. Tell him or her that it’s time. 

249. The Presidency That Wasn’t

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Greetings, my fellow Americans. This is the first time in my life that America has gone to the polls with so little to hope for and so much to fear.

On February 29 of this year I wrote a silly story about a child born on Leap Day. I repeated it, in longer form, on July 6. As the Presidential campaign degenerated, the story haunted me with a view of a lighter and better version of things. I had written the end of the story first; now I felt impelled to go back and fill in the beginning and the middle over a number of posts spaced out through the summer and autumn. If you want to see them, check out the tag cloud for Leap.

Today is the big day, the day of Leap’s fate and unwanted triumph. I can’t leave him hanging. I have to tell the ending again, somewhat abbreviated, this time. I owe him that much, after all I’ve put him through in his alternate America.

********

In 1952 a boy was born on Leap Day. His Dad was named Alan Hed, and he wanted to give his son the same name, but his wife had a quirky sense of humor. She named him Leap Alan Hed, and all his childhood acquaintances called him Leap A. Hed.

The teasing drove him to a foolish act. Leap began to count his age by Leap-day-birthdays. When he was sixteen, he started putting his age down as four. He spent a lot of time talking to the principal about that, until the school finally got tired of the whole business.

The draft board wasn’t amused when he turned eighteen and still claimed to be four, but when the 1969 draft lottery gave him draft number 285, they stopped worrying.

Leap never married (he claimed he was too young) and the IRS was indulgent. They figured he would regret his claims when he wasn’t eligible for Social Security until he was 260 years old.

Leap eventually put that nonsense behind him, but not soon enough. Billy Joe Barker, a newspaper columnist, heard about him and touted him as a write-in candidate for President in 2016. It started as a joke, but it caught fire. If you’ve read any recent posts, you know the details.

Donald Trump denounced him. Nothing new there. Donald denounces everybody.

********

Unfortunately, some jokes get out of hand.

When the polls opened, well over a hundred million people wrote in Leap Alan Hed, each thinking he was the only person in America who would do so. It brought a landslide in both the popular vote and the electoral college.

Weren’t the voters surprised? And wasn’t Leap terrified? He headed for Canada – he had camped near the border the night before just in case – and sought asylum. The Canadians didn’t want any part of the controversy. They wouldn’t let him in.

Leap thought about moving to another country, but there wasn’t anywhere else he wanted to live. And there probably wasn’t any country that would take him. Except Russia, and he was no Snowden. Or Manafort.

He decided to just disappear, and he did. I don’t know where he went; he didn’t tell me. Geraldo claimed to know, but that turned out to be a bluff. Somebody said that he crossed the Canadian border and was heading north, following a compass, but everybody knows you can’t walk to the North Pole now that the ice caps have melted. Probably looking for a Fortress of Solitude, and you can’t blame him.

All those people who voted for Leap are now wringing their hands and wondering what is going to happen next. They never thought he would win. They never thought he would run to Canada like a modern day Draft Dodger. Which, essentially, is what he is — drafted to be President, and scared out of his wits.

Hillary has been very quiet about it all. She hopes to win in the House if they can find Leap, and get him to resign. But it’s problematical. Only fourteen Democrats and eleven Republicans were elected to the new Congress. Aside from a few Libs and Greenies, the rest are all newly elected Independents, sent by a disgusted America.

Bernie is smiling.

Donald claims he will still win, and when he does, he plans to invade Canada.

Hillary is biding her time.

********

Okay, folks, it’s been a long time since February, and Leap’s story is now over. But wouldn’t the wait for tonight’s election results be less dreary if you had written him in?

248. The Last Leap

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For the rest of Leap Alan Hed’s story, check out the tag cloud for Leap.

It was late. The sun had already set and with its passing, the chill of a November evening had set in hard. Leap Alan Hed – calling himself Joe and hoping that none of his homeless companions around the fire would recognize him – pulled his coat closer around his shoulders and stretched his hands out to the fire.

It was a vain hope. The press had hounded him out of his home in Dannebrog, and hounded him half way across America and back again. His picture had been spread across the country in countless newspapers and television broadcasts.

One of his companions said, “Joe,” and his tone said that he knew the real name behind the nom de flight, “tomorrow is the big day. What do you think will happen?”

Leap said, “I don’t know. They won’t vote for me. They aren’t that stupid, no matter how frustrated they have become. They will vote for Hillary and God knows what that will mean. Or maybe even He doesn’t know. Or they will vote for Donald, and everybody knows what that will mean.

“In a few days, or maybe a few weeks, I’ll be able to surface again and get back something like a life of my own. I just hope there’s a country for me to go back to.”

His companion shrugged, and said, “I don’t have a life to go back to. I haven’t had anything like a life in years. I can’t vote for you, or anybody else. You have to have an address to register to vote and I haven’t had an address in years. But I would vote for you.”

“Why, for God’s sake? Why?”

“Because you aren’t him and you aren’t her, and anybody else is better. Somebody has to do the job. At least you don’t want it, and that means something.”

“If nominated, I won’t run. If elected, I won’t serve.”

“I don’t think so. I think you would come out of hiding and do your duty.”

Leap shook his head, and just said, “No.”

“Its going to be Donald or Hillary or you,” the other said.

Leap sighed. He said, “No good can come of this.”

***************

GOOD LUCK, AMERICA.