A speculative mind

I have basically finished my novella The Methane Sea . I am exploring my options with it and shopping it around. In the mean time, here is an excerpt of it that will give you a glimpse into the mind of the commander, Dr. Drake at a time when things are not going altogether well. So it has come to this, Drake thought. Mutiny is what they call it on a ship. What was it called on a research mission? She had heard the comment about breaking the door down. They had tried to talk quietly, but there was no hiding from her. Dr. Drake had put on her most formal outfit. The powers that be at Central had chosen her to command this mission. No one was going to take that away from her. Try as you might, I will thwart you. I will thwart all of you. The disgrace of having her mission fail was unacceptable. She would see this through to the end no matter how many lives it cost. Their lives weren’t important anyway. They were mutineers. Scum. Break the door down? They probably could, but she would be

  The thing that makes John Irving’s writing compelling is truth. The characters may be unusual or even occasionally do things that mystify us, but they are always true to themselves. They are consistent. And the unfolding of the stories reveal larger truths. His stories have some comic moments, but nobody would call them comedies. This is true with the novel The Last Chairlift . For example, the gay and trans characters in the story are unapologetically gay or trans, even though this takes place at a time when tolerance for anyone outside the “norm” in sexuality was even less than it is today. The main character, Adam, is heterosexual. He has an unconventional upbringing, surrounded by unconventional people and ghosts. Even the ghosts exist in their own truth, even though Adam says he doesn’t understand the rules for ghosts. Whether the ghosts actually exist or are a metaphorical construct, I will leave up to you to decide. But Adam and his mother and a few others can see the ghosts

  We have a nightly routine at our house. My wife tends to go to bed before I do, and every night I read to her as she is getting ready for bed. For my birthday this year my wife bought me The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal, and I started to read it. I had only gotten a couple of pages in when I thought, “this needs to be a night time reading book.” I knew my wife would like it, because I instantly recognized it as a bit of an homage to one of our favorite movie series. The title should have been a dead giveaway: The Spare Man . While not actually trying to do impressions of Myrna Loy and William Powell, while I was reading, I did try to channel their energy. And if you haven’t yet figured out what movie series I am talking about, I suggest you google William Powell and Myrna Loy, then watch the films! Our protagonist is Tesla Crane a rich and famous roboticist who is on her honeymoon with her new spouse Shal who is a retired detective. Their honeymoon trip is on a cruise ship to

  I just finished watching the 2019 television series version of Catch-22 staring Christopher Abbott. Probably 40 years ago, I watched the 1970 movie version with Alan Arkin. Probably like 50 years ago, I read the novel by Joseph Heller. In Catch-22 we follow Yossarian, a bombardier stationed on an island in the Mediterranean Sea during World War II. Yossarian is told that once he flies 25 missions, he can go home. But as he and his fellow crewmates get close to 25, they raise the line to 30 missions, then 35, then 40, and so on. We see Yossarian trying to navigate this psychological hellscape. As it has been some 50 years since I read the novel, I would be hard-pressed to say how faithful each screen version was to the original source. That being said, I think it would be hard for a two-hour movie to do true justice to the rich characters from the book. A series should be able to do a better job. And it does . . . but I still think we did not get to know Yossarian’s friends as we