A speculative mind

  When I am writing science fiction, sometimes I have to do research to make sure what I am talking about makes sense scientifically. With fantasy, you can pretty much make up any rules you want as long as they are consistent. With science fiction, you should be grounded in the real world as much as you can be. It is about getting the facts right. You should follow the laws of physics. Or, if you are going to break one (it can only be one) there has to be a logical reason for breaking it. It has to be scientifically plausible. My soon-to-be released Novella The Methane Sea takes place on a planet with methane ice (solid) and methane lakes (liquid), and methane in the atmosphere (gas). I had to look up the freezing point, melting point and boiling point of methane (at something like standard pressure). Even though I didn’t talk about those values in the story, I do talk about temperature changes, and the methane does change from one state to another, so I had to know what those v...

  Once upon a time I was going to become a teacher. I did all the training and earned a teaching certificate, but other than some stints as a substitute teacher, I did not use it. I had a hard time getting a full-time job, and by the time my certificate had expired, I had moved on to other things. Every teacher has undergone the transition from student to teacher. I did my student teaching at Highland High School in Pocatello Idaho. All in all, not a bad school to be doing your student teaching. I remember that I was not much older than the kids I was teaching, but to them, it was like I was from another planet. I was an adult. I was “Mister Branchfield.” I had never heard myself referred to as that. I had to stop myself from laughing the first few times I heard it. It’s like somebody was joking, only they weren’t joking. I was going to be forever Mr. Branchfield from that point on. Teachers remember what it was like to be sitting in the students’ shoes, but I doubt students ev...

  I can remember when the transistor radio was the coolest tech device on the planet. I did not know what a transistor was. I just knew that I could have a radio that I could carry along with me. Prior to the transistor, radios, TVs, and computers had vacuum tubes. They were appliances that were large and had to be plugged into the wall. When you turned the device on, you had to wait a minute for the tubes to warm up. If you looked into the ventilation slits you could actually see the glow from the filaments in the vacuum tubes as they warmed up, exactly like the filaments in a light bulb, except they took longer to start glowing. When the radio or TV had been on for a while you could feel the heat coming off it. You could even see the heat shimmer. But the main problem for the old tube radios was that they were fixed in place. The new transistor radios encapsulated a new word “portable.” The old devices were heavy and produced a lot of heat, a lot of waste heat. That is wasted e...

  I had a good experience last week at the Willamette Writers meeting in Newport. The guest speaker was Philip Margolin, a best-selling author who has written 30 books. He writes “legal thrillers’ not to be confused with mysteries. He said when he started out, the term legal thrillers did not really exist. If you had a lawyer taking on a murder case, the story was usually classified as a murder mystery. Authors like John Grisham (and himself) turned legal thrillers into its own genre. Two of his stories have made it on screen, The Last Innocent Man , and Gone but not Forgotten. He graduated with his law degree from NYU Law School. He said that he already had a job lined up when he graduated, that being, a law clerk for a justice on the Oregon Court of Appeals. When I heard that, my ears perked up and I went, “I wonder . . .” The rest of his presentation was interesting. He went into private practice. He loved Perry Mason when he was growing up, but he said Perry Mason’s clients...