Rockets - Extrapolated Worlds

Worldcon 2025

Belated greetings from Worldcon 2025! Here’s my wife Joyce and I on the day we dressed up in Star Trek costumes. Those legs! Love my science officer.

We haven’t been to a science fiction convention since Boskone sometime in the eighties, when we were living in Boston and I was wrapping up my degree at MIT, long enough ago that I can’t really comment on how things have changed. About the only thing I remember from that long-ago event was the Orion slave girls from Star Trek who were not wearing much more than body paint. Not present at the 2025 Worldcon, alas, though there were certainly some amazing costumes (and also, some amazingly poor taste, but each to their own). My favorite was a woman in a full-on shiny silver spandex retro-futuristic spacesuit, complete with a custom backpack and a fully enclosed transparent bubble helmet. She could have walked right off the cover of an old-school pulp magazine.

Worldcon is where the Hugos are decided by fans, and it was very much a fan-oriented conference. There were multiple events to choose from every hour of every day, from panels about hard sci-fi topics like using Oort cloud objects to hitchhike between stars to how to craft costumes. (Plug for Joyce: she made her dress and my pants… the woman has skills!) It was impossible to go to all the things that caught my interest, so I focused on writer-oriented topics.

I was fortunate to get into limited-attendance “table talks” with several short-form editors. My favorites were Trevor Quachri and Emily Hockaday from Analog, who were simply delightful, and for whom I was a known quantity, as they’d bought a couple of my stories. My experience with other editors was “interesting,” as they say. My limited creds were of no import, and the message was that it’s a strict meritocracy. Which seems unlikely, based on my experience of the world, but it makes sense to walk that line when besieged by people trying to break into the market. And also, they get a truly boggling number of stories per edition – someplace between 100 to 1000 submissions per published story. Crazy. In any case, I did not manage to spark new business relationships. I’d probably have been better off to focus on fans – which makes sense, right? It’s a fan-oriented conference.

Another thing I noticed was that the crowd split into writers and other pros or semi-pros doing the hustle in their writerly garb, and fans. And if you presented as a fan, like by wearing a costume (oops!), you were automatically sorted into the ignore bin by the hustlers. No judgement here on my part – again, kind of makes sense. All grist for the mill. Next time I’ll probably do the Nebula conference, which is very much a professional focus. And should the opportunity for another Worldcon present itself (as in, I can couch surf, because big-city hotels are just way out of reach at the moment, because writing…) I’ll have a better handle on the dynamics.

Oh and final note, I read most of the Hugo entries, and perused the rest (peruse = they were so far out of my range of things I like to read that I would not ever read them In Real Life), and only one of my picks won: Ray Nayler’s “The Tusks of Extinction,” an excellent science fiction novella. The other winners were fantasies, which are not my cup of tea. And also not what I write, so… hmm. And there were some really good science fiction nominees! Which led to a lot of reflection on my part about market demographics and why people vote for certain things (genre preference, quality, whether or not the author – as opposed to their work – is perceived as deserving an award). None of which line up favorably for me, at the moment!

So to circle back to the start of this post, anybody up for some thinly-disguised Star Trek smut? I mean, romance? Romanscifi? I hear that’s hot…

Dip Netting

Sockeye salmon – known locally as reds, due to the color of their flesh – spawn in the last couple weeks of July. If the run is good, residents are allowed to catch up to 25 fish per head of household, plus another 10 per family member. A typical red weighs maybe 5 to 8 pounds fresh out of the water, and will produce a couple fillets that will easily feed 4 for dinner.

This year, hundreds of thousands of salmon were passing the sonar counters on the day we drove down from Anchorage to the south shore of the Kenai River to harvest reds. I netted 18 for my household, and my son Max who has quite a bit more endurance took 29 for his. And there were plenty more swimming upstream; we were just out of energy. We could go back for more, but… it’s a lot of fish. Enough to last us until next year.

Kirkus Review

Way back in fall of 2024, I paid Kirkus Reviews $400 for a professional review of The Extrapolated Man. It was, I figured, a way to get some credibility. I could post it on Amazon and so forth. And then the review came, and I was shall we say, “disappointed.” So much so that I set it aside for a few months before returning to it. Now of course you, my hypothetical reader, might reasonably think “Ah he got a bad review and he’s in a funk.” And it certainly wasn’t a great review. It was sort of middle of the road review. No, what pissed me off at the time was that it seemed like a careless, half-assed review. A review written after a quick skim, by a college student in need of some extra money who wedged it in between term papers. And that’s unkind, but hear me out.

The Extrapolated Man is firmly, explicitly, consistently set in our solar system. Everything happens HERE. Even the plot element of a faster-than-light drive never gets our characters farther than Jupiter. And yet: “It’s a post-intergalactic war universe…” So let me think. Interplanetary is between planets, in our solar system. Interstellar is between stars, like, say, Star Trek. Intergalactic is between galaxies. Star Wars is nominally in a different galaxy, so I guess maybe kinda? Anyway I hit “intergalactic” and everything that followed was tainted. My dear reviewer was clearly not paying attention, so how could I trust him?

So there it sat for quite a while. I did eventually snip out a useful chunk and splash it around where it seemed like it might do some good. It’s really not a bad review. But I was, and am, unimpressed with the quality of the service.

Now I feel like a grumpy old man with unreasonable expectations, so without further ado, here’s the review.

A treasure hunter in a Mars colony discovers a potentially dangerous record of an ancient man’s mind in Franklin’s SF novel.

In the far future, Maggie Lebedev lives in a colony on Mars and is a “technomancer,” meaning she can repair and reactivate old technology. It’s a post-intergalactic war universe, and Mars and Earth are controlled by tharks, which are fearsome, murderous four-legged, two-armed creatures. Maggie and her crew come across an old shipwreck that contains a nuclear thermal rocket engine, which they can sell, and they also find a skull. It has a “brainstone” attached, which stores a recording of a person’s life. Intrigued, Maggie gets the interface working and finds it belonged to Lt. John Gray of the torchship Tereshkova. He was a Space Force pilot, but oddly there’s no mention of him in the records. So why the coverup? As Maggie connects to the brainstone and pores through his memories, a new threat emerges when a mysterious villain appears and tries to seize the artifact. Maggie learns that Gray’s ship can travel in hyperspace, a capability the tharks deny being possible. If she can resurrect Gray in another body, perhaps the two of them can restore Gray’s ship and permanently subvert the rule of the tharks. It won’t be an easy battle, as “the old lizards who run the United Colonies are not going to give up a single joule without a fight.” Franklin’s space drama is vast in scope and in its efforts to create a new world with all new life forms and language. The premise is irresistible, and the narrative’s alternating perspectives across very different time periods on the Mars colonies work well. The protagonists are attractive and relatable characters with loads of talents and capabilities. The complexities of the novel can be overwhelming at times, however, and the space-age lingo and ever-evolving plot points are cumbersome and slow the story’s momentum.

SF that delivers a complex world and compelling characters. – Kirkus Reviews

Argos’ 10th Birthday

For Argos’ 10th birthday we went camping at Tonsina Point, which is on the northwest edge of Resurrection. It’s only about a 2 mile walk in from the parking lot, which makes for an easy carry. Argos has pretty bad arthritis in his elbows, so even though he wants to go everywhere with me and do everything, I have to be careful not to push him too hard. No more ski trips or bike rides or long backpacking trips. But he’s loving life, as you can see here as he tries to become one with the beach.

The Origami Man – sold

I’m happy to report another sale to ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT. No spoilers here, of course, but my novelette “The Origami Man” is a mashup of three core concepts:

All wrapped in a delicious near-future setting in the Gulf of Alaska, where the Anthropocene has come to roost.

No idea when it will be published – hopefully sometime in 2025! More to come…

Lake Louise Rocket Launch

On 29 March 2025, the Alaska Northstars rocketry club held their annual high power rocket launch at Lake Louise, about 3.5 hours north of Anchorage where I live.

The lake is about 10 miles across, and we launch from the middle of it. Not owning a snowmachine, I brought my fat tire bike along and rode out to the pads. It took me about an hour to ride it, struggling to find and stay in tracks that were at least 24 hours old, which gave them time to set up.

The biggest rocket we launched went up about 38K feet on an “O” motor. The two I brought barely broke a thousand on F26 motors, but flew perfectly. (Each time you move up a letter in a motor designation, you double the total impulse of the motor… so there’s quite a difference between an F and an O!)

I’m already looking forward to next year, but I think I’ll rent a snowmachine and a cabin to stay overnight!