Downloads

Ventus - Complete novel

I've made my first novel, Ventus, available as a free download, as well as excerpts from two of the Virga books. I am looking forward to putting up a number of short stories in the near future.

Complete novel: Ventus

To celebrate the August, 2007 publication of Queen of Candesce, I decided to re-release my first novel as an eBook. You can download it from this page. Ventus was first published by Tor Books in 2000, and and you can still buy it; to everyone who would just like to sample my work, I hope you enjoy this version.

I've released this book under a Creative Commons license, which means you can read it and distribute it freely, but not make derivative works or sell it.

Book Excerpts: Sun of Suns and Pirate Sun

I've made large tracts of these two Virga books available. If you want to find out what the Virga universe is all about, you can check it out here:

Major Foresight Project: Crisis in Zefra

In spring 2005, the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts of National Defense Canada (that is to say, the army) hired me to write a dramatized future military scenario. The book-length work, Crisis in Zefra, was set in a mythical African city-state, about 20 years in the future, and concerned a group of Canadian peacekeepers who are trying to ready the city for its first democratic vote while fighting an insurgency. The project ran to 27,000 words and was published by the army as a bound paperback book.

If you'd like to read Crisis in Zefra, you can download it in PDF form.

Short Stories

I'll be adding new stories here periodically. First of all, you can try my Aurora-award nominated short story "Hopscotch." The year this was nominated, another of my stories was also nominated: "The Toy Mill," which I wrote with David Nickle. "The Toy Mill" won the award; but I've always been fond of "Hopscotch." Here it is, in its entirety excerpted from my collection The Engine of Recall.

Hopscotch

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Another dumb article on why spaceflight is bad for you

Filed Under:

polemics

The way these people don't think about the solutions is breathtaking

As reported in Science Daily, some biologists writing in the Journal of ' Biology are warning that travel to Mars and other planets may not be a good idea because "spaceflight weakens the immune system" and "harmful bacteria proliferate under spaceflight conditions."

One has to wonder what these people mean by "spaceflight conditions." Almost certainly, what they mean is zero gravity. Certainly, the Russians discovered all sorts of nasty bugs growing in their air conditioning during the Mir missions, and it's been known for decades that sealed living environments do breed bacteria. Also, cosmic rays and other forms of radiation encountered in space are mutagenic.

But really, people, think! This doesn't mean that space flight is intrinsically dangerous. It means that badly shielded tin-can environments that aren't spun for gravity are a bad idea. And that is quite a different conclusion.

Prolonged exposure to zero gravity weakens the immune system, so don't expose astronauts to prolonged zero gravity. Invest in some research into how to spin the spacecraft. Then spin the spacecraft.

Secondly, shield the damn things. The only reason why radiation is considered an issue is because it's expensive to transport heavy shielding into orbit. One solution would be to use lunar water; simply put bags of the stuff around the ship. That makes it heavier and hence requires more fuel... but now the problem can be seen for what it is, a simple problem of launch costs.

Spaceflight is not bad for our health. Cut-rate spaceflight that avoids the obvious solutions is.

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SKYLON

Posted by Adam Crowl at Nov 23, 2009 06:02 AM

Hi Karl

One way to start boot-strapping ourselves off-world is for better space-access via a good design. NASA is really good at Big Dumb Rockets - witness "Constellation" as successor to the Shuttle - but has no commercial sensitivity. A true space-access design would operate like a plane and IMO the SKYLON design of Reaction Engines Ltd. is one system that could do it. That's something the Shuttle could never have done even in the most optimistic scenarios of its operation.

But what could justify a fleet of highly reusable spaceplanes? Solar Power Satellites?