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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Pendulum swings back to life existing on Mars

Filed Under:

Mars

Fresh data from ALH 84001 rules out nonbiological origin for carbon

This story is far from over. The latest analysis of the tiny specks of magnetite found deep inside the Martian meteorite ALH 84001 appear to have ruled out nonbiological explanations for their origin. This on the heels of an August paper that showed that the rock had originally come from an area of Mars that was warm and bathed in liquid water.

What does all this mean? Nothing conclusive. The evidence is definitely tipped in the direction of life, though; for instance, there's methane on Mars, but no obvious geological mechanism that could produce it. (Since methane can only survive for a few years under Martian conditions, it must be continuously replenished from some source.) There's now known to be an enormous amount of water right under the surface in the Northern hemisphere, which increasingly looks like it was the location of an ocean at one time. And in the past couple of years we've seen direct photographic evidence of subsurface water in the form of fresh gulleys in crater walls.

All of this could have been learned in a matter of weeks or months, thirty years ago, had NASA gone to Mars after Apollo. As it is, I may be dead and gone before this particular controversy is resolved. But at least there's progress.

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+30 years of frustration

Posted by Adam Crowl at Jan 01, 2010 02:21 PM

Gil Levin is still arguing that the 'Viking' life experiments were positive, his experiment especially, and everything I've read only supports his claims. However the abioticists are reasonably requiring a higher standard of evidence for such a big claim as 'Life on Mars', which means the data does still seem equivocal. There do seem to be odd reactive species in the soil and the charge environment does seem hostile to near-surface organics. At the same time the seasonal colour changes on the rocks that Levin detected haven't been explained nor have the mysterious methane belches. Mars is an enigma wrapped in a puzzle.

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