Amelia Earhart’s Plane Found on Sonar?

Regular readers of this blog will know that we’ve closely followed the search for Amelia Earhart’s aircraft by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). 

Now, perhaps, most intriguingly, their search may have paid off. TIGHAR'S long-standing mission has been to find the twin-engined Lockheed Electra that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan flew in while making the fateful Pacific leg of their round-the-world flight attempt, before vanishing in July 1937.

A sonar scan shows an “anomaly” resting in about 600 feet of water, off of Nikumaroro Island, which is some 350 miles from their planned destination, Howland Island.

Is this Earhart's Plane? - TIGHAR

This, along with a recently unearthed picture taken in October 1937, showing some debris closely resembling the landing gear of Earhart’s aircraft sticking out of the water off of Nikumaroro Island, is the strongest evidence unearthed thus far to suggest what happened to the plane.

But what happened to Earhart and Noonan?  Were they trapped in their plane when it crashed, perhaps rendered unconscious by the impact and couldn’t escape?  Did they make to the nearby island, where they managed to eke out an existence for a while? If so, what happened after that?

It’s likely these questions will never be fully answered and the mystery that had intrigued so many – including myself – for well over 75 years, will endure.  Amelia, of course, is a prominent character in my alternate history novel War Plan Crimson and has a short story all to herself in my alt-history collection, Elvis Saves JFK!

Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

Poetic Justice - Part II

It’s not always parallel universes and alt-history on this blog. Sometimes it’s other stuff. Like poetry. Yes, poetry. You’ll remember how in this space, a few months back, I wrote about the release of the poetry anthology Poems from Planet Earth, from the good folks at Leaf Press and edited Yvonne Blomer and Cynthia Woodman Kerkham.

Well, the good news is that it’s finally out and the poetically-minded of you can order it online here.  

The book has its genesis in the Planet Earth poetry and spoken word series held every Friday night at the Moka House in Victoria.  I was honored to be a regular reader at the series that featured many fine poets, including Patrick Lane, Pamela Porter (a Governor General’s award winner for poetry).  I remain indebted to Yvonne and the others at Planet Earth for their graciousness and kindness (Hi Sheila! Hi David!).

I am also highly honored that I also have a poem included in the anthology… it’s also quoted in  a  chapter introduction, which also freaks me out a little. If you like poetry, or just remotely curious, I encourage you to give this book a try.

Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

An Alternate Space Age

Back in the early 1950s, a group of visionaries, led by rocket pioneers Werhner von Braun and Willy Ley, astronomer Fred Lawrence Wipple, among others, and ably abetted by famed illustrators Chesley Bonstell and Fred Freeman, published a series of articles starting in the March 22nd 1952, issue of Collier's Magazine, entitled “Man Will Conquer Space Soon.”

Can you imagine how this looked to someone for the first time?

Only it wasn’t so much as a series of articles, as it was a manifesto. Featuring beautifully rendered space shuttles with sweeping fins that looked like they could’ve come off a Cadillac, towering rockets the size of Saturn Vs that looked like the overgrown children of the V-2, wheel-shaped space stations that were spun for artificial gravity and plans to land on the moon, and after that, Mars, the series, published by Collier's between 1952 and 1954, was a call to action for nothing less than a step-by-step exploration and colonization of the solar system by man. “What are we waiting for?” asked one article. In 1955, the cause would be taken up by Walt Disney who produced the ground-breaking  “Man in Space” series for his Disneyland television series, hosted by von Braun that picked up from where Collier's had left off. 

The booster on its pad. Freaking huge.

The campaign succeeded in that it set the pattern in the popular consciousness and media for the next decade of what exactly manned spaceflight would look like. However, when we got there, things turned out a little differently. We got to the moon. We got  had our space shuttle and we got our space station. But that’s it. A permanent human presence on the moon, never mind a trip to Mars, seems as far off as it was back in 1952.  I don’t know about you, but when I look back at what could’ve been and what was being planned, I feel ripped off.

The fleet of moonships being assembled in earth orbit.
Note the space station and winged orbiters in the background.

Despite the disappointment, or perhaps because of it, this has proven fertile ground for the field of alternate history.  The first, was Allen Steele’s “Alternate Space” Series, composed of the short stories “Goddard’s People,” “John Harper Wilson” and the novel The Tranquility Alternative.  The two short pieces are stand-alones, while the novel is an interesting, if slightly cynical, look at this world of missed opportunity, combined with an actual-but-never fulfilled U.S. plan to base ICBMs on the moon as some kind of Cold War super-deterrent.  As I like Steele as an author already, this was a treat when he combined his brand of gritty realism and detail with that lost sense of wonder. My only complaint that hopefully may be addressed in a future reissue is that the complete series was never issued under a single cover.  However, if you wish, you can track down the two short stories in Steele’s Rude Astronauts anthology of short fiction. They're both well worth the trip to your local used book store.

The second person to approach the Collier's 1952 space program as alternate history is  documentary filmmaker David Sander, with his Man Conquers Space feature film project, that sets out to tell the story of the Collier's space program as if it actually happened. Unfortunately, Sander has been beset by a series of bad breaks, but has continued to search for funding. Despite it all and in the meantime, he has still managed to produce some superb trailers that fill you will both a sense of wonder and loss (I hope he'll forgive me for posting these here).

Ultimately, Man Conquers Space is a movie that should be made, and in a perfect world will be made. I still have hopes that someone will come forward and help Sander to finance this worthy project, which like the best of alternate history, potentially has the power to shed a light on how we got to our present situation in our own world. If a movie like Veronica Mars can be crowd-financed on Kickstarter.com by its fan base, then why not this one?

Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

A Review: Himmler's War, by Robert Conroy

Sorry about the delay in this month’s entry, but here we are, better late than never, right?

I honestly don’t know what to make of this book, Himmler's War. First, the author, Robert Conroy, has done some very creditable work in this genre, including his first novel, 1901. What puzzles me is that with a promising start, this book can end, well,  so lukewarmly.  Let me explain.The book starts out with an interesting take on a familiar World Word Two alt-history premise where Hitler is killed and Himmler takes charge after the accidental killing of Hitler by a lucky hit from an American bomber (We saw a similar concept a few years ago in Dobson’s and Niles’ superior Fox on the Rhine, where the SS boss takes charge after the assassination of Hitler).

Fine. I can take that as a point of difference. I can even accept when Himmler strikes a separate peace with Stalin (also seen in Fox on the Rhine). In this book, however, the deal is slightly sweetened for the Soviets (I won’t say how), who give the Nazis a couple of thousand T-34 tanks to bash the Western Allies with.  I can accept all that, plus the other goodies Conroy throws at us to keep the plot boiling in a satisfying manner. It could’ve very well happened that way.

Unfortunately, I do have a major bone to pick with Conroy. And that unfortunately, has to do with a central point to his plot: that the Nazis, as thin on the ground with resources as they were by the summer of 1944, could build and deploy an atom bomb by the spring of 1945 (I don’t consider this a spoiler as there is this huge mushroom cloud-thingy on the cover of the book).  By that time, the Nazis had already thrown in the towel on the atomic bomb, conceding that while it was a technical possibility, they simply didn’t have the resources or the manpower to pull it together. When you compare it with the four and half years and billions of 1940s dollars spent on the Manhattan Project, you get an idea of what it actually took to develop a workable atomic weapon. (A better and more plausible alt-history Nazi atomic weapons program is in The Trinity Paradox, by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, where an anti nuclear activist from the 1980s travels back in time to 1943, and unwittingly passes secrets along to a Nazi mole who enables the Germans to develop a “dirty bomb” that they drop on New York City.)

So in the final analysis, while Himmler’s War is a rollicking read, it suffers from this lack of historical plausibility that makes for so much of the real great alternative history books and makes this book not so satisfying as it should be.  There’s no doubt that Conroy can write; however, he has yet to deliver us, in my opinion, a worthy successor to 1901.


Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

Announcing a New Title: The Key to My Heart

Well, it's almost ready.

 I'm pleased to introduce my latest novel, The Key to my Heart. I've been steadily at work on for the past three years and now is almost ready for its launch on Smashwords.com. I'm just in the middle of the final edits and have received the all-important ISBNs for the varying e-editions. Here's the cover I've done - let me know what you think. 

The Key to My Heart started life over ten years ago as an exercise in a "hard-boiled" detective novel, but I put it away. I came back to it a few years ago and here it is.  As I said, I'm very pleased with the finished product. I think it was well worth the wait until the plotline was able to gel.

Ah, but what is this book about, you ask?  It's set in post-war San Francisco and the hero is a washed-up P.I. named Chance Gannon.  When he's gunned down by mysterious and beautiful woman in his own office, it launches him on a case that not only threatens his life, but the entire world!

I hope you like it.

I expect to launch The Key to My Heart in the near future. So watch this space!

Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

Review: The Axis of Time Trilogy by John Birmingham

You’re in command of a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered supercarrier packed with advanced jet fighters, missiles and the latest in command-and-control systems. All of the sudden, there’s a strange electrical disturbance, a vortex opens and you’re thrown back in time decades to the eve of a great battle that will decide America’s fate.

What do you do?

Stop me right there if you think you’ve seen this one before. You’d be right. That’s how the film The Final Countdown (1980) begins with the USS Nimitz thrust back in time to eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

An F-14 dines on a Japanese Zero in The Final Countdown.

So you can imagine my misgivings the first time I fell across the initial book in John Birmingham’s superior Axis of Time trilogy, Weapons of Choice, where the fusion-powered U.S. Navy supercarrier USS Hilary Clinton (Hey, it could still happen!) is thrown back in time from 2021, along with a multinational fleet of similarly advanced ships with their weapons and crews to the eve of the Battle of Midway in 1942.

The alone almost earned the book the distinction of winning an airborne trip across my living room. But, fortunately, I stayed with the book and was quickly rewarded. Where in The Final Countdown, the heroes are yanked suddenly back through time through a cheap-ass deus ex machina plot device that saves the timeline just as they were about to take on the Japanese and change history; the protagonists in Birmingham’s book are under no such compunction and set about merrily changing the course of history in big juicy ways with their advanced technology.

But the bad news is some of that same technology has also fallen into the hands of the Axis and the Soviet Union.  

The commander of the time travelers is Admiral Phillip Kolhammer. Kolhammer has the unenviable task of fighting a reinvigorated Axis, all the while keeping his own 21^st Century forces together and working with his contemporary allies of 1942, some of whom would just as soon take all of the technology and use it for their own gains. Kolhammer is also battling racial and moral attitudes of time. Here I think Birmingham benefits from hindsight a little too much and may be a bit hard on the Allies; they were, as he seems to forget, men – and women – of their time.

In the next two books of the series – Designated Targets, Final Impact – we see some of consequences of  - intended and not – of Kolhammer’s tampering with the timeline. Birmingham shines here with some very good speculative writing, trying to guess at the sort of strategic, technological and social changes that might be wrought by the mass landing of a bunch of technologically advanced time travelers in a less advanced era. By the end of the last book, with a cloud hanging over us, we are left wanting for more.

Birmingham is supposed to be work on a new novel in the series, so I will be happy to read it once it comes out.

I definitely recommend this series if you like military alternate history. All three books in the series are  available in paperback your local bookstore or online.

If you like that sort of stuff,  you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

Book Review: Stephen King’s 11/22/63

A belated Happy New Years, first of all.

I received 11/22/63 as a birthday present last August.  As I was just finishing off  The Company of the Dead (see the review) I put it aside and made it next on my list to read for this blog. With breaks for moving across the continent, job searching, finding a new place to live and oh yes – reading and reviewing Lavie Tidhar’s admirable Osama: A Novel, I can now report that I have just finished reading Mr. King’s magnum opus on the subject of time travel, the JFK assassination and the butterfly effect.

The first thing I will say, if you have not read this book already – read it. Buy it, even. You are missing a great reading experience.  At over 800 pages it is an immersive experience for both narrator and reader was we go back in time via “rabbit hole” to the world of the past. By “immersive,” I mean immersive. You literally taste and smell the world around you. King’s background research is first-rate into both the era and the subject matter at hand is nothing short of impressive.

A schoolteacher, Jake Epping is given a key to such a “rabbit hole” in time by a close friend with one proviso: he has to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing JFK.  Aye, and there’s the rub: for all of his extensive research, King has firmly come down on the side of the “lone gunman” theory – that Oswald, history’s greatest fuckup and self-professed patsy – could’ve pulled this off just by his little old self.  If you’re one of the many out there like me who believes at some level that there could’ve been a conspiracy you may find this vaguely unsatisfying as King connects the dots.

Lee Harvey Oswald: Patsy or Lone Nut with a Gun?

In the interests of full disclosure, let me say that I was only a few months past my first birthday the day John F. Kennedy died. So my connection to Camelot is somewhat tenuous at best. I grew up however, sharing that sense of collective loss and outrage mixed with disbelief that one man, however deranged and however lucky a shot, could’ve been responsible for changing the course of history.  Or, if you prefer the argument of King, things worked out exactly the way they should’ve.

I can’t help upon reflecting upon King’s central thesis of the place of the “lone nut with the gun” in society. Unfortunately, recent U.S. history – you can supply the places and dates –has been marked with examples of what one deranged man with a gun can do, so perhaps the Kennedy assassination is just one in a series of very lamentable incidents.

But I digress.

So with his friend’s blessing, narrator Jake goes off into the World of the Past. He gets involved in a few events that are a prelude to the main event, that only serve to give him confidence and help build him as a character.  I had thought at one point this was getting in the way of the main action, but now I see King’s wisdom in his plotting his book this way. Well done. Once this is done, events assume their own pace and chug along nicely until the inevitable and suspenseful climax.

If you’re looking for a book that is by turns well-written, fun, immersive (there’s that word again) well-researched and full of plausible speculative fiction at its best, then Stephen King’s 11/22/63 is the book for you. Enjoy.

In the meantime, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.