rlfj: Blog

My wife was babysitting for our youngest (34-year-old) daughter the other day and after she came back from shopping, our six-year-old granddaughter started brushing out her mother’s hair. “Mommy,” she said, “You have such shiny hair!” Our daughter has dark brown hair.

“You mean white hair?”

“No, silver.”

It was a great testament to our daughter’s self-control that our granddaughter is still alive.

A few typos in Chapters 14 and 15 were fixed. Thank you to my eagle-eyed readers. I try, but it amazes me when something still sneaks past my editors and me. Anyway, the second invasion has begun. Enjoy!

There are 29 chapters in Martian Justice, so Chapter 15 is the midpoint. So far, people seem to like it. We’ll just have to see. Enjoy!

I got several questions about the use of hydrogen in the story. Where is the oxygen needed for combustion? The hydrogen economy of WestHem, EastHem, and Mars is a combination of things. First, hydrogen is needed for the fusion reactors and engines of the period. As told in Greenies, fusion began to be used as an Earthly power source after petroleum was exhausted in World War III. Not sure why they needed to go to Jupiter for hydrogen since there is plenty of hydrogen on Earth, locked up in the form of water. Perhaps the fusion reactors need a special mix of deuterium or tritium, and the gas mines can separate and concentrate specific elements.

Hydrogen was also needed for combustion vehicles. This would include tanks and APCs, and air vehicles such as fighters, attack craft, Hummingbirds, Mosquitoes, etc. (Greenies, Chapter 3 - “Denver had once been one of the smoggiest cities in the nation but smog was now a thing of the distant past thanks to fusion power and hydrogen burning engines.”) Greenies also specifies that spacecraft engines are fusion powered as shown in Chapter 4 - “The WSS Mermaid, an Owl-Class, stealth attack ship…Her twin fusion engines were both at idle…”)

There was also a comment (a polite one and very well educated, no complaints from me) about my understanding of orbital mechanics as shown in the interception and capture of the tankers, basically that I had it all wrong. I read the complaint and smiled, and then said, “So be it!” I am channeling my inner Heinlein and having fun! If Captain Kirk can do it, so can I!

We’re about halfway through the story, so I turned voting on. I hope you like the story. Thanks, in advance. Enjoy!

Sorry for the delay in posting. Life gets in the way at times.

One of my readers commented a few weeks ago that it seemed I was pushing too hard on names changing on Mars. Too many seemed to be ‘risqué’ and I might be pushing the limit. I didn’t give it a lot of thought, since Al Steiner used similar names in his stories. Then I got to thinking. This story occurs roughly 130 years from now. Names change over time. My family arrived here in the 1750s and almost immediately changed the spelling of their last name. Why? This was well before Ellis Island, where immigration agents sometimes ordered people to ‘Americanize’ their names because they couldn’t spell the original European versions. Were my relatives running from their past? Or were they illiterate? No way of knowing now. Still, names change.

Discrepancy discovered. In Greenies, the Martian rail system was called MarsTrans. In earlier chapters here, I called it MarsTran. I have gone back and edited this and reloaded a few chapters. I also cleaned up another typo or two.

In any case, piracy is alive and well in outer space. All those space pirate novels I read when I was a kid have finally paid off! Enjoy!

I hope your Christmas was merry and bright, and I hope your Christmas wasn’t white. Snow on a holiday is a major problem!

I haven’t been able to be productive and do any writing lately. We are remodeling the kitchen and have moved everything into the living room and dining room. We are living off an electric skillet, a countertop microwave oven, and an easy-bake oven. Every half an hour I have to answer questions, everybody in the crew has an incredibly loud phone ringer that goes off every ten minutes, and I now know their life stories. It should be finished sometime in either the spring or summer, but I am not sure which year. My wife is going as crazy as I am.

Anyway, Mars and WestHem are moving closer to war. I’ll be turning voting on sometime next week. Enjoy!