L4 Station Release and Other News

Cover Image – ID 159616182 © limbitech | Dreamstime(dot)com

First item:

Sometime March 20, midnight Amazon time, my latest novel L4 Station will be released.

While an adventure story (with a young protagonist) it is also a near future, hard science fiction novel. It is in my Remembered Earth universe and builds on the Lunar Series of short stories and novellas (though it is completely standalone).

As I say in the blurb:

The first crew replacement ship to the L4 point of the Earth-Moon system carried the new personnel needed to continue mining the asteroids found there.

It also carried thirteen-year-old Raymond Jones and his younger brother Roger, along with others their age.

Raymond is a bookworm and also from the Moon which makes him a two-time loser to some of the other kids.

But he is determined to not let the bullies, the dangers of space, or his lowly status defeat him.

And others are starting to notice his determination, especially Cindy.

You can read the first few chapters on the website here. (Limited chapters because the story is going into Kindle Unlimited for three months.) It will be $1.99 through the end of March. Go here for purchasing options.

It was fun for me to watch the story unfold through the eyes of young Raymond. And his even younger brother, Roger, is hilarious but like Raymond, capable when need be.

Second item:

Also, if you have been reading the story Rocket Season on Substack, and wish to continue, I am still posting chapters here on the website. See here, to start with Chapter 1. I probably won’t cross-post them anywhere else because it’s easier to just post them up once and this seems to be more popular than my Substack where I thought I would post stories.

Rocket Season is a hard science fiction story but with extreme extrapolation of the physics. The underlying conceit (or trope if you prefer) is that the assertion known as the Mach Principle is real. Ernst Mach proposed the principle in the nineteenth century. He conjectured that the amount of inertia of an object is in relation to all the other masses in the universe, the universal mass. Einstein was an admirer of Mach and actually used this conjecture as he developed general relativity.

James Woodward (the physicist, not philosopher) actually used this principle to develop a drive he calls the Mach Effect Gravity Assist drive (MEGA). He believes it works, unfortunately, no one else has confirmed his experiments. Reading about it made me think of the impulse engine of Star Trek.

Anyway, that’s some of the physics (extrapolated) of the story which is also an adventure story and a bit of a love story.

Third item:

By the way, the Lunar Series of stories I mentioned above will be released in paperback on Amazon and Barnes & Noble on April 10. I will post links to Luna: A Collection as soon as Amazon puts it up for sale.

Thank you for reading.