May 08 2025
The bionic man returns!
No, not that bionic man. Back in 1958, then Major Jack Steele, MD, coined the term “bionics,” which later helped inspire author Martin Caidin to write the book Cyborg (in which Dr. Steele is mentioned), which in turn spun off the TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man.” So Jack Steele could be considered “the father of bionics.” Since I married his daughter, that could make me the “brother-in-law of bionics.” Since then, I’ve had a few mechanical/electronic implants of my own.
All of which is a long way of saying I’ve been through a few things over the past few years, including a pacemaker implant, a couple of crashes due to a defective pacemaker lead, and finally a pacemaker replacement (no leads, now directly implanted in my heart!) That is part of the reason I’ve only had one new book published in the past year (Kakuloa: The Downhill Slide – more about that in a bit.)
The other bit of cyborg-iness (hey, I’m an author, I’m allowed to make up words) has to do with my kidneys. They don’t work very well, in fact, hardly at all. Partly due to lifelong hypertension, partly due to the insult from losing a lot of blood due to an internal bleed, partly due to the repeated insults of having my heart rate drop to its default setting of thirty beats per minute (hence the pacemaker). (That default setting, by the way, is a fascinating bit of biology having to do with heart muscle cells. If you grow heart tissue in a petri dish, it will start beating on its own once a threshold is reached. It’s related to the Belousov-Zhabotinsky) (or BZ) reaction.) Anyway, decreased kidney function leads to increased fatigue. Unfortunately, there is no “bionic” replacement for kidneys, at least, not exactly. An artificial kidney machine is currently way too big to implant, and requires regular clinic visits to be hooked up to. The alternative (other than a transplant) is something called peritoneal dialysis, where what amounts to a cleaning solution (mostly sugar water) is pumped into the peritoneal cavity (where your organs live), allowed to soak up the waste and toxins that have built up, then drained. (Sounds worse than it is.) I now have a computerized machine that I hook up to each night which takes care of the filling and draining…and I feel much better.
All of which is a rambling way of saying that I’ve been away from the writing because I’ve been sick, but I’m feeling better now, and I’m back.
What’s been happening publishing-wise
While I didn’t update this site, I did manage to get a few new things published, including two short stories, “Roadside Assistance”and “Relic,” published in The Expanding Universe 9 (TEU9) and The Expanding Universe 10 (TEU10), respectively. “Roadside” is available as a standalone ebook, and “Relic” will be Real Soon Now.
I mentioned above Kakuloa: The Downhill Slide. This is a follow on to Kakuloa: A Rising Tide, and both are continuations of the Alpha Centauri trilogy. The resort and casino that Parry Cohen is building in Rising Tide is now fully operational, so when a dead body turns up in a hotel elevator, things get serious very quickly. Retired detective James Watson (whom you may remember from the short story “Shakeup”), now living in the Alpha Centauri system, is called in to investigate. Several readers have praised Downhill as my best yet. Find out for yourself here.
What’s next?
Next up is the third Paul Fabron book, Delta Pavonis: Destiny. The title is subject to change, because as I work through it I’m wondering if it needs to be two volumes. Destiny will be the last, but I’m wondering if there needs to be a Delta Pavonis: Side Quest in there. Just kidding about the title, it doesn’t fit the pattern, but Paul is getting a bit sidetracked from what he sets out to do at the start of the book.
There’s more Carson & Roberts in the works, and a couple of people I’ve mentioned it too are pushing me to finish the Apollo 18 novel that I abandoned when that movie of the same name came out. I’m also toying with the idea of a time travel story. We’ll see.
Let me know your thoughts. Cheers!