Lockdown and The Walking Dead
Zombies are not my thing. As a child, I avoided the undead in my Dungeons & Dragons world for power-hungry humans, elves, or orcs. Evil is not mindless and faceless. It does not rise from the dead, but forms in the living.
Because zombies do not interest me, I have not read The Walking Dead comics and will avoid comparisons to the original work, but I will take a Bowie Knife stab at the walkers.
There are a hundred themes in The Walking Dead. Someone has a class on all of them. I think all themes roll up into a big one I call Happiness and Truth.
Mellowed links and The Vote
With the impeachment of Donald J. Trump behind us, it is time for reflection on the events of the last month. On any day, I collect more links than I can read in a week. Most of us are like this. Bombarded with information, it’s hard to choose the quality from the click-bait. If I wait a few days, the stuff I thought important in the moment, was just …
Endurance and The Coronavirus
This story, especially in 2020, is important. First, just as an adventure story, like in my science fiction, someone is going to pay the price for the adventure. There is usually a character who will sacrifice their life for the better good. Sometimes, a character will charge into battle to give everyone else a chance to escape. But in this story, …
Smoking and January 6, 2021
Leo Tolstoy wrote the definitive judgment on Christianity in his book The Kingdom of God is Within You. You should read it. If you can remain conscious, and mindfully absorb the arguments Tolstoy makes about non-violence, it will forever change your view of humanity. Mahatma Gandhi read it and freed India from the British empire. Martin Luther King, J…
A New Glossary
Sometimes the tool comes to you. WordPress is a robust platform, but it has a few quirks that get under the skin of experienced coders. Everything is a post is a fine model, but after seventeen years you should be able to display those posts in dynamic ways. Sure there are plugins, but WordPress is the platform, and a platform that doesn’t you give the to…
Putting an End to Hibernation in Sci-Fi
Galaxy crossing science fiction space operas are pure fantasy. Sure, we call them science fiction because they have spaceships and plasma rifles, but there is little science in even the most hard sci-fi stories. The term “hard science fiction” is rather new. When Arthur C. Clarke was writing his novels and fashioning one of the most influential movies of …
The Single Best What is a Virus Video
After finishing my first episode of TWiV, I realized that I needed a refresher course on viruses. I want to know the basics, without taking biology again. YouTube is both a cesspool, a library, and my first stop when researching a subject. I have learned to look for older videos YouTube Creators have not repurposed into sponsor driven streams filled wi…
Theme in a Brave New World of Coronavirus
I try not to think about theme when I am writing. Falling in that pit is the quickest way to lose a story. In a literature class you were told that theme is what the author is trying to convey, a central idea or meaning to the story. In rare exceptions, that might be true. In truth, authors have no idea what themes will manifest when they start a work. A …
Bedtime stories in the age of COVID: An Introduction to TWIV
This Week in Virology. The podcast about viruses. The kind that make you sick. A refrain I hear more than once a week since I started listening to this excellent podcast all about the coronavirus. No. That’s not right. This podcast is all about viruses; the kind that make you sick. In late March, I realized my regular sources were not enough to keep me…
Dreams and the White Gold Wielder
As children all we have dreams. As infants we lack income, property, and choice and we are fragile and slow to grow compared to the rest of the natural world. As soon as we achieve enough independence to think and wander on our own, society dictates we get an education, attend church or temple, or at least recognize a higher power. Unable to chart our own…
This Day All Gods Die
What life is valuable? More precisely, whose life is valuable? Is your life more valuable than mine? Does your position, title, salary, or family relationship make your contribution to this small planet more valuable than mine? This is not a small question. We ask it in fiction yet ignore it in reality. On this globe, everyday decisions have determined…
Keith Hobson’s -126th Birthday
I do not celebrate birthdays. Despite the convention, you have only one. All days after that are living days. The particular orbit of our planet around the sun has nothing to do with age. Age is biological. If our planet orbited at the distance of Uranus, most of us would never celebrate a birthday. Worse than the birthday celebration for the living is th…
Despair and The Long Shadow of The One Tree
Have you been locked in despair for weeks while ignoring events around you? Have you looked up to find that it is a fresh spring day, the birds are chirping, and the air is crisp against your skin, then wonder how you missed it? That is what reading The One Tree is like. It is a deep dive into the character of Linden Avery, a character who never sees the …
Chaos and Order and Theme and Madness
Those “real-people” reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have difficulty finding themes in The Gap Cycle; imagining a more clueless lot is difficult for me. At the end of The Real Story Stephen R. Donaldson summarized his intent, his themes and—in broad strokes—outlined the story he prepared. The Gap Cycle is not an attempt to mimic the Wagnerian epic of Der R…
The Collected Works of Arthur C. Clarke
2001: A Space Odyssey was boring. There I said it. I know you were thinking it. After the chimpanzees smash bones to Thus Spoke Zarathustra there is about a hundred minutes of nothing until we get to, “Open the pod bay doors,” followed by a light show that requires the high of psychedelics to be appreciated. That 2001 was boring did not stop…
The Nature of Evil, or The Wounded Land
What is Evil? Does it exist? When you speak about the world, do you define an act, a person, or a group as evil? I have called Donald Trump Lord Foul since the 2016 Republican National Convention, by association, am I calling him evil? If evil does not exist, then what is that quality we identify as evil? Is evil a treatable sickness, disease, or mental c…
Consumption, A Dark and Hungry God Arises
How much can humanity consume? Earth is a solitary realm. She has a long past, most of it devoid of humanity. Thanks to plate tectonics and the unique chemical ability of sediment and stone to record images of Earth’s past, we know that other creatures once roamed the plains and forests, or swam the deep oceans of our world. The Kansas prairie is full of …
Lord Mhoram’s Victory and The Power that Preserves
A few dramatic scenes are etched onto the consciousness of the collected public. From cinema there is Indiana Jones running from a boulder only to land at the feet of his rival, or Lawrence crossing a desert on a camel. From television there is the intro to MASH, or Kramer entering Seinfeld’s apartment. “Neuman!” From literature there is the white whale s…
First-Person Fail: The Extraditionist
I grabbed The Extraditionist as a Prime Early Access Deal. I was looking for something outside my diet of science-fiction and fantasy. I figured a good crime novel was the way to go. I might have been right, this was just the wrong novel. This is supposed to be a novel about a drug lawyer—they call them Extraditionist south of the equator—that is all s…
Reviews, Rape, and Forbidden Knowledge
Before the Internet, I did not read book reviews. Professional reviewers—those paid to churn out a weekly summary of the latest media—tend toward promotional hype—when the product is from their corporate overloads—to sanctimony—when the product is from a competitor. For science fiction, professional reviewers are especially complicit. The dullest, drawn o…
Hile Troy! The Illearth War
Hile Troy! Just kidding. Hile Troy, the character introduced in Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Illearth War is one of my favorite fantasy fiction characters. Sure, the name helps, but it’s his story arc that fascinates me. Hile Troy, like Covenant, is summoned to the Land through the same magic that started the story. But his arrival was a mistake. Atiaran…
Violence, Fear, Hate, and the Modern Student
Modern martial art students separate their martial art training from the rest of their life. Compartmentalizing it as an activity that they share with people they barely know. They go to work, watch television, attend events and family outings without integrating or considering their martial art practice. It is just another activity on a full schedule. …
Science Fiction
In the tradition of Doc Savage, Dr. Who, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Martian, serial Sci-Fi from The Fundamentals Universe.
Serial Science Fiction
Short Stories
Keith Hobson Meets Erin Smart – Keith’s View
The following short story was not cut from The Fundamentals, but it is missing. This is Keith’s and Erin’s first meeting told from Keith’s point of view. When editing the final version of The Fundamentals I found that I had a few chapters told from minor character viewpoints. That was important f…
Evacuate!
A fire consumed the ship. A fire that burned like fire on Earth. It billowed black and white smoke that stretched up, or at least away, from the ship. Tongues of orange and black flame whipped around as if caught in a strong wind, but when they stretched away from the ship they didn’t extinguish …
Mother’s Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is an American holiday. Other cultures have harvest celebrations, but the tone of an American Thanksgiving is unique to history. I drafted this essay after the September 11 terrorist attack, while the Iraq war was still young, and the Afghanistan conflict had failed to capture or ki…
Martial Arts
Martial Arts in Anger
In my software development career, in anger was a phrase that meant you were developing a program or a process out of frustration with what was available. I share my mindfulness martial art practice out of a similar frustration. The trend in martial art practice is to stress combat effectiven…
Pinyin
The Pinyin system is the accepted standard for the romanization of Chinese characters. Pinyin means spell sound and is used to teach the standard pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese. It is also the standard system for entering Chinese characters on computers. Because of this standardization, it is …
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the foundation to understanding a subject. Martial art practice is filled with words that have similar meaning or are used interchangeably. When forced to put my practice into writing I discovered that in a single paragraph I would skip between form and posture in the same descript…
