What's the story behind your latest book?
I started Episode 4.135557 a few years back, and it's been sitting on the shelf for a while. I've wanted to do story with space pirates for quite some time; there was an episode of Lost In Space that took the concept seriously, and it was so cheesy that I had to give the concept my own spin. The nucleus of the first part is the idea about the emergency reserves of biomethane used to power the rocket. The latest word on the Hubble Constant is that the universe is likely Euclidean, but the Riemannian theory had currency when I wrote it, so I'm sticking to it and that is the imprint the story has from the time I wrote it. The perspective that I'm writing from is 1947; this was the dawn of the Cold War, when the starry-eyed optimism of the postwar years gave way to the fact that "Uncle Joe" wasn't quite as friendly as the American public had been led to believe by the Roosevelt administration. Soon after, the USSR launched the first satellite, conducted their first nuke test (you're sure swell, Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg, and your pals too!), and it wasn't long before we were biting our nails and worrying about ICBMs; my story captures the shift in perspective at that juncture of history. The computer technology is fairly plausible as of 1947 (though of course we have better tech now), and the BSOD was one I had worked on (though I changed one of the parameters). The speech about piracy was (ahem) inspired by a real-world young inventor annoyed about people ripping off his software. (I can't blame them too much, since he was charging five hundred bucks in mid-'70s dollars for a BASIC compiler. I'm only charging the price of a cheeseburger for my story, which also took a lot of time and research.) That sets the stage for the piracy metaphor, and as for the young inventor, he's now as rich as God.
How do you approach cover design?
I do have some artistic ability, but it takes me a very long time to come up with anything good. And I haven't picked up the art pencils in ages. Anyway, I'd like to say I slave for hours over the design with Corel Draw, but that wouldn't be the truth. For Episode 4.135667, I got some public domain images from NASA and whipped it together in MS Paint. Stir, whip, stir, whip, whip, whip, stir.
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