Across Canada today (Saturday, May 30, 2020), the major daily newspapers in 12 cities are running a terrific interview with me by Eric Volmers about The Oppenheimer Alternative. You’ll find the interview in these newspapers coast-to-coast (in Canada, the major weekend edition of a newspaper is the Saturday one, not the Sunday one): Vancouver Sun […]
Today is the 90th birthday of SETI pioneer Frank Drake. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Frank several times, and his work makes an appearance in The Oppeheimer Alternative:“Yeah, that wouldn’t be so bad.” Feynman held up the latest Astronomical Journal, dated October 1959. “But Frank Drake’s got a note in here. He found decimetric […]
Today is the 50th anniversary of the release of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the second film in the series. I gain more respect for that film on each viewing. There were production choices, dictated by budget I suppose, that bothered me when I first saw it as a kid: the use of so […]
There’s just one week left until The Oppenheimer Alternative comes out, so here’s our penultimate real-life chapter-head epigraph from the novel:“The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with […]
Forget all those (cough, cough) rave reviews of my novel The Oppenheimer Alternative, coming out in eight days. Here are the reviews one of my top-five favorite novels got when it was first published in 1930: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. It’s a great read for a hot summer day! “This department announces a […]
Just two weeks — a scant 14 days! — left to get my latest novel The Oppenheimer Alternative at the pre-publication special ebook price of an atomically small US$4.99 or local equivalent at Amazon, B&N, Apple Books, Kobo, etc., worldwide. After that, the price goes up, up, up like an Orion rocket! Worldwide ebook buying […]
We spent an interesting evening watching the 1947 movie The Beginning Or The End, which was the first-ever dramatic treatment of the Manhattan Project (the subject, in part, of my new novel The Oppenheimer Alternative, coming out two weeks from today). Overall, the film ranges from charmingly earnest to sappily sentimental to just this side […]
Each year, July 16 marks the anniversaries of two of the defining moments in the entire history of Homo sapiens, both of which are still within living memory for some. For this year, 2020, July 16 is the fifty-first anniversary of the day on which human beings first embarked on a voyage to another world, […]
In my new novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative — coming June 2, 2020, and available for pre-order now — the following exchange occurs between J. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty (with Kitty employing a racial slur that was regrettably all-too-common during the Second World War): “They … they’ve dropped a second bomb,” Oppie said, holding her. […]
