There have been major disappointments in the garden this spring. One of my two persimmon trees leafed-out only weakly last spring and almost not at all this year. It’ll have to be replaced. A new peach tree that did well last summer also failed to survive. Peaches and persimmons grow in abundance in my neighborhood. Our mountain climate is just cool enough to allow them to thrive, so I’m extremely disappointed with these two. I’ll have to try again.

On top of that, my white sapote tree, which has performed spectacularly for the past several years, is taking a break this year, with no fruit. At least I hope that’s what’s happening. Fingers crossed that it’s not on its way out too.

And it’s been a light year for the avocado tree too, though it looks quite healthy.

But at least my old reliable Miltoniopsis orchid has put on a show! Look at this beauty:

This is one of the first orchids I acquired in my current collection. It’s been around for years and blooms annually, but this is the best it’s ever looked. For some reason, this year, all the flower spikes opened at the same time. Hey, I’ll enjoy what I can.

I’m up by 5:15 most mornings (my dog insists). It’s dark outside, but the stars are bright. For the past few weeks I’ve been watching a dance of planets: Venus, seeming fixed in place, with Mars & Saturn shifting around it. It amazes me, how much they move from night to night. I was able to see the conjunction of Mars and Saturn on April 4, when they appeared closest together, although that was a misty morning and they were just glowing blurs.

Jupiter is supposed to be joining the dance. Four planets, all together! If you can see the eastern horizon, Jupiter should already be visible. But I’ve got a tall mountain in the way, so I don’t know yet if I’ll get to see them all.

Visit EarthSky.org for details.

We all have different definitions of what science fiction is and what we expect from the genre. Reading is a very personal pastime. Tastes vary widely, and as a writer, I recognize that not everyone is going to like my work.

For me, science fiction is about exploring new ideas and trying to take them in new directions, with adventures along the way. Writers in this genre have always been influenced by the work of others, and have built off that work. But exploring new paths is part of the genre too.

This idea of newness, of novelty, of exploring fresh settings and situations is to me, what science fiction is about. Of course, not all readers feel that way. They have expectations. Over the last six months since Edges was published, it’s garnered a few scathing reviews when it didn’t meet those expectations. Specifically, it didn’t include most of the expected tropes of space opera. Fair enough!

Edges is not about galactic empires, trade networks, fast-paced interstellar wars, planetary rebellions, or humanlike aliens. And it definitely does not include faster-than-light travel. That last idea — no FTL — is kind of the point of the series. The galaxy is big. Really, really big. That’s why the last Nanotech Succession novel is titled Vast.

On the front page of my website I have a quote from long-time reader Larry Clough. It’s a flattering quote, but honestly, I posted it there as a warning, so potential new readers know what they’re getting into.

“Linda Nagata presents a unique world-view. Every one of her books that I have read has been alien and disturbing. I love and identify with the characters, but the situations they inhabit stretch the mind. This is as true of Linda Nagata’s fantasy as her science fiction. Her work is really, really different. And that’s a good thing.”

I am so grateful for readers who can enjoy my weird end of the field, along with all their other favorite forms of science fiction! And thank you for taking the time to recommend my books to others, and for posting your positive reader reviews. Together, you keep me going, and you give me a reason to write the next book. Cheers! 🍻🚀

I first “met” Vonda N. McIntyre online, circa 2011. She warmly welcomed me into the writers cooperative, Book View Café, which she had helped establish. It was such an honor getting to know this “big name” writer. Vonda’s 1978 novel, Dreamsnake, had won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Pacific Northwest Booksellers award — at a time when successful young women writers of science fiction were far more rare than they are these days. She also won the 1998 Nebula Award with her novel The Moon and the Sun.

Vonda and I were both website geeks and before long we were working together to develop a new online store for Book View Café.

Eventually, I was very pleased to have the opportunity to meet Vonda in person, over a fine lunch at a shoreline restaurant in her native Seattle. I got to see her again at the Spokane Worldcon where she was guest of honor. Over the years, she’s been hugely supportive of me and my work, something I deeply appreciate.

Just this past week, horrible news arrived. Vonda has been diagnosed with inoperable metastatic pancreatic cancer. Grim, though not quite imminent, as she described it. There is time, and there are treatments to prolong the time and, I hope, to provide quality of life.

None of us knows if we will be here tomorrow, but most of us don’t have to face such a stern diagnosis. My heart goes out to Vonda, and it’s my hope that we will have her with us into the future, and that we will see her next novel before too long.

Find Vonda’s novels here at Book View Café, and while you’re there note the minimalism of her posted bio. That’s so Vonda N. McIntyre. 🙂

Just noting a couple of recent incidents…

On Sunday, I stayed overnight in Portland before catching an early morning flight home. While I was there I received my usual daily email from Amazon, with suggestions on books I might be interested in — but this time every book in the email was on the business or process of writing, and all were by WMG Publishing. I might not have noticed this, except that I’d spent the prior week at a workshop put on by WMG Publishing on the business and process of writing. **Ahem** How did the Amazon AI know I was at the workshop?

Then on Tuesday, I used my Android phone to look up the number of our local plumbing company and give them a call. Afterward, I sent myself an email reminder (as I do). In the subject line I typed “Al” and Google suggested “Allen’s”. I accepted that and it next suggested “Plumbing” (capitalized). So because I called a phone number, the AI guessed the likely subject line of my email.

I told all this to my husband.
He asked, “Do you like them spying on you?”
My answer: “No! It’s creepy.”

But they’re not perfect yet. On the way home from town I asked Google to tell me the weather. It gave me the weather for Portland even though I’d left Portland over a day before. Go figure.

I haven’t posted in a while. What with hurricanes, earthquakes, politics, nuclear war, global warming, etc., posting about a new review can seem a bit trivial, and I haven’t been inspired to write about other topics.

I have been keeping busy, though. I’ve been working on a new novel in an existing story world. I’m 44,000 words into it, which is a big enough investment that I feel like I ought to finish it. I had/have an ambition to hammer out an extremely rough draft by the time I head to the mainland in October — four weeks from now. That would be some kind of a miracle for me, but hey, you never know.

I write best when I’m confident. I tend not to write at all when I’m feeling discouraged. Not a tough-survivor trait, I know, but it is what it is. Today I’m feeling discouraged. Tomorrow will probably be better. If I could look at writing as a hobby instead of a career, I think I’d be happier — but I still need to figure out where the money is coming from.

For many years I’ve done all my writing on a Toshiba laptop. A few years ago it started having issues, so I stopped allowing it online. It’s worked great ever since then. I’ve only been using it for writing and coding ebooks, and I back up my files multiple times a day.

Two days ago I finally ordered a new laptop.

Today — a discouraging day — I decided to start my writing session by typing out all the things that are bothering me. This is something like Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” but not in longhand. I was less than two hundred words into this exercise when my old laptop crashed. System dump something or other, scary stuff. Ugh. But at least I hadn’t just written some wonderful artistic passage! And the laptop rebooted.

Being of a paranoid nature, I decided to take a snapshot of everything on the laptop’s hard drive. (I’ve done this before and like I said, I back up files frequently. But extra insurance, right?) I copied almost all the folders onto a USB stick, leaving out only a couple of things I really don’t care about. Everything, all together, came out to slightly over a gigabyte of data. Years of work. One gigabyte.

Easy to tell I never kept photos, movies, or Photoshop files on this computer.

Within a few minutes after I finished copying files, the laptop crashed again. It rebooted again, but I can take a hint. I won’t be doing anymore writing on the dear old Toshiba. Maybe I’ll fire up the old Netbook and use that until the new laptop arrives. Or I’ll use this Mac desktop, though it’s getting on in computer-years too.

Sigh.

Technology.

Twitter can be a rough-and-tumble place. People have opinions and most do not hesitate to share them. I don’t claim innocence and I do recognize that nuance is often lost with 140 characters.

But what is it with the grand sweeping condemnations?

Grand sweeping condemnations — that’s my term for when people choose a demographic characteristic common to a large and otherwise diverse group — and accuse all of being guilty of some shared sin. In my Twitter timeline white men and baby boomers are common targets. It will be different for you depending on who you follow — and who you unfollow. Damn right I’ve unfollowed people for excessive GSCs.

(Yes, #notAllMen is either a legitimate dissent or an ironic comment. Hard to be sure in all cases.)

I don’t understand the logic of GSCs. What do people expect to gain by using them? Shore up the perceived tribe by casting disdain on others? Maybe.

As a baby boomer, it’s hard not to notice how the baby-boomer hate routine has become increasingly common. Otherwise fine folk who would not for a moment consider themselves bigots are happy to play this game. No big deal if you want to insult me. I know how to unfollow.

In the abstract though, when baby boomers are held up as the worst generation, reprehensible in all aspects and particularly in their regard for the environment, I get offended on behalf of people like my husband.

Ron devoted his career to Haleakala National Park. He worked long hours for limited compensation because it was his goal to protect the park’s unique and fragile natural areas from the ravages of invasive species, and when he retired from the park service he left those wilderness areas in a far healthier condition than they’d been when he started. The ecological recovery has been amazing.

In essence, Ron picked one place in the wide world and poured his heart and soul into making it better. That might be a strategy to consider, for those of you who want to point fingers at his generation. Better to act, do something, than to accuse and complain and alienate those who actually have contributed to the betterment of the world.

And one more bit of motherly advice from the old lady: Don’t determine your tribe by simplistic demographic dividers. There is more diversity in any group than many of us care to admit. Yes, even those heinous baby boomers.

Here are four baby boomers, celebrating the completion of a fence to keep feral goats and pigs out of Maui’s amazing national park:

Left to right: Ross Hart, Ron Nagata, Mike Ing, Ted Rodrigues
photo credit: Dallas Nagata White

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there!

My two children are adults now, but I’ve always loved being a mom and still do. Perhaps as a consequence, moms have often been prominent in my fiction.

My children were quite young when I wrote my first novel, The Bohr Maker. In that story, Phousita, one of two main protagonists, is not technically a mother but she’s a mother-figure for many. In Tech-Heaven the solo protagonist is a widowed mother with a close relationship to her own mother, her mother-in-law, and her daughters. Deception Well is a bit short on mothers, but Vast makes up for it, I think. Limit of Vision doesn’t directly explore motherhood, but in Memory one of the driving emotional themes is the strong relationship between the protagonist, Jubilee, and her mother. The Red trilogy is lacking in motherhood — it’s Dad who gets the focus here. But in The Last Good Man motherhood returns as a powerful emotional force behind a fast-paced plot.

True Brighton is the protagonist of The Last Good Man. As a forty-nine-year-old mother of three adult children, she’s not your usual action hero–but then she’s not your usual forty-nine-year-old mom, either. True is an army veteran, working now as a military contractor. She’s seen her share of battlefield action and she understands all too well the pain that parenthood can bring. In this opening scene, True encounters a father desperate to hire the services of Requisite Operations to rescue his kidnapped daughter:

Read the entire first chapter of The Last Good Man here.

Best wishes for the day, whether you’re a mother or not. 🙂

“…there is nothing for me to do as we circle the world except to admire the overwhelming beauty of this place that we have threatened and corrupted with our wars and our poisons. Lotus passes from daylight into a night lit by electric lights that outline the continents and surround the oceans, and in time it is day again, and we are bathed in the bright-blue reflected glow of the Pacific, and I can’t stop looking at it all, taking it all in. Astronomers speak of finding Earthlike worlds around other stars, but they are speaking in hyperbole, in meaningless generalities. There is only one Earthlike world. There will only ever be one and it is fragile, and if it takes the cold manipulations of a fathomless AI to bring balance and to protect this precious place from the madness of those who would set it on fire, so be it. I, for one, am proud to serve as a soldier in that war.”

–excerpt from The Trials, Book 2 of the Red trilogy

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Image courtesy of NASA.
Image caption: “NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a unique view of Earth from the spacecraft’s vantage point in orbit around the moon.”
Follow this link for more information on this image.

I’ve been reading a lot of election analysis over the past week and, incredibly, much of it seeks to point fingers of blame for the Republican victory at the Democratic party, or at “social justice warriors,” or at very generalized groups. Today’s guilty party was straight middle-class white women, of which I am one. Blame me if you want to, but it’s bullshit.

The Republican candidate won either because the election was hacked (and no one is talking about it), or because enough people rejected a fully qualified candidate in favor of one who lacks good judgment according to 74% of exit poll respondents.

Granted, we now know that polls are utterly worthless. But it appears that people knew what they were buying, and they bought it anyway. This is mind boggling to me. Honesty, humility, knowledge, and a propensity for public service used to be valued traits in this country. Apparently, no longer.