Category: Uncategorized
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Reading the Hieroglyphs
The Hieroglyph anthology gets its official release September 9, and the publishers are leaking some teaser material. You can go here to read a preview of the e-book version on Scribd. Or you can download a PDF excerpt here, including the introduction by Lawrence Krauss and the essay "Innovation Starvation" by Neal Stephenson which inspired…
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Arisia 2014 — Featuring ME!
This coming weekend I'm off to romantic Boston for the Arisia 2014 convention at the largely parasite-free Westin Hotel. If you want to stop by and see me, here's my schedule. Friday, 10:00 P.M.: Military SF: When Diplomacy Fails A panel on military SF, moderated by Alexander Jablokov, with me, Debra Doyle, Dennis McCunney, and…
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A Book About Venice
I love Venice, and I have enjoyed Peter Ackroyd's work in the past, so I was very pleased and excited when I got his book Venice: Pure City. But as I read it I became more and more frustrated and disappointed. Mr. Ackroyd attempts to paint a portrait of Venice, incorporating its history, its art, its mix…
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A Christmas Tradition
Long-time readers of this 'blog know that I like to put up a link every Christmas to my favorite holiday-themed Web site in the whole world: the NORAD Santa Tracker. This year, think a moment about the people who created that site. Their normal job is air defense. Three hundred and sixty-four days a year…
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Real Steampunk Airships, Part 4: The Man Who Counts
The real Golden Age of airships arrived in 1900, when Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched his Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 from a floating hangar on Lake Constance in southern Bavaria. Zeppelin was from a very old and influential family in the small German kingdom of Wurttemberg. His sovereign sent him to America as an observer during…
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Real Steampunk Airships, Part 3: Robida’s World!
It wasn't until 1884 that a really practical airship took to the skies. La France, built by a pair of French Army Captains, Charles Renaud and Arthur Krebs, is generally considered the first truly dirigible aircraft. It was 165 feet long, with an overall weight of about 2 tons. Most of that weight was taken…
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Real Steampunk Airships, Part 2: Dirigibles!
Balloons could get you up in the air, but they weren't steerable. Various inventors tried to build powered airships which could fly anywhere the pilot wished to go, but during the first half of the 19th Century they were stymied by the massive weight and enormous fuel consumption of available engines. Turns out railroad technology…
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Real Steampunk Airships, Part 1: Balloons!
This little blog series is based on a talk I gave on August 18, 2012, at Pi-Con in Enfield, Connecticut. About a dozen people showed up, which was very gratifying, and I think all of us had a good time. Airships are the signature technology of steampunk and alternate-history stories. If you look up in…
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My Fiction
Novels: A Darkling Sea (2014), Tor Books. Corsair (2015), Tor Books. Arkad’s World (2019), Baen Books. The Initiate (2020), Baen Books. The Godel Operation (2021), Baen Books. The Scarab Mission (2023), Baen Books. Short Stories: “A Diagram of Rapture” (F&SF, April 2000) “The Alien Abduction” (F&SF, September 2000) “Return to Skull Island” (Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives #1, 2001) “Train…
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Apocrypha
APOCRYPHA by James L. Cambias A beautiful girl in trouble draws Joshua bar-Joseph into a deadly plot! It is night in Alexandria, but the great metropolis never sleeps. Down by the waterfront, inns and taverns are filled with publicans and sinners. After dark the city vigiles only go there in groups. The worst dive of…
The Cambias Digression 