Will this robot sub find the Atlas Fracture?

Screen Shot 2014-12-03 at 10.43.25 PMScientists from the UK, USA and Australia are using a sonar equipped robot sub to measure Antarctic ice shelves from the underside. Will this little robot swim under the Ross ice shelf and find the Atlas Fracture zone? – that thinned area of localized stress that is the perfect place for terrorists to attack to collapse the entire France-sized ice shelf? Probably not, since the Atlas Fracture zone was cooked up primarily for my novel of the same name. But if they do find a major thin ice fracture zone in Antarctica with this thing, I’ll be psyched to read about it!

Read all about the Atlas Fracture now! 

Sporty Spy Vehicle

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAIn the final scenes of my upcoming thriller, The Ceres Plague, Perry Helion has to crash a private party driving a Belaz 7555 mining dump truck (also called a “haul truck”). Not your usual James Bond-type Aston Martin spy sports car. These Belarussian-built trucks are made to work in tough industrial conditions. Though their designers probably never imagined quite what Perry asks one Belaz monster to do.

The Belaz 7555 has a payload capacity of 55 metric tons, or about 3 and a half city buses (if they’d stay in the cargo hopper). And that’s just the cargo, adding in the weight of the truck itself, and we’re tipping the scales at 95 metric tons.

Bond can keep his BMWs and Benz’s. Perry favors the downhill kinetic “oomph” of a fully-loaded Belaz making tracks toward the bad guys.