Does gender make the scribe?

MenvsWomen-Writers-infographicDo men or women make better writers? A loaded question. In fact, a question that is almost impossible to answer. The rub here is the word “better.” Clearly, the determination of better is purely subjective. Some folks like character-driven writing, some like plot-driven work. One form is not inherently “better” than the other, it’s a matter of taste and predilection.

Still, the online grammar-checker site Grammarly.com has put together an infographic that attempts to answer this question of whether gender makes the scribe.

-Tim

The straight noise on silencers

Screen Shot 2014-12-04 at 10.04.27 PMThe tech website Ars Technica has a great piece on the devices folks slap onto the end of guns in movies (and, truth be told, in thriller novels!) allowing them to kill their enemies with barely a peep. These devices are typically called silencers, but should be termed suppressors, as they don’t actually render silent the report of a firearm. In fact, even with a suppressor, the bark of gun can be quite loud. A suppressor will lessen the sound somewhat, and allow for the shooter to get by without heavy duty ear protection. But the soft chirp of the suppressor-equipped gun so familiar from the movies is, like most things in Hollywood, largely a fabrication.

The reason we so often see a silenced pistol-equipped character blipping his way past a passel of bad guys is because the concept captures our imagination. There’s something of the superhero about the capability to remove enemies so swiftly and quietly. The idea of an explosive firearm rendered nearly silent is a movie meme that viewers find interesting. And as the greatest film director who ever lensed, Stanley Kubrick, said about making movies, “Accurate is good, but interesting is better.”

Which makes me think super silencers aren’t going away anytime soon in movie land (or thriller novels for that matter!).

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! 

A view from The Ceres Plague

 

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One of the more remote towns in America is the tiny village of Gambell, Alaska. Located at the northwestern tip of St. Lawrence Island in Bering Sea, Gambell is only 40 miles from Russia’s Siberian coast. Gambell is also the windswept stage for some of the dramatic events that unfold in The Ceres Plague, the next Perry Helion thriller.

Here is a view of Gambell taken by NOAA photographer Lt. Tim Smith this summer with the Arctic sun riding high in the sky. The town of Gambell is to the right, Siberia along the horizon. Here’s a link to the high res file.

 

Life imitates thrillers

Screen Shot 2014-08-21 at 10.13.12 PMIt’s not often that the elements of an adventure thriller come true in real life. But reality has just given my thriller The Atlas Fracture a gold star. The book speculates on microbial life found deep under the Antarctic ice. And this microbial life is not the kind you want to bring home to meet the parents.

Now further research on water samples taken from under the ice cap in a feature called Lake Whillans confirms there are all sorts of bugs swimming around. “We found not just that things are alive, but that there’s an active ecosystem,” said lead study author Brent Christner, a microbiologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “If you had to think up what would be the coolest scenario for an ecosystem in Antarctica, you couldn’t make this up.” Well, not to be cheeky to Brent Christner, but actually you could. Check out The Atlas Fracture and the follow-on The Ceres Plague (available soon).

Could one of the microbes found in Lake Whillans be the bug that Dr. Crandee finds in The Atlas Fracture?

Let’s hope not.

Sneak peek at The Ceres Plague cover

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Here is a sneak look at the cover for the next book in the Perry Helion thriller series, The Ceres Plague. Perry discovers that a former Air Force Base in the Bering Sea, supposedly contaminated with toxic waste, isn’t what it seems. You can see all of Ceres in September!

Polar bear protection: shotgun or rifle?

EllenRifleIIIn addition to my role as reputed kingpin of the Perry Helion thriller series (the next book of which, The Ceres Plague, will be out in September), I am also the editor of Ocean Navigator magazine. Ocean Navigator is for folks who like to go on voyages, either along a coast or across an ocean. As ON editor, I get some interesting requests — like a recent appeal for help in choosing a weapon for protection against polar bears.

One of ON‘s regular writers is Ellen Massey Leonard, who, with her husband Seth, has sailed around the world in a wooden sailboat. The Leonard’s next adventure is a sail through the Northwest Passage aboard their newest boat, Celeste, a 40-foot cold-molded cutter built in British Columbia in 1986.

Turns out the Canadian government — and common sense — requires that voyagers making the Northwest Passage through Arctic Canada carry some sort of firearm for protection against polar bear attack. Should that firearm be a shotgun or a rifle? In Ellen and Seth’s case, the issue was further complicated by the fact that neither of them had ever touched a gun before.

Since Ellen had read my Perry Helion thriller The Atlas Fracture, she asked me if I could help by providing them with some gun training. This seemed like an intriguing task, so I said yes and then brought in my friend Steve Konkoly, a former naval officer and a fellow thriller novelist. With more formal training in firearms, Steve was a natural lead instructor (my role was to assist Steve and toss in an occasional brilliant observation about ballistics or bullet grain or announcing lunch time). We set up a session at the Scarborough Fish and Game Association’s firing range in Scarborough, Maine.

Unfortunately, Seth was not able to attend, so the training and decision process was on Ellen alone. Steve showed her the basic operation of a pump action 12 gauge shotgun and a bolt action, .308 caliber rifle. Then it was time to shoot. Steve fired a few shotgun blasts into the firing range’s sand berm. Following that, Ellen stepped up to take a turn at the trigger. Her first attempt at a shooting stance involved feet close together and her body leaning away from the gun (!). We got this corrected and Ellen was soon blasting sand grains with the best of them.

Next up was the Ruger Scout .308 rifle. Ellen dutifully listened to loading procedure for the three-round magazine, how to work the bolt and line up the target with the ‘scope. Then it was back to Steve to take the first few shots. The explosive report of a .308 is damn impressive.

Ellen was impressed. She only needed to experience the fury of one shot sent down range before she announced, “I’ve made my decision.” It would be a shotgun for her and Seth on their journey. Let’s just hope they never have to use it.

Of course, after lead instructor Steve, I took full advantage of the opportunity and blasted off a few rounds with both the shotgun and the rifle. I managed to pound some sand with the shotgun and put three rounds on target at 100 yards with the rifle.

Perry would be pleased.

New cover arrives!

243x355pxTheAtlasFractureThe new cover design for The Atlas Fracture has landed. A threatening cloud of smoke, a drill rig beset by howling winds, a deep blue sky and an ominous burst of color on the horizon – they all work to suggest deadly happenings in Antarctica as Perry Helion fights a clever team of terrorists determined to unleash environmental disaster.

Designer Shannon Perry, who works from her home in Virginia, executed this design and she did a fantastic job. If you get a chance, let us know what you think of the new direction by email: tim at timqueeney dot com. And sign up for our mailing list (at top right) for the latest info on Perry and his colleagues at DARPA’s Office of Scenario Projection (OSP).

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.