Tag Archives: Bering Sea

Ceres Plague first draft and Provideniya

Posted on by
Reply

20_bigThe final scenes of the next Perry Helion thriller, The Ceres Plague, take place in the struggling Russian Bering Sea settlement, Provideniya. Like some other cities in Russia — and America — Provideniya has seen better days. The end of the Cold War resulted in Provideniya losing a sizeable chunk of its population. Vistas of Providenyia are dominated by the herd of outsized apartment buildings that graze across the city’s hillside. Many of the drab apartment blocks, built during the Soviet era, stand empty and crumbling, giving the town an air of dissolution and fall. Sad for the people who still live there and have to suffer through the brutal winters, but a great locale for the final action sequence of The Ceres Plague.

By the way, the first draft of Ceres is now complete. A few weeks of re-writing, beta reading and editing and The Ceres Plague will be winging its way to readers.

I wonder if any of The Ceres Plague’s future readers will live in Provideniya?

White Alice

Posted on by
Reply

WHiteALice3Their odd, parabolic shapes loom strange in the treeless tundra of the Arctic. Like alien eyes or movie screens where there are people. Even the name is enigmatic: White Alice. A name that suggests Lewis Carroll and fantastical realms. In the 1950s and 1960s before communications satellites became plentiful, the U.S. military needed a method for keeping the far flung bases in Alaska in touch with the command center at NORAD headquarters and with the Pentagon.

White Alice was the answer. It was a system for scattering radio over the horizon using bizarre curved antennas. The White Alice parabolic antennas rising up from the empty tundra testified to Alaska’s importance as one of the front lines in the Cold War struggle with the Soviets.

WHiteAlice

The enigmatic White Alice shapes make an appearance in my next Perry Helion thriller, The Ceres Plague. They’re just one of the mysterious remnants of the Cold War that crazed humanity-transforming Dr. Taylor Crandee gets his mitts on in The Ceres Plague.

top photo by TVJ

Weaponizing the weather

Posted on by
Reply

bering strait mapUsing the massive power of modern weapons to cause devastating global environmental change is one of the main threads of my thriller, The Atlas Fracture. A recent post at Salon, “We Tried to Weaponize the Weather,” describes some of the efforts by scientists and the military in the 1950s and 1960s to do just that.

A shadowy and “unofficial” group of top scientists and defense officials called the Von Karman Committee regularly looked at ways the Soviet Union might be planning to change global weather — such as damming the Bering Strait, which would cause the Arctic sea ice to melt. They also studied methods by which the U.S. and NATO could also “weaponize the weather” and attack the Soviet Union. An excerpt:

“Another scheme was to divert the Gulf Stream, which would severely change the climate of Northern Europe. Still another idea was to dam the Bering Strait. Such alterations would have clear, long-term effects on world climate. And these changes seemed possible. Reflecting on von Neumann’s predictions, the NATO group believed that an extraordinary tool lay in the hands of military planners: the hydrogen bomb. ‘It is perhaps true,’ the committee concluded, ‘that means presently within man’s reach could be employed so as to alter global climate for long periods.'”

Luckily the Von Karman Committee’s efforts were never implemented. But what if some of the committee’s wild ideas had been attempted? How close would they have come to the events depicted in The Atlas Fracture?  You’ll have to read it and judge for yourself!