Thriller writer Andrew Mayne presents free audiobooks and short stories of mystery and adventure.
This episode features Payload, read by special guest Justin Robert Young.
Heard your friends talking about Andrew Mayne’s books but don’t have the coin to pick one up? Now you can listen to his first three book for free in audiobook podcast form.
The Grendel’s Shadow: T.R. Westwood, distinguished professor of biology and the galaxy’s greatest hunter is in for the biggest challenge of his career. When an unknown animal starts killing off settlers on a backwater planet run on coal and steam power, he’s the only person who can help stop the slaughter.
GET The Grendel’s Shadow audiobook HERE!
Public Enemy Zero: The world is out to kill Mitchell Roberts. A strange virus is on the loose sending everyone he comes in contact with into a homicidal rage. He’s got to stay a step ahead of everyone around him if he doesn’t want to get ripped apart alive.
GET Public Enemy Zero audiobook HERE!
The Chronological Man: The Monster in the Mist: When the citizens of Boston begin to go missing in the fog in 1890, it’s up to the mysterious Smith, inventor and adventurer, to figure out what’s going on with the help of his assistant, April Malone.
GET The Chronological Man audiobook HERE!
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Are you a fan of Andrew Mayne’s fiction books? Would you like to know all the inside scoop on what’s coming next? Sneak peaks at projects in progress? Free un-published anywhere else short stories?
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR ANDREW MAYNE’S BOOK MAILING LIST
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The breakout Science Fiction author of 2011 is waiting to invade that brand spanking new eReader of your choice. If you found yourself a Kindle Fire or iPad 2 under the Christmas tree this year you need to snag entire Andrew Mayne catalogue, all for under $4.
The Weird Things podcast host has four best selling titles: Grendel’s Shadow, Public Enemy Zero, The Chronological Man: A Monster in the Mist and The Chronological Man: The Martian Emperor
Since they all cost .99¢ each, you can have hours and hours of critically acclaimed, groundbreaking SciFi writing for less than the price of lunch.
Here is what people are saying about the works of Andrew Mayne:
“What I found was a gem of a book for only .99 cents. A fast paced thriller that I literally couldn’t put down. I will definitely be checking out the other Andrew Mayne titles on Kindle.”
– Robert Gemienhardt about Public Enemy Zero
“Mayne’s books just keep better! The Chronological Man: The Monster in the Mist was excellent! It had well written characters, good dialog and a great story to be told!”
– Simone Allyne about The Chronological Man: The Monster in the Mist
“This book reminds me of all of the best elements of old school science fiction, combined with modern sensibilities.”
– Dennis Owens Jr. about The Chronological Man: The Emperor of Mars
Find all of Andrew’s books here or download them directly from your eReader or smart phone using the Kindle, iBooks or Nook store apps.
Andrew Mayne is one year older today, officially.
Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time with Mayne knows two emotions: an amazement that one man can be so multi-talented and a staggering frustration that one man can be so multi-talented. This year, he decided he wanted to be an author, more specifically a fiction author since he already has a robust library of non-fiction and instructional magic books.
So he sat down on a flight from Houston to Fort Lauderdale and on his iPad wrote out the beginnings of a story.
That story is the first chapter in his first fiction novella, The Grendel’s Shadow. It has been a fixture on the Amazon.com Science Fiction Adventure Top 100 since it’s release. The only reviews for it that aren’t five stars are four stars. Which is pretty cool.
Until you find out that he’s written four more books. Since the release of Grendel. On March 28th. Four of them. In less than two months. The two of them that I’ve read are very good.
Also, in his spacious downtime from that he put in the research and development to create and release a brilliant new utility Photosynthesis. For which there are only eight left to pre-order.
It’s not human.
Yes, Andrew is a year older. But does it really matter? He’s just going to conquer death anyway then write 60,000 words about it in 48 hours.
In all seriousness, this site doesn’t exist without him. In this context as a writer, I do not either.
Happy birthday, old friend.
Technological advancement moves in strange ways. It’s often the technologies that come from just outside our mainstream field of vision that change things the most radically.
The properties of semiconductors were well known decades before anybody thought they’d be a great way to shrink vacuum tubes into transistors and then microchips. The implications of a really big network where everybody you know is plugged into it with PCs and mobile devices was a hard concept for anybody to fathom.
I’d like to tell you about a technology on the horizon that could be bigger than anything else we’ve seen before and make possible all sorts of crazy things like Doctor Who-like Tardis boxes that are bigger on the inside, matter replicators and line-of-sight teleportation.
It’s a technology that’s already been proven in small forms in the laboratories and now faces the challenge of finding out if it can scale without ridiculous amounts of energy.
The concept began with a theory by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein about what happens when matter gets really, really cold. Quantum physics informs us that we can never know the precise position and velocity of a particle. This means the more you know about one, the less you can know about the other. If you slowed down a particle enough and looked at it under some special microscope it would look like a blur. The act of slowing it down means that its exact position has to become literally fuzzy.
In laboratories we can see this fuzziness by creating a Bose-Einstein condensate; a bucket of atoms supercooled to the point that they behave like one uber-atom and quantum effects are magnified. One of the cool applications of this is the atom laser (it’s called a laser even though it’s not made of light).
An atom laser works by using a Bose-Einstein condensate to cool a group of atoms and then using a technique like magnetic fields or an actual laser to propagate (emit) the matter in some kind of beam. In the image you can see what a beam of sodium atoms looks like when emitted from a magnetic trap.
The potential for this is immense. It’s very much in its infancy and hard to tell what will actually become of it, but when you can reliably get matter to behave like light, amazing things are possible.
An awesome particle beam
You could use this to create an incredibly powerful particle beam that would be even more precise than a laser and create smaller microprocessor components and be used to etch out things like nano-scale devices out of solid matter.
Tardis boxes
The fact that you can change matter’s position to such an indeterminate state means that you could theoretically have two particles in the same space. This could allow for matter compression where you could squeeze a large amount of matter into a confined area. Like Doctor Who’s Tardis, this would give a box that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Keeping molecules and complex structures from falling apart would be very big challenge however.
Teleportation
The ability of a matter laser to “project” beams of atoms means that a form of line-of-sight teleportation is theoretically possible. The image of the atom laser above shows a kind of crude form of that. If you could contain the beam over long distances through some other means or use a matter equivalent of a fiber optic cable, you could shoot atoms at near the speed of light from one point to another. At the receiving end the atoms are returned to a high temperature and reassembled, er somehow (see below).
Matter replicator
A Bose-Einstein condensate also makes interesting chemistry possible. You can cool down two different types of atoms and merge them to create molecules. You could theoretically do the same with an atom laser. Crossing beams could be used to create molecules and maybe even assemble more complex structures and build things out of scratch like the matter replicators on Star Trek.
It’s anybodies guess how far off any of these things are or even if they’ll ever happen in a way that makes it into day to day use. The biggest complications are often the unseen ones after you’ve proven what you thought was the most difficult part. That said, when the first laser was fired off in a laboratory, people could think of only a few applications for what was at that time an unwieldy technology. Decades later we can mass produce lasers for pennies apiece and use them in everything from Blue Ray players, to satellites to key chain toys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_laser
http://cua.mit.edu/ketterle_group/Animation_folder/Atom_laser.htm
Researchers studying nine patients who survived swine flu during the H1N1 pandemic have noticed that they produced a wide range of antibodies that could be used to fight off other strains.
Currently they’re looking to see if they can use this to make a universal vaccine that could fight off any type of influenza – even the ones we’re most concerned about here on Weird Things:
We’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope it doesn’t give us an immunity to the bad-ass day walker virus.
Over at CrunchGear they have a nice overview of why Minecraft matters. For the uninitiated, Minecraft is a fun sandbox game that lets you build things out of virtual blocks. The blocks have different properties and can be made into materials like glass. Think of it as the Matrix meets Legos. The game is hugely popular and shows how much we like to build and create. Some folks have gone as far as making deck by deck replicas of the starship Enterprise and actual working mechanical computers. Think about that one for a second.
One of the fascinating premises of movies like Tron and the Matrix is the idea of a computer powerful enough to simulate life itself. Although some process (like protein functions) are way beyond our current capabilities, replicating them virtually is an engineering problem and not an insurmountable scientific one. Sooner or later we’re going to see a research paper about a virtual bacteria that behaves precisely like its real world counterpart. From there it’s all a matter of scale before we’re creating virtual Olivia Wilde’s that have cellular chemistry every bit as complex as our own.
Aside from creating super intelligent AI, imagine if you took the 100 smartest people in the world and made virtual versions of them – and then you overclocked the computer. You’d be able to compress 100 years of scientific discovery into minutes. This is why concepts like the singularity give people the willies. It means that all those things we think of as being 1,000 years off in the future could be really just weeks away once you reach a certain level of computational ability.
Games like Minecraft and Sim City are the starting point to a very interesting journey. I hope we’re part of it.
A brief explanation of why Minecraft matters
Building mega objects in Minecraft
So a new research paper has come out and told us what Hollywood has been telling us for years; if we meet aliens they’re most likely going to act like 16th century conquistadors and take our resources and annihilate us in the process. Similar to Stephen Hawking’s dire warning it says contact would spell doom for us all. Space.com
The rational is that since that’s what we did in the past to other other civilizations, that’s what an advanced civilization will do to us.
There are some very serious flaws with this argument. Let’s take a look at a few of them:
1. Our galaxy is a really, really big place
The argument claims that aliens would come to earth and take our minerals and such. Why? Current estimates put the total number of planets in our galaxy in the hundreds of billions – maybe even the trillions if you count planetoids. Even if we assume an absurdly highly number of them have intelligent life, that leaves millions of planets to exploit for minerals and other resources.
The galaxy is not a bigger version of the earth. In the 15th century humans lived on every habitable continent. There was no place you could go for resources except Antarctica that didn’t have people living on it. Trying to exploit any place for resources meant that you were likely to come up against indigenous populations.
In a really big galaxy, there’s no reason to upset the locals unless that’s what you want to do.
2. Energy
Space is big. The distance between solar systems is huge. If you have some kind of technology that can easily bridge this gap or lesson the amount of energy you need to travel between stars, earth’s resources are going to look pathetic in comparison. Seriously, are we worried they’re coming here to steal our coal to fuel their space ships?
3. Comparative Advantage
Any sufficiently advanced species should have a grasp of economics. Like us, they may not always heed what they’ve learned, but if they’re flying about space they probably have a better grasp on prosperity than we do. If they’re profit motivated it would be the best possible news for us.
One of the most important principles of economics is comparative advantage. It basically means this; If you have two parties unevenly matched in skill and productivity, it’s always advantageous for both for the more skilled and productive party to let the lessor skilled party focus on production of whatever the first party is least efficient at – even if it’s more efficient than the second party.
An example would be Apple. By focusing all of its energies on designing iPhones and allowing a less-skilled party to make the iPhone, Apple increases its productivity and profit. The less-skilled party benefits by making the product. Both gain. If Apple focused all its resources on designing and making the iPhone they’d make less overall because it’s unable to maximize what it’s most efficient at.
In our alien contact scenario we’re the unskilled, inefficient party. Despite this, we still have value we can bring to a superior civilization. That value may be in providing services, cheap labor or producing reality television. Whatever it may be, the most valuable thing we can offer isn’t our resources, but 7 billion individuals with varying degrees of creativity and ingenuity. Comparative Advantage
However…
If they’re a bunch of religious zealots who abandoned everything they learned that gave them prosperity or secular zealots with no regard for the concept of individuality, we’re screwed.
As we prepare for tomorrow’s live hunt for what is known as the “Night Creeper”, we thought we’d share with you some photos from a recent reconnaissance of the area. Our first nighttime recon resulted in Justin and I getting stopped by the police FYI. It appears we’re not the only ones paying attention to the weird reports coming from the area.
What stood out most to us is the fact that this area forms a triangle with two other hotspots of unusual activity and they both have large bodies of water nearby that lead straight to the Everglades – a wild environment filled with cryptid and unusual phenomena.
On Monday night’s live show (9PM EST) we plan to go into a tunnel that’s the main access point between the wetlands and the area of interest. We’re not assuming it’s a cryptid or some other creature that’s been sighted. We just find it very interesting.
During our daylight investigation we found signs that something was living underneath there or at least spent some time there. The above photo shows a very large fish head that was dragged 10 feet above the bank into a dark corner. A raccoon or Gollum? We hope to find out.
What’s better than a photo? A photo of a ghost. What’s even better than that? Capturing that photo on a friend’s iPhone. Of course the problem is, ghosts are never very cooperative and not likely to show themselves on demand. That’s why we’ve created this handy tutorial for faking a ghost image on a friend’s iPhone.
Remember that time you went to take a photo and when you looked at it your iMac screen mysteriously shown through your body as if you were an ephemeral spirit because deep down your souls are intertwined? I do.
Got a weird photo? Send it to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail with “Weird photo” in the subject line or upload it to Flickr and tag it #weirdthingscom.
I took this photo outside Disneyland. It’s of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. No retouching took place. This is exactly how the photo appeared!
My own private Cloverfield from Andrew Mayne on Vimeo.