Was Author Isaac Asimov a Prophet?

Fifty years ago Isaac Asimov published his predictions for the year 2014 in The New York Times. Asimov had written more than 500 books during his career, among them science fiction novels and nonfiction scientific books, so it’s no surprise that he pondered the future. He wrote an article titled, “Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014,” and his guesstimates of what life would be like today are close to reality.

One of his predictions was that electroluminescent panels would be in common use. The panels are currently used in display signs, retail lighting and flat panel television sets. He also predicted that gadgetry would increasingly relieve man of tedious jobs and that sight-sound communication would be in place. That certainly describes FaceTime and Skype, among other devices. And the screen he described to view people called on telephones, and for studying documents and pictures, can be compared to today’s computers, smart phones and tablets.

Asimov thought that robots would be in common use by this year. We do have robotic  vacuum cleaners and computer controlled “robots” in various industries such as car manufacturing, although robotic servants are not yet commonplace.

Some of his predictions were close, but haven’t yet ocurred. He said, “Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,” heating water and converting it to coffee, toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs.” That hasn’t happened yet although instant coffee machines are currently in use.

Among his predictions were that the global population would reach six and a half billion. We’ve surpassed that number by some 60 million, so he was close. Asimov said that we would have become a race of machine tenders and that schools would have to be implemented to teach workers to maintain them.

Some of his predictions may never become a reality, such as homes with glowing, multi-colored ceilings and walls, but far-sighted man that he was, that and other predictions may actually come to pass.

~Jean Henry Mead
Jean Henry Mead Audiobooks

(Source: Huff Post)

Good news, and Happy 2014!

by Carola

The good news has been rolling in recently. Latest is that the 4th Daisy Dalrymple mystery, Murder on the Flying Scotsman, is now out in audio.

  
Last week I got a terrific review of the new Daisy mystery, Heirs of the Body, from ShelfAwareness.com

 "Heirs of the Body marks Daisy Dalrymple's 21st adventure. Dunn has kept her affable heroine--a writer turned amateur sleuth in 1920s England--lively and engaging throughout the traditional whodunit series. As Daisy's aristocratic family become embroiled in another cozy mystery, Dunn offers a strong sense of place, tight and suspenseful plotting and well-defined motives--all serving to enrich the entertaining puzzle at the heart of the story." --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

 A few days before that, I heard that the first three Daisy books are going to be translated into Hungarian! I can't wait to see whether Hungarian cover artists have the same penchant for black cats as the Polish.

This is the latest Polish cover: Mistletoe and Murder, nicely timed for Christmas.


And I got a contract from my UK publisher for another Regency Trilogy. No idea what those covers will be like, but the ebooks are 

So, altogether it's been a great year and I can only wish myself and everyone else as much success in 2014!

Happy New Year

Happy Boxing Day to All Readers!

When I was young you could buy a paperback book for 35 cents. Of course it was much harder to come up with 35 cents back in those days, but it was still a good price. At least for a bibliophile like me. And this love for books led to my becoming an anglophile. Let’s just say that I’m a lover of all good things.

Back in the mid-fifties we teenagers would hang out in the local drugstore. These were magical places for me, because those four walls contained all of the things I loved best. A soda fountain where they made everything from scratch, even Cokes; makeup including the latest fads in eye shadow (blue back then), lipstick and nail polish (the rage was Fire and Ice and was the reddest red you have ever seen); and most importantly: BOOKS! Racks and racks of paperback books.

There was always a sign posted that said, “THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY, BOOKS ARE FOR SALE ONLY.” Of course most of us ignored that. The owners didn’t run me out because I always bought something before I left.

It was there, when I was about 18, that I discovered my beloved Agatha Christie. The first book I happened on to was MURDER IN THE VICERAGE, and I was instantly addicted. I went on to read and reread every book that she had written. Something about her style relaxed me when I was anxious, comforted me when I was hurt and brought a good deal of pleasure to my life.

Through her books I learned of Boxing Day, a bank holiday in England. For a long time I thought it had something to do with pugilism, and I wondered why it came right after Christmas. Eventually I learned it referred to Christmas gifts and a day off for the hired help.

Historians don’t agree on how this holiday originated, although some say the tradition began in England in the Middle Ages. Servants, of course, had to work on Christmas Day, so on the day after left-overs from the huge feasts of the rich were boxed up and sent with the worker-bees as they visited their families. It seems that tradesmen also followed this tradition for their help.

The idea of an extra holiday in celebration of a Christmas Box, or gift, seems wonderful to me, and this Yankee is going to celebrate it. I invite all and sundry to join me…Yanks, Brits, and all readers.

Happy Boxing Day to all readers!

Hugs,

Jackie

Jack Carston and Me

My last contribution featured a spoof interview in which a good friend, the highly talented and incisive journalist Sara Bain, asked questions of my detective, Jack Carston. It started me thinking about my own relationship with him. I’ve known him for about 20 years now and I think he’s getting ready to retire. He first came into my head in the early 90s and now, 5 books later, the compromises he’s had to make are beginning to get to him.

He started because the UK publisher, Piatkus, liked a stand alone thriller my agent had sent them but wanted a police procedural instead, so I set about writing Material Evidence. The ending/solution was based on an actual case I read about in a book on forensic medicine, but the interest came from Carston and the team I found around him. I say ‘I found’ and that seems to be how it was. They all emerged, with their tics, foibles, ways of speaking and relationships ready formed.

Carston himself is curious about things, a creative thinker; he’s interested in people but routines bore and frustrate him. His opinion of some of his superiors is relatively low but his wife, Kath, makes sure that his self-esteem doesn’t get so high as to make him obnoxious. In fact, the love and humour in their marriage is one of the strongest themes running through the books.

Why did he choose to join the police? Well, he’s always wondering what makes people (including himself) tick and likes solving puzzles. At first he joined because he was idealistic and wanted to be on the side of the good guys – but the job has made him more aware that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are relative terms, especially when it comes to people’s motives for what they do. His high success rate derives from the fact that he’s not only fascinated by people, he cares about them, too. He’s not obviously ‘flawed’, has no particular rituals, doesn’t drive a flash car, and his only addiction is his wife. He has a temper, is sometimes childish, doesn’t tolerate fools, despises people who don’t respect the rights of others and is driven mainly by compassion.

I’ve followed him through five books so far and, without any conscious plan on my part, he’s definitely evolved – and in a specific direction. The job has taken him more deeply into the psyches of other people (and his own) and, if he had any moral certainties to start with, he certainly doesn’t now. When I first wrote about him, he solved the case by using the testimony of the various suspects to get into the mind of the victim. The picture he saw there was pretty bleak. But the way he did it – using the physical evidence, but building a picture of who the dead woman was – told me I was dealing with someone who trusted his insights into behaviours. In the next book, things were clearer because there was a definite ‘baddie’. Even then, though, the murders and the motives were surprising and not at all clear cut.

It was The Darkness that signalled the real change. He found himself sympathising with someone who was living a normal life helping others but who was also guilty of very serious crimes. It had quite an impact on him and when, in book four, Shadow Selves, his investigations brought him in contact with highly intelligent people in a university and hospital, the pettiness, self-importance and corrupt nature of some of the people there put another dent in his certainties.

And in the latest book, Unsafe Acts, at the same time as he’s trying to solve two murders and unravel a plot to sabotage an offshore platform, a vindictive superior officer decides he’s had enough of Carston’s unconventional approaches and he faces a charge of indiscipline. It makes him wonder whether he should actually leave the force.

I’m not yet sure of the answer to that, but I will be when I start book six, which might well be the last in the series.

Oh, and seeing that it’s Christmas Eve, compliments of the season from Scotland.

Spider Mountain Isn't Really a Mountain at All

My first audio book was just released, a novel for 9-12 year-olds. Mystery of Spider Mountain is a semi-autobiographical novel based on my childhood, growing up in the Hollywood Hills where, if you climbed high enough, you could see the Pacific Ocean.

Spider Mountain was home to all sorts of crawling creatures, including trapdoor spiders which my brothers and I watched spin hinged doors to hide their homes in the ground. There were also a few tarantulas that had escaped Central American banana boats that docked at southern California ports 

But Spider Mountain isn't a mountain at all, although it appeared so from the vantage points of my four younger  brothers and me. We lived at the foot of the large hill and wondered who lived in the mysterious house at our mountain's summit. It was surrounded by huge evergreen trees and we could hear dogs barking at night, imagining them the size and temperament of wolves or maybe a St.  Bernard. Some nights we'd sit around making up stories about the strange house's inhabitants. Perhaps they were aliens or bank robbers hiding from the police. Kids had vivid imaginations in the days before television and electronic devises.

One day, while our parents were at work, we climbed the hill to spy on the people who lived there. A narrow, winding road wound its way to the top but it was choked with weeds and debris, so how could anyone drive to the summit? A tall eucalyptus tree stood  halfway up the hill complete with a long looped rope that we kids used to swing on. We called it "Dead Man's Tree" because the rope resembled a hangman's noose.

All these things and more are incorporated into Mystery of Spider Mountain, the first novel in my Hamilton Kid's mystery series as well as how lost children can survive in the wilderness.

The three and a half hour recording is available in print and ebook editions, but I'm most excited about the audio book version, which was skillfully narrated by Chelsea Ward. Chelsea will also narrate book two in the series, Ghost of Crimson Dawn as well as A Village Shattered..

The book is available at Audible.com, Amazon.com (soon on iTunes) in time for Christmas. 

Happy Holidays

Celebrate Solstice

 And have a Very Merry Yule! 

                                                                Carola 

And as I won't be back till after New Year's, I'll wish everyone all the best for 2014, and to the world: Peace and Compassion

You Cannot Kill The Christmas Spirit

By Mark W. Danielson

Yankees Catcher Yogi Berra once quipped, “You can observe a lot by just watching.”  While this is true, you can also learn a lot from listening and reading.  By nature, authors are a curious sort who may be more inclined to watch, listen, and learn, but book worms are in a league all their own.  These are the people I am addressing today, for they yearn to glimpse into the other people’s lives to understand history.  Today I am sharing a treasured recollection from a dear friend who grew up in England at a time of world war when civilian casualties were the norm.  It was a time when no one knew if they would make it through the day, and yet somehow they managed to carry on in whatever sense of normalcy they could muster.  I salute all of the survivors of World War II, civilian and military.  This one’s for you.       

“. . . It goes back to an air raid shelter.  Sitting in there with my mother and sister, listening to the Luftwaffe paying us a welcome.  Watching the candles flicker.  Later would come the rockets. My sister, four years older, told me Eskimos ate candle wax.  ‘Oh, don't tell him that, Mary - he'll believe you!’  Mom said. And the bombing began. Down the street a house was obliterated.  The family in their Anderson shelter were too close to survive.  At our house, the piano blew from one wall to the other, and, as in tornadoes and their freak affects, the curtains in a microsecond blew out and the windows went back into position, and the curtains were hanging on the outside of the windows.

A little man in an old raincoat came a few days later.  He jotted our damage down in a little black book - who in officialdom in those days, didn't have a little black book?  We factored in our curtains, and chalked it up to the war effort.   ‘During the raid of August 13th, severe damage was done to Stanmore and Edgware, near  to Fighter Command  at Stanmore, Bentley Priory.’  The Jerries were always trying to knock out Fighter Command....twelve miles from our house, which cost our neighbors dearly.  After the war I would ride by Bentley Priory on my bike, and listen to birdsong....

‘How many in reserves?’ Churchill asked during one dicey fight with the Luftwaffe. 

‘None sir.

Cut to the end of the war in Europe.  Not the flags, although I helped my mother hoist the Union Jack from a bedroom window.  No more local concerns.  Do we remove the chamber pot from  the Anderson shelter?  Are we free to pee, you and me? No more getting up in the blackest night, under strobing searchlights, creeping downstairs, holding hands, heading for the air raid shelter.  Entering through the dank sacking opening, lit by two candles, settling onto our bunks after checking for river rats.  And the sirens, and the bombers - any English family could tell German and English and American engines or worse - the hard uncompromising drone of a V-1 rocket. 

Dad was home on leave one night.  He worked twenty hours a day repairing Handley Page Halifax bombers, sometime witnessing the hose washing out a tail gunner's boggy mushy remains, all goggled and gunner wings brevet mocking him.  Faithful gloved hands, or what remained of them, on his .303 quadruple Brownings.  So Dad came home.  One night, in the shelter, a V-1 cut out and spiraled down. Dad threw himself across us, my sister and I.  ‘Daddy!  Daddy! I can't breathe!  I can't breathe!’

His Home Guard winter coat uniform, complete with corporal stripes, weighted us down, suffocating, suffocating ... except the family down the street died.

Know what?  I like Mars Bars.  Candy was rationed, two ounces a week per child.  I gotta Mars Bar.  Later, in l953, we emigrated to Canada.  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘They got Mars Bars.’  And I tried to figure my Canadian currency, which earlier had been spread on the kitchen table by my dad.  ‘Now, this is a quarter, and this is called a dime...’

This morning I watched an episode of World at War.  VE Day.  I remember it so well, helping my mother hoist the Union Jack at the bedroom window... A glorious sunny day.  People festive in Trafalger Square, about twelve miles away...  Sailors in soldiers' hats -- soldiers in sailor hats...

Dancing, dancing, kissing the girls . . .”

Much has changed since 1945, and the majority of those who experienced world war have passed from this Earth.  Yet the legacy they have left behind shall never be forgotten, so long as their recollections are shared.  Merry Christmas, everyone.  I wish you all a safe and joyous holiday season.