Premium Post: Hard(er) Science Fiction Concepts In My Next Project

From the deepest depths of the 1950s through the 1980s comes some tech going into BLOOD ON THE BORDER

Although most of you are familiar with my work as an independent author — only my bizarro novella “Little People, Big Guns” is traditionally published at the moment — that hasn’t always been the case. My small-town creature feature The Thing in the Woods was originally published by a Canadian small press that also put out several anthologies containing my short stories, all of which are still on my Amazon page. My Viking monster story “Nicor” was originally published by Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, both individually online and in a collected volume.

Now that The Walking Worm is available for pre-order for a 2/5/25 release date, I’m back to work on a project I intend to send to an agent and a traditional publisher. I’m keep the cards close to the vest at the moment, but the project is a military science fiction novel entitled Blood on the Border.

And here are some real-life scientific proposals that are going into that world. I’m going for harder science fiction concepts here, not softer stuff like Star Trek technobabble or Star Wars space fantasy. The first one is above the pay-wall, but the rest you have to pay for.

Project Excalibur-This was one of the more fanciful parts of the Reagan Administration’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), as opposed to the conservative “mini-satellites ram incoming missiles” Brilliant Pebbles. Basically the full power of a nuclear explosion is concentrated into laser beams, which would help avoid the problem of nukes being less effective in space. The Federated Worlds’ Scimitar torpedoes are an evolved form of Project Excalibur, useful for standoff point defense (stopping oncoming missiles and fighters) or striking enemy capital ships from a distance depending on the settings.

(Image courtesy of this website.)

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