“A wicked fun read.” — Kirkus Reviews (and who am I to argue?)

YA With Real Science

BY LEILA ROY – Kirkus Reviews


At the risk of bringing unwelcome attention to just how very little I paid attention in my high school science classes*, one of my favorite things about Christian Schoon’s Zenn Scarlett is that it—like John Barnes’ Losers in Space, which I also enjoyed immensely—is another entry on the short-but-rapidly-growing list of YA science fiction that reads like it is based in somewhat believable science, rather than in magic disguised as science. Meaning that Schoon makes a real effort to have the details of his title character’s life on Mars sound scientifically plausible.

Or at least plausible to someone with only a very basic understanding of The Science: It’s possible that he just threw a bunch of science-y sounding words around and fooled me. Even if that turns out to be the case, I won’t hold that against him, because it’s a wicked fun read.

Zenn is a 17-year-old girl who’s studying to be an exovet: a veterinarian who specializes in treating alien species. She’s following in the footsteps of her mother, who has been presumed dead for years after suddenly—like, in a split second—disappearing. Zenn is prickly and suspicious, slow to warm up to people and even slower to trust them. She much prefers the company of animals, regardless of their planet of origin, and really, who can blame her? Getting close to people just results in getting hurt, disappointed or left behind.

Now, though, the Cloister where she lives and studies is in danger of being shut down by the xenophobic town council, and the sudden rash of suspicious accidents isn’t helping to swing the vote around in her favor: Zenn Scarlett has a great sense of place, both physical and political; wonderfully described alien species that aren’t at all anthropomorphized; a likable heroine, tight pacing with lots of chapters ending on exciting old-timey serial cliffhangers, and a good amount of humor. I enjoyed it hugely…with a few minor caveats. (You totally knew that was coming, didn’t you?)

The major one is this: Zenn, a girl who is described as suspicious of most people and especially of people from town, doesn’t once suspect handsome townie Liam Tucker of having anything to do with the “accidents.” Which seems unlikely to me, especially given that—despite the bonding and googly eyes they share later on—she’s not his biggest fan at the beginning of the book. 

Beyond that, the human characters (and the sentient aliens) are mainly stock characters: Zenn is a prickly know-it-all, her uncle is gruff but loving, Liam is flirty but damaged, Hamish is an insectoid alien whose tendency towards literalism is very reminiscent of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Data. They’re all quite likable—minus the villains, one of whom is revoltingly bigoted and another whose motivations are slightly more complicated, but who is no less one-dimensional—but none of them are all that multi-faceted.

The mystery itself is almost secondary to the worldbuilding, and it really only serves to introduce the larger story and bigger questions—What happened to Zenn’s mother? Who kidnapped her father? What is the nexus?—and regardless of any of my quibbles, I’m really excited to see where Schoon (and Zenn!) goes next.

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Boffins declare: LIFE ON VENUS! OK, maybe not so much. But hey, phosphine. So, there’s that.

Exciting news from our sister planet! Winged beings with a penchant for cross-species shenanigans? Well, not so far, sadly enough. Still, it’s early days…

But OK, yes. We’ve found traces of phosphine, a possible exudate of a possible life form, up in the possibly warm and friendly reaches of the Venusian stratosphere. Well done, boffins. But let’s not put the champagne popping before the probing. (Sorry. That came out badly.) Probes, tho. We need the probes, or at least the more extensive tele-looking and documentation to check out the exud-ers of said phosphine before we get all “Venus: Crawling with Living Stuff and Now… Sexier Than Mars!”

34 Memes Illustrating Humanity's Reaction To The News About The Possibility  Of Life On Venus | Bored Panda

You’ve seen the meme by now, right? Yeah, that pretty much sums up the recent news. NASA has suddenly terminated its years-long romantic, one might say stalker-ish attachment to lovely, patient, ruddy-complected Mars. And who’s the goddess now? Upstart thinly veiled seductress Venus. OK. Not thinly. Thickly veiled. In… well, in poison, for the most part. But possibly not the part where the little Venus bugs flit about pumping out the you-know-what. Anyway, stay tuned. I’m the sure the boffinating on this has scarcely gotten started.

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Legendary Powell’s Books Sez “So Long, Jeff Bezos. Sorry! (Not sorry…)”

Just in time to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day, the globally beloved Powell’s Books brick-and-mortar-words-on-real-paper-palace in Portland announced it will no longer port its books over to gazillion-pound-clickgorilla Amazon. Many authors, of course, need that clickgorilla to keep afloat, but ya gotta admire Powell’s cajones for logging off the gravy-stream.  

And (synchronicity!) when I dropped by Powell’s online, I was greeted by a friendly review of my first Zenn Scarlett novel.  “The story is full of intriguing alien species, and their ailments. Add to that, some cool vet tech, and you have a bio nerd fest in the making. I also enjoyed the mystery of the various ‘accidents’ involving the beasties. townies push hard from every direction to shut down the Cloister, not renew their lease, and use the land for agricultural purposes. Indeed, Christian Schoon is an author to keep an eye on…” Awwww. Isn’t that kind?

So, thanks Powell’s, best of luck and keep on keepin’ on.

Portland's Most Famous Bookstore Will No Longer Sell Books on Amazon
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Yabba dabba… duhhh…whaaat?

Maybe it’s just a case of auto-sleep-writing. Is that a thing?

According to IMDB, I co-wrote “The Flintstones: A Page Right Out of History.” This… is news to me. Now, to be fair, I DID write the scripts for a number of H-B shows back in the way-back. But still, kinda mysterious. Did they need to credit someone/anyone at some point in order to publish a programming catalog with a name/any name attached? Just scan the H-B writers archive and throw a dart? And why dredge me up if they already had one writer to credit? (Assuming that Mark H. was himself in fact a writer on the program.) Hmmm…. wonder what the residuals come to after 30 or so years. Yo! Hanna-Barbera! CALL ME!

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And now: meet the newest equine life form to appear at the ranchito: it’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash! (he’s the one lying down…)

Am pleased to present a newly arrived (and dang if he ain’t adorable) creature here at the Schoon ranchito — being gently bothered in the photo above by resident anthropoid and colt-whisperer, Kathleen. The newbie is our spankin’ fresh wonder-boy, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, born early April. So, huzzah! Take THAT, pandemic. New life amid the viral apocalypse. Downright uplifting.

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Good worlds are hard to find! Or: Is THIS why we aren’t being swarmed by alien life-snoopin’ bots?

Yikes! Explora-droid!

A recent Sci Am article considers the so-far-fruitless hunt for intelligent life beyond Earth and attempts to deal with Fermi’s query “if life is out there, where the heck is everyone?” Their take? Well, first of all, if self-replicating machines are the obvious way to cross interstellar distances, we should’ve been knee-deep in beeping explora-droids by now. We don’t seem to be knee-deep in these devices. So, is that just because our mostly empty cosmic neighborhood is, like, so far out in the galactic boonies that we can’t even get Grubhub delivery? Or, is it because there’s some other element inherent in organic-built machine-ish exploring that prevents them from doing it in a way that allows them to reach us. Or, possibly, to reach anywhere. I know. Counter-intuitive, eh? The article authors figure maybe it takes undaunted, obsessively curious biological units to achieve the necessary level of galactic-scale void-crossing/life-finding. Which leaves us, for the time being, utterly FTL (freakin’ totally luckless) – at least until we invent drives capable of FTL. (Heh. See what I did there?) Better start building those miles-long generation starships then, eh?

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Earthly ocean vents & alien life. Hmmm… what’s the connection? Well, why don’t we just “Ask an Astrobiologist”?!

Lots of excitement bubbling up about the off-world life potentially lurking, swimming, feeding, breeding, having organizational invade-the-Earth meetings deep under the ice-covered oceans of several moons orbiting gas giants… right in our own solar system’s back yard! Sweet. Except for the invasion stuff. So what can Earthly black smokers and other underwater vent environments teach us lowly Terrans about the living systems waiting to be discovered on Europa, Enceladus, etc. etc?  So glad you asked.  Because I have here a podcast from Dr. Laurie Barge NASA’s team-leading researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, and the Oak Crest Institute of Science. Here the basic scoop, as stolen from NASA’s excellent site that encourages us to ASK AN ASTROBIOLOGIST: “Join us as we welcome Dr. Laurie Barge, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, and the Oak Crest Institute of Science. She studies topics like self-organizing chemical systems, the emergence of life on early Earth, hydrothermal vents and mineral-organic chemistry, and the habitability of other worlds. Dr. Barge recently become the Science Principle Investigator for the InVADER project (In-situ Vent Analysis Divebot for Exobiology Research), and is also deeply invested in outreach and mentoring for women and minorities in STEM fields. Aired October 23, 2019”

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Do Elon Musk’s shiny Starships threaten to totally muck up our search for life on other planets? Possibly.

Any NASA spacecraft bound for any planet in the Solar System goes through some serious de-germ-ifying before it launches. The last thing we Earthers wanna do is dump a load of our microbes all over a planet that MIGHT be hosting the answer the Really Big Question: is our world the only life-bearing rock in the universe?

So, Spaceship-building super-dude Elon Musk is in a hurry to hurl his gorgeously retro-sci-fi-looking Starships hither and yon from here to the Oort Cloud. Main exo-target in his sights is Mars. His goal: make humanity a two-planet civilization before bone-headed humans or a rogue asteroid/comet or the zombie apocalypse destroys our comfy, wet, warm, one and only home. But Elon doesn’t think planetary protection protocols are really much of thing to worry about re: the Red Planet. Mars is a cold, irradiated, life-unfriendly world, he says. Any microbial life could only survive deep underground. Don’t worry – be Musky, he says. Others have other stuff to say about whether we should be concerned about skewing any life-type discoveries made amid the ancient sands of Barsoom. (What? Not a John Carter fan? Shame.)

In any case, here’s what the hive-mind over at Reddit thinks. Food for thought, Earthers….

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Hubble’s new-found exo-planet has the exo-life Holy Grail of room-temp Goldie-Locks-zone room-temp exo-water? Yes. But….

First of all, let’s not get all “Whoa! It’s Earth’s long-lost twin sister!” and “Near-Earth discovered!” and “Could there be life?! I think I see someone WAVING!” and other over-eager hyperventilating. This isn’t Terra v.2.0.

Not Earth-y, huh? All right. Then what’s the big nerd-splosion about?

As the highly intelligent bipeds over at the The Verge inform us, it’s a mini-Neptune, OK? And yes, it apparently has some liquid water in its upper atmosphere. But that’s about it at this point. Further down, before you hit the most-likely rocky core? Murderous pressure and BBQ-level heat and not friendly to living stuff. So, sorry. But still, it’s a landmark discovery in its own sense, ie, Hubble’s amazing ability to resolve the water molecules in the atmosphere during the planet’s transit across its dwarf star-sun. So, cheers for that, science. Well done! Now settle down, class.

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OK: aliens with our level of tech look at the Earth from light years away and they see….. this!

                                                                                   S. Fan et. al., arXiv (2019) arXiv:1908.04350

So, any certified sci fi geek, or even any slightly-beyond-casual astro-news scanner, knows that so far our only visuals of exoplanets amount to a couple of infuriating little pixels of light.  But some crafty scientists flipped the script. They sorta reverse-engineered how Earth would look to someone viewing it from many light years away if they were shackled with our pitiful 21st century Earther level of telescopery. The result: the above image. So, the black lines represent coastlines, allowing our no-doubt quintuple-eyed, tentacled, quadruple-headed alien viewers to spot the *squint your two, pitiful eyes* outlines of Africa in the middle, Asia in the U.R. and the Americas to the left. Can’t see it yet? Squint harder. Get the full scoop over at Science Magazine.

 

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