If you like fantasy, dark fantasy, paranormal fiction or science fiction, you're in the right place.

Here you'll find a free short story, a serial, my blog, and excerpts and links to suspenseful paranormal fiction, dark fantasy, fantasy and science fiction e-books.

News and Views:

February, 2012. February is a cold snowy month, a good time to read about vampires, witches, demons, quests, spacemen and time travel. This is the year that the world is supposed to end in December according to the Mayan Calendar folks. So you don't have much time left to read my novels.

This month I blog about asteroid  collision with Earth (see below). Coming soon to Page Turner Editions are Book Five of  my Raven Lenore series, The Case of the Missing Android, and The Further Adventures of Frankenstein's Monster.  Also, my Morgaine the Demon-Witch series has new covers. Check them out at Page Turner Editions .

You'll find the links to all my e-books on this web site, for example, the sequel to The Traveling Vampire and the Farmer's Daughter, The Traveling Vampire and Twilight in the Catacombs is available at Page Turner Editions E-Books. My latest novella The Sleeper, an adult retelling of the Sleeping Beauty legend with a twist ending, is also available at Page Turner Editions .

At the top of this page you will see a table of links to my biography, a free short story, a serial, a gallery of interesting art and photos, my favorite web sites and links to information about each of my novels. The E-books featured may be purchased at Page Turner Editions and other online booksellers such as Amazon, Fictionwise, Barnes and Noble, Sony E-Books and many others.

If you prefer a printed book to an e-book, Dinner With Dracula is available as a paperback at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Dinner With Dracula is the hilarious adventures of Charles Winterbottom, an Indiana Jones type character who is a buffoon. An ad for Renaissance paperbacks can be found by clicking here.

This month's short story is Artifact.  Two space bums discover a space station built by an extinct alien race.

The sixteenth episode of Morgaine's Familiar is entitled Raven's Formula.  Raven Lenore is possessed by Morgaine and mixes Keith's semen with other ingredients. 

 

February Blog

Asteroid Collisions

In recent years, astronomers, paleontologists and geologists have given us one more thing to worry about. That a large meteor or comet may strike the earth and destroy humanity or at least a good portion of it. If a collision occurred between Earth and an asteroid a few kilometers in diameter, it would release as much energy as several million nuclear weapons detonating simultaneously. This would be enough to trigger a nuclear winter. Those who survived the blast might starve to death as all plant life died.

 

Recently we have seen a spate of science fiction movies with this theme, and it has been a staple of SF and doomsayers for a long time. How real is the threat? That is the question I intend to answer here. Note: Much of the information I gleaned from a Wikipedia article entitled "Impact Event." Wikipedia has a lot more information about possible asteroid collisions with earth and other planets in the solar system.

Throughout recorded history, hundreds of minor impact events have been reported, with some occurrences causing deaths, injuries, property damage or other significant localized consequences. An impact event in an ocean or sea could create a tsunami that would cause destruction both at sea and on land near a seashore.

Small objects frequently collide with the Earth. There is an inverse relationship between the size of the object and the frequency that such objects hit the earth. Asteroids with a 1 km (0.62 mi) diameter strike the Earth every 500,000 years on average. Large collisions, with 5 km (3 mi) objects, happen approximately once every ten million years. The last known impact of an object of 10 km (6 mi) or more in diameter was at the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs.

Asteroids with diameters of 5 to 10 m (16 to 33 ft) enter the Earth's atmosphere approximately once per year, with as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, approximately 15 kilotons of TNT. Usually they explode in the upper atmosphere, and most or all of the solids are vaporized.  Objects with diameters over 50 m (164 ft) strike the Earth approximately once every thousand years, producing explosions comparable to the one known to have detonated above Tunguska in 1908. At least one known asteroid with a diameter of over 1 km (0.62 miles) may collide with Earth on March 16, 2880.

Objects with diameters smaller than 10 m (33 ft) are called meteoroids (or meteorites if they strike the ground). An estimated 500 meteorites reach the surface each year, but only 5 or 6 of these are recovered and made known to scientists.

The most significant recorded impact on earth in recent times was the Tunguska event, which occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908. This incident involved an explosion that was probably caused by the airburst of an asteroid or comet 5 to 10 km (3.1 to 6.2 mi) above the Earth's surface. It caused an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) to be knocked over. In my latest Morgaine novel, Morgaine and the Necromancer, this event plays a part in the plot.

Numerous science fiction stories and novels center around an impact event; possibly the best-selling was the novel Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama opens with a significant asteroid impact in northern Italy in the year 2077 which gives rise to the Spaceguard Project, which later discovers the Rama spacecraft. In 1992 a Congressional study in the U.S. led to NASA being directed to undertake a Spaceguard Survey with the novel being named as the inspiration for the name to search for Earth-impacting asteroids. This in turn inspired Clarke's 1993 novel The Hammer of God. A variation on the traditional impact story was provided by Jack McDevitt's 1999 novel Moonfall, in which a very large comet travelling at interstellar velocities collides with and partially destroys the Moon, fragments of which then collide with the Earth.

Several disaster movies have also been made: When Worlds Collide (1951) dealt with two planets on a collision course with Earth – the smaller planet a "near miss," causing extensive damage and destruction, followed by a direct hit from the larger planet.  Meteor (1979) features small asteroid fragments and a large 8 km (5 mi) wide asteroid heading for Earth. Orbiting U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons platforms are turned away from their respective earthbound targets, and toward the incoming threat. In 1998 two films were released in the United States on the subject of attempting to stop impact events: Touchstone Pictures' Armageddon, about an asteroid; and Paramount/DreamWorks' Deep Impact, about a comet.

The prophesies in the Book of Revelation in the Christian bible seem to indicate that part of the devastation of the Apocalypse will be caused by objects falling from the sky. I used this scenario in the fifth book of my Morgaine series of novels, Morgaine and Armageddon.   

Whether a catastrophic asteroid collision with earth will occur within our lifetime is problematical. What is certain is that sooner or later, one will strike. Will we be ready to either divert it or deal with the consequences?  

 

If anyone has any comments about my blog or my novels or just to say hello, my E-mail address is jvadalma at hvc.rr.com.

Remember that downloading, uploading or copying copyrighted material without permission from the copyright owner is unlawful and a Federal crime. Always buy your e-books from a legitimate bookseller. All of the material on this web site is copyrighted. If there is anything on this web site that you wish to have a copy of, please ask permission by contacting me at jvadalma at hvc dot rr dot com.

Joe Vadalma, a proud member of EPIC, the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition. 

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