Authors Electric

Brahe's lost star tracker Happy new year! Time to reckon, to reflect and to resolve, or so they say. Not my strong points. My mind roils with riptides. I have to swim criss-cross if I'm to make it ashore. Don't expect any consistency here. Besides, as Emerson pointed out, it's overrated. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," he wrote, "adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Now we march into the third decade of the twenty-first century, too many out there goosestepping to the deadly drums of tyrannies past. You can't call this mess millennial anymore. No more excuses. With a precious few notable exceptions, this brave new century has been a big disappointment. Those of us who came of age in the last century expected so much more.  We see no magic-bullet cures for major diseases, only Big Pharma raking in obscene profits for incremental palliatives with terrifying side effects that announcers list i...

I meet the most interesting people in the course of researching books. Tycho Brahe is one of the most memorable. For example,  I got to know great Danish astronomer Tycho Brae from  researching  Ophelia Risin g . I couldn't resist putting him into the novel and improvising a bit on his biography. Of course, perforce, "real" historical figures become fictionalized soon as they come on stage. The author gets to spin them into all kinds of hybrid narratives, as long as they seem believable. To wit, I wondered: How would Tycho have crossed paths with the Melancholy Dane? Tycho Brae shows up again in  Ophelia Regina , the third and final volume-in-progress of what is to be an Ophelia Trilogy. Now seems a good time to reflect on Brahe's history and the particular twists I gave it in the first novel that I must now adhere to as backstory, like it or not. Ah, what tangled webs we weave. I won't apologize. Shakespeare did it all the time. The Bard even made an obl...