Category: Mystery

From There To Here, the Curious Path to Granger’s Crossing

Posted on November 25, 2023April 24, 2024 By Mark Tiedemann

It’s a good question: how does a veteran science fiction writer come to write an historical mystery-slash-love story? Especially one set in a period and place wherein, as far as I can find, no one else has bothered to set fiction.

There are clear parallels between historical fiction and science fiction (clearer still between historical and fantasy) in that, depending on how far back and where you go, world building becomes a major component, and science fiction is very much about world building. Though the emphasis on that has of late verged on too much. We still have to create character, develop plot, and have something meaningful to say.…

Have I Mentioned…?

Posted on March 1, 2023March 1, 2023 By Mark Tiedemann

Did I mention I have a new book? It launches in April, the 25th to be exact, and I’d like to tell you something about.

Granger’s Crossing is a departure for me. At least, at first glance. After decades of writing and publishing science fiction, I took a shot at historical fiction.Â In fact, this novel came directly out of another project, which was science fiction.

Quite some time ago I had an idea for an alternate history. I poked around for a good departure point and settled on the Louisiana Purchase. What if, I asked, it had never happened?…

Still Reaching, Still Dreaming

Posted on May 31, 2020 By Mark Tiedemann

Everywhere else there is news of calamity, sadness, tension, idiocy. It’s Sunday, a beautiful morning. Â Something else, then. Something reaffirming, that there is still space for dreams, room for better, and the substance of higher aspirations.

(Image courtesy of Linda Overton)…

It Hurts

Posted on February 7, 2014February 7, 2014 By Mark Tiedemann

By now, I’m sure, many people know about the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham.Â Bill Nye, he of the bow tie, the science guy, stepped up to the podium to have it out, toe-to-toe, with Ken Ham, erstwhile champion of creationism, founder of the Creation Museum in Kentucky which has been the subject of continual mirthful derision by anyone with even a scintilla of understanding about science.Â They were to debate evolution versus creationism, which in my mind is like debating the similarities between Einstein and Sasquatch.Â Other than the assertion by certain folks that they are somehow (a) equivalent and (b)…well, really, there is no “b” in this formulation.…

Giants

Posted on July 30, 2013 By Mark Tiedemann

Sequoias, I’ve heard, are bigger.

Still.

They almost dare you to photograph them in some unique way, as if knowing that, at least at first, you can’t help but shoot the standard-issue, clichÃ©d image of immense stands of imposing forest.Â Walking among them I didn’t feel small so much as unimportant.

That’s something of a clichÃ© as well, but it fits.

We left the Elk River center, drove up 101 a short way, passing another beach, through mist and gray that separated where we were from anywhere else we might go.

We stopped at the shore, walked between burms of sand, spent time in the non-place of fog and suggestion.Â …

…And the Winners Are

Posted on December 27, 2012December 27, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I should be writing fiction instead of writing about it, but I must continue my year-end summations.Â I’m off tomorrow, so I intend to get down to serious stuff.

Anyway, I read some pretty good novels this past year.Â Much as I admire, respect, and feel a duty to read broadly in nonfiction, when it gets down to it, fiction is what I live for.Â (Well, Donna comes first, sure, but as we’ve been writing a novel with our lives…ahem)Â Fiction takes me away.Â It opens things up, offers newness in a way nothing else does.

As I get older I find myself reading more slowly, soaking in the sentences.Â …

12-12-12

Posted on December 12, 2012December 12, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

Because I can’t resist the date.

This particular confluence of numerical coincidence won’t happen again this century.Â Proper appreciation must be shown.

Or, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, “I have always and dearly loved calendrical questions because they display all our foibles in revealing miniature.Â Where else can we note, so vividly revealed, such an intimate combination of all the tricks that recalcitrant nature plays upon us, linked with all the fallacies of reason, and all the impediments of habit and emotion, that make the fulfillment of our urge to understand even more more difficult…”

It is in our nature to reject coincidence as simply what it is, especially when it comes to cosmic events.Â …

Preferred Position

Posted on May 8, 2012May 8, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I really like Neil deGrasse Tyson.Â He’s my kinda scientist and he speaks well.Â Please watch the entire video before continuing with my little bit.

Okay, there’s a lot in that with which I agree.Â In fact, he gets to my preferred stance on the whole issue, that I would rather not have to deal with the categories and all the rhetorically inevitable garbage that comes with them.Â The problem is that most people actually won’t let you do that.

If I am asked honestly about my thoughts on whether or not there is a god, my answer is usually predetermined, not by me but by the person asking the question.Â …

Noir at the Bar

Posted on March 17, 2012March 17, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

There is, in University City, which is attached to St. Louis with Washington University as a buffer, a cool little coffeehouse/restaurant called Meshuggah’s.Â They play host to a literary event called Noir at the Bar, which my friend Scott Phillips and a gentleman named Jedediah Ayres manage.Â Primarily it’s all about crime fiction, which apparently includes a vast range of macabre material.

They had me in their line-up on February 28th.Â I am the first science fiction writer to perform at this event and I think it went rather well.Â It was recorded for podcast by Booked and the link to my reading is now up.Â …

A Moment For A Promotional Message

Posted on February 27, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

Tomorrow night, Tuesday, February 28th, I’ll be reading at a venue that is somewhat a departure for me.Â It will be at a little ongoing literary rumpus called Noir At the Bar—here’s a blog post to give you a taste—in University City, on Delmar, at a little place called Meshuggah’s.Â I’ll be there with three other readers—Kevin Lynn Helmick, Caleb J. Ross, and Gordon Highland—and what makes this unusual for me is that Noir at the Bar is, as the name suggests, for NOIR.

Now, yeah, I write mysteries.Â After all, my three Asimov robot novels were “robot mysteries.”Â …