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Welcome to the Inspirations Cafe'. So here I am with my grande' caramel latte and you're sitting over there with your--what is that?--chai tea? Hot chocolate? A vente macchaito? This is the part of the site where I tell you about projects, events, good movies, how to save humanity, and the nature of the universe. You know. Trivial things like that.

April 2008: Designer Thoughts: Earlier this week, I went to Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the Ben Stein movie. Reviewers haven't been very kind to the film, but I thought it made some good points. I also liked the filmmaker's use of old film clips (like Victor Frankenstein proclaimng "He's alive!") to add some humor and emphasize the points made in the interviews. I am curious about how widespread the phenomena discussed in the film are. I teach at a state university, but Arkansas isn't exactly a hotbed of liberalism and business professors don't usually face tenure issues because of their religious beliefs, so I haven't really seen any signs of the oppression the film describes. I felt that Stein presented a good counter-argument to those who blame all the world's ills on religion. Atheistic regimes (e.g. Stalin's Russia) have been pretty bloody too, but our memories are short. I admit I found the critics' reviews disheartening because I felt that they were unjustly negative toward the film because they disagreed with it politically. I've seen Christians treat their opponents just as badly, and try not to fall into that trap myself. Liberals are supposed to be tolerant and Christians are supposed to love their enemies, but mostly I think we just redefine love and tolerance to allow us to treat people as badly as we like. That gets back to my earlier point about how both religious and atheistic ideologies have driven atrocities. God save us (with apologies to those who don't share my faith) from ourselves.

CSFF Blog Tour:

If you're a fan of Christian science fiction and fantasy and want to keep up with what people are saying, visit these blog sites:

CSFF Blog Tour Main

Jim Black: Jim's Fiction Review

Justin Boyer: Fantasy Freak

Grace Bridges' Blog

Amy Browning's Pages of Discovery

Jackie Castle: Journey into Grace

Christian Science Fiction: Brandon Barr

Valerie Comer: In Val's Little World

D. Davidson: Sci-Fi Catholic

Chris Deanne: Write and Whine

Janey DeMeo

Merrie DeStephano's Blog

Jeff Draper: Scriptorius Rex

April Erwin

Linda Gilmore's Blog

Karen Hancock (Author of Arena and other great books)

Katie Hart: Writing Christian Novels

Sherrie Hibbs

Christopher Hopper

Becca Johnson: The Writer's Sword

Rachel Marks: Shadow of the Wood

Shannon McNear (My buddy with a passel of kids): Senandoah Dawn

Karen McSpadden: Disturbing Reviews

Melissa Meeks: Forest Rose

Rebecca Miller

Eve Nielsen: Questwriter

John Otte: Leastread

Lyn Perry: Bloggin Out Loud

Deena Peterson: Deena's Books

Rachelle: Zyphe Blogspot

Cheryl Russel: Unseen Worlds

Ashley Rutherford: God's Light Upon Me

Hannah Sandvig: HannasLifeisCool

Chawna Schroeder on Blogspot

James Somers

Speculative Faith

Steve Trower: Christian SF (Old Testament Space Opera)

Donna Swanson: Windfallow

Daniel I. Weaver

Laura Williams on Blogspot

April 2008: Lisa Tawn Bergren's The Begotten is the feature book in this month's Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy blog tour. The Begotten is the first book in the Gifted trilogy. Reviewers have described the book as being more like The Lord of the Rings than The da Vinci Code and as "the X-Men in the 14th century." A group of Christians in the middle ages find an ancient letter written by St. Paul and find themselves pitted against dark, supernatural forces. The book has received very fine reviews on Amazon. Click on the cover to read the Amazon reviews or visit Lisa's website at http://lisatawnbergren.com/home/html.

March 2008: This month's CSFF Blog Tour features Andrew Peterson's fantasy, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. If "dark sea of darkness" sounds like the author ran out of dramatic-sounding adjectives, it's probably because this book doesn't exactly take itself seriously. The reviewers on Amazon described it as smart, wickedly funny, and irreverent. (Gasp! Can we have irreverent books on the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour?) Anyway it sounds like great fun, so let's check it out, shall we?

I confess I'm still reading the sequel to Chris Walley's book which was featured on last month's tour. I'll miss his world and characters and hope the third book isn't too far behind. Meanwhile, check out the darkness of the dark sea of dark. It's likely to be a dark tale. Meanwhile visit http://andrew-peterson.com/ and http:www.rabbitroom.com to get acquainted with the author. Then, once you're hooked and you know you have to read the book, just hop over to Amazon and order it.

I'm off to Savannah for a spring break mission trip. Hang tough!

February 2008: This month I'd like to introduce you to a really interesting sci-fi universe. It's 10,000 years in the future and humanity has spread itself across the stars. Has the "second coming" described in the Bible happened yet or hasn't it? In the mid-twenty-first century "The Great Invervention" ushered in a new age of peace on "Ancient Earth" and, shortly thereafter, humanity went to the stars. Automated ships seeded hundreds of planets, terraforming them over the centuries into worlds capable of supporting human inhabitants. People continued to be born, to marry, to grow old, and to die but the ancient sins that plagued humanity for so long were a thing of the past. Lying, cheating, and stealing were unheard of. Then something went wrong. Of all the "Made Worlds," the planet Farholme was the most distant from Ancient Earth. A young forester named Merrall saw something crash from the sky. That night he had a strange nightmare, something almost unheard of since the Great Intervention. Then his uncle began behaving strangely and a Sentinal, a member of a police force assigned to watch for the return of the ancient evils, arrived on Farholme. Chris Walley, a geologist from Wales, has created a compelling universe filled with exotic settings and interesting characters. Check out the reviews for his book on Amazon or visit his Chris's blog sites at www.chriswalley.net and chriswalley.blogspot.com,

It seems like every time somebody really talented shows up in the world of Christian science fiction and fantasy, people can't help comparing him (or her) to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein. So how does Chris Walley compare to these luminaries? Well, he's Christian, he's talented, and he's from the British Isles. His work also shows a refreshing blend of scholarly intelligence and poetic imagination that makes his science fiction universe all the more believable. Read him for yourself and see what you think.

FOLLOW UP COMMENT: I ended up enjoying The Shadow and Night even more than I thought I would and immediately went out and bought the sequel. This is Christian science fiction at its best. Actually, it's some of the best science fiction of any kind I've read .

January 2008: This month's CSFF Blog Tour features Auralia's Colors, a mytical fantasy written by film critic Jeffrey Overstreet. Set in the gloomy kingdom of Abascar, this first book in the Auralia's Thread series introduces Auralia who is found by a river as a baby and raised by outcasts. The kingdom is ruled by a jealous queen who has done away with color everywhere but in the royal court. Auralia, however, has a gift for finding colors everywhere and bringing them to life. Most of the seventeen reviewers who rated the book on Amazon gave it very good reviews. Many gave it five stars and the overall average was 4.5. One critic wrote that the book was more reminiscent of the fantasy novels of another time and rated it lower than the others. Another reviewer, who expressed distain for modern fantasy, gave it a perfect rating for the same reason. Check it out on the Amazon site for visit the author's web and blog sites at http://lookingcloser.org/auralia/default.htm, http://auraliascolors.wordpress.com and http:lookingcloser.wordpress.com/.

November 25, 2007: This month's CSFF Blog Tour highlights a new book by an old favorite. Back in the 1980s, Crossway Books published Stephen Lawhead's reimagination of the King Arthur legend. Taliesen, he first book, told of the sinking of Atlantis and the meeting of Arthur's parents. I remember the Tolkeinesque imagery and well-developed characters. The Pendragon Trilogy has since been released to the mainstream market. Now Lawhead has put his own creative touch on the legend of Robin Hood and Will Scarlet. Stephen Lawhead calls to mind an era in which Christian artists stood in the mainstream of society producing high quality artistic works like Dante's Inferno and Handel's Messiah. I'm glad to see his work featured alongside that of other mainstream writers. I'm sure it will be a delight to Christian readers and readers of other faiths. Before returning to the Christian faith of his childhood, C.S. Lewis realized that most of his favorite authors were Christians even though he was an atheist. There was something otherworldly in the way they wrote. May Lawhead's readers find this to be true as well. To read more about Lawhead's books, click on the covers at the right. You may also want to visit Lawhead's own website at stephenlawhead.com.

October 13, 2007: The CSFF Blog Tour Book of the Month: This month's book is The Bark of the Bog Owl, Book 1 of the Wilderking Trilogy, by Jonathan Rogers. This is a middle grade/young adult fantasy.

Other Random Thoughts for October: I've been watching the new Bionic Woman series. I've got mixed feelings about it. The new actress is pretty and the production values are high but, like many new series, its a darker take on the old idea. My reaction to it is somewhat like the reaction I had to the new Kolchak: The Night Stalker series. I watched both hoping for a rush of nostalgia, but didn't really get it. The shows had been changed so much that there wasn't really any of the old atmosphere left to them. The old Kolchak was hilarious and the new one was dead serious (except for the morgue attendant who had a crush on Kolchak's partner. He was funny.) I did watch it for as long as it was on, however. I like the new Bionic Woman series all right even if I'd have written it differently. How, you might ask? I actually wrote up a treatment for an alternate version of the show. I'll include it in a future website. The original Bionic Woman was a spin-off from the 6,000,000 Man series which was based on the novel Cyborg by Martin Caiden. Steve Austin, the lead character, was a test pilot and former astronaut which resonated with 1970s audiences. Chuck Yeager's breaking of the sound barrier and the Apollo missions were relatively recent memories. Some of Steve's enemies included Barney Miller/Hiller a former racecar driver who had also been rebuilt into a bionic man, and several androids who looked pretty scary with their face masks ripped off. Jaime Sommers was Steve's childhood sweetheart, a former tennis pro. The two had just been reunited when a skydiving accident led to her bionic reconstruction. Jaime died just as they were planning to get married. She was later resurrected because of the outcries of heartbroken fans who fell in love with what was supposed to have a been a one-shot character. There was a sweetness to those old shows that I miss in these darker times.

September 19, 2007: Our CSFF Blog Tour continues this month with Austin Boyd's book The Return. This is the first book in the Mars Hills Classified series, a series of "hard" science fiction novels set on the red planet. This is a tale of international--nay, interplanetary--intrigue set in the not-too-distant future. Visit Amazon's The Return page or Austin Boyd's website at http://www.austinboyd.com/

Boyd's life is an interesting story in its own rite. He's been training to be an astronaut for years and has been close several times, but never actually made it into space. Writing these books is a way of making up for that and he takes us along.

I'd also like to recommend another interesting book I just re-read after my most recent trip to California. Starting in the 1980s, Martian Chronicles author Ray Bradbury wrote a trio of detective novels set in the Los Angeles area in the 1940s. One of them, A Graveyard of Lunatics, is set in a fictionalized version of Paramount Studios. (I realized this when I saw the cemetery on the Paramount lot.) Much of the setting and many of the characters were drawn from Bradbury's own life. The main characters are based on Bradbury and special effects artist Ray Harryhausen when they were young men.

August 19, 2007: This months CSFF Blog tour features George Bryan Polivka's adult fantasy novel, Legend of the Firefish. This is the first book of the Trophy Chase Trilogy. According to the reviews, this is an adventure tale with pirates, swordplay, and chilvary in a fantasy universe. The reviewers give the book good reviews overall, though one takes issue with the author's "pacifist" view of Christianity. It sounds like a story with complex and interesting characters set in a well-developed universe. Check it out on Amazon or on read Polivka's interview on the Harvest House website.

July 23, 2007: Back Up and Running: Sorry to have been away for these past few months. I've been in prison. Not really. It just seemed like it with the series of mishaps and miscommunications that kept my website down for so long. Was it modem failure, the outsourcing of my web hosting company, the expiration of my domain name, or some combination of the three? Good questions all. Anyway, I'm delighted to be back. These past few months, I've been busy working on the third Intrepid Force novel and on the Intrepid Force graphic novel adaptation, Silicon Circus. Both are actually going pretty well, though writing a novel is certainly faster than trying to design one using 3d computer graphics. Poser and DAZ3d have revolutionized the process, but it still takes a while. A couple of weeks ago, I drove down 70 miles south of New Orleans to an old fort called Fort Jackson that I thought might be a good place to base an Intrepid Force setting on and I was not disappointed. The fort is star-shaped, believe it or not. It's surrounded by a moat that is covered with scummy green water and made of red bricks. It is shaded by umbrella-shaped oak trees and has iron rails along the top. Next week I'm playing tourist to soak up atmosphere in some other interesting settings out west.

It did my little comic book nerd's heart good to see my era's Legion of Superheroes back in the mainstream of the DC Comics universe in Justice League and Justice Society's Lightning Saga miniseries. The Legion hasn't been the same without Superboy. In my opinion, he was an important link between the Legion's 30th century science fiction universe and the rest of the DC comics universe. He also allowed us to see this far-flung futuristic world through the eyes of a Kansas farm boy. I'm not sure if the "classic" Legion will get their own book again, but I'd like to see it.

Mike Jones Rocks: Oh, yes. I'd also like to congratulate my college friend Mike Jones, Jr. for getting a job as a designer at artist Steve Rude's new studio, Rude Dude Studios. Mike was always a fan of Rude's work, so this is a dream for him. Rude has just released the first new Nexus comic in ten years in comic book shops, so go get yourself a copy if you're into superhero comics. I was delighted to see Mike's name listed in the credits. (Also see the article on Mike's Star Trek parody, Star Quack, in the "Friends and Favorites" section of the Emporium Press Bookstore.)

December 11, 2006: In Memory of Dave Cockrum: I was visiting Marvel Comics' website last week and I noticed that Dave Cockrum, one of my favorite comic book artists, had died of complications arising from diabetes. When I think of Cockum, I think about the work he did with the Legion of Superheroes and the X-Men when I was in elementary school. (I even remember him illustrating the box of the Superboy model kit.) His science fiction style covers pulled me in, sparked my imagination, and gave me a hunger for that universe. They still do. Cockrum was one of the few artists that actually loved drawing the Legion of Superheroes with its team of over twenty regular characters, and it came out in his work. It's sad to think that we won't see any new Cockrum Legion or X-Men stories.

This panel is from one of Cockrum's Legion stories. Notice Timber Wolf's hair. It looks like Timber Wolf copied Wolverine, but Timber Wolf actually had it first. Cockrum left DC comics shortly after this and was part of the team that revamped the X-Men. Wolverine inherited Timber Wolf's do as part of the deal. Nightcrawler and Storm were Cockrum creations. Cockrum also gave Storm and Phoenix the white, birdlike eyes that so many artists of that era copied because it looked cool.

November 21, 2006: Comics In the Day: I've been writing a case study on Marvel Comics for an academic journal. These days Marvel is facing the duel challenge of keeping its old fans happy and attracting a new generation that loves video games and Japanese manga. They've produced some good work like "The Ultimates" with its grand movie-quality art and drama and "The Astonishing X-Men" which is written by Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, Angel, and (one of my all time favorites) Firefly. For all the quality of the new comics, there are some things I really miss from the comics I used to read when I was younger. One of them is the voice of the narrator. Modern comics mainly use the caption blocks (the yellow squares in the panels) to tell readers where a scene is located, but some of the earlier writers used them for some pretty nice prose writing. If you look at Len Wein's classic Swamp Thing work, for example, you see narrative voice at its best. There was a certain personality to the comics of the seventies and early eighties that I think must have reflected the personalities of young writers like Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Steve Gerber, Marv Wolfman, and the rest. In addition to the action, the stories had a poetic, whimsical quality about them that was often sad and always filled with wonder. It's like they were written by young hippie generation guys who grew up with "The Lord of the Rings," "Star Trek," and space flight. I also miss the idealism of those earlier days. This was before Hank Pym (Ant-Man/Giant Man/Yellowjacket) became a wife-beater and Iron Man became an alcoholic. Superman's relationship with Lois Lane would never have resulted in pregnancy. Nobody died as a result of the Hulk's rampages. Braniac 5 (of the Legion) was a gentle intellectual instead of an arrogant ass. I can understand the reason for some of the changes. The heroes of the old days may have been too perfect, but I'm concerned that the loss of heroism has gone too far. The stories are so much darker than they used to be and sexual morality is--face it--pretty much nonexistent. (e.g.You've got Cyclops of the X-Men shacked up with Emma Frost in a school full of teenagers and nobody seems to care.) I'm afraid the stories are a reflection of the times we live in. They're written by a generation that has largely been failed by its parents, teachers, political leaders, and religious leaders. They've been failed so much and so often that scandals don't even surprise them anymore. That concerns me more than anything. We need heroes more than we ever have, but nobody believes it when they see one. Is that too harsh? Am I showing my age here? (Mayhaps.) Do I care? (Nay.)

Another rant: Our society's big on deconstructing its myths these days. We're getting all the (supposed) dirt on Abraham Lincoln and the rest. We finally know the truth--or some intellectual cynic's version of it anyway--but can you destroy the myths without harming the ideals they have come to embody? I'm afraid you can't--not on the scale we're slashing and burning them anyway. I realize nobody's perfect and disappointment's a part of life, but our society's having its ideals gutted on a massive scale and the inspiration to do better and be better is fading fast. If nobody else lived up to those ideals, why should we? Sometimes I see the Baby Boomers as the generation that killed its parents. Of course they also gave me all of those cool comics.

November 16, 2006: Tim Rants or The Private History of a Story That Failed: A short story I wrote just got rejected, so join me for a little bit of ranting and raging. No, actually the thing that ticked me the most was one reviewer's comment that "the author wasn't half trying." If they only knew. The story was called "Frankenstein's Planet." I wrote it after I'd seen Tom Hanks in "Castaway." It's set in a futuristic work of interstellar travel. A guy who designs androids on an amusement park planet finds himself alone on a deserted rock after everybody else in the park is killed in an attack. The only dome intact is the haunted house exhibit, so he's trapped in a world of eternal darkness living in a haunted house with a bunch of monsters. He survives by reprogramming the monsters to function as friends rather than ghouls. Finally he uses the park's equipment to manufacture an android woman who embodies his dreams of the perfect mate he never had. That's where it got tough to write. I had two big problems to deal with. The first one was how to keep the story from degenerating into a lurid sex fantasy. Here's a guy alone on a planet with a beautiful woman he can completely control. How do you make it about the beauty of love--or even the unrealized fantasy of love? That's really what I wanted. I had several options: 1. The guy's really, really moral (by himself, for the rest of his life, she's really, really perfect...). 2. The android gets her brain fried because of damage to the equipment. The guy has to re-educate her and develops paternal feelings for her. 3. The guy gives in to temptation and is ashamed of it. He almost destroys her to atone for his guilt, then stops himself. 4. Because of laws against android prostitution, there were mental failsafes (like Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics) programmed into female androids that prevented them from serving that purpose. (I finally settled on the last one with some of the first thrown in too. The guy was pretty moral, but needed those failsafes.)

The second problem was how to end the story. Could the human narrator and his android dream girl ever get together? Could a human male get together with a soulless automaton in a way that made sense? Could the story still be satisfying if they didn't get together? I struggled over that one too. These were the endings I considered:

1. The Pinnochio Ending: Charis, the android girl, "dies" saving the narrator. Alien beings turn her into a real woman by transferring her memories into a cloned body that is either a much more sophisticated android or a human woman. The author never knows which. I even called my aliens "The Blue People" in a tongue-in-cheek wink at the Blue Fairy.

2. The Legacy to Humanity Ending: The android outlives her creator by hundreds of years and becomes a major figure in lifting humanity from a new dark age. She was a being of love and gentleness in a world that had forgotten such things.

3. The Almost-Human Ending: Did I say she was an android? She was really more like a clone with a few cybernetic parts. She was so close to humanity, she probably had a soul anyway. Her nervous system was, after all, cloned from human tissues. No one would mind a human man and an almost-human woman getting together would they?

4. The "If You Love Something, Let It Go" Ending: The guy finally realizes that the only way to make Charis human is to give her free will and releases her. She goes away and never comes back...or does she?

5. The Forerunner Approach: The narrator, who is afraid of love because of a lifetime of hurt and disappointment, learns to love by being around Charis. He finally meets a real woman who is everything he hoped to find.

The Pinnochio ending with the "Blue People" was the first one I came up with. In the end it was still the one I liked the best. Numbers 2 and 4 were noble but depressing. I'd seen Number 5 on a couple of science fiction shows. The guy has to choose between the perfect android and the real woman and chooses the real woman. On the shows I saw, the androids were more appealing (call me "Shallow Tim" but they were! There's an attraction that goes beyond physical beauty, but it's hard to capture in film.) and it blunted the point a bit. After all my brain-wracking, I finally went back to that first ending because it was the original ending and the only one that felt right to me, and the reviewers said it was too "Deus ex machina" (God in the machine: powerful beings show up and save the day) and zinged it. Actually that was my first thought, but I still liked that ending best. I might have gotten away with it if I had foreshadowed it more. If you use the "deus ex machina" approach you need to have shown glympses of the machine ahead of time.

Anyway, you can call it "God in the machine" if you want, but "just not trying?" You have no idea.

I saw the movie "A.I." when it came out and wasn't really satisfied with the ending. The film, as a whole, gravitated between Spielberg's gentle sentimentality (which I like, by the way) and Kubric's harsher portrayal of things. The little android boy finds a mother who loves him and she leaves him beside the road. At the android junkyard, we meet a gentle android nanny who read stories to children and then see her melted. The whole thing left me unsettled and a bit depressed. I guess that was the goal. I understand better the struggles Spielberg, Kubric, and the rest of them went through in telling a story about beings that seem human but aren't. That thorny issue of androids and souls just keeps rearing its head.

October 2006: On Synchronicity and Going Hollywood: I've been working on Intrepid Force: Heritage, the third in the Intrepid Force series for a while now. It's a kind of prequel/sequel built around the life of Pirate Eisman's 115-year-old Uncle Enoch. Enoch started out as a minor character, but he's grown over time. He's kind of a mixture of Cecil B. DeMille, George Lucas, Ray Bradbury, and--well, an idealized version of yours truly. Can I admit that last part? One thing that makes this book different is that it takes place in three different time periods. In 1984 Enoch is a 15-year-old comic book and sci-fi fan. In 2008 he's in L.A. starting out as a movie producer in a "haunted" movie studio. In 2084, the Intrepid Force's era, he's a 115-year-old man living in a future he used to write about and dealing with a threat from out of the past. The challenge is to take the reader though those time periods and keep the eras straight. I'm trying to write it with parallel plots at this point. We'll see how well that works.

I've had interesting experiences researching for the book. When I started out, I knew that Cecil B. DeMille was a big name in Hollywood history, but that he was also the producer of some of the great Christian epics like "King of Kings" and "The Ten Commandments." I wanted a character who was a Christian but who was a believable Hollywood personality, and DeMille seemed like a good model to start with. Even before I studied his history, I started making up background for Enoch's character. I came up with the name "Heritage Studios" for his film studio and linked it to television programs including one loosely based on Star Trek. Later on I found out DeMille's first studio really was called Heritage Studios and that he had once owned Culver City Studios when the Star Trek pilot, "The Cage" was filmed. I changed my studio name to Heritage Productions and, last summer, traveled to California to attend a spiritual film festival held at Culver City Studios. I didn't get to tour any of the soundstages, but just being there sparked my imagination.

I did take the deluxe tours of Universal Studios and Warner Brothers while I was out there, however. Those are both good tours and I recommend them both. The Universal tour is mostly of the backlot, though they do take you into the Crossing Jordan soundstage and to the prop warehouse. The Warner Brothers tour goes more into the mechanics. They took us into about five soundstages (Gilmore Girls, Studio 60, Cold Case Files, the George Lopez Show...what else?), a museum full of Harry Potter props, an editing room, the music room, the prop warehouse, the foley studio, and the backlot tour as a part of it all.

Now it's time to get back on that book.