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Last Updated:
Saturday, 26 August 2023 20:56 EDT, © 2022, 2023

The Books:
Warning: My novels contain sexual
situations; the Dark Energy series explores the impact of telepathy on sex and
the other series contain sex as a part of the lives of the characters. On
a scale of 0 - 5, where zero contains no sex and five represents pornographic
descriptions, I would say that the sex in these novels is at a level 3 to 4. Therefore, these books
are not for children. My novels also contain explicit Christianity; the
characters go to church regularly and discuss Christian morals and general
ethics. There are also snippets of the sermons that are delivered in
church included in the stories. Within the stories spying and combat take
place; however, the descriptions aren't particularly bloody. Each series
involves building a business to support the characters' activities; therefore,
there are descriptions of some business financial and operational activities.
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Transmission speeds as a function of frequency

Attack on ORNL by two enemies

Tamu

Bishop 'Father Dave' |
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Illustration of persistence of vision as a quantum theory

Space port with spaceships and modified C-130

Raw gold

Gold coins |
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Sense of Gravity Series - 7 books: Chuck, Cathy and
their friends explore the Solar System and beyond using an artificial gravity-well
based space drive.
 
Chuck and Cathy
 
Bill and Anna
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Earth: Mathematics leads to a space drive
Chuck and Cathy create a spaceship using an artificial gravity-well, but are targeted by a drug gang on Earth.
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Moon: The space drive leads to a Moon base
Iran launches a space station and attacks the US Moon base and space station, but the US responds.
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Mars: Aliens were on Mars before us
The Chinese and the Europeans build their own Moon bases, but China uses its base to attack the others.
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Asteroids: Space wars are matters of minutes
Despite being forbidden access to the Moon, China builds a new Moon base and attacks the US.
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Jupiter: An FTL
hyperdrive changes things
Jupiter is now as close as next door and the stars are
a possible destination
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Colonies: Colonizing the Moon and Mars
The Moon colonies are growing
and the Mars colony won't be far behind
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Centauri: The stars
are in reach
We aren't alone in the universe
Sciences used and abused: Physics -
gravitation, special relativity, orbital mechanics; mathematics -
topology;
military science; planetary sciences;
astronomy; geology; astrogeology; chemistry. For more
details, see here.
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Gravity-well representations

Plan view of various spaceships
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About the Novels:
When I began writing science fiction, as a long-time reader of SF and as a Christian, I was aware of the different ways that religion and Christianity had been portrayed over the years by many authors in their SF stories. In many, religion was not treated at all; it wasn’t important to the story or to the characters. In some stories, such as the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis (Lewis, 1950) and Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories (Tolkien, 1965), Christianity was used allegorically. A few explicitly included Christianity, such as Weber’s Honor Harrington series (Weber, 1993), Kurtz’ Deryni series (Kurtz, 2014), and
Inferno by Niven and Pournelle (Niven & Pournelle, 1976). Some books began with standard Christianity and then modified it, such as Heinlein’s
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice, 1984) and
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961). Some authors have used religions other than Christianity in a book, such as Zelazny’s
Lord of Light (Zelazny, 1967) and some have invented a religion, such as Modesitt in the Imager series (Modesitt Jr., 2009). And then some have treated Christianity as a bad thing (Pullman, 2000).
Therefore, I had a wide variety of models for including religious or spiritual practices in my novels. In a short story, there isn’t room for anything but the most critical elements of the story; hence, it’s not surprising when a short story doesn’t mention religion. However, a novel has more scope and the full development of the novel’s characters supports revealing the religious feelings of at least the main character.
I wanted my characters to be similar to the people I admire and that meant they would go to church regularly. They might miss a Sunday here and there because of some important event; however, their default practice would be to attend church. Further, I wanted my characters to be serious about their faith. I see this in the world I inhabit, so I wanted to ground the more fabulous parts of my novels in as much reality as possible.
So, I began to write. At first, the novels’ contexts just contained regular attendance at church. However, saying, “And he went to church,” grew old. The preacher had to say something worthwhile in a sermon occasionally. Then the characters began to take over and when they ran into problems, they had to consider the solutions. Sometimes that involved a moral or religious question. Since I didn’t have a theologian to generate the sermons or solutions, I had to read the relevant parts of the Bible for a weekly sermon and generally think about the questions my characters were raising. That means the results did not come from some tablets of gold, nor have they been blessed by a committee priests and theologians. They come from the author, me, and are based on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The fidelity of my writing to that inspiration is absolutely subject to debate.
In a similar way, the business world is inextricably linked
to the stories; the characters are supported by some external magic, they must
create a means to support themselves and their scientific work. That meant
the accounting had to be correct; the income had to be balanced against the
expenses of these made-up businesses. In some cases, the business aspects
also contributed to the problems the characters encounter. The characters
would also have to travel and that meant the local descriptions had to be
realistic. Therefore, almost all of the locations are places in which I
have lived or spent some time visiting.
Finally, I want to note that the initial books in each series
are simpler than the later books. As the stories evolve, the characters
meet and interact with more people and the number of sub-stories increase.
I've attempted to make the character list at the beginning grow with the
increase of characters. I also had to age the principal characters
properly; birthdays occur and need to reflect the ages properly.
There is a rudimentary literary analysis of the novels
here.
Cited Works
Heinlein, R. A. (1961). Stranger in a Strange Land. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Heinlein, R. A. (1984). Job: A Comedy of Justice. New York: Ballantine Books.
Kurtz, K. (2014). The King's Deryni. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group.
Lewis, C. S. (1950). The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.
Modesitt Jr., L. E. (2009). Imager. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.
Niven, L., & Pournelle, J. (1976). Inferno. New York: Pocket Book.
Pullman, P. (2000). His Dark Materials. New York: Random House.
Tolkien, J. R. (1965). The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Weber, D. (1993). On Basilisk Station. Riverdale: Baen Publishing.
Zelazny, R. (1967). Lord of Light. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Biography:
I started subscribing to Astounding/Analog Science Fiction/Fact in the ‘60s and more than 50% of my 7500+ book library is SF. So, I have read a lot of science fiction over a large number of years. I have lived and read through a large portion of its history and know how to recognize the ones with solid scientific backgrounds and which ones contained characters that I grew to care about and wanted to read more about. So, now I writing SF; I'm writing books with stories that I want to read, populated by people I like, and based on science as we know it today, with the exception of one or two extrapolations that make the stories science fiction.
I
am the Principal of Hartley Consulting.
I am also the Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Vice President of
Sisyphus Energy, Inc. (SEI).
Previously I was a Senior Member of the Research Staff at the Department of
Energy Oak Ridge Facilities (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Y12 Site and East
Tennessee Technology Park). I graduated
Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Wofford College in
1968, majoring in mathematics and foreign languages.
I received my Ph.D. in piecewise linear topology from the
University
of Georgia in 1973.
I've been active in the practice of operations research for more than 50
years.
I am a
past Director of the Military Operations Research Society (MORS), a past Vice
President of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science
(INFORMS), a past President of the Military Applications Society (MAS), and a
member of the INFORMS Simulation Society (ISIM).
I also serve as the Technical Advisor for Operations Research and
Modeling to the International Psychopharmacology Algorithm Project (IPAP).
I am a Senior Fellow with the George Mason University School of Public
Policy,
a consulting resource for the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), Modeling, Virtual
Environments & Simulation (MOVES) Institute, and a Research Fellow with the
University of
Alabama
in Huntsville,
Center for the Management of Science and Technology (CMOST).
I've co-authored Cognitive
Superiority: Information to Power (2020), authored
An Ontology of Modern Conflict: Including Conventional Combat and
Unconventional Conflict (2020),
An Ontology for Unconventional Conflict
(2018)
Unconventional Conflict: A Modeling Perspective (2017),
Predicting Combat Effects (2001), co-authored OOTW Analysis and
Modeling Techniques (OOTWAMT) Workshop Proceedings (1997) and
NATO Code
of Best Practice for C2 Assessment (2002), contributed eleven chapters to
nine other books, and written more than 150 articles and technical documents.
My expertise includes modeling of combat, DIME/PMESII (diplomatic,
information, military, economic / political, military, economic, social,
information, infrastructure) operations, verification,
validation, and accreditation (VV&A) of models, psychopharmacology modeling, and
simulation. I received the
Koopman
Prize for best publication in military operations research in 1994 and the
Steinhardt Prize for lifetime achievement in operations research in 2013.
In 2022, I was presented the MORS
Clayton J. Thomas Award for
distinguished professional service and expanded application of military and
national security research.
Motto: There's more to life than reading books
... but I don't remember what it is.
To contact me, use my initials 'DS' lastname 'Hartley' the
number '3' and 'comcast.net' - make the subject line 'Science Fiction Books' or
something similar.
Return to Dr. Dean S. Hartley III Entrance.
