Jack of Harts

Snowmaggedon has come and gone and left my hometown buried and digging itself out. Half my coworkers are snowed in and I had to dig myself out just to get to work. And today I did some cleanup in my patented tennis shoes, basketball shorts, and tank top because the temperature was in the 20s, it was only a 30 mph wind, and I didn’t want to get hot. I love shoveling like that. And waving at everyone who looks at me like I’m crazy. 🙂

Minefield clearance has recently become an issue of some interest to the world.

And I’ve seen people say that we recently withdrew our minesweepers from a certain area that needs it at the moment. Those statements are generally said with great interest and suggestions that maybe they should be sent back, given current foreign events. As many untruths go, this is a true statement that suggests an untruth that people should think.

In this case, there are two truths that change what things look like in reality.

The first truth is that, while yes, multiple minesweepers have been withdrawn from the area in question, they are very old minesweepers. Older than most people reading this right now. They were built in the 1980s, an age before modern cruise missiles and drones changed the face of warfare. They were built back when we were still learning the lessons of World War II and trying to grasp the lessons of the Cold War. Wooden-hulled minesweepers that must sail through a minefield to destroy it are literally a weapon of a different age. That is the first truth. Sending those vessels into that threat environment would be asking for them to be sunk by the new threats that dominate warfare.

The second truth is that other vessels designed to do minesweeping duties are deployed in the area. We have a number of brown water naval vessels designed for speed and to operate in the modern threat environment. Key amongst their abilities is the capability to sail outside a minefield and send in remote devices to disable the minefield. They don’t even have to enter it. And they are logged in to the modern warfare systems that keep them in modern air defense mode and have a full tactical link up with aircraft and other naval ships in the area. In a full scale war situation, these are the vessels you want to perform mine clearance.

The full truth is that the vulnerable old technology minesweepers were removed from a high-threat environment while more modern vessels designed to perform minesweeper duties in a high-threat environment have been deployed. The other full truth is that the high-threat environment has still proven to be rather dangerous for shipping in the area and it will take a great deal of work by the civilized navies to end that threat. And that work will require risk. As long as the enemies of civilization wish to shut down major trade routes, the civilized nations must stand up to them, or civilization itself will be in peril.

My Jack of Harts universe has room for a little bit of everything.

I try to keep the science grounded, but without being the kind of hard science fiction that bores people. I love those hard sci-fi stories, but I know most people don’t. But I will say that everything that happens in the Jack of Harts universe has a science reason for existing. Even catgirls and all those other things that Jack fights. Genetic engineering is a real thing in the universe, and it can make all kinds of crazy creatures. As for the tech itself, I try to show the Earth factions still using tech that we find relatable. Fusion engines. Lasers. Missiles. Gravitic cannons and gravitic generators are really the One Big Tech they get from aliens, which makes them faster and more dangerous, but most Earthborn designs are still something that looks like a futuristic version of what we have now. That is on purpose. It is designed to keep most of the stories I write grounded in the kind of reality that the reader can understand, even as I throw new and interesting things at them.

That is probably the most unrealistic thing about my writing actually. The idea that we will recognize our future world. One way or the other, I highly doubt that we actually will. Just as the world we live in now is utterly alien to the world of a hundred years ago, I expect the real time of Jack will be just as alien to us. But when I write stories, I am writing them for people now, and so I make the decision to write stories that make sense to our eyes. Even as I show all kinds of crazy things in them. The normalcy is what makes the crazy stand out after all.