The entry begins:Someone once told me that adding a helicopter scene to a movie will, on average, boost the movie’s box-office take by a surprisingly large amount -- $30 million, $50 million, I forget how much exactly. I have no idea if this is really true, but just to be on the safe side I put helicopter scenes in all of my novels. Besides, helicopters are fun! I flew in a Huey helicopter over Honduras in the mid-Eighties when the military was assigning National Guard units to build roads in that country. (They were also deployed there to intimidate the Sandinistas across the border in Nicaragua.) I was just a cub reporter then, accompanying some of the Guardsmen from Alabama, but the helicopter crew let me sit next to the side door and wear the radio headset and everything.Learn more about the book and author at Mark Alpert's website.
Anyway, I tried to relive that experience by writing a helicopter battle into my latest science thriller, Extinction. The book is about the merger of man and machine, so it has lots of fascinating and ominous technologies: bionic arms, artificial eyes, cyborg insects (this is a real-life project funded by the Pentagon -- the bugs have electronics implanted in their brains and flight muscles so they can serve as radio-controlled micro-drones). But the most ominous technology of all is Supreme Harmony, a surveillance network created by the Chinese government to crack down on political dissidents. To analyze all the thousands of hours of video collected by the cyborg insect drones, the Chinese Ministry of State Security...[read on]
A longtime science journalist, Alpert specializes in writing novels that incorporate real theories and technologies. His earlier books — Final Theory and its sequel, The Omega Theory — have been published in more than twenty languages.
My Book, The Movie: The Omega Theory.
My Book, The Movie: Extinction.
--Marshal Zeringue
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