Lisa Paitz Spindler

After completing the Nine Paths leading up to the premiere of The Nine Lives of Chloe King, I received an e-mail stating that there was one remaining items in the box that had not been part of the clues, but that its meaning would become clear during tonight’s premiere.

That item is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. At first, I assumed Chloe would be reading this book in school, but that its themes would somehow relate to the story overall. Unfortunately, she’s not reading the story in school, but the themes do in fact relate to the premiere.

Spoilers follow if you haven’t yet watched the pilot.

A more in-depth recap will follow in the next day or two, but I did indeed notice the “forbidden love” theme between Chloe and Brian. They meet at the vintage clothing store where Chloe works every afternoon after school, where he bought a “kitty cat hat.” They have in common a missing parent: Chloe’s dad left her and her mother when she was very little and Brian’s mother died five years prior.

Oh, and Brian’s father is trying to kill Chloe.

That truth will be difficult enough for Chloe to learn, but I won’t be surprised if we discover that the Rezza family (I assume that’s Brian’s surname) will turn out to also be of the Mai. Alek said something along the lines of how humans and the Mai split was up to interpretation. It’s possible that the Mai themselves argued about their future with humans and wedged into two main groups with the Rezza family heading up the opposition.

This would actually be a boon to Chloe in the long run if her relationship with Brian goes anywhere. With him also being Mai, she could at least kiss the guy without killing him — unlike the Xavier’s sorry fate.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed The Nine Lives of Chloe King, plan to continue watching it, and if you haven’t seen it yet — fire up that Tivo. Chloe is the possible Buffy heir apparent. Jasmine kicked butt too.

Stay tuned…

This week’s Danger Gal post profiles Raquel Donovan from Heather Massey’s debut space opera romance ONCE UPON A TIME IN SPACE. Here’s the story summary:

In the sea of stars, an epic love story is about to begin…

Earth is dying. Nick Venture, the last living descendant of Christopher Columbus, embarks on a dangerous mission to find a new planet and save humanity. This places him on a collision course with Raquel Donovan, the deadliest space pirate in the galaxy.

Raquel lives for one purpose: revenge against a horrible demon from her past. When an attempt to hijack Nick’s starship backfires, Raquel becomes his protector in order to avoid capture by the tyrannical Space Defense Corps. Nick and Raquel are irresistibly drawn to one another despite the forbidden nature of their attraction. But the conflicted pirate’s deepest secret could tear the couple apart even as humanity’s time runs out….

One of my favorite aspects of this story is indeed the heroine. As Heather and I have discussed on our own blogs and elsewhere, in Romance so often it’s the hero who gets to have all the fun. They often get to be real monsters with a true redemption story and reward of love when, in contrast, heroines are confined to being stereotypically pretty and likable. We recently had a great discussion on this topic over at Dear Author with Heather’s guest post “Enter the Extraordinary Heroine: Are We Ready For Her Yet?” where we talked about paranormal and gritty — sometimes called unlikable* — heroines.

In the past five years I’ve seen the tide turning, however, and I really hope we continue to see a wider range of heroines. I have nothing against the girl-next-door and her out-of-this-world vampire/alien boyfriend story line, but prefer this character type be part of a larger spectrum and not the only offering. After all, when the hero is the bad boy in need of redemption, it’s the heroine who carries out that redemption, so I don’t see this role as passive. To quote Teresa Medeiros “[P]robably the most subversive thing we dare to do is to make the woman the hero of her own story.”

One of the reasons I write this blog is to call attention to those heroines who break the “good girl” mold. Raquel Donovan is a hardened space pirate and certainly acts like one with her behavior sometimes bordering on cruel. Like we’re used to seeing with so many heroes, Donovan has reasons that explain such behavior. She’s lived through some pretty terrible experiences.** She’s on a revenge mission and nothing will get in the way of that need. Well, nothing except the hero.

I don’t want to spoil the plot of this new release, but Donovan’s sex appeal isn’t martyred in building such a hardened character. She is actually known far and wide as The Siren. This despite the fact, or more likely because of it, that she’s lost an eye. Massey didn’t pull any punches when it came to creating Donovan. I appreciated that Donovan’s deformity was front and center instead of hidden from all but the hero, as is often the case. Early on, we see inklings of a softer — and very well protected — side of Donovan, but it takes the hero the whole book to be let in on that. In the meantime, he trusts his gut and intuition and offers the redemption so many Romance heroines have been rewarding heroes with for the past thirty-some years in the Romance genre.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN SPACE is available from Red Sage Publishing and features the last living descendant of Christopher Columbus on a desperate quest to find a new world. Standing in his way is Raquel, the deadliest space pirate in the galaxy.

To learn more about Heather Massey, visit her at www.heathermassey.com.

* Because, you know, one of the worst things a woman can do is be unlikable.
** Lo and behold, Donovan is also a heroine whose terrible experience is not rape.

I’m blogging today over at Contact — Infinite Futures about superfluids possibly forming in the core of Cassiopeia A:

Scientists recently came one step closer to confirming the existence of neutrino superfluids after examining changes in the heart of the 330-year-old supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. The leftovers of exploded stars, the core of a neutron star is so dense that atomic nuclei dissolve. Then all those itty bitty quantum parts are up for grabs. What happens then?

Come find out how we might use this substance in science fiction and in real life.

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Scientific research uncovers new facets of our world every day. Scientists have to name these discoveries and some of the ideas they come up with I find to be very amusing (especially physics). Below are thirteen of my favorite funny science terms. Any of these would make excellent geek band names.

1. Nanoputians or Nanoputian Molecules: These organic molecules form a structure that appears human. These molecules are named after the residents of Lilliput in the book Gulliver’s Travels. There’s even a whole Nanoputian family. See Ballet Dancer, left, which sort of reminds me of an XKCD strip.

2. Space Invader Tranposons: Transposons are “sequences of DNA that can move around to different positions within the genome of a single cell.” Space invader transposons are bits of DNA that infiltrate DNA via a horizontal transmission (passed from one unrelated individual to another) instead of other kinds of transposons that are transmitted vertically (from your parents) because they’ve infiltrated sex chromosomes or RNA. Kind of reminds me of the premises of X-Men or Heroes. Also, one such “jumping gene” is called Sleeping Beauty.

3. Sonic Hedgehog: No, it’s not the Sega Genesis game character, but this signaling molecule is named after that character due to a mutation connected to it that causes fly embryos to have spiky appendages. This molecule is fundamental not only to vertebrate development, but also triggers an undifferentiated brain cell to turn into a dopamine neuron.

4. Dark Strangelet: These “sub-stellar agglomerations of strange matter” are formed when neutronium — which is created inside super-dense neutron stars when “the protons and electrons in atomic nuclei fuse to become neutrons” — collapses into quarks. Think of it as huge amounts of pressure squashing elemental particles into even itty-bittier particles. This is called “quark matter” or “strange matter.” Dark strangelets are thought to possibly occur when isolated pockets of strange matter exist, maintain their deep gravity well properties, and overwhelm all matter around it.

5. Naked singularity: There might be a naked singularity at the center of Sagittarius A. A naked singularity is theorized to be just like other singularities except that it doesn’t have an event horizon, so light (and conceivably other objects, I imagine) can escape and events inside of it can be observed from the outside. A naked singularity is a black hole going commando.

6. Spaghettification: This refers to the distortion an object experiences as it nears the event horizon of a black hole. First an object splits in half, then those halves into four, then into eight pieces. This decomposition process continues until an object is split into atoms and becomes a string of elemental particles.

7. Sparticles: Theoretically, when elemental particles such as leptons, photons, and quarks were produced in the Big Bang, each was accompanied by a matching sparticle: sleptons, photinos and squarks. I still want to hear Gerry Butler yell “This is sparticle!”

8. Big Bang Theory: “Our whole universe was in a hot dense state; Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait…The Earth began to cool; The autotrophs began to drool, Neanderthals developed tools; We built a wall (we built the pyramids); Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries; That all started with the big bang!”

9. ACHOO: Autosomal dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst syndrome happens when you walk outside into bright sunlight and start sneezing your head off. Gesundheit.

10. Nibble: Eight bits make a byte. Four bits make a nibble. So, that means two nibbles make a byte.

11. Gluon: These elementary particles keep quarks stuck together.

12. Flavor: In particle physics, flavor is “the property that distinguishes different members in the two groups of basic building blocks of matter, the quarks and the leptons.” Please tell me someone has already done an LOLCat about a lepton that “haz flavor.”

13. Harry Potter gene: This is a gene that triggers the hormonal cascade initiating puberty. Harvard researchers discovered the gene while studying a family in Saudi Arabia where several members never experienced puberty.

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