Writing any story not set in the world of today, a couple years back, or a couple years forward is an exercise in period fiction. “Period” doesn’t have to mean hoop skirts, horse-drawn carriages and swords. Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, set during the mid-1990s tech bubble, is a period piece. So…
A follow-on article to the Israeli business magazine Globes’ interviews with female Mossad agents (mentioned in this post)extensively quotes the agency’s director, Tamir Pardo, on his attitudes toward female operatives. In short: he’s all for them. A couple of the more interesting quotes: “Women start at the Mossad at younger…
The penultimate showdown in Doha 12—a three-way gun battle between Our Heroes Jake and Miriam, the Hezbollah team out to kill them, and the Mossad team out to kill Hezbollah—takes place at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Green-Wood, now a National Historic Landmark, is 478 acres of green set between Park Slope…
Flying cars? Teleportation? Bullet trains? Not even. In the version of 2032 envisioned by South, governments don’t have money to spend on real police or schools, far less this kind of stuff. The transportation picture then looks much as it does now, with certain big absences. Trains Amtrak, long…
Another Mossad Book Thirty-year CBS correspondent Dan Raviv has (with co-author Yossi Melman) completed Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, a book about the history of the Mossad. The Hebrew-language version is already a bestseller in Israel. This interview in the Jewish Press discusses some of the highlights. Of…
In Part 1, I went over the current state-of-play in American healthcare finance and reviewed the Republican proposals for changing the system. Assuming this agenda takes hold (the basis for the future I planned for South), we end up with a picture that unfortunately is a more extreme version of…
[10/7/13 update: not unexpectedly, the Mitt Romney for President website has been taken down, so you won’t be able to follow the links to that site provided below. There are plenty of other links that still work, though.] No matter what happens in the future, one thing will remain constant:…
Some of Mossad’s female agents have spoken semi-on-the-record to Lady Globes, an Israeli monthly women’s magazine, about their lives in “secret warfare.” You can read the English-language wrapups in the Times of Israel (includes a link to the original article, in case you read Hebrew) and RT-Novosti (somewhat different quotes…
It’s transformed into Doha 12. Back in this post, I mentioned the problem with using Identity as a title: too many other people had the same idea. I found 24 other books named Identity in Amazon without even looking hard. Which posed the dilemma: what do I call it? I…
One of the major set-pieces in Doha 12 is a three-way gun battle involving Our Heroes at Philadelphia’s massive 30th Street Station, the terminus for the city’s subway, commuter rail and Amtrak. It was completed in 1933 and is a fine example of early-to-mid Art Deco, with its classicist forms…