Here’s the deal. Write a review of Specific Impulse on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com by August 31st. We’ll even accept reviews written for book review websites and blogs – for that you’ll have to send us the link at info@charlesjustiz.com.

We’ll take all the reviews (good or bad but hopefully good…), throw them in a box, grab another friend’s unsuspecting yet uncorrupted child and have said child reach in the box and pick a winner.

Winner gets an iPad, brand new, all shiny, in the box, delivered directly from the good folks at Apple. Same rules as before –  doesn’t matter who you are (relative, friend or stranger) or what you say (friends and relatives, remember we know where you live) – just do it by the August 31st due date.

Here are some of our favorites so far:

I looked up only to realize that the plane had landed and some passengers had already departed. I was so entrenched in this story that I was completely unaware of anything else around me. I love a book like that!

My schedule has only allowed me a few stolen moments of reading a night… and each night I have felt like I’m curling up to visit old friends. Each evening, I have literally felt as if I had to rush back to the book to make sure Carin and Jake were okay! I somehow knew they would be… I had that much confidence in them… but Crurabi is just THAT scary! Justiz crafted characters with whom I was immediately both endeared and fascinated.

I truly look forward to CJ’s next book… Which BETTER be a sequel! I’m sure that is what Fred would do!

I’m generally not a Sci-Fi fan, but these characters really mattered to me, and I really want to know what happens in their future. Everything was somewhat plausible in real life. I could believe these things were happening, which made it a great read!

It is amazing. I love the way Charlie develops the characters through the book. You actually grow to enjoy finding what happens next. You start to draw your own conclusions, you want to know more. This, in my opinion, is the sign of great fiction. If this book were a TV series it would replace Fringe in the genre.

So, get to work and, as always, thanks for the support. And for being a part of the adventure.

Fly high,

Charlie

PS  My production staff (Dayna) has finally gotten the voiceover artist (Dayna) to record another free chapter podcast.  The podcast has been posted by my webmaster (Dayna) and is now available thanks to my publicist (Dayna) on iTunes.

Thanks to JP Pritchard and Lana Hughes with KTRH-AM in Houston for having me on this morning.  It is always nice when someone wants to talk to you about your book.  They asked a lot of great questions about Specific Impulse as well as about the future of NASA.  Click the link below to listen.

Charles Justiz on KTRH-AM in Houston

It’s my first official book signing!

Barnes & Noble Baybrook
July 24, 1:00 to 3:00 pm (yes that’s tomorrow)
1029 W Bay Area Blvd.
Webster, TX 77598
(281) 554-8224

I am here to tell you, having done a few of these with Dayna for Rock to the Top, these things can be excruciating for an author.  Especially a first time, unknown author.

Let me set the scene for you:  a customer walks in, looks at the author, looks around, looks back at the author, looks at the stack of books in front of the author, looks around again, looks at the author’s poster, looks back at the author and say something profound like, “where are the bathrooms?”  Quite humbling I must say.

So, come join in on all the fun at my first book signing thanks to our good friend Ethan at our neighborhood Barnes & Noble.  He has gone out of his way to promote the signing and we are forever grateful.  Ethan very much likes BLTs so we will be taking him to lunch soon should you want to join us…

If enough warm bodies show up and so desire, Dayna will do a reading from Specific Impulse.  And we can all count how many people ask me where the bathrooms are (in the back, to the right).

Thanks again for all the support!

Every author likes getting fan mail. When it comes from one of your favorite performers of all time, it’s mind blowing!  This arrived in the email box from David Crosby of Crosby, Stills & Nash:

Charlie …….I read SF ……I started with the Heinlein juveniles when I was about 10 and have been devoted to the stuff ever since …..I have readalmost every author in the business and when I find one I like I read everything he has written ……this is the best first novel in SF I think I have ever read …..if it isn’t the best one , it’s one of the top half dozen and frankly I can’t think of one better ……I read it in two days because I could not put it down ……could not …….has tons of my favorite elements in it including computer that wakes up ……..great characters ……great action …..great plot ……as good a pilot as you were ….you were wasting time …..go directly to your computer and start on the next one ….please……wonderful book …..if by chance you have already written the next one please send  it to me now …….if you have not I am going to become the biggest pest you have ever encountered …….hope sincerely for this books success…..hope very much to see you both soon thanks for the read / ride……croz

I will ‘carry on’ Croz and get that second one out soon.

I was recently asked an excellent question. Was the experience at my high school in Miami helpful in my journey through life so far? I honestly couldn’t answer. There were many excellent schools in Miami that would have given me a leg up on life.

However, thinking back I do have some very strong memories of those times. I remember taking a Calculus class from Mr. Blitzer. This class was not your traditional class where they bored through the book and tested at a pace prescribed in some curriculum. This guy actually loved this stuff! His passion for the subject brought it to life for me and made me understand why we should even bother with such trivia. Because of him, I understood calculus better than most of my fellow cadets when I got to the U.S. Air Force Academy. It was an immeasurable advantage to a budding engineer.

I remember a weird troika of learning between three teachers: Dr. Garcia-Montez, Brother Vincent de Paul and Mr. Barrett. Garcia-Montez taught my Spanish Literature class and could quote entire pages of Spanish poems. A former lawyer in pre-Castro Cuba, his talent served him well when he became a P.O.W. in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. He gave me a rich understanding of the texture and timbre of the words on the page and infected me a little with his passion for the written Spanish word. I still have a copy of La Vida es Sueño that I occasionally page through thanks to him. But even more, his stories of the Brigade 2506 trials gave me a feel for politics in war that has left a stale taste in my mouth to this day. Brother Vincent had a tremendous love of Classical English literature. Because of him, I have a dozen Shakespeare soliloquies stuck in my head. Although painful at the time, I thank him almost daily now. The last horse on that team was Mr. Barrett that taught Contemporary English Literature. He taught one of his classes with a blank blackboard – discussing a Simon and Garfunkel song. Towards the end of the class he turned and wrote one word on the board. Four letters. It changed my view of the power of music forever. Moreover, between these three diverse teachers, I was able to sense the depth and color of literature in two languages and across centuries. My contemporaries in the public high schools did not get this opportunity.

There were the days of pounding tennis balls across a court in the blistering heat. We were playing against schools that were literally ten times bigger than we were and could draw from a much larger talent pool. We won our share and we lost our share, and through it all, it taught me how to accept both victory and defeat with dignity.

Looking back, I think that I would have gotten a good education at any of the other high schools in Miami. However, there is no question that my days at Archbishop Curley High School helped to shape me in a way that I would not change for anything.

Here’s the radio interview I did with my other favorite radio diva Marsha Collier.  Be sure to follow her on Twitter @MarshaCollier. She’s the author of several eBay For Dummies books, a Customer Service & Social Media Influencer and the host f KTRB Computer & Tech Radio.

“I love good quality science based fiction. When I saw this book I had to check it out. Inventive and brilliant — the best I’ve read in years and I can’t put it down.  Worth taking the time to get lost in a fine story!”
–Marsha Collier, Author and Host of Computer & Technology Radio

I never thought that this day would come – we are publishing my first novel Specific Impulse. You have to believe me when I use the word “we.” This has been a group project. I need to thank all of you talented folks for letting me bother you with my simple-minded questions. For letting me fold parts of your lives into my fiction. Thanks mostly for letting me bug you incessantly without you throwing me out the door. I greatly appreciate that. I don’t bounce well.

Also, I have to tell you that the experiences of being a fiction writer are different from what I was expecting. For example, I recently let my two older boys read the book. I found that I was more nervous for their opinion than I would have been for a review from the New York Times. Then they both came back raving about the book!  They wanted to know what happened to Jake, Carin, and Fred.  They even wanted to know where the next book was.  A spot on Oprah’s book list could not have made me happier.

So please accept my heartfelt gratitude for all your support, love, and friendship over the life of this project. I could not have accomplished this without you. I can now only humbly hope that you enjoy reading Specific Impulse as much as I enjoyed writing it.   –Charlie

FRED is the third main character in Specific Impulse, the new thriller from author Charles Justiz. This machine-based intelligence – or computer – will quickly become one of your favorites in the book.  For fun, we created the What Would FRED Do? store at Cafe Press with shirts, mugs, stickers, etc.  Here is what Charlie had to say about FRED:

So why should I include a machine-based intelligence in a thriller? To be honest, the idea started on the back porch with my brothers discussing what we meant by the term “intelligence.” We all seemed to agree that an intelligent individual would possess the ability to extrapolate solutions, call on experience, think abstractly, and comprehend and act on complex concepts. Then my Brainy Brother asks if that would apply to a machine.

Now you have to understand my brothers – and Brainy Brother especially. Brainy Brother has a measured IQ of 190. My other brothers aren’t that far behind him. We all knew that Brainy Brother was leading us towards the classic Turing Test argument. Alan Turing, who made Brainy Brother look like a complete dullard, proposed the test in a famous paper that he wrote in 1950. How smart was Turing? All computers today are based on Alan Turing’s work. Yeah, all of them.

“Charlie’s book is good. It feels like a Patricia Cornwell novel, before she started to suck.”
–Andy Mann, friend and fan

In a nutshell, the Turing Test proposes that if a human is talking via a microphone to someone or something that they can’t see on the other end and our human can’t tell whether it is human or machine on the other end, then the thing on the other end is intelligent. It is simple and elegant as all of Turing’s work was.

We four brothers went through the standard arguments, came to conclusions that had been reached before and then Brainy Brother asked his simple question. “If we all agree that such a being has to be as intelligent as we are, why do we call it artificial intelligence?”

We all came to a crashing halt. It was an excellent question. My two other brothers engaged Brainy Brother slowly but without conviction. Finally, I said, “There is no such thing as artificial intelligence. There is intelligence. The only thing that you can do is describe the basis for that intelligence – where it resides. Either in a machine or … “

I then realized that Brainy Brother had set a wonderful trap for us (don’t play chess with him). Humans are also machines. We are just machines of the meat variety (biological variety if you are so inclined). Brainy Brother knew all this when he started this thread, so I wondered what he was really getting at. He asked his next question, “What is the difference between them and us?”

We could only come to one conclusion; everything would be different. Intelligence in a being is molded by its worldview and its worldview is molded by its perceptions. The perceptions of an intelligent human-made construct would depend on whatever programming it had and whatever sensors it used to interact with its environment. In today’s environment, the construct would gain most of its input from limited sensors. No, I thought, it would gain the majority of its input from the internet. I sat back in my chair, staggered by the implication. And FRED, the third main character and machine-based intelligence  in Specific Impulse,  was born.

Specific Impulse is set to be released on June 1st – just a few days away. Help me spread the word across the Universe….and possibly win an iPad for doing so. OK? OK.

So here’s how it will work. On June 1, 2010 – not before or after that date, just on June 1st – tweet, post or blog something that mentions both Specific Impulse (in a good way…) and the link to buy the book at http://tinyurl.com/charlesjustiz. Then, email me a link or a screen shot of what you tweeted, posted or blogged.

We’ll take all the entries and pick a grand prize winner at random to receive a Wi-Fi 16GB Apple iPad. We’ll also give away autographed copies of the book, stuff from the What Would FRED Do? store and official NASA patches to lots of you who send us the links or screen shots.

That’s it. Simple, no rules, no disclaimers, anyone is eligible whether you have 10 followers or 100,000 and that includes friends, family and strangers who I hope are soon to be friends and fans.  Just has to be done on June 1st, 2010 if you want a chance at the free stuff!

Thanks for all your support. And I truly hope you enjoy Specific Impulse.

Charlie

P.S. I know you want to win the iPad but help a guy out here – start spreading the word….

“Engaging for both its use of science and suspense, ‘Specific Impulse’ blends the macro- and micro-worlds with intrigue and adventure. A unique combination that kept me engrossed throughout!”
– Robert Pearlman, Editor collectSPACE