Blazing novel

And link to fire-aftermath fund.

Organizer of the upcoming Energy & Science Technology Conference, Aaron Murakami, succinctly summed up last week’s drama (see my January 23 post.) Here’s an excerpt from Aaron’s newsletter this week:

“Al Francoeur– a longtime researcher...is scheduled to present The Onan and Dynamotor Technologies at ESTC 2026 this June.”

“His lab was recently damaged by fire. Years of irreplaceable research equipment, components, prototypes, and documentation - gone.”

Murakami adds, “Al is one of the good ones. He’s contributed to this community for years. Now he needs our help.”

To help get the expensive machines he rescued from the fire–and what remains of his testing equipment– into a useable workshop again, here’s the link: Francoeur’s GoFundMe.

Photo by Jan Francoeur when 3 of the 5 rescued machines were out.

Trail-blazing author

Parts of the northern hemisphere experienced deep snowfalls this week. Down in my valley in BC, though, it’s merely cold. Yet it’s not too late in winter to recommend books for reading while inside a cozy bungalow.

Even if you’re in the warmer South, you might want a diversion from world news. How about fiction that dramatizes original characters and stories of revolutionary inventions vs. vested interests?

Could that be a new sci-fi genre? If so, Charles Bensinger is a pioneer.

In Bensinger’s Beyond Fire novel, for example, a wealthy man makes a speech at the opening of a New Century Engine plant.

“As the great Nikola Tesla, the father of our Electronic Age, said, we will at last ‘harness the wheelwork of nature’ to demonstrate to the world the non-necessity of aging global wars or sacrificing our natural environment to wrest the remaining scraps of black gold buried under our precious landscape or locked beneath sea ice in the arctic north.”

In Beyond Fire, the opposition struck back, hard!

In the Epilogue to his latest novel, Disruptive, Charlie Bensinger wrote:

“The chemistry of old needs now to become replaced by the physics of natural resonance.”

He added that such a major shift “…will, of course, send major shock waves throughout the world’s financial and political structures. Much economic and social disruption will occur.”

“ If, however, in the process of adjusting to a radically new global energy paradigm, an equivalent shift in consciousness can likewise occur, then the transition to a New Earth may indeed become possible.”