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My writing blog/diary or hear the laments of the author.
My model making blog, where you can see how I fritter my life away on creating trivial things.
You will die like a dog for no good reason.
— Ernest Hemingway
In 2071, Sergeant Tachikoma leads a Marine combat armor squad. She knows the Corps never promised her a rose garden, only the chance to fight for her country.
Now, she faces her greatest challenge, two terrifying alien pillars that trapped her into reliving the same day again. The day she dies.
Today, she needs every ounce of courage to save her people from annihilation.
Based on cutting-edge theories on the nature of the universe, this white knuckle military SF thriller contains drama and mystery.
“This story is great, with a very firm grasp of the Marine Corps lifestyle.”
— Sgt D. Barrow, USMC
I ended up writing a military SF story as my debut novel quite by happenstance. I was writing another story, just before Christmas 2012, when a phrase popped into my head, It’s all Big Dog’s fault that I died yesterday under a mountain in Afghanistan. I wrote the phrase down, and put it to one-side, so I could carry on with my other novel.
My good intentions didn’t go as planned.
The ideas encapsulated in that sentence wouldn’t leave me alone. It kept nagging at me. The idea literally forced me to start writing a new novel, driving me to run with the random phrase, morphing more and more ideas, until I ended up with creating the Bad Dog novel you are reading now.
But one thing became obvious, I wanted to write a story where the concerns of the character are driven by their desire to do their duty, and that her solutions came from military doctrine. The scope of the problem in this story is very much about tactics, but tactics are driven by doctrine and what is called the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, and act. The decision cycle was developed by the military strategist Colonel John Boyd of the United States Air Force. Boyd applied the concept to the combat operations process, and the Unites States Marine Corps took his ideas to produce their book on doctrine called, Warfighting, that I talk about in this novel.
For those of you interested in the science behind Bad Dog you’ll all have to thank Professor Max Tegmark, for his ideas about us all living in a mathematical based multiverse, and Professor’t Hooft for developing the idea about living in a holographic universe. Both of these men were the inspiration behind the pillars and how they work. Any mistakes in the physics are of course attributable only to me.
Ashley R Pollard
London, UK
January 2018
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