Outer Diverse by Nina Munteanu

My latest book, Outer Diverse, is coming out this fall and we are launching it at Con*Cept in Montreal in October and Hal-Con in Halifax in November.

I'm really excited about this book. It's the first of the Splintered Universe Trilogy. Here's a bit about it:

…Splintered Events, Single Destiny…
…An entire spiritual sect is inexplicably wiped out by Eclipse, the largest crime syndicate in the galaxy…
…Glitter Dust, a new seductive but dangerous contraband narcotic of mysterious origin and sold on the slipstream, is used by certain spiritual fanatics to travel to another dimension and “experience God”…
…An elite Eclipse assassin, known simply as the Rose, is entrusted with an eclectic hit list of prominent galactic citizens, including spiritual leaders, information pirates and dust traffickers…
…One of the Rose’s targets, an eccentric priest, prophesies the Suntelia Aeon, a catastrophic End of Age, triggered by the joining of twin souls…


Galactic Guardian, Rhea Hawke, fears that this dire resurgence of an ancient prophesy may be fulfilled at last. She suspects that these latest moves by Eclipse are linked to the return of the cruel extra-galactic Vos. The Vos invaded thirty years ago and would have destroyed Earth if not for the intervention of a benevolent but arrogant alien race, the Eosians, who have now claimed Earth for themselves as their price.

This is going to be Rhea’s hardest case yet—particularly since she’s been taken off the case and fired by her Eosian boss for her most recent in a legacy of bungled missions. And Eclipse is gunning for her.

Rhea’s desperate race to expose their plan before the galaxy falls again to the cruel Vos catapults her on a journey to the far reaches of the galaxy, where she will discover the shattering truth about duel twin worlds and her ultimate role in preserving or destroying them both.

Outer Diverse is scheduled for release October 15th 2011 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and other quality bookstores near you.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visitwww.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.

Celebrating the Bitch: Thelma & Louise

Twenty years ago Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis drove off a cliff into movie lore in Thelma & Louise. This “ground-breaking female buddy movie cum road-trip, crime spree and chase flick … deals with rape, a fatal shooting and sexual awakening, all to a country-rock soundtrack,” says Linda Diebel of the Toronto Star in her recent tribute to this Ridley Scott motion picture and its Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri. Thelma & Louise hit many firsts for women. It was one of the first movies to portray women using violence as an alternative form of action; it was the first to effectively show the raw power of women locked in friendship; and the first to depict a passionate choice for liberty in death vs. a compromised life.

From introducing Brad Pitt as a sex symbol to portraying women as independent and powerful, Thelma & Louise still resonates with a visceral message two decades after their iconic leap into the Grand Canyon. The ending, in which the pair lock hands and sail over the canyon in Louise’s 1966 T-bird convertible, remains controversial even now.

Spiritual Ecology and the Lesson of Crete

If Gaia is our “Natural Mother” then Ecology is her language—Nina Munteanu

In a time when North American scientists and politicians are debating the pros and cons of a new carbon tax, theologian Sallie McFague contends that climate change currently poses a greater danger to the globe than Nazism prior to the Second World War (See my postscript at the bottom of this post). In a previous post, I described the debilitating psychological condition called solastalgia, a response to the loss felt in climate change-related impacts. McFague goes so far as to embrace a militant approach to the problem, urging citizens to dedicate themselves fully and be willing to sacrifice to save the planet’s eco-system. In her recent book, A New Climate for Theology, McFague espouses a spiritual attitude of gratitude and praise toward the natural world while adopting a radical war footing against global warming.

National Day of Prayer

Today is the National Day of Prayer in the United States. I know because, as I was driving through Detroit, I tuned into WMUZ Radio and heard it from Bob Dutko, host of "The Bob Dutko Show". The National Day of Prayer is an annual day of observance held on the first Thursday of May and designated by the United States Congress: people are asked “to turn to God in prayer and meditation.”

I was intrigued to listen to Dutko’s show because he was about to ask listeners of the program what they were praying for today. Dutko began by reading President Obama’s proclamation, who honored the service and sacrifice of the men and women of the United States Armed Forces “we recognize that it is because of them that we continue to live in a Nation where people of all faiths can worship or not worship according to the dictates of their conscience…As we observe this day of prayer, we remember the one law that binds all great religions together: the Golden Rule, and its call to love one another; to understand one another; and to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth…Let us also use this day to come together in a moment of peace and goodwill…Our varied beliefs can bring us together to feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted, to make peace where there is strife; and to life up those who have fallen on hard times.”

Dutko launched into a passionate invective of what constituted “appropriate prayer” and by whom. Dutko proclaimed that only prayers delivered to our One True God delivered by true Christians were appropriate and beautiful. He did not consider prayers by Muslims or Hindus appropriate for today (reserved for true Christians) nor did he consider them beautiful because they were prayers to a false god. In fact, he considered this act of prayer “ugly”.

“The One True God is a jealous God,” Dutko reminded us, invoking the first of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:1-3: thou shalt have no other gods before me.

After taking several calls from listeners, Dutko proceeded to give us his prayer for today, which ran along the same lines as his introduction: he prayed that so-called enlightened Christians would change their misguided false beliefs that included Darwinian evolution, unconditional love, respect and inclusion of marginal groups like homosexuals and different races. Duco advocated a revival of the old fundamentalist Christianity that invoked Jesus as the savior of our sins.

Not only is this very unsporting of Dutko; it lacks respect for the majority of humankind (who are NOT fundamentalist Christians or Creationists).

It saddens me to hear that this very closed-minded exclusionary sentiment continues to prevail in the world during a time when peoples and cultures need to communicate with one another respectfully and with compassion. Such exclusionary sentiment is predicated on fear and fear-mongering and a hubristic sense of righteousness. God is not exclusively your God or exclusively my God; God is all things to all people. God may come to one culture as the personification of a wise man and to another as the divine Universe of Intent. They do not exist in mutual exclusion. Because God is God. Like so much in the Bible, God’s commandment to Moses—do not worship other gods before me—is best read metaphorically.

What did God really mean by “false gods”? How many of us cherish our personal possessions? How many of us worship our material wealth? How many of us obsess over our outward image (“It’s all about optics, Nina,” my old boss used to tell me)? How many of us are ruled by lust and other desires? How many of us vigorously compete for status (often at the expense of others). So, Mr. Dutko, what are our real destructive false idols? Allah? Yahweh? Vishnu? Shiva? How about greed, power-mongering, lack of compassion, and obsession over physical beauty—to name a few.

When we judge someone else’s faith as ugly, or exclude another’s reverence in a divine presence as less worthy than our own, we are judging and excluding ourselves from our own divine nature. For they are us.

Dutko mocking Hinduism or the Muslim faith as false or Florida pastor Terry Jones publically burning a copy of the Quran are not just the immature antics of bullies; they represent the most insidious form of terrorism on world peace.

So, here’s my prayer…

I pray that humanity may be graced by the wisdom to love purely, to look beyond the surface and the literal and see that deep down at the metaphoric level we are the same and all deserve respect and compassion. ALL OF US: Muslim, Jew, Christian, woman, man, child, animal and plant, water and mineral.

Our beloved Earth and her home, the Universe, deserve better. We all do.

Beam Me Up, Scotty: Teleportation, Schrődinger’s Cat and Quantum Entanglement

What do the terms squeezing, photon subtraction, entanglement and homodyne detection have in common? Together, they represent the quantum manipulation that researchers used to achieve the first documented case of successful teleportation of quantum light.

In the journal Science last Friday, researchers reported that they had successfully transferred quantum information from one place to another without having to physically move it. It was destroyed in one place and instantly resurrected in another, “alive” again and unchanged. A notion exploited in the film Prestige, based on a teleportation invention by Nikola Tesla. It’s also pretty much what happens in the SF show Star Trek in which an object is “destroyed” atom by atom in one place then built or "beamed" back with the same pattern elsewhere.