Check out this article by Chris Anderson from  sUASNews:

WHEN THE FUTURE SNEAKS UP ON YOU

Last month, at a Congressional hearing, Sentator Patrick Leahy quoted an FAA prediction that there would be “as many as 30,000 small, lightweight unmanned vehicles [drones] operating in the national airspace by the end of this decade”. That was considered a lot. And he was talking about seven years from now.

Guess what. There are more than 30,000 such small, lightweight drones in Americaalready. My own company sells more than 10,000 a year, and we’re just one of many. We’ve been at it for nearly four years.

Drones are not just remote-controlled aircraft (there are hundreds of thousands of those, which have been flown by hobbyists for decades); instead, they’re computer-controlled unmanned aircraft capable of autonomous flight, following GPS waypoints and otherwise executing pre-programmed missions and controlling on-board cameras. A decade ago, this was the sole domain of the military. Today, you can buy one for less than $550.

How is it possible that Senator Leahy and the Federal Aviation Administration don’t have any idea how many such drones there are in America?

The simple answer is that they’re stuck in the past. The FAA typically tracks aircraft from aerospace companies that go through a certification process. They’ve assumed that the only people who can make drones, which are after all highly complex flying robots, are such firms…….

Read the rest of the article at sUASNews. 

So Drones are here to stay. They can either be incredible tools or something else altogether. The Dragonflies series seeks to enterain while exploring this very issue.  

Don’t miss Book One, coming May 14.  

The book has spent some time in the top ten on the Barnes & Noble NOOK Bestsellers list yesterday and today, peaking at #8.

Cold Quarry also flirted with the top 100 in Amazon’s Kindle store this morning, moving to #1 in “hardboiled mysteries”, #1 in “men’s adventure fiction”, #3 on Amazon’s “Kindle Movers and Shakers list,” as well as #1 in “Detective fiction” on the NOOK.

Thanks so much to all who’ve been buying the book!

• Title: Dragonflies “Shadow of Drones” by Andy Straka
• Genre: Science Fiction, Crime, Military, Thriller
• Published by: LLW Media–representation and distribution by Trident Media Group, New York
• ISBNs: 978-1-4756-0203-6 Mobi 978-1-4756-0204 ePub
• Price: $2.99  Print length: 200-240 pages

Synopsis:  Former Army helicopter pilot Raina Sanchez is plagued by nightmares. She can’t erase the memories of being shot down in Afghanistan, of losing her foot in the crash, and the death of her commanding officer. When asked by an ex-military contact to participate in a secret drone operation with ties to the war, she jumps at the chance to exorcise some of her demons.

She joins Tye Palmer, the decorated ex-infantryman who rescued her from the flaming wreckage of her Kiowa chopper. As civilian private investigators, together they embark on a sensitive, risky effort: using cutting-edge micro air vehicle drones in an attempt to expose the son of media mogul Nathan Kurn as a campus date-rapist.

But as Raina and Tye come closer to the truth about Kurn and his powerful allies, Raina’s loyalties take a potential detour when she begins to understand a chilling reality. In a world where surveillance devices as small as tiny insects are being piloted into places most would never imagine, public and private forces both large and small are maneuvering to control them with inevitable consequences. For Raina and Tye the danger didn’t end when they finished their military careers−the threat has just begun….

Why write about drones?

Until a couple of years ago, I paid little attention to UAVs or unmanned aerial vehicles−more popularly known as drones−only reading about them in occasional news reports of military strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. But around 2010 I came across some concept videos and began reading news articles about smaller drones, known as MAVs or micro-air vehicles. Already under development, many of these are as small as birds with some concepts even smaller, the size of insects. I realized then the enormity of their potential, not just for military use, but in law enforcement and investigation as well as many other beneficial civilian uses. As a novelist, I began to ask myself what if? And the idea for the characters Raina Sanchez and Tye Palmer and a near-future science fiction detective series was born.

As a falconer, it’s no secret I’m fascinated with flight. The symbolism of hawks, falcons, and other birds of prey has helped inform my bestselling Frank Pavlicek series of private eye novels. But I’m also a bit of a technogeek (My father was an engineer, after all, and I have a twin brother who is an economist) so perhaps it’s not all that surprising that I would also gravitate in my fiction toward writing about drones.

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Christmas collides with unspeakable tragedy in “Directions For Disassembly Of An Old Set Of Swings.”

Now available as a Kindle book.

Preview:

It will have to be in winter, one of those bright frozen days when your wife is off volunteering at the hospital and the neighbor will let you borrow his pickup so you can carry the pieces to the dump. The old swings will be hard to pry from the earth at first; they will have stood in the same corner of the yard for years. A decade or more may have passed since the shootings. Some will have tried to forget. You will need a pitchfork and a shovel, and most of all a willingness to stare straight at rememberings. The sun will warm the back of your neck as you start to sweat in the cold morning air….

Whatever the truth, the idea of spy vultures raises some interesting issues. In addition to all of the drones flying around in Daniel Suarez’s new Sci-Fi novel KILL DECISION, the main character employs ravens outfitted with cameras to provide real time aerial intelligence. And in my own private eye novel COLD QUARRY, a terrorist plan is potentially hatched (no pun intended) involving carrier pigeons. Such birds have been used in warfare  throughout history to ferry messages back and forth.

Personally, I question whether the Israelis would have much luck being able to control vultures. Ravens would make more sense, although they would not have the range of a vulture. Even a well-trained hawk or falcon is possible, although again, precise control and range would always be issues.

Who knows? With all of the spy drones, many now weaponized, tooling the skies these days, almost anything is possible. I’ll have much more to say on this subject soon since I’m putting the finishing touches on a novella, part of a brand new series to be released as an original ebook, that revolves, at least in part, around this type of technology.

What’s your favorite potential spy creature?

Since he first started breaking into houses when he was fourteen years old, Junior’s never once been caught by the law. In CRASHED he is blackmailed by Trey Annunziato, one of the most powerful crime bosses in LA, into acting as a private investigator on the set of Trey’s porn movie venture, which someone keeps sabotaging. The star Trey has lined up to do all that’s unwholesome on camera is Thistle Downing, America’s beloved child star, who now lives alone in a drug-induced stupor, destitute and uninsurable. Her starring role will be the scandalous fall-from-grace gossip of rubber-neckers across the country.

Junior knows what that he should do—get Thistle out and find her help—but doing the right thing will land him on the wrong side of LA’s scariest mob boss. With the help of his precocious twelve-year-old daughter, Rina, and his criminal sidekick, Louie the Lost (an ex-getaway driver), Junior has to figure out a miracle solution.

CRASHED is Hallinan at his comedic best. A 2011 Edgar Nominee, Hallinan’s ten previous novels, all thrillers, have received high critical praise. In the 1990s he wrote six mysteries featuring the erudite private eye Simeon Grist, a series which made several Ten Best lists, including that of The Drood Review. Now regarded as a cult favorite, the other books in the series were widely and well reviewed, and several of them were optioned for motion pictures. In 2007, the first of his Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers, A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART was published to unanimously enthusiastic reviews. “Hallinan scores big-time,” said Kirkus Reviews, which went on to call the book “dark, often funny, and ultimately enthralling.” “Nail” was a Booksense Pick of the Month and was named one of the top mysteries of the year by The Japan Times and several major online review sites. Rafferty’s Bangkok adventures have continued with THE FOURTH WATCHER (2008) and BREATHING WATER (2009), THE QUEEN OF PATPONG (2011) and THE FEAR ARTIST (2012) all of which have appeared on several “year’s best” lists.

As any falconer quickly learns, the federal government has numerous regulations regarding birds of prey. Most of the laws serve a good purpose: to protect these noble creatures as the precious natural resource they are. But when combined with zealous tax enforcement, sometimes the rules can can result in bizarre consequences. The case of the illegal stuffed eagle as art is a case in point. Read all about it in this Wall Street Journal article by Eric Gibson. As Gibson puts it: “Only in the fantasy bazaar of the U.S. government’s imagination can an item that is worthless carry a multimillion-dollar price tag.”

Today is “cyber Monday,” online retailers answer to Black Friday. How ironic then that yesterday’s Wall Street Journal weekend edition carried yet another great column by L. Gordon Crovitz about the issue with even more detail about how Russian, China, Iran, and several Arab states continue lobbying the UN’s  International Telegraph Union, a pre-Internet relic, to allow them to impose international taxes and employ other more direct means of censorship. Next week brings the Wold Telecom Conference in Dubai. Find the US State Department’s fact sheet about the upcoming conference here.

I’ve written the Author’s Guild in New York and I urge all other artists and writers to contact their respective organizations about the matter. We all need to stay tuned.

Videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzNQarkk95Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=z-lwA9GJ1e0#!