Mental Crudites – Appetizers for the Creative Mind gives the aspiring Science Fiction writer lots of ideas for building their future worlds. This volume, Helping Science Fiction Writers Get Their Ideas Off The Ground, contains fourteen chapters describing different spaceship propulsion systems that authors can use to move their characters from a planet's surface to orbit, between planets in a star system, or across the interstellar void. Journeys can take weeks, years, or generations, depending on the needs of your plot. Or they can happen in the blink of an eye. Every topic is grounded in science, or at least my interpretation of the strangest quantum and cosmological phenomena.

The final chapter is a short story which uses some of the ideas in the first fourteen chapters to help tell a tale of betrayal, heartache, and retribution.

The chapters were originally written as blog posts based on a series of challenge prompts. I hope you enjoy this book at least half as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Rob Johnson

January, 2021