Katherine Murkowitz Saga

Caught in an international confrontation and espionage beyond her control, Katherine Murkowitz endeavors to preserve a world-saving secret that only she carries. 

Denial of Sunlight

(Free Introduction & Chapter 1)

Seeking to reestablish herself after a professional debacle, Katherine Murkowitz joins a small, eccentric electronics firm as the first title in the saga opens. The firm's sale to a Chinese company begins a whirlwind of layered deceptions, international intrigue, and subtle romance, as the potentially world-saving discovery of Keith Sutter, the firm's founder, becomes the focus of two great nations. Preparing to stun the world with their coming independence from fossil fuels, the Chinese secretly produce Sutter's solar-electric cells in an underground facility nestled in the Qinling Mountains. Their excess purchases of petroleum as a buffer against an international reaction drive up world energy prices, capturing the attention of young Jim Newberry at the CIA. The American response, a Special Forces operation to deny the Chinese this technology, ensnares unwitting people and other nations to earth-shaking effect.
 

Emergence

Katherine and Xing find themselves in the custody of extra-legal U.S. intelligence operatives in this sequel to Denial of Sunlight. Their detention could become permanent but for a chance meeting with Davis and Ellis, two members of the Special Forces team that carried out Operation Sunlight Denial, as they also exited China. Katherine calls Senator Arthur Greyson’s office when she is mistakenly given a brief window of access to communications. During the call she talks to Larry Williams, a young and committed staffer, securing a second link to the free world that is yet unaware of the role played by the U.S. in the Sichuan Earthquake of 2008.

The attempt to keep Jim Newberry and Barry Phillips, CIA analysts whose work was pivotal in setting the covert mission in motion, isolated from any information about Sunlight Denial backfires, as Jim’s new position at the CIA exposes him to clues about the real cause of the Sichuan disaster, and Barry’s position in the Vice President’s Office brings him into professional contact with Larry Williams.

The quest for the truth is met with a determined effort by the outgoing Administration to kill everyone with knowledge of Sunlight Denial in what becomes a race for survival.

As the facts come gradually to light, a new Administration must shift some valuable time away from the global financial crisis to deal with the emerging truth, the full exposure of which could develop into an existential threat of even greater magnitude. 

Full Exposure

Katherine and Xing receive a hostile welcome as they arrive on American soil, revealing the multiple layers of power working both for and against them. A new American President sets aside higher principles in an attempt to avoid conflict with the Chinese as their leadership uncovers the full extent of the attack during Operation Sunlight Denial.

The world fixates on a crushing financial crisis which allows extraordinary events to remain out of sight. Covert operations by the new American administration struggle to confront remnants of a secretive unit unleashed by their predecessors; China demands concessions in retribution for the violation and destruction of Sunlight Denial. The many facets of power in tension ultimately reach the unstable vertex from which threatening secrets might remain finally buried or become exposed in the full glare of international attention.

Only Katherine’s secret can leverage the outcome.

Why I wrote the KM Saga

I think we have yet to come to grips with the disastrous events of September, 2001. Our engagement in our government seems to have changed--I think it's diminished. We have swirled, or have allowed ourselves to be swirled, through the subsequent years as if living in a thriller filled with combat, Special-Forces operations, secret government programs, and international conflicts that play out beyond public view. This, of course, benefits media of all forms and allows those in power to subtly put us in the position of characters moved forward by events. The responsibility for this is ours. In the absence of the pressure of robust civic debate and engagement, those in power will expand their reach to fill the space.

Katherine's journey is an allegory for our collective path in these intervening years. It is set on a background of actual events as she finds herself in circumstances she did not seek, eventually becoming the focus of forces she does not understand, yet possessing a secret that holds power over all of them. While not foretelling consequences in detail, the tale closes with a warning about how our digital infrastructure can pose a risk to our democracy.

While having an underlying criticism, this is not a partisan critique. No names of political parties appear anywhere, and high government officials have no personal names. I do not think that the evolution of events has any dependency on the particular party in power in the United States. 

I hope that readers can enjoy the story as a thriller in its own right and finish it with some questions about how we have dealt with this very different world.

Short Stories

"Torment"

This story resulted from a difference of opinion I had with my son. He didn't think wearing a helmet while cycling was always necessary; I disagreed. As he was an adult, I had no worldly consequences to offer him when he acted as he saw fit. After I pleaded with him that he could suffer injuries worse than death, he told me not to worry and that he'd almost certainly die. At that point, my mother's words echoed in my head, "if you do that, I'll haunt you." This was her joking objection to anything we'd do without her blessing, but in addition to joking, she meant it in the traditional manner of the dead haunting the living. So I told my son, "if you die, I'll haunt you." He objected that that would be impossible since he'd be dead already. I replied, "if you think the living being haunted by the dead is scary, wait 'til you experience the dead being haunted by the living!" This is how I think it might play out.

Torment: The Myth of Hell Made Real is now a full-length novel that explores the ethical questions and social impact of punishing the guilty dead who escaped justice in life. Let me know if you’d like to read the pre-published manuscript.

                                                                                                                         Click above for Amazon.

"PURSUIT"

Do we really know those close to us? What happens when we find that a friend, acquaintance, or colleague is guilty of some insidious crime that we've read about but hope never to experience? What happens when we find out we're their target?   

Click here for "Pursuit" for free.

About Robert Troy

DISCLAIMER: All content on this website and views expressed herein are mine alone and do not represent St. Anne's-Belfield School, its administrators, employees, or other community members.

Teaching Physics

Teaching is building and tinkering, at least they are if you want to do it well for a long time. But unlike many other creative endeavors, the building and tinkering in teaching are fundamentally cooperative, with the primary cooperative relationship between teacher and student. My vision of teaching physics is to work with students as they build their understanding of the physical world. In the best of circumstances this occurs through a process of tinkering, both in the physical world--it's pretty easy to frame any exploratory activity or experiment as a you-figure-it-out proposition--and in the intellectual world as students experiment with connections among principles that will help them understand more fully. Teaching physics gives perhaps a unique opportunity to help students see the full range of human understanding, from the abstract concepts that form the core of all theoretical constructs to the concrete applications of building devices. 

Bringing that full scope of understanding into view for students requires a specific approach to introducing and discussing physical principles. I recall the greatest compliment from my undergraduate professors at the University of Scranton being 'that's a very physical explanation.' The core of a physical explanation is a focus on how events and interactions occur as opposed to an over reliance on mathematics. The mathematical expression of principles and laws is necessary to establish specific predictions but is insufficient for genuine understanding.

A workable approach to having students focus on this level of understanding is to require a narrative explanation of a scenario that is under examination in a given problem or exercise. Having a good range of resources available for reference is essential to helping students and the teacher develop their own understanding. Here are few titles that I have found useful. This list is a brief sampling and certainly not exhaustive. There are many other authors whose work has added to this body of literature.

Paul Hewitt's Conceptual Physics is a good survey of physics for young, introductory students. The narrative explanations give solid traction for students not inclined toward mathematics, but Hewitt does include enough of a mathematical formulation for several topics that it is easy to expand the presentation to challenge students for whom a deeper mathematical approach is appropriate. 

Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science, by Gerald Holton and Stephen Brush is a great resource for the history of physics and the development of physical concepts. Some students thrive by exploring the questions that scientists have asked in the face of challenging problems. This work also explains the motivation for new concepts as part of the solutions to those problems.

University Physics by Sears, Zemansky, and Young is great bridge from the introductory level to the elementary undergraduate realm. I studied the sixth edition as an undergraduate. The narratives are more sophisticated than Hewitt's, and the mathematical analysis allows for applications from algebra and trigonometry to differential and integral calculus. 

To stretch students to a deeper view of classical physics I like Classical Mechanics: A Modern Perspective, and Classical Electricity and Magnetism: A Contemporary Perspective by Vernon Barger and Martin Olsson. Here, too, the narratives will stretch students, and their focus on select, detailed examples provides depth without a sense of being bombarded with exercises.

For quantum mechanics, L. I. Ponomarev's The Quantum Dice is produced in the mold of Holton & Brush. The historical narrative and evidenced based concept development captures the intellectual excitement of the quantum revolution. Ponomarev also connects physical concepts to broader historical and artistic developments, providing a human view of the quantum revolution that is too often presented as disconnected from the human experience.

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