Europe Diary - Week 1

My little family is visiting the motherland.

We are in Germany, where my wife was born and my ancestors made fine wine. The trip is a holiday, a chance to catch up with my wife's many relatives, and an opportunity for my soccer-obsessed son to see some games of the Euro Cup.

We started with relatives in Lüneburg, a really beautiful town. And we went to look at the best view in the city - from the historic water tower.

Next we were off to Berlin.

In each town hosting games of the Euro Cup, there's a Fan Zone, with giant screens to watch the games and a bevy of beer and sausage vendors. The Fan Zone in Berlin is huge, with a mile of astroturf stretching back from the Brandenberg Gate.

We stopped in for a burger at Five Guys in Berlin. The food was excellent, but very expensive. They had their supply of local potatoes in the middle of the shop, with details of the farm they came from.

Our next stop was Düsseldorf, which sits on the Rhein River, to see our first match.

We originally entered a kind of ticket lottery, which got us three seats to see Turkey vs Chechnia. But my wife wanted more, so she joined the French team fan club and got double passes to some French games.

So in that Dusseldorf, my wife and son went to see France play, while I wandered around in the city. Down by the docks it was crowded with huge groups of various nationalities, drunkenly singing their anthems and local tunes.

This next guy knows how to party! Drink with a bird on your head or why even bother?

Allow me to translate. Frog vomit is the drink du jour.

This is a shopping centre in Dusseldorf, with over a thousand trees planted on it. You've got to love the design.

We had a brief stop in Celle, my wife's home town. It was the last day of school and the school-leavers had painted each other in bright colours and got brought into town on tractor wagons!

Leipzig was next, where we arrived at the biggest train station in the world! This is just the front entry.

It's been a market town since Roman times, so the town square is huge.

While my wife and son hit the next French game, I went to the Fan Zone and rode the Ferris wheel.

I watched the game for a while, but I'll be frank, it was boring. The atmosphere is fabulous but the sport itself is often very dull indeed - 90 minutes of ultra careful play and no scoring.

There are some nice sculptures in Leipzig though. It feels like a very wealthy town.

Leipzig is also home to the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, or Völkerschlachtdenkmal.

It commemorates Napoleon's defeat by half a dozen armies in the largest open battle that had ever been seen on the face of the earth.

It was also built to encourage German pride, so the images are very powerful - brave soldiers, holy knights, proud mothers uplifting their children to glory. And the scale of it it amazing.

This is the viewing platform. Behind me is a historic cemetery that looks like a castle. And behind that in the far distance is a nuclear power station!

But it's a long way back down.

As our final stop in Leipzig, my wife suggested an ice cream Cafe. This one has been around since before the wall was built! And the sundaes were sensational.

Next, we're heading back to Berlin. We've also got more soccer games to see and a side trip to Paris!

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About me

Hi there, I'm Joel Rheinberger, author and broadcaster.

I have seven books you might want to check out:

ZeitHeist - after the ecological apocalypse, the banks and corporations that ruined the planet build an island paradise for themselves. And a group of Aussie thieves are hired to crack the place open.

The Poppy Lu Series - a young pilot learns to fly without a plane and joins the world of super heroes. Three books so far: (1) Suddenly Super, (2) Surprisingly Super and (3) Seriously Super.

The Hopping Ghost - a wee Scottish vampire finds herself in deep trouble in 1920's Shanghai.

Chick Magnet - a crime caper with a number-crunching assassin tracking down stolen drugs.

Discipline - a modern fantasy about an apprentice to a black magician.

When I'm not writing, I talk for a living on ABC Radio. (But for the record, this blog is purely personal.)

Some of my interviews get played right around the network, so if you live in Australia you've probably heard my voice. Often doing silly things, like getting naked on the radio or brushing a dead whale's teeth.

I also created and presented a long-running ABC podcast called Nerdzilla, which was about comics, computers, sci-fi, super heroes, games, gadgets, and geeks.

Before my time at the ABC, I was a copywriter. I won some awards for it, including a couple of New York Medals.

When I'm not typing or talking, I play games with my friends and teach Loong Choo Kung Fu.

I live in Hobart, truly the most beautiful city in the world, with my equally beautiful wife Iris and my son Louis.

You can find me on Twitter.

I have an author page on Facebook too.

I even post on Mastadon noe and then.

And I would love to email you! Please join my list. 

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ZeitHeist Launch!

I officially launched my latest book in Hobart this weekend.

It was a part of the Indie Authors Book Fair, so we had dozens of self-published authors like myself selling our wares. Here we are:

As it was an official launch, I got to make a speech and attempted to explain the origins of ZeitHeist:

"Hello everyone,

Thank you for coming. Thank you to Georgie and Mark for organising this day. It’s great to be here amongst my fellow writers.

I’m Joel Rheinberger. I’m usually a broadcaster on ABC Radio. But today I’m here to launch this - my new science fiction novel ZeitHeist.

I fell in love with sci fi as a kid, because the future was just so cool.

People flying amazing space ships, exploring weird new worlds, meeting freaky aliens, upgrading their bodies with awesome cyborg parts, and most of all - Pew! Pew! - They had cool sci fi weapons.

And cool futuristic stuff was enough, for a kid.

But as I got older, and especially as I started writing, I could see that great sci-fi is not about cool stuff from the future, it’s about real stuff from the now.

It’s about the seeds of the future being planted now and the things that might grow from them.

I don’t know if this book is great. That is a decision for you.

But I do know I’m saying something about the now. That we’re screwing up the planet and I’m frightened and furiousd about the future my son will live in.

I remember the exact moment this story germinated in my head.

I was talking to Rob King, who runs the Antarctic Division’s krill aquarium.

Krill look like tiny prawns. They live in all the world’s oceans but Rob’s aquarium is for the Antarctic ones, which are happiest when the water’s between zero degrees and one degree.

He told me he’s testing how they’ll handle climate change.

As we get more CO2 in the air, it dissolves into the water too, which makes the water more acidic. So how do krill cope with that?

The adults are okay, but the eggs are a different story. As the acidity rises, the eggs fail.

If we do nothing, by the end of this century, only half will hatch. By 2300, maybe 2% will make it.

You might think that’s just a sad little story about a single species. But krill are the bottom of the food chain, the basis of virtually all marine life. If they go, so do all the fish, the whales, and the octopi..

And the people who rely on marine protein go too. The UN says that’s currently three billion of us. Scary, isn’t it?

So ZeitHeist takes place after that environmental apocalypse. The fish are gone. We’ve killed off the oceanic algae and the forests too, so oxygen levels have plummeted. You need O2 in a can to go outside, so humans and rats are the only vertebrates left in the wild.

But the people who wrecked the planet - the banks and corporations - have built themselves an island paradise amongst the ruins. And a small team of Australian thieves are hired to crack the place open.

It’s still a fun read - there’s lots of cool sci-fi stuff in it. Hackers and gene splicing and murderous drones and futuristic weapons - how do they go? Pew! Pew!

It’s too early to drink, so I’ll ask you to raise your pretend ray gun and shoot my new book.

Pew! Pew!"

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