Was a Time When: A Novel That Asks, What Happens When, Not If, Resource Depletion, Population Pressures, and Climate Change Push the Wo

Sam Penny's avocation is to research a scientific scenarios of a large catastrophe that affects humankind and to tell people of what to expect using fiction, writing novels that describe what people who live through such events will see and feel. Born on a farm in Oklahoma before WWII, Penny entered the University of Oklahoma at the age of 17 and graduated with a BS degree in Engineering Physics. He went to the University of Illinois to earn a MS degree in Physics in 1960. He accepted a position at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley as a computer systems programmer, working in the Luis Alvarez Physics group. Alvarez won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1968. In 1970 Penny and a fellow physicist/programmer formed a "start-up business" in the computer software industry. Penny was the CEO of the partnership as it grew and moved into the micro-computer hardware business. In 1981 the group merged with SBE, Inc. to go public. Penny left to try other business ventures and joined Exploration Logging, Inc in Sacramento to manage their software development of systems for logging oil and gas well drilling. He returned to SBE in 1992 in product development and marketing. Penny retired as the VP Engineering from SBE in 1998. He and his wife began tour the USA full-time in a Portable Home (PH), also know as an RV. In our case, this is a fifth-wheel trailer. This offered a means for doing on-site research for the 7.9 Scenario, a story about what would it be like if the same earthquake that struck the New Madrid Fault under the Mississippi River in 1811 struck in today's world. Two novels resulted from that research, Memphis 7.9 (revised) and Broken River, both of which have been successful sellers on Amazon since 2005. Penny became interested in the impacts of climate change, resource limitations, and population overshoot and did considerable research on possible scenarios. His latest literary effort is a new novel, Was a Time When, that tells of the western USA during the remainder of the 21st century. Penny's current efforts will be focused upon the effort to market his new book. He is looking into what his next research project will be. There is more to write.