Everyone admires power couples, right?

Here’s a couple of couples spawned right here in Texas that you ought to get to know.

First, Carin Gonzales and Jake Sabio.

They are brilliant and well-versed in both science and self-preservation, which is good because they are the only survivors of a weird explosion that wipes out a whole bunch of researchers inside a crater. The pair realize that whatever killed the others has infected them, both for good (they are stronger and faster) and for evil (sometimes, they just pass out). Their task now is to find a solution, without being caught by the feds who want to study them, and an evil little man named Crubari, who is trying to kill them.

They are the protagonists of an absolutely compelling thriller called Specific Impulse, and brought to you by our second power couple.

They would be Charles Justiz, the author and Dayna Steele, his wife and promoter. They are the kind of overachievers that make you feel like a slacker.

He was until recently an actual rocket scientist, a pilot who trained almost all the space shuttle pilots for NASA. He “retired” and started an international aircraft consulting business. He blogs about his impressions in Europe. And meanwhile, he plotted out a trilogy featuring Gonzales and Sabio, and finished the first of the series.

Dayna Steele was Houston’s best known DJ, who turned her own experiences into a self-improvement book, Rock to the Top: What I Learned about Success from the World's Greatest Rock Stars, and turned that into a career as a motivational speaker.

You can buy their books together on Amazon for $30.12. Feeling slackerish yet?

The Steele-Justizes live in Seabrook with their three high achieving (what else?) kids.

Her experience with having her first book published, and punishing book tours that ensued and all that, informed their plan for Justiz’s book. They decided to self-publish and sell it online with very little promotion except the occasional stop at a local book store or a radio talk show. So far they’ve sold more than 500 copies, which Steele says is more than most new books sell.

He adds, “To get the word out for the book, we have used social media and all the tools available to us in the 21st century. Getting the word out is not the challenge. The challenge is to get people to notice it in our information-flooded age.”

Justiz , whose personal creds are solid, says everything in the book is “actual science,” which includes the third protagonist in the novel, a, um, robot named Fred, who helps Gonzales and Sabio out of some tricky situations.He’s not self-propelled, pretty much a box with a brain, but he’s smart enough to get someone else to move him when it’s necessary. (They’ve spawned a Fred fan club and you can buy a “What Would Fred Do?” t-shirt.)

Robots?

“Of course,” he says. “We have robots in our house (no, not the boys). As a matter of fact, so do you. Doesn’t everybody have refrigerators to chill their food, machines that wash their clothes, machines that transport them to work and machines that fly them to distant destinations? The level of intelligence in these machines is getting greater. Some of these machines are already linked to each other, to the house and the internet.
Also, we do have a couple of roombas in our own home that scurry around the floor doing the vacuuming. They are fun to watch.”

As a reading snob who doesn’t touch science fiction or thrillers, I was surprised how much I wanted to keep reading, wanting to see what would happen. For those considering such a book for the younger readers in the family, be advised it’s got some tough violent action, but no sex, really.

The author says, “I purposely put no sex in the first book for reasons that become clear early in the second book. I did this because I wanted to first develop a strong bond between Jake and Carin that was not just sex driven. I wanted the reader to know that either one of the main characters would go through fire to save the other – a conscious decision on their part rather than one that could be clouded by emotion. Lovers will admittedly do crazy things for each other, but I wanted Jake and Carin to have a tremendous respect for each other first . . . In short, I wanted them to be two lovers that do not fall in love at once, but fall in love at last.

And what do we anticipate in the second and third books? “They’ll continue with the main characters. Their infection has gone past the tipping point and they are in a race for survival. In the second book, I get to view the social and religious impediments to their plight. In the third book, their challenges are more political. All three books are written as thrillers,” he says.

Justiz is not afraid to compare his material to the science-based writings of Michael Crichton, who created Jurassic Park. And, yes, there have been some nibbles from movie folks. He mentioned on a radio show that his characters were inspired by people he’s known, which begs the question: Who did he shape the arch villain and creepy Crubari on…and does he live nearby?

No worries, Justiz says, “Crubari is really an amalgam of several people in history. I wanted someone that was small framed, fairly intelligent, very powerful and had an enormous streak of self-preservation to the point of paranoia. I mainly used the life of Rasputin as the framework for Crubari. Due to other story elements, he had to be from South America.”

And now about this book-selling couple. How did they meet? She will tell you, they met through David Crosby of Crosby, Stills and Nash.

She got to know Crosby when he was living in Houston doing drug rehab. In 1990, when CSN played the Woodlands Pavilion, “David asked me to help coordinate a group from NASA. Charlie was in that group and it was love at first sight for me, lust, I believe, for him.”