Posted in Space Travel on January 29, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Among manned space exploration advocates there is much debate over where to go next. For the last few years it was assumed NASA would follow through on President Bush’s vision to return to the Moon. Now maverick scientists are proposing an alternative plan also reported at Spaceflight Now. Their hope is for [...]
Posted in Science Fiction on January 25, 2008 | 10 Comments »
Last night I woke up and not being able to get back to sleep read “Balancing Accounts” by James L. Cambias in the February, 2008 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I always love reading a good short story when my brain should be dreaming; it makes the fiction all the more vivid. [...]
Posted in Science Fiction on January 23, 2008 | 4 Comments »
After playing around yesterday trying to find ways to see how popular science fiction was, I decided to use the same techniques to identify Robert A. Heinlein’s most loved stories. The results, gathered on 1/22/8, were both predictable and surprising:
Starship Troopers
176,000
Stranger in a Strange Land
130,000
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
96,700
“Gulf”
61,300
Time Enough for Love
58,900
The Puppet [...]
Posted in Science Fiction on January 21, 2008 | 7 Comments »
This morning I got up wondering just how popular is science fiction. Google makes a wonderful barometer of popular culture so I did a bunch of searches and put them into Excel. Since I mainly was interested in trying to find out if Robert A. Heinlein was maintaining his popularity after death, I [...]
Posted in Science Fiction on January 18, 2008 | 5 Comments »
The Road by Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. The Road is a novel that will stun your soul. I found this stark metaphor about human nature so beautifully written I would use it as a textbook on writing. Although the term science fiction is seldom used when reviewing this literary [...]
Posted in Inventions on January 15, 2008 | No Comments »
The news is full of reports on the failures of electronic voting machines. After the 2000 election everyone expected inventors would jump on the problem and produce a full proof voting machine. That hasn’t happened. I’m wondering if there isn’t a simpler solution. Why not use the cell phone for voting.
Imagine [...]
Posted in Audio Books, Science Fiction on January 9, 2008 | 3 Comments »
The job of a science fiction author is mighty tough! To write a great science fiction story requires showing the reader something they’ve never seen before, and that ain’t easy. Age of the genre and reader are big factors here. When science fiction was young, “The Time Machine” by H. G. Wells dazzled the Victorian [...]
Posted in Memory, Science Fiction, Space Travel on January 6, 2008 | 8 Comments »
Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein is my all-time favorite book and I’ve read it every few years since I discovered it in 1965. I turned thirteen in late 1964, so discovering Robert A. Heinlein and science fiction during puberty integrated a biological transformation with a sense of wonder. If we could only [...]
Posted in Information, Science Fiction, Web on January 4, 2008 | 4 Comments »
The Internet is truly amazing, but I’m not sure if Millennials who never knew a world without the Internet know that. I thought I’d pass on some old fart stories about how social networking among science fiction fans used to work. They aren’t as bad as the stories my father told me about walking miles [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on January 1, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Science fiction has always been about speculation, and some old SF writers even called it speculative fiction. Humans have always speculated about what’s possible, with what if scenarios, so even though the word science had not been invented, I believe there were science fiction “writers” since the dawn of time. We know the ancient Greeks [...]
