Ringworld in Oz

When I was a dumbass kid of 10 I acquired a reading addiction by discovering the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.  When I was a dumbass kid of nineteen, I dropped out of college for the first time and bought the fourteen Oz books and reread them.  At nineteen I felt like a grownup [...]

The Purpose of Science Fiction

Why do you read science fiction?  Do you read science fiction purely for entertainment, or do you want something more from science fiction? I’ve always expected a lot more from science fiction then maybe I should have, and that might be unfair to the genre. I never wanted SF to be merely [...]

“Appearance of Life” by Brian W. Aldiss

Generally, my reading of short stories are unfair to their authors.  I read them quickly, like gobbling down chocolate chip cookies, with little thought other than immediate gratification.  I want to change that.  I want to slow down, read each story twice, and put some contemplation into figuring out what the author’s ambition was when [...]

Rethinking Interstellar Travel for Science Fiction

If you read science fiction we live in a small universe, but if you read science, the universe if horrendously huge.  There is no way with words to convey the immensity of space – even math fails to give us a feeling for the size of reality.  If we drove over to Proxima Centauri in [...]

Science Fiction’s Imagined Black Swans

Most people watching a movie or reading a book set in the future would label the story science fiction.  Yet, if you look at the backlog of science fiction stories, which surely must exceed a million by now, has there ever been one that even came close to predicting the future?  Despite silly beliefs about [...]

Has the Universe Gotten Too Big for Science Fiction?

District 9 is the much talked about new science fiction movie that was released just days ago.  But I have to ask:  Is District 9 science fiction? Since we get so few new science fiction movies every year why should I even suggest that one isn’t science fiction?  We’re always overwhelmed with comic book movies [...]

Making SETI Chit-Chat

Humans have been playing galactic wall-flower, afraid to make first contact with our alien neighbors, but what happens when a neighborly little green alien sends us an interstellar text message, what will we type back?  Linguists aren’t even sure if interstellar communication is even possible, but let’s say we overcome the language barrier rather quickly.  [...]

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Time Machine is the big bang origin of the science fiction universe.  I’ve read The Time Machine a couple times before in my life, but I never noticed that it was the origin of all science fiction, but then I haven’t spent the last decade rereading the classics of science fiction before either.  On [...]

Manned Space Flight – Is it even on your radar?

During the glory days of NASA, between President Kennedy’s great 1961 proclamation committing the United States to going to the Moon within a decade, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in July 1969, there were three great space programs:  Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.  Each manned rocket launch during those years was covered by all [...]

Better Than Television

Will there ever be a better invention than television?
Of course I hear all the young Internet dudes instantly reply, sex.  Really, and how many hours have you spent humping compared to boob tube dazing?  And by the way, I count video games and porn as byproducts of the invention of television.  Television is powerful.  It’s [...]