| what is going on down there? |
[25 Jul 2009|09:29am] |
Strange things are happening on Jupiter and if you read far enough down you will see that this happened fifteen years to the day after Shoemaker-Levy.
And yes, I read Spaceflight Now, because NASA has locked me out-- me and IE5. Way to egalitarianly spend my taxpayer dollars, boys...
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| earth to alphane moon |
[20 Jul 2009|12:54am] |
Is anyone else ever going to post in this community? I, for one, am getting a bit tired of ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) raf2a and her obsession with Kim Stanley Robinson.
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| a mars novel, sort of |
[20 Jul 2009|12:13am] |
A couple of weeks ago I finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge, which I've hitherto missed, and which was billed as the first of his Martian novels. Like I've said, I always take something away from his books, even ones I don't consider particularly good; this one was all right, not much more, but not long enough to try one's patience. Many things which seized my interest were just left hanging-- and not in an exciting and edgy literary way, either; they were just undeveloped, or cut off. Not that I was too surprised: one of the reviews on the back said something like "In a genre not noted for complex and interesting characters blah blah blah..."-- you always know if the character development is praised, the plot is going to be weighed in the balance and found wanting.
But it was a nice addition to his settlement-of-the-solar-system novels, and held up pretty well, except for an awful lot of references to things like xeroxing huge paper manuscripts on an asteroid, or playing cassette tapes, which dated it a little...
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| red planet part 2 |
[10 Jul 2009|09:03am] |
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I've only been on for a few days, and Twitter is an evil habit, but I did find this helpful hint on Cory Doctorow's site, the author of the previously-mentioned Little Brother. I'd like to read all Mars novels before I die, and would especially like to avoid missing any classics...
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| red planet part 1 |
[09 Jul 2009|12:00pm] |
I saw Buzz Aldrin on Fox News the other day-- ok, ok, I was just passing by, and stopped when I saw it was him; he said we shouldn't spend the money to go to Mars unless we're willing to COMMIT TO A PERMANENT PRESENCE THERE.
That's the first time I think I've heard anyone talk seriously about really going to Mars, for good. Anyway, I got excited.
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| stories and ideas |
[04 Jul 2009|01:25pm] |
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I just saw an interlude interview on CSAPN's BookTV with a guy named Craig O'Hara-- he's co-founder of a new publisher PM Press. They are starting an SF series that apparently combines short fiction with in-depth author interviews, and the first two authors in the series are Kim Stanley Robinson and Terry Bisson... wish I could get my hands on them!
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| star trek xi |
[18 May 2009|12:02am] |
I want to write more about Star Trek XI. I liked it. A lot.
But I'm very very upset.
So for now I'll just direct you to this...
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| lost world |
[18 Feb 2009|10:37pm] |
So, tonight I was watching a rerun of the NOVA episode on Titan, and I was remembering the feeling I got when I first saw the Titan surface images. Amazed; excited; disappointed... a little. Because it was another red, poisonous world, and as cool as it was, we wouldn't be walking around there anytime soon.
They were talking about how you could melt lead on the sidewalk on Venus, and it's been awhile, but Venus was stolen from our imaginations too. Well, not completely, of course, but you have a whole different starting place once you know the surface temperature is 800° and the pressure would crush a tank. I was just feeling that regret a couple of weeks ago as I was watching the Creepy KOFY Movie and they were showing some horrible film whose name I've already forgotten-- was it "Planet of Prehistoric Women"? about a manned expedition to Venus, including a robot named John (who died, unfortunately); and Venus of course was inhabited entirely by blonde girls in bikinis, but it was the old Venus, the water planet, the tropical paradise, like in C.S. Lewis' Perelandra...
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| a giant telepathic network of brains |
[15 Jan 2009|02:12am] |
Now that I've actually had online friends for a year, instead of happily typing away into the void (as was previously my custom) I've noticed that people occasionally disappear, without notice or explanation. And a voice you were used to hearing, and responding to, is suddenly silent...
So this reminds me of one of the favorite stories of my youth, which I read over and over again: "Rebirth." I think it's also been published under the title "The Chrysalids." IN A WORLD GONE MAD, after devastating nuclear war, there are just a few people left, in Labrador *shudder*. And of course, every fourth or fifth person born is a...hmmm...MUTANT-- but the society has their own horrible ways of dealing with that. But a few people are born telepathic mutants, so nobody really knows about them... until later. But the telepathic kids talk to each other in their heads all the time, though they don't, for the most part, know each other's actual physical identities. And every once in awhile, someone goes silent, and they never know what happened until they hear of some kind of ghastly thresher accident, or something, on a neighboring farm...
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| christmas on ganymede |
[22 Dec 2008|10:03am] |
So, I had a bad night the other night: couldn't sleep and I was pretty cold as well-- maybe that was partly due to the open window, but once you're freezing it feels like it's too late to fix anything. ANYWAY, I turned on NASA-TV, which usually bores me to sleep in quite a short time-- in a nice way; but it didn't work this time, since apparently even NASA is not an antidote to despair. Not even forty-five minutes of listening to one of the flight engineers trying to sit on a fan to block its output and set off an alarm.
Before that segment, though, they showed an interesting clip of Ganymede and Jupiter, and it took me quite awhile to find the story (as NASA's main sites won't even let me enter anymore due to my now-uncool browser). However, here it is, and I think Ganymede turns out to be a fascinating place.
I have two SF collections of Christmas stories, and one of them is called "Christmas On Ganymede." I haven't read it in quite awhile, but maybe I will look at some of the stories again this year. But I think it's a good time for someone to write, or at least assemble, a new collection of far-future Christmas stories. Maybe they're out there and I just haven't seen them-- if they are, let me know...
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| RE: Day The Earth Stood Still |
[02 Dec 2008|01:21am] |
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Have you seen this?
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| the day my heart stood still |
[02 Dec 2008|01:06am] |
I just saw a trailer for the remake of "The Day The Earth Stood Still."
No.
Nikto.
Nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto nikto
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[16 Oct 2008|11:22pm] |
They had some kind of category on Jeopardy this evening about classic science fiction titles. The contestants missed pretty much every one. But I got them all. I've read all those books. I HAVE all those books.
Oh, and that guy that won the Nobel Prize for Economics? He said he was inspired to do it by the Foundation novels. Where the social scientists pretty much control everything.
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| catholic spam |
[03 Aug 2008|01:09am] |
Whoa freaky...
http://www.sophiainstitute.com/productdetails.cfm?sku=264
Here's the description that came with it:
The Tripods Attack! is the first volume in our Young Chesterton Chronicles, a series of novels that star beloved Catholic author G.K. Chesterton re-imagined as a young man in a fictionalized 19th-century setting.
Here is action-packed science fiction and alternative history with a strong dose of Catholic sacramental and supernatural elements. There are themes from Chesterton's thought, and appearances by characters from past fiction and history (Father Brown is one; you'll meet the rest when you read the book).
All in all, The Tripods Attack! is an utterly unique --- and thoroughly Catholic --- book your teenagers will love . . . and you'll want to borrow!
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| gifts, TOO MANY! |
[29 Jul 2008|11:34pm] |
I just saw Gregory Benford as a talking head on NOVA, and really, is it fair that anyone should be a UC physics professor, and a fantastic SF writer (and now I read also, a CEO of biotech companies, in his retirement). And he was pretty good-looking too, in a big, blonde sort of way.
The winner so far in SF 12 is "Chu and the Nants" by Rudy Rucker; it says in the intro he's another one of these, a retired math/computer science professor. He has a website and a blog, though I couldn't find the story online, at least not for free...
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| genres |
[27 Jul 2008|03:37pm] |
Years ago I used to know the difference between a novella and a novelette, though applied in some rather weird literary contexts. But I needed to look it up, now, so was glad to find this quote from the exact source that suited me (though it was on Wikipedia):
A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. While there is some disagreement as to what length defines a novella, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000.
I guess I'd need to look up the word cut-off for a short story if I wanted to accurately locate the novelette, but the truth is, when I'm reading something, I have no idea what the word count is anyway.
I just wanted to say that probably the single most re-read science-fiction piece of my youth was the novella(?), "Rebirth."
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[25 Jul 2008|01:34am] |
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OK, am I hearing this correctly? The reform school superintendent of the New Orleans School District is named Valis? and he still can't get student behavior under control?
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| what remains |
[24 Jul 2008|12:25am] |
I've read so many short stories over the years-- decades-- that have left me with ideas and imagery. Short stories are really the foundational genre of science fiction. Most of them, I can't remember who wrote them or what they were called; sometimes I come across them again years later.
This anthology I'm reading now has quite a few good stories. One in which civilization is destroyed by ice suddenly exploding out of all electrical appliances in use. The story itself is just run-of-the-mill, but the imagery of the ice, annihilating and encasing everything...
"This Is The Ice Age" by Claude LaLumiére.
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| new sf |
[19 Jul 2008|07:09am] |
I was at Barnes and Noble the other day looking at the new science fiction shelf. It was a pretty straggling and horrible selection... is this just our local store (never as good) or is publishing falling off, or deteriorating into endless series? There was so much series fiction everywhere!
I saw a tenth anniversary collection of ST:VOY short stories which I'd never seen before. I'd like to read it, but I'd never pay for it!
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[12 Jul 2008|11:49am] |
I need recommendations for science fiction this summer-- I'm at loose ends. I went down to the library yesterday planning to pick something off the shelf, but their SF section has deteriorated so badly in the last few years, it's hard to make sense of it-- they have a lot of random volumes of series stuff, plus they mixed the fantasy in with it, so it's hard to sort. And they've just reduced it so severely, getting rid of many good hardcovers that were core works and replacing them with cheap, second-rate paperbacks, or nothing. Most major authors are barely represented, or not represented at all. I need to just order something, I guess, but I miss being able to browse a shelf and have something attract me.
I ended up with a recent SS anthology, always a good place to branch out from. This was a new addition, one of very few. It has several authors I recognize (and admire) and many others I don't. I really miss Terry Carr's anthologies-- it's been decades now, I guess: I found every one of them full of stories that ranged from excellent to mind-blowing. And who else later... Gardner Dozois, and Wollheim? They were good too, but nothing ever quite equalled Terry Carr, in my opinion. If I had the money, I would still purchase story anthologies each year-- they always seem to be on the cutting edge.
So, I wanted to read something by Zelazny, but it all looked like fantasy. Or Greg Bear, but Queen of Angels wasn't on the shelf; I liked Darwin's Radio and loved Moving Mars. I still have an unread copy of Larry Niven's Rainbow Mars, and also Samuel Delaney's Dahlgren, which I inherited somehow. I suppose I should get to those eventually. I kind of feel like just going back and reading Waldo, again...
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