Bent Corner

John Scalzi, my new favorite author (Old Man’s War, Zoe’s Tale), sits down with Cory Doctorow to talk about such things as tapping bacon to cats and writing in the first person as a 16-year old girl. This is part one and there is also a part two to the conversation.

BBC News reports that 26-year old Matt Smith is to become the 11th actor to take on the role of the Doctor in Doctor Who.

Though I enjoy good sci-fi — to be perfectly honest, I also enjoy quit a bit of bad sci-fi — I’ve never really gotten into Doctor Who. I’ve tried. It’s just never appealed to me. That doesn’t mean its bad. Its just not for me.

Not only is Matt Smith the youngest actor to ever play the role of Doctor Who, he also has to be the whitest. Has the man never gone outside? He has the skin color of whole milk. And what’s with the hair? Would it kill the guy to get a haircut every once in a while?

The SciFi Channel is celebrating the Christmas holiday by showing Star Trek: The Next Generation from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. the next morning.

Looking at the lineup of episodes, it looks like they are only showing the best of the best. At least they are the episodes I remember being the best. Unfortunately, my personal favorite episode, The Inner Light, didn’t seem to make the list. That’s really strange, especially considering the fact that this episode won the Hugo award in 1993 for Best Dramatic Presentation.  It was one out of only two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation to win the Hugo.  The only other episode was All Good Things…, the show’s final episode.

At least they are being consistent.  The SciFi Channel isn’t showing that one either.

Leave it to the SciFi Channel to show a Star Trek: The Next Generation marathon and leave out the two award winning episodes.

These times are eastern, so you live someplace other than the east coast, you are going to need to do some quick math.

The official trailer for the new Star Trek movie is now up on the Apple website and it looks like this will not be a movie for me. Not only does Captain Kirk look to be younger than just about everyone in his crew, it looks like they are building the Enterprise not in an orbiting ship yard in space, but somewhere on the ground here on Earth.

Just when I thought Paramount Studios was incapable of passing up an opportunity to make a nickle from anything Star Trek related, they turn around and make remastered versions of classic Star Trek episodes available for free on the CBS website.

The Accidental Time Machine
Joe Haldeman
Ace Books
ISBN 978-0-441-01499-6

This book begins in the 2050’s. Matt Fuller is a twenty something graduate assistant in the physics department at MIT. His life is going nowhere. His girlfriend just left him. His dissertation is dead in the water. While working as a lab assistant, he constructs a calibrator that emits one photon per chronon. He quickly learns that there is a problem with the calibrator. When he presses the reset button, the device disappears and then reappears.

Matt notices that each time he presses the button, it takes longer for the calibrator to reappear. He begins to keep a log of how long it takes to reappear after pressing the button and soon learns that each time it disappears and reappears, it takes twelve times as long as the previous journey. It also physically moves from the time before.

Matt ascertains from this that the calibrator is traveling forward in time. He has accidentally created a time machine.

He realizes that if he attaches a metal container to the calibrator with a wire, the metal container and anything in the container will travel with the calibrator. He first tests this out with a turtle he purchases from a pet store. He then decides to attach the calibrator to an old car, get inside, and press the button.

Every time he does this, he travels farther and farther through time, traveling twelve times as long as the journey before. Each time he appears in the future, he finds a far different world from the one he left before. In this, the book is similar to Haldeman’s science fiction classic The Forever War in that the central character finds that society is constantly evolving and changing.

I enjoyed this book. I love time travel stories and this is one of the best I’ve read. I highly recommend it.

The science fiction novel Mars Life, the next book in the science fiction Grand Tour series by Ben Bova hits shelves on August 5. If you place an order with Amazon before it is releases, you will get an extra 5% discount.

Ben Bova is the only author I have an automatic buy policy on when it comes to their books. As soon as one of his books is published, I buy it. I don’t read reviews. I don’t wait for the paperback. I immediately buy it and read it. It doesn’t matter if I am currently already reading something else. I put that book down and read the new Ben Bova book.

His novels are that good.

Though the books fall very much into the realm of since fiction, the various technologies presented in the books are based more on science then fiction.  You wont find anyone beaming down to a planet or spaceships that are capable of faster then light (FTL) travel.

Check it out.

If you attend this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, you will have the opportunity to buy one of these snazzy official Battlestar Galactica toasters. They are being made available from NBC Universal at $75 each. The production run is limited at 1,000.

The term “toaster” is a racial slur used by the Colonists against their hated enemies, the Cylons.

Link

FedconUSA convention promoter Tim Brazeal has begun the impossible task of purging all incriminating evidence against him and his company by deleting the entire message board at FedconUSA.

Click on the image to see a full sized version.

Not that I am surprised he is doing this. He pulled the plug on the show after it had already begun. I’m only surprised he waited this long to take the message board down. Most of the people posting to the FedconUSA forum were highly pissed off over what had been done to them.

I only wish the people who attended FedconUSA had picked somewhere other then the FedconUSA website to be ground zero for their angst. A website Tim Brazeal couldn’t remove. Hopefully one of them will quickly register a site and create a quick I.P. Board forum to replace the one Tim Brazeal removed.

These people have every right to be angry.