Tag: Science Fiction
Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi sit down to talk
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.
Trailer for ‘Star Trek: 90210′ now online
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.
The Accidental Time Machine
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.
Grimspace
Grimspace
By: Ann Aguirre
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Ace (February 26, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0441015999
Sirantha Jax is a jumper. She has a rare gene that allows her to navigate a spaceship through Grimspace, a mysterious void that allows quick travel between two distant points in space. A jumper can find beacons in Grimspace that serve as the jump points, the on and off ramps of grimspace. It’s unknown who (or what) created the beacons. What is known is that only people with the J-gene can detect the beacons.
People like Sirantha Jax.
Grimspace was just a lot of fun to read. It’s space opera at it’s very best. To say that I loved this book is an understatement. When I go to Borders or Waldenbooks and I peruse the science fiction section looking for something decent to read, this is just the type of book I’m hoping to find.
I can’t recommend this book enough.
Orson Scott Card hates gay people that want to settle down and get married
Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card has his secret Mormon holy underpants in a bunch over the idea of allowing gay people to marry. Marriage, that sacred holy union enjoyed by the likes of Britney Spears and Keven Federline and Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley.
Orson Scott Card does not like gay marriage and he chose to argue his views in the pages of the Mormon Times. How brave of him.
Here is some of what Orson Scott Card had to say:
These judges are making new law without any democratic process; in fact, their decisions are striking down laws enacted by majority vote.
No, that’s not what is happening. Massachusetts and California Judges have ruled against laws that discriminate against gay people. That is what judges are supposed to do. They strike down laws that discriminate against people because of their race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation. It doesn’t matter if a majority of voters agreed to deny rights to gay people. There is a difference between a Democracy and mob rule.
Remember how rapidly gay marriage has become a requirement. When gay rights were being enforced by the courts back in the ’70s and ’80s, we were repeatedly told by all the proponents of gay rights that they would never attempt to legalize gay marriage.
It took about 15 minutes for that promise to be broken.
Who promised him that? It’s not that people want to legalize gay marriage. Those of us on the pro-gay marriage side just think that the government shouldn’t enact laws that make it illegal. There is a difference.
My wife and I enjoy the rights and privileges afforded to us because we are married. She is my legal next of kin and I am her’s. If I am ever in a life threatening accident and decisions have to be made concerning my care and treatment, not only will my wife be allowed to remain at my side, she will be allowed to make those decisions. The reason for this is because she and I are married.
This is only one of the many rights and privileges bestowed on married couples. Gay people in committed relationships love the person they are with just as much as I love my wife. Why should my wife and I get rights and privileges that committed gay couples don’t? I hate the fact that we deny this basic right to gay couples.
It’s embarrassing.
And for the record, if I am ever in a situation where my wife has to make a decision about my medical care, I want her to keep me alive any way that medical science allows. Not only do I want to be hooked up to machines, I want them to invent new machines just to keep me going. I want to live!
The choice is her’s though. She is my wife. She has earned the right to unplug me.
Escape Pod 161: Alien Promises
This week’s episode of everyone’s favorite science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod is the young adult story Alien Promises by Janni Lee Simner. It’s read by Anna Eley, wife of Escape Pod Editor-In-Chief Steve Eley.
Even though the story is labeled as a being for young adults and I am very much an old adult, I enjoyed the story immensely. It’s about a young girl who dreams that one day aliens will come and take her away. Not the kind of aliens who stand in front of Home Depot looking for work and who speak only Spanish, but the kind who travel in silver space ships and communicate through telepathy.
It was a good story.
Anna Eley does a fine job reading the story. Her voice has a quality to it that meshes nicely with the story’s main character and it brings life to the first-person narrative. My only criticism is that I think she pronounced reader as leader. It’s at about the 2:40 mark of the story. I listened to it a couple of times and it sounds like leader even though reader is the only word that makes sense.
It is stories like this that makes me appreciate the Escape Pod podcast for everything it brings.
Going to California
Sheri and I are driving down to Dulles this morning to catch a flight out to southern California to visit my family. It’s been far too long since I’ve been home. We will be out there for a week.
We are flying on jetBlue. I’ve never flown them, but I’ve heard nice things about them. They have a TV built into the back of each seat. Not only do they show movies, they offer Direct TV along with XM satellite radio. An added plus is that they fly into Burbank Bob Hope airport and not Los Angeles International (LAX). Read the full article »
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