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“Wild” and The Author
Read more: “Wild” and The AuthorI went to see the movie “Wild” a few weeks ago and enjoyed it a lot. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it highly. Two Oscar nominations have come from this film, one for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, Reese Witherspoon, and one for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role, Laura Dern. …
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Communication
Read more: CommunicationI got to thinking today (always a bad sign) about how I would start a class on writing. That is, suppose I had to teach a class on writing to total novices, what would I say at the very beginning of the first class. Now, being an unpublished writer of science fiction, the thought of me teaching…
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Revision
Read more: RevisionRevision. For a writer, what is it and what’s involved? If you’re a writer, like I’m (unsuccessfully so far) trying to be, revision, in most cases, will occupy the greatest segment of your time in writing. Writing is largely revision, the sages say. Revision is the process of rewriting your work, be it anything from very…
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Computers And Literature
Read more: Computers And LiteratureWhat do you think? Will a computer ever be able to write a novel? Or paint a masterpiece? Or compose a great symphony? Or any symphony? Limiting this discussion to writing novels and their shorter cousins the short story, will a computer, following only the directions of its programming software, ever be able to write…
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All That Life Out There, Part 2
Read more: All That Life Out There, Part 2Several times I’ve written in this blog about the possibility of life on other planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. (Or other galaxies for that matter.) It’s almost certain that life exists somewhere else, even though we here on Earth have never been able to find any evidence for it. The recent findings that water…
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The Logical Structure Of Science Fiction
Read more: The Logical Structure Of Science FictionI write science fiction. I also read science fiction—the two go hand-in-hand. Most of the sci-fi I read has been published by well-known publishing houses, and is reasonably good, though it can vary from very good to mediocre. But what I want to talk about in this post is one of the things that helps…
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H. G. Wells Got It Right
Read more: H. G. Wells Got It RightEarlier this year, I wrote a blog post about not contaminating other worlds with Earth-bound microbes. Let’s keep planets that might have microbial forms of life free of our own bacteria, I said. (See my blog of 7/13/2014.) I also said let’s not contaminate sterile worlds with our trashy bacteria. Today I want to explore…
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The One-Way Trip
Read more: The One-Way TripThere’s a Dutch nonprofit corporation called Mars One which has put forward a plan to send a team of humans to Mars in or around 2025. The trip is a one-way affair: you go there and don’t come back. It’s an audacious plan, granted, and seems to be, at this stage of the game, well…
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Disparate Styles
Read more: Disparate StylesA few weeks ago I finished reading one science fiction book and started another. The one I finished was Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi, (Tor paperback, 2005), and the one I started was Shipstar, by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven (Tor hardbound, 2014). (Shipstar is the second of a set of two books. The…
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All That Life Out There
Read more: All That Life Out ThereA few weeks ago (October 12, 2014) I wrote a blog post about the immense distances between stars and their planetary systems. The distances are so large as to make travel between star systems very difficult, if not impossible. Now I come across an article on Yahoo Finance entitled “Here’s Why A Leading Futurist Hopes…
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A Few Thoughts On Ebola
Read more: A Few Thoughts On EbolaHere’s few ideas that popped into my head over the past few days about the presence of ebola disease in the United States. Keep in mind, a lot of the talk about ebola lately is political. It’s also epidemiological. I’m not a politician, nor am I a political pundit, nor an epidemiologist. As a PhD…