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The Superintelligent Species
Read more: The Superintelligent SpeciesIn this post, I want to continue, in a more limited way, from the post I made last week, about traveling the universe, or at least our Milky Way galaxy. Last week’s post was about why we haven’t been visited by aliens from other planets, and I gave some reasons why this hasn’t taken place. …
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The Logic of Other Worlds
Read more: The Logic of Other WorldsAs I was watching on television a few days ago one of the first three Star Wars films to be made (they’re now numbered 4, 5, and 6) I kind of became aware of just how much the film*—although ostensibly taking place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—was using so many…
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AI and Me
Read more: AI and MeI don’t know what I think about AI (“artificial intelligence” for the uninitiated). Like any new advance in technology, especially technology of computers, it has the power to be useful to those of us who use computers daily, or even less often. The search engine I use most often is now advertising that it is…
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What Should Science Fiction Do?
Read more: What Should Science Fiction Do?I’m a science fiction writer. While only a very few people have read any of my works, (mainly editors and critique group members), I do have wide-ranging opinions on the subject and have presented them in this forum occasionally over the past several years. Science fiction can be a powerful medium for examining the human…
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Mental Telepathy In Science Fiction
Read more: Mental Telepathy In Science FictionI’m currently working on a story of about 23,000 words (that makes it a “novella” or “novelette,” depending on your definition) that has to do with humans from Earth who come in contact with beings on another planet who communicate almost entirely by mental telepathy. Their brains are so big—maybe 50 to 100 times the…
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Space Opera: A Definition
Read more: Space Opera: A DefinitionI have had, over the past 20 years or so that I’ve been trying to write science fiction, and on one or two occasions, to answer the question, “What is space opera?” It’s a fair question given that space opera is the type of science fiction I write, and that it is probably the most…
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Where Are They? – Part 2
Read more: Where Are They? – Part 2In the previous entry in this series of blog posts about the possibility of alien life in our galaxy, and especially about such life visiting us here, I speculated about the wide disparity between the knowledge we’ve obtained about the universe—which is substantial—and our ability to move around in that universe—which is miniscule. We’ve only just gotten…
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Where Are They? Part 1
Read more: Where Are They? Part 1This is likely to be the first of three postings on a topic that has intrigued me for several years—the prospect of intelligent life on other planets. Enrico Fermi posed his famous paradox, basically “Where are they?” in 1950. He was referring to the question of why highly intelligent, highly sophisticated visitors from another planet…
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Bubonicon 50 – 2018
Read more: Bubonicon 50 – 2018Well, the Bubonicon Science Fiction convention #50 here in Albuquerque, NM is over for 2018. It ran from August 24 to 26, and as I do every year, I attended as much of it as I could, hoping to grab a rare tidbit of information or advice, or perhaps a little dirt or the real scoop on some facet…
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Suspending Disbelief
Read more: Suspending DisbeliefIf you read much fiction, especially science fiction or fantasy, you may have heard of the phrase “the willing suspension of disbelief.” It’s used to indicate a willingness on the part of a reader to accept as real the descriptions, the materiality, the phenomena and/or the validity of a world which does not exist in this universe, and…
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Sci-fi Worldbuilding: Anthropology
Read more: Sci-fi Worldbuilding: AnthropologyI just got back from the 2018 edition of the Pike’s Peak Writers Conference, (#PPWC2018) and had a great time. As usual. Lots of good sessions on many different aspects of writing, and had a chance to pitch my first sci-fi novel to an editor. He asked for the first 50 pages, which, by the…