Star Trek: The Original Series

I had forgotten The Devil in the Dark.  The worst episodes were badly thought out commentsries on social problems of tge 1960s such as This Side of Paradise.  Some of the best science fiction such as The Devil in thr Dark did not survive advancing science.  The Horta was a silicon-based life form living deep with a planet with human miners.  While it easy to sympathize with the Horta's cries for its unborn children, the notion of life where silicon took the place of carbon did not long survive Linus Pauling's work on chemical bonding.  

Carbon's unique bonding capabilities are dependent on the availability of both p and s electron shells in a way that silicon cannot.  This is why there are very long alkane chain molecules (methane, methane, propane, butane) but not much past silane (SiH4).

I am slightly surprised to see a Wikipedia article about "carbon chauvinism."  It does acknowledge the chemistry problem of p-s bonding, but I see some postcolonial discussions.

Islam, Monirul (2016). "Posthumansm: Through the Postcolonial Lens". In Banerji, Debashish; Paranjape, Makarand R. (eds.). Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (1st ed.). New Delhi: Springer India : Imprint: Springer. p. 117. ISBN 978-81-322-3637-5.

This crap goes everywhere. 

How to Reslly Destroy a Ray Bradbury Story

A Sound of Thunder (2005).  The idea that time travel can diastrous results, has been around for decades.  This movie version of Bradbury's story is just so over the top in how it imagines the results with insufficient explication of how the death of a late Jurassic butterfly changes the evolutionary to create half-lizard, half-primate creatures.   And the changes keep coming in waves with these portrayed like enormous tsunamis.   A really disappointing adaptation of a great idea and story.

Nightmare

I just had a bad dream thst would make a fine short horror film.   Bugs are flying through the region.  If they bite any female, they die but become bodily fluid lethal to males.  Proper screening is essential.  Everyone retreats indoors.  All essential services and goods are delivered by male delivery personnel. 

Elaborate as you will. Title for story, novel, film: harem.

How Old is the Term Green-Room?

I have always seen it used to refer to the room just off stage where guests wait to be called out for a talk show.  I am currently reading a Jules Verne novel The Steam House where he uses the term in the modern sense.  This is an 1860s.. I am unsure how to characterize it.  The only sci-fi element is that the protagonist and hopelessly imperialist British friends are traveling around India in a road locomotive train.  

A steam engine made up to look like a steel elephant pulling half dozen cars in an adventure that I suspect is going to end in a confrontation with a promoter of the Sepoy Rebellion.

Verne is mostly remembered for his sci-fi but he also wrote more conventional fiction sometimes with a political twist.

If You Enjoyed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

I just started reading The Left Hand of Dog free for Kindle on Amazon.  It is not the laugh out loud book but it is witty and involves a guy and his dog, Spock, kidnapped by cute fuzzy aliens.  I am only three chapters in so far but it is fun.

The deeper I get, the funnier it gets.  The dialog between the sentient robot that the fluffy bunny bounty hunters kidnapped, and Big Bird is riotously funny.

A Pail of Air

I have mentioned this as one of my favorite short science fiction stories before by Fritz Leiber.  I am reading Galaxy Science Fiction Superpack #1 on Kindle.  I cannot remember if it was free or just cheap and just ran into it in there.  And even reading it the third time it is powerful and hopeful as any story can be where Earth is so cold that liquid helium is the top layer on top of the frozen layers of atmosphere. 

Also, another classic science fiction writer: Murray Leinster "Med Ship Man" is one they I had never seen before and for a story written at least 50 years ago, it is not hopelessly dated or clumsy.

Shiny Metal Boxes

Great Late 21st Century Sequelarcoma:

That Novel I Am Reading Really Captures What the Next Generation Will Lose

Shiny Metal Boxes

Marvelous Satire

I am reading a very funny free sci-fi novel on Kindle titled Shiny Metal Boxes.  Imagine all the marketing madness of current data mining apps combined with severely inflated prices and a widely used corneal implant that provides all of the useful features of your cell phone by looking at a virtual icon.  Double blink executes that icon.

Our protagonist is trying to figure out if her employer's corneal implant eyeGo (did Apple trademark the i?) is making people sick.  I cannot copy and paste from Kindle but many sections are wonderful satire of our current maddeningly marketing driven antisocial media.

The discussion of news media pandering about an asteroid with a 1:8 chance of hitting Earth in 3472 shows enormous awareness.

It just gets better: quantum entanglement leads to remote viewing of planets all over the galaxy (wormholescopes) and then pointed back at far distant Earth, recording Earth's past.  This leads to lawsuits over barely past wrongs.  The government takes over history recording and stops the suits.  "With the lawsuit rush over, lawyers settled for fewer yachts."

I just figured out screenshots

A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

Of all the stories in this multi-volume set, this is so uninteresting and silly that I have stopped reading it.  Princess of Mars had action to make an antique science fiction novel tolerable.   This makes me think of Carlos Castaneda's fraudulent doctoral dissertation.  Not clever enough, scientific enough fiction to be worth the time. 

Radium as Supermetal

When Burroughs wrote Princess of Mars, radium was the new wonder metal.  Radium water baths were believed to be a source of health.  Radium was a component (or at least claimed to be) a component of many patent medicines.  I used to have some 1920s error quack medicine devices that purported to be radium containing.  (They did not glow in the dark, so color me skeptical.)

In Princess of Mars, Radium and its many yet undiscovered powers were at the heart of Martian technology. 

The horrors of radium poisoning of watch dial painters was still unknown.

There Are No New Ideas

I am reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' Princess of Mars, and I can immediately see from where Jabba the Hutt comes.

It is terribly outdated by now with what we know of Mars, but it is still a pretty entertaining adventure story.  Parts of it are passable science fiction within the constraints of what we knew of the Red Planet at the time (which was precious little).  I keep imagining the ferocious six-legged multitusked "dog" (or its Martian equivalent "Woola" and how much the CGI guys would have had creating this beast which seems like a bigger and uglier version of my Springer Spaniels.

H.G. Wells' The Time Machine

Wells was a socialist although one of a peculiar kind.  When the Sleeper Awakes is profoundly racist in its animalistic portrayals of Africans and a future socialism the result of one man's hereditary estate gradually taking over the world economy but in a profoundly totalitarian way.  It is a darker, perhaps more realistic vision than Bellamy's Looking Backward on which it and many other similar utopias and dystopias are thefts.

Anyway, what I found interesting is his dark view of the likely effects of a system that he theoretically embraced. The net result of the end of competition and strike is an intellectually inferior, feminized, and incapable human race.

Oath of Fealty

 When Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle teamed up, the results were better than either of them.  I just re-read Oath of Fealty and I find myself wondering why this was never made into a movie.  Their other great collaboration of the time, Lucifer's Hammer, would have been expensive before modern CG.  But Oath of Fealty, easy.  The jailbreak scene alone would have justified the movie.

Many parts are now dated.  The projection forward from 1980 Los Angeles was plausible, at least to those of us who lived through that horrible time.  Today, Los Angeles is practically civilized by comparison.  Many descriptions of LA remind that I was living in the same areas as Niven.

Re-Reading Larry Niven's A Hole in Time

It is a collection of short stories, one of which has the first description of a "flash mob."  It is not based on social media, of course, but news media coverage of local crowd.   In "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club" we are introduced to a bunch of criminals who use the recently invented teleportation booths to show up at riots to loot, pickpocket, and rob.  I shudder to think of social media flash mobbing with teleportation booths.  Of course half a million people would get busy signals so I guess it would work out okay.

Amusing Line But I Am Easily Amused

I'm reading "Time Trap: Red Moon science fiction, time travel trilogy book 1 (Red Moon Trilogy)" by Micah Caida and wanted to share this quote with you.

"“I don’t know what your problem is but I bet I can’t pronounce it.”"

I'm reading "Time Trap: Red Moon science fiction, time travel trilogy book 1 (Red Moon Trilogy)" by Micah Caida and wanted to share this quote with you.

"“I don’t know what your problem is but I bet I can’t pronounce it.”"

I’d worry about that when we found some liquid. With as much as we were sweating, dehydration was a given. I’d gotten more light-headed with each step and I was sure a small furry rodent had slept in my mouth for a week."
 reading this book for free: https://a.co/7OumQSQ

I am not sure where this book is going but 1/3 of the way through, some of the fantastical aspects should be foreshadowing some science fiction.  I am tired of it in spite of the often clever writing. 

Unnerving Sci-Fi: Dead City

Free on Kindle.   A pretty good zombie novel but I am getting Wu Flu overtones.   I am not sure when it was written but I am already seeing hints that the disease was created by the company selling the government the cure.  It is a dreadful situation morally and also dreadfully compelling.

Let me emphasize.   This is not a roman a clef.  The painfully obvious inclusion of the necrotic (those not yet over the zombie threshold) in every form of ad and the replacement of blacks as the victim group is painfully funny and satirical.

'When you wanted a nation to obey, you told it a deadly enemy was knocking at the gates. When you wanted a nation to obey, you told it that without the government’s protection, something horrible might break out like wildfire." 

More Amazing Sci-Fi Stories

The 14th Science Fiction Megapack is not all gems of the Golden Age, but some of them are masterpieces.  "No Great Magic" has a costumer for a Shakespearen troupe convinced that she lives in the playhouse because of a nervous breakdown and therefore is not entirely trusting of her senses.   They are preparing to perform Macbeth and some of the actors are just getting too much into their parts, not as Banquo, Macbeth, and the witches, but as the actors who played them in Shakespeare's time.  I think you can see where this is going.  Every acting troupe is own the move through space... and time.

"Escape Velocity"

I am reading The 14th Science Fiction Megapack on Kindle.  (If I think too much, it wears me out and I become less pleasant to live with.)  This is one of only two sci-fi stories that I have read in which a 1911A1 appears, and as it turns out, is central to the plot. 

It is apparently firing 185 gr. JHP. How do I know that if not explicitly stated?  Read the story and find out how.

Destination: Moon

You may know of this 1950 movie.  I just started watching it on YouTube.   Even within the first few minutes I am amazed.   Based on a Robert Heinlein novel who was also one of the screenwriters.  Chesley Bonestell as the space art consultant.   A story of American industry not the government (doubtless Heinlein).

So much right about space.  That we (and I mean the United States at the height of courage) actually did it in a way that was actually far more complex and without anything as advanced as nuclear propulsion less than 20 years later is amazing.