Reckless Forum

This is so reminiscent of Jules Verne's Nautilus, both concretely and conceptually. In fact, that's probably what they should name the vessel if it is constructed. On the scientific side, there are at least two important considerations. One is that the heat generated by the submarine itself or its d...

Without a doubt, Star Trek defined an era and a generation. Among the five series, DS9 was my favorite (they couldn't run away from their troubles!). The last few episodes of Voyager became intriguing (most of the rest I felt was pseudo-spiritual gobbledygook) and the Enterprise prequel finally star...

I think that sense of wonder may be the true dividing line between "hard" SF and "soft" SF. It is frequently asserted that hard SF is more rigorous and grounded in science, but that really isn't true. // I also suspect there are multiple narratives besides the sense of wonder, a...

Athena will remember a novel I started some years ago ("Slower than Light") which had many good aspects, but the culture I created, while interesting, was in retrospect too idyllic. // If I were to go back and revisit that novel, and I might, I would think more deeply about how flaws migh...

Utopias are actually relatively rare in SF, in part because they are boring. // Huxley suggests that the "Brave New World" in his book isn't new at all, that human nature will simply exapt new technologies that come along, often for the worse. I don't want a brave new world, because it is...

Of course, as a physicist, I tend to like simple, broad categories; biologists are rightly suspicious of such axiomatic bifurcations and more likely to see more nuanced genera. :) Such are the subcultures of science. A very apt distinction between physics and biology, some of it having to do with t...

Comments? Thoughts? Athena, of course, has thought about this even more than I have.... I yielded to the temptation of giving such a talk twice. The first time was in grad school, when I discussed John Fowles' The Magus. The second time was when I was an instructor and gave a talk about LeGuin's wo...

Ursula LeGuin has had abysmal luck with the filming of her wonderful books. I'll limit myself to the best-known, the Earthsea sextet. The film made for the Sci-Fi Channel was terrible -- leaden acting, preachy dialogue, all the fine nuances of the story and the characters dissolved in black versus w...

Dear Rene,

congratulations on the PhD (arduous though it was) and welcome both to the site and the East Coast! Not as bad as you thought, eh? (*laughs*)

Along doomsday lines, a very unusual book came out that examines in detail what will happen to the world if humans go suddenly extinct -- whether by neutron bomb or Rupture (climate, flora, fauna, and the changes and artifacts wrought by the human presence). It is The World Without Us by Alan Weisma...

The neatest thing about this teaser is how much is conveyed so quickly -- exotic settings (supernovae, branes), distinct characters, cultural customs (the bidding and price of services, the nova surfing ritual). I like the attention to both small details (Umialik, like umiak...) and the elegiac tone...

... but the trailer looks promising. Agreed -- though I would have picked different actors for Lyra's parents/antagonists. Jason Isaacs and Julia Ormond, for example (there are other equally good candidates... but this is no longer negotiable). In the theatrical version of the full trilogy at the N...

The November issue? But it's only August! Back to the important issue -- have you seen the cover? Do you get any say in it, or is it totally up to Herr Doktor Schmidt and his fellow editors? I enjoyed that story. The two very distinct cultures in it were deftly and economically depicted. I bet you a...

On the heels of Randall's book comes Paul Steinhardt's and Neil Turok's Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang, which uses the concept of colliding branes to advance the theory of cycling universes. The whole idea rests on very speculative foundations, but at least the writing is good!

I just finished Giancarlo Genta's book that deals with ET life and intelligence. Instead of posting my own review, I found a review on another site that pretty much covers what I planned to say: Lonely Minds in the Universe