Radio Silence, a short but very creepy story… 36,400,000. That is the expected number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, according to Drake’s famous equation. For the last 78 years, we had been broadcasting everything about us – our radio, our television, our history, our greatest discoveries – to the rest of the galaxy. We… Continue reading Radio Silence
Tag: speculative fiction
The Man from Earth
A few thoughts after wasting away an hour or so of my Bank Holiday morning watching The Man from Earth, a relatively low-budget tale written by one-time Star Trek writer Jerome Bixby: An impromptu goodbye party for Professor John Oldman becomes a mysterious interrogation after the retiring scholar reveals to his colleagues he has a… Continue reading The Man from Earth
Cold Calls
After watching this week’s instalment of For All Mankind early this morning1 I found myself dipping into the first half dozen episodes of new Apple TV+ show Calls before starting work for the day, then picked up on the final three episodes this evening. I was aware that this show was coming, but had deliberately… Continue reading Cold Calls
Romulans
Star Trek: Picard season one showrunner Michael Chabon has been sharing Some Notes On Romulans and I am eating this up with a spoon: Traditional Romulan compounds — Romulans live in kinship units — are built at the center of a kind of hedge maze whose outer perimeter is often contrived to look like a “natural” grove of trees,… Continue reading Romulans
Grandmother-Starship FAQ
From Marissa Lingen’s1 So your grandmother is a starship now: a quick guide for the bewildered: What is happening, seriously, what is even happening? Your grandmother is becoming a starship! She has gone through many phases in her life already — infant, child, teenager, young adult, student, worker, in many cases spouse, parent, retiree. She… Continue reading Grandmother-Starship FAQ
Irresistible
I’m indebted to Tim Bray for the pointer to jwz’s They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo, which I must have read at the time but which I don’t think I posted about here: I’m going to draw a line through 1930s agitprop, Ronald Reagan, methane-breathing zombie space aliens, the Mozilla logo,… Continue reading Irresistible
Novel Gazing Redux
This series of posts by Marissa Lingen about authors of speculative fiction posted at Novel Gazing Redux under the heading of Present Writers is fascinating stuff: [On Lois McMaster Bujold…] One of the things I love about Lois’s work is that she is extremely speculative about relationship, family, and reproduction. You cannot separate out the… Continue reading Novel Gazing Redux
Mercy
I’d completely missed that earlier this year Paul Cornell wrote a couple of short followups to the Human Nature/The Family of Blood two-parter from back in the day. Interesting to see the difference a couple of regenerations made to the Doctor’s attitude to a defeated foe. (Context, for the weak.) [Via Cultbox]
Make it so.
Dan Hon’s been thinking: It’s that time when I wonder again if I should package up all the little Twitter microfictions I’ve written into an ebook to sell.— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) January 4, 2021 Go for it. I’d buy that for a dollar!
Not Ready
I never got round to reading Ready Player One because judging by the reviews I read at the time it sounded as if the book was unutterably proud of itself for stringing together lists of pop cultural trivia for geeks to recognise. Judging by Laura Hudson’s review for Slate , I don’t think I’ll be… Continue reading Not Ready