A speculative mind

  Sometimes an idea comes to me and then it just sort of sits there, mulling around my subconscious until I decide to write a story. Then I think, ‘hey, you know that idea I had? I wonder if would work for this?' One idea I had was when I was musing about eye color. I know that people with brown eyes have more pigmatic (yes, I made that word up) protection from the sun than blue eyes. They are less sensitive to bright lights. But I wondered if there was more to it. Did people with different colored eyes actually see colors differently? That seemed a stretch, but what if they did? Or, what if it wasn’t eye color, but what if there were genetic differences in cones in the retinas, or if there were genetic differences in the optic nerves that made the color you see as blue look green to me? How would we ever know if red to you looks like purple to me? What if different brains simply interpret colors differently from each other. The answer is, we can’t know. The only way to know woul...

    In the movie Moonfall , an alien entity knocks the Moon out of orbit   In John Scalzi’s When the Moon Hits Your Eye , the Moon is turned into a substance not unlike cheese.   In Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, the Moon explodes, literally on the first page.   In The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber, a new “planet” suddenly appears near the moon and starts consuming the Moon. Seriously, what does science fiction have against the Moon? What did it ever do to these writers? Was it shining too brightly while you were trying to sleep one night? Did something bad happen to you during a full moon? Were you on a drunken bender and the Moon was mocking you while you puked into a ditch? I guess after the Sun, the moon is the most dramatic thing in the sky at least when there is not some temporary celestial event going on like Aurorae, or meteors. So, if you want to make a big impact in your story, I suppose you could do some mischief to the biggest thing in the nigh...

                                                                                                                                               Art by Mollyroselee Way back in ancient times when I was in high school, I had a girlfriend. I lived in Eugene and she lived in a little community, about 10 miles away. Being as we were teenagers, finding places to “make-out” was high on our priorities. This was my first serious girlfriend and neither one of us were very experienced at having a relationship. Just to be clear, our make-out sessions did not advance to the ultimate step. But it was not easy to find a place to have some privacy. D...

  A few months ago I read the intelligent fantasy The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett and enjoyed it. Now I have finished A Drop of corruption which is the second book in the series. The narrator is Dinios (Din) Kol. He works for Ana Dolabra. Together they are the equivalent of a police detective unit. But this takes place in a very different world than ours. They work for the empire of Khanum. It is a powerful empire, but it is beset each year during the wet season with enormous creatures, called leviathans or titans, that wander ashore from the sea and destroy everything in their path. Or they did before gigantic sea walls were erected. These sea walls have to be maintained and armed and manned by the legion to keep the leviathans at bay. The blood of the leviathans is useful to produce drugs and augmentations to the people of Khanum that imbue them with specific powers. Some have heightened analytical abilities, some have increased sensory abilities, etc. Our narrator,...

  As I have mentioned, I worked for two seasons on the Spotted Owl Survey for the US Forest Service back in the day. This involved setting up stations around areas that were scheduled for timber harvesting to see if there were owls nesting there. We would look at a topographic map and see where we needed to put stations (usually along logging roads) so that we could get complete coverage of the area to be harvested. We would go out during the day and mark these stations with ribbons, then at night we would go to each station and “hoot” for ten minutes. If we did not get a response, we would move on to the next station and so on until we could be sure there were no spotted owls in the vicinity. This meant we were working at night in the woods. There is a lot of wildlife activity at night in the woods. It is not just owls, a fair number of wildlife are nocturnal. We saw coyotes, bobcats, cougars, bats, frogs, deer, elk, among other things. But it was not just seeing the wildlife, ...

  I have been much disappointed by Aurora Borealis performances over my life. Each time they predict one might be visible in our latitudes, I waited up and saw nothing. To be fair, auroras (aurorae?) are kind of fickle. They are created by solar storms that send charged particle into Earth’s upper atmosphere where they interact the atoms there. The timing has to be right. The direction of the charged particles has to be right. That can all be a bit hard to predict. Also, I live close to the 45 th parallel. Not a great spot to watch auroras from. We rarely get any this far south. Still, sometimes they predict when it is possible, and I go out and look to no avail. Last year there was a great aurora that lots of people who live where I do, saw. I didn’t, not for want of trying. My wife and I drove around to places where there was not a lot of light pollution, but no dice. The next morning we saw lots of posts from people who had seen it, even from places I would not think would be...