A speculative mind

  Since it is an Olympic year (sort of), I have been reminiscing about my former track and field career. I was a pretty good track athlete in my school days. One track meet stands out in my mind, one particularly bad meet. All athletes experience ups and downs, good days and bad days. I was no different. But the singular meet in question was the district track meet of my junior year in high school. I had great expectations for that meet and there was every reason why I should have had. The previous year’s district meet had gone spectacularly well for me. I had been a sophomore (my first year of high school) and I had finished second in the 100 meters to my fellow teammate, 3 rd in the 200 meters. Finishing first or second at district meant you were qualified for the state track meet. So, I had qualified in the 100 and just missed out in the 200 by a hair.   In addition, our school had qualified two 4 X 100 relay teams to the district meet (we had a lot of good sprinters in my school

  This year Martha Wells won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel. Her winning novel was Network Effect . I have never read anything by Martha Wells. I discovered that Network Effect is the fifth book in The Murderbot Diaries series. I decided I had better start at the beginning with the first book: All Systems Red . It turns out All Systems Red won the Hugo, the Nebula Award, and other awards in 2018 for best novella. The main character calls itself ‘Murderbot’. It is a SecUnit: a security unit, owned by “the company” and contracted out to provide security for survey teams or anyone else who needed security. The Murderbot is some kind of a cyborg, part human and part machine, but it is more machine than human.   It has artificial intelligence and human brain tissue. It does not have status a as person, hence it can be owned. All SecUnits come with governor modules that govern what they can and cannot do. Well, they are supposed to have governor modules. This particula

  “And by the way it’s not about making money, it’s about taking money. Destroying the status quo because the status is not quo. The world is a mess and I just need to rule it.” – Dr. Horrible, from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. The mad scientist is one of the classical literary tropes of science fiction. But wait a minute. What’s a trope? I know there are some out there who have heard the term but are too embarrassed to ask what it is. A trope is a literary device or motifs, something that is used over and over. It can be a figure of speech, an iconic character, a cliché.   In a mystery it can be the detective with personal problems. In a Jane Austin novel, it could be the young woman who is too smart for her own good. And In science fiction, we have the mad scientist. “My limbs now tremble and my eyes swim with the remembrance, but then a restless, and almost frantic impulse urged me forward. I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit.” – Victor Franke