A speculative mind

  Peter F. Hamilton’s A Night Without Stars is a sequel to The Abyss Beyond Dreams , which I reviewed a few weeks ago. Most of the story takes place many decades after the first book, so most of the characters are new. Though some characters come from the Commonwealth which has developed a functional version of immortality by downloading their brains into a new body or a machine body. But the people stuck on the planet Bienvenido have been sealed off from the Commonwealth for thousands of years (by their reckoning). Bienvenido is cut off from everything, having been cast out of the Void into intergalactic space. I am glad that this takes place so far removed from the first book because Svlasta (the protagonist from that book) grew increasingly hard to like as that book progressed. Thankfully he is long dead before most of the events of this book take place. And yet, we find ourselves with another troubling protagonist in A Night without Stars . Chaing is a security officer. His ...

  How to write science fiction? Well, here are a few tips.   To start with, you don’t get there by watching science fiction movies or television or video games. If you want to write science fiction, you need to read science fiction. And not just science fiction: Reading literary fiction will strengthen your diction, Read histories and mysteries, Biographies and classics, Everything you read, Will strengthen your mastery. Okay, so it’s not the greatest poem, but you get the idea. Reading is the best training ground. Next, if you are really going to be writing science fiction, you should have a better than passing acquaintance with science. You don’t necessarily have to have a science degree, but you need to have paid attention in school and maybe done some self-learning. For example, if you want to write a space opera then you should have an understanding of things like gravity and inertia, Newton’s laws, relativity, and how they might affect a ship or other bodi...

  Clearing Hurdles: The Quest to be the World's Greatest Athlete by Dan O’Brien and Brad Botkin, is the story of O’Brien’s life. Dan O'Brien won the Gold Medal for the decathlon in the 1996 Olympics at Atlanta. Biographies and autobiographies are not going to be very interesting if the subject in question has led a charmed life throughout with few challenges to overcome. It is the bad things that have happened in their lives, the journey overcoming the odds, that make the story interesting. Dan O'Brien certainly had his share of “interesting.”. Dan was an orphan. He was biracial living in a conservative small town. He did get adopted and that was a stoke of good luck. His family was poor but relatively happy. He went to college in Idaho and was not ready to be on his own in the world. He partied. He struck up a fond relationship with alcohol. He had shown great athletic promise in high school and had gotten a scholarship at the University of Idaho, but it wasn’t long bef...