A speculative mind

  In 1963 Cape Canaveral was the place all NASA rockets launched from. But then in November of that year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It was a shocking moment for the country. Other presidents had been assassinated before, but none in the modern age, with reporters giving minute by minute updates. Anyone who was alive on November 22 nd , 1963 would always remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. As a way of honoring Kennedy, who was linked to the space program in the public’s mind, President Johnson signed an executive order renaming Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy. But having the name changed on so prominent a geographic feature did not sit well with many Floridians. It remained Cape Kennedy until in 1973 when the Florida legislature changed it back to Canaveral. The oldest map that contains the name Cape Canaveral is from 1564. It was the Spanish who named many of the geographic features of the area and “canaveral” means canebrak...

  The other night I was flipping channels and came upon Zero Hour!, an old black and white movie from   1957. I had remembered hearing that the film Airplane! was taken from Zero Hour! I have seen Airplane! many times and in some passages can recite the lines (yes, I am a nerd). So as I was watching Zero Hour! (oh, these exclamation marks are getting annoying) I was hearing many of the same lines I knew so well, except without the comic twist. I learned that the filmmakers actually bought the rights to Zero Hour! so they could directly borrow from the script. Parody is making fun of something purely for entertainment (like Airplane! ), whereas satire is trying to teach us something about the institution or person (or us) being satirized. Parody is always played for laughs, while satire may or may not be funny. If it is of the funny variety, it can feel like parody. Spaceballs is a parody of Star Wars . There is no deeper lesson behind Spaceballs . Terry Gilliam’s Braz...

  The space opera is a classic subgenre of science fiction. It developed in the late 1920’s as fiction that romanticized space, space ships often at war with somebody, space battles, lasers, aliens etc. Think Star Trek or Star Wars . But space opera began in written form.   The pulp science fiction magazines like Weird Tales, Astounding Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories . The giant of the early days of space opera was E. E. “Doc” Smith, in particular his Lensmen series. But in the 1940’s consumers of written science fiction began to grow tired of the subgenre. Anything done to excess tends to wear thin. People were seeing too much repetition and were maybe beginning to think that all the best space opera stories had already been told. It was time to move on to other forms of science fiction. Hollywood didn’t get the memo about the death of the space opera. That is just about the time that Hollywood caught the science fiction bug. Often inspired by comic books, serials p...

  A number of years ago I saw the movie, The Martian and I loved it (see my blog The Best science Fiction Films Part 1). I had heard that the film was based on the novel by Andy Weir, and I thought to myself that I must someday read the book. That someday came as I was walking through an independent bookstore and saw it on the shelf.   I thought, why not? I had read Weir’s book Project Hail Mary a few months ago and liked it very much. The reason I wanted to read The Martian was because books are always different than the movie (and usually better). From the movie I knew the major plot points and how it would end, but I could live with that to satisfy my curiosity about the writing. First, I will say that the movie follows the book fairly closely. There is one major plot point as well as a few minor ones that were left out of the movie, but overall, it was a faithful adaptation of the book.   Astronaut Mark Watney is left behind on Mars. Everyone assumes he is dead...

  Iain M. Banks was a master of world building, or perhaps I should say Galaxy building since The Culture series by Banks takes place over pretty much the entire Galaxy over thousands of years. I have been reading the Culture books out of order, just because I happened upon them in the order I did. But since of the scope of the series is so vast with so many characters, I really don’t think it matters much in what order you read them.   Much of the heavy lifting of running a galactic civilization is given over to artificial intelligence. The AIs that attain great prowess are called Minds (Minds with a capital M). Each gigantic ship that is nearly a world to itself, is run by a Mind. The Mind is the ship. The humans can kick back and enjoy themselves. But sometimes the humans get caught up into the intrigue of the Minds. No spoilers here. I don’t think it would be possible for me to explain enough to generate a spoiler. But the Minds do have their own agendas. Some invo...