A speculative mind

  When I was young, my father worked on the Governor’s staff. It was a hard job with long hours, but it did come with some perks. One of the perks was that occasionally he was able to take his family on vacation and stay at “the Chateau.” The Chateau was on the National Guard camp on the coast. I was told it was where the General stayed when he was in residence at the camp. The Chateau was a lovely log cabin design built in the 1930’s, but it was big. To my ten or eleven year-old eyes it was huge. I believe the arrangement was that a member of the Governor’s staff could schedule a stay there if it was available and only pay for a cleaning fee. So, one Christmas we stayed there along with another family who were friends of ours. I don’t remember a lot of detail because this was like 50 years ago. I do remember the house: exposed logs of the walls, beautiful hardwood floors, and a huge rock fireplace. Santa would have no problem fitting in that fireplace. This was just the coolest ...

  It is nearly the end of the year. It is the time when everybody is doing top ten lists. So here is a top ten: my completely unobjective list of the top ten books I have read this year. Many of these did not come out this year, but I read them this year. Those that did come out this year I will mark with a: (2022). Overall, it was a good reading year for me. I have read 52 books this year according to Goodreads. There was nothing that I absolutely hated, though a couple were just so-so. The ten books that follow were not so-so. I rank them in no particular order.   The Martian – Andy Weir The Daughter of Dr. Moraeu – Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2022) Fuzzy Nation – John Scalzi Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens Fevered Star – Rebecca Roanhorse (2022) Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro The Book Thief – Markus Zusak The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – V. E. Schwab A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir   M...

  A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers reminded me a little bit of The Velveteen Rabbit . Not that there were any robots in the Velveteen Rabbit . I remember in college my Philosophy of Education professor discussing existentialism. And then he launched into a reading of T he Velveteen Rabbit as an example of existentialism. This story takes place on a world where robots became self-aware and decided that they did not want to be slaves to humanity anymore. The humans accepted this and the robots were given territory of their own, free from human interference. This all happened 200 years before our story takes place. Our protagonist is Dex (they/them) who is a monk. They make their living travelling a circuit of villages offering comfort and tea to those in need. At one point they read about an abandoned hermitage in the mountains and they decide to drop everything and go visit this site. The road into the mountains is not maintained and the going gets rougher. One night ...

  Going through shelves of classic science fiction at the library, I noticed Eon by Greg Bear. I had never read it before and decided to give it a try. Some years ago, I read Darwin’s Radio by Bear, and liked it. What I was not to know was that when I got to about three quarters of the way through Eon , I learned Greg Bear had died. The book was suddenly infused with some reverence and respect. This was a writer of many books, a winner of Hugo and Nebula awards. Science fiction writers, even successful ones, rarely make the news even in death. It fell to the writing community on Twitter to inform me of his death. The novel Eon is part of a series called The Way . In this story, an asteroid, moving of its own volition parks itself in an orbit around the Earth and Moon. This is not behavior normally seen in asteroids. So, on investigating we discover a world inside. In fact, multiple worlds, perhaps a gateway to multiple universes. There is a rich tapestry of well-developed char...