A speculative mind

  Can a decade become a caricature? My teen years were in the 1970’s and none of us who lived through the 70’s thought our decade was going to be a figure of fun. When you are a part of it, you don’t realize what people are going to make fun of later. I think there are two reasons why people snicker when the 70’s are mentioned: clothing styles and Disco. Both things could be called extensions of trends that started in the 60’s. When the hippy styles of the 60’s became more formalized for the dance floor, the result was (in hindsight) rather bizarre. They did not seem bizarre at the time. People following present fashion trends never understand that they are wearing something that will be laughed at in ten years. Yes, I did have a pair of bell-bottom blue jeans (are they making a comeback?) The mere mention of the 1970’s conjures up someone in a ridiculous pose wearing a disco suit. We who lived through the 70’s just went about our normal life. There were quite a lot of things tha...

  When my father was born the world was a different place. Television did not exist. Radio was just a novelty; there were no broadcast networks or stations. Telephones were a rarity. If you wanted news, you had to read a newspaper. The peak of technology was the Model T Ford. The state of medicine was very different. This was before penicillin, even before sulfa drugs, so if you got an infection, it was bad news. My father’s father had a kidney problem. He went in for an operation which he survived, but later died of what the doctor called “ether pneumonia.” My father said his family never bought that explanation and thought the surgeon or staff made an error that cost him his life. I don’t know if there was anything to that. It is hard to second guess a diagnosis 100 years after the fact, but what little researching I did on the subject has shown that ether pneumonia was not a thing. In any event at age six, my father became the man of the house. At that time, his mother was eig...

  Children of Time by Adrien Tchaikovsky is one of those epic science fiction tales that takes place over a span of thousands of years. But, lest you fear that you have to acquaint yourself with new characters every couple of chapters, no. Not so much. There are two separate races that we follow in the story: the humans and the spiders. The spiders were an experiment gone wrong. The experiment was supposed to introduce creatures from Earth to a newly terraformed planet where an introduced virus would genetically uplift a selection of monkeys, so their accelerated evolution into intelligent creatures could be observed. Unfortunately, an ill-timed war (is war ever well-timed?) killed off most of the human population of the galaxy including the scientists working on the experiment. The monkeys did not survive their descent from orbit, so the virus found other organisms to uplift, namely, spiders. I love that this idea of genetic uplift pays homage to David Brin’s Uplift series. The s...