A speculative mind

  Extinction is a normal part of the evolution of life on our planet. You and I and all individual organisms eventually die. That is the way of things. Entropy happens. Entropy is a word from the third law of thermodynamics that basically means: things fall apart. The natural tendency is for things to become less orderly as time goes on: things break down, things erode, things rust, things wear out. Entropy is a measurement of how fast that is happening in any given system. Individual death is a natural outcome of entropy.   But an extinction is where all the members of a species are no longer living. Millions of species have gone extinct over the lifetime of our planet. There are natural background extinctions that happen continually. But sometimes there are events that trigger mass extinctions, where vast masses of species go extinct all at once (all at once in geologic terms, which might mean over the course of hundreds of years). There have been 5 mass extinctions over ...

  Simultaneously to my retiring was the opportunity to join a writing group. My wife and I are consistent walkers in our neighborhood. One day while my wife was walking down the sidewalk by herself, she passed a house where an older woman lives. We would often see this woman doing her own neighborhood stroll with her walker. We would always smile and say hello to her and she would reciprocate. But on this instance while my wife was walking by the house, a different woman was at the house and asked my wife if she was a writer. Sort of a random thing to ask a stranger, but my wife said, yes, she was. The woman said that there was a writing group that was meeting in the house, and would she like to come in. So, she went in and joined the Wednesday morning writing group. This was just a few weeks before I was to retire. She instantly liked the group, and a few weeks later (after retirement was official) I joined the group. I discovered that this group had been in existence for some 4...

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...