A speculative mind

                              Welcome to the wild and wooly era of self-publishing. Anyone can publish a book now. The only requirement is that you have to actually, you know, write it. To be fair, there have always been ways to get your book published. Vanity press is the term used for a “publishing company” that, for a fee, would publish your book, no questions asked. It didn’t matter what the book was about, or if it was any good, or if it was even legible. If you put up the money, they would publish it. Vanity press companies have been around for eighty years or more. They are still around today in one form or another. There are also hybrid quasi vanity platforms that have some discernment about what they print, but you still have to pay for it up front. The advice I was always given was to avoid publishing companies that you have to pay. If they are legit, they should be paying you. Vanity press compan...

I think of science fiction as being one of the more imaginative genres of literature. After all a science fiction story has to do all the things every other kind of story does, plot, character development, setting the scene, building relationships, etc., plus it has to introduce at least one wonder that the readers are unfamiliar with. It could be world building on an alien planet (or our own planet in some unrecognizable future). Or it could introduce a technological wonder or evolutionary advancement. You often hear science fiction credited with predicting the future. Being an imaginative genre that is often set in the future, this seems like a logical conclusion, especially when you can point to times that science fiction got it right. Way back in the 1800’s Jules Verne showed humans going to the moon. He even showed his astronauts experiencing weightlessness.   Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World talked about genetic engineering. Science fiction grand master Arthur C. Clarke...

Merriam Webster defines geography as: “ a science that deals with the description, distribution, and interaction of the diverse physical, biological, and cultural features of the earth's surface .” From that definition you can tell that it is about more than just learning the names of capitols and rivers, but still that definition is broad and vague. I think it is sometimes hard for geography to be taken serious as a science. People look at physics and chemistry and geology, and they can see the science inherent in them. They are about measuring and quantifying. Not too many science fiction stories get written about geographers. And yet, there are some cutting edge things that have been happening in geography. GIS stands for Geographic Information System. In simplest terms a GIS is just maps linked with databases. You have all used a GIS whether you know it or not. Anytime you have used an app like Google Maps or Bing and you ask it where the nearest McDonald’s is, you ha...

If you have never seen it, you should really try to watch an old TV series from the 1970’s called I Claudius . I Claudius was a BBC miniseries that I believe first made its appearance on American television on Masterpiece Theater. The series is based on the books I Claudius , and Claudius the God by Robert Graves and gives us a look inside the Roman Empire from the middle of the reign of Augustus through the reign of Claudius. The emperor Claudius was called Claudius the Stammerer, or Claudius the Idiot. A stammerer he was, but if we are to believe Graves, Claudius was no idiot. We follow the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula (yes, that Caligula) and Claudius. Most histories about the early Roman Empire use Tacitus as their source. Tacitus was a man of facts, names and dates (though he was not above throwing in a cutting remark now and then. When Graves wrote I Claudius he based his novelization of this period on the writings of Suetonius. In contrast to Tacitus, Suetoni...

The series Fringe ran on Fox television from 2008 to 2013. It was a science fiction show about FBI agents investigating other worldly technology and events. When I tried explaining that to a friend he said, “so you mean like The X-Files ?” And I am like No, it’s not like X-Files . . .   Okay I guess it does kind of sound like it. But it really was not like The X-Files . First of all it was different in tone. X-Files had a darker, atmospheric tone to it. To me it felt like Fringe was a bit more grounded in the real world. (If I can say that with a straight face about a show with parallel dimensions, teleportation, creatures who could stop or alter time, and a mad scientist who insisted a live cow reside in their Harvard laboratory . . .   but it felt more grounded to me.) Also Fringe felt like it was going somewhere. The mystery was slowly revealed and eventually resolved. With The X-Files (much as I loved the show) it always felt like we were falling down the rabbi...

There is a big push to build self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles. This push is technology driven, but it is not the technology of the cars or the artificial intelligence or the sensors that make it work. No. What is driving this is the technology of hand-held electronic devices: Cell phones, I-pods, tablets, and the like. It is the inability of people to put these devices down when logic dictates that you should not be looking at them. Like for example, when you are driving, or walking across the street, or operating heavy equipment. Common sense would seem to indicate that these are potentially hazardous activities and perhaps it might be better to hold off on answering that text message instead of responding to it this very minute. But people are stupid. I say this with some authority. Just read the paper every day. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if the stupid people just killed or maimed themselves , but how many innocent people have died because of the action...

I just recently finished the novel 11-22-63 by Stephen King. The date in the title is the day that President Kennedy was assassinated. It is a date that anyone who lived through that time would recognize. I suppose it would be equivalent of September 11 th , 2001 for anyone who was alive on that date, or December 7 th , 1941 for anyone who was alive then. This is a book about time travel. Our protagonist (Jake) is shown a portal that leads him back to 1958. Al, the man who shows him this portal,  wanted to use it to prevent the assassination but Al came down with cancer and is unable to do the job so he encourages Jake to do it. Jake is reluctant to do this because he doesn’t know what the consequences would be. Right on Jake. The whole thing sounded like a really bad idea to me. You can imagine how even small changes in the past can mushroom into larger changes to history over time. But to alter a seminal event like the assassination of a president would have to have en...