A speculative mind

I have recently had the opportunity to visit London, Paris, and Edinburgh. That is why my blog has been absent the past couple of weeks. One of the things my wife and I did was to ride the Eurostar train from London to Paris (through the “chunnel”). Something that struck me, is the similarity between a high speed train and an airliner. The interior cabin looks very similar. Walking into the train, if you didn’t know better you might think you were on a plane. But it is the external appearance that I want to talk about. Both the high speed train and the airplane need to be streamlined to minimize wind resistance. You don’t want a lot of wind resistance (except under the plane’s wing where wind resistance is a good thing). The streamlined design carries with it an inherent beauty, symmetry and smooth lines. Space ships also need a streamlined shape if they are going to be travelling through an atmosphere. But if they are not going to be travelling through an atmosphere, they ca...

How can a children’s nursery rhyme teach you about the laws of Thermodynamics? “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.” This is an illustration of the second law of thermos dynamics. “All the King’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” This is an illustration of the first law of thermodynamics. Let’s look at Humpty falling down first. In short, things fall down; they don’t fall up. Left to their own devices, things always eventually proceed from energy states of higher order to energy states of lower order. When Humpty is sitting on the wall, he (is Humpty a he? I don’t know that Humpty’s gender has ever been definitively stated) he has potential energy. In the act of falling, Humpty has kinetic energy, the energy of motion. When Humpty comes to the big stop at the end he becomes less orderly. Yeah, in fact he is a mess. But also the kinetic energy is converted to heat (infrared radiation) which is the least orderly state of...

The paperback version of my novel Star Liner came out a month ago and this allowed a number of my friends (who won’t read ebooks) a chance to read and comment on it. One of them said something to me the other day that struck home. The novel is a science fiction space opera that is part murder mystery and part action/adventure. But she said it seemed to her that there was an underlying theme to the novel. It is about art. Even though I was not consciously trying to make a statement about art, it is there. I can see what she means. In some ways even though the story of Star Liner takes place centuries into the future, in some ways it is similar to our own. Jan, my main character, is an artist. I am using artist in a broad sense to encompass any form of artistic endeavor. Jan himself is a singer and actor, but it would not matter if he were a painter, composer, sculptor, or a poet. The same problem faces artists of his century that face artists in our own time: it is really ha...

One of the most important things that affect the marketing of a book is the cover art. That’s what people see. It is supposed to catch the eye and make a person go, “hey, what’s this?” There are a lot of different schools of thought about what a cover should look like. Some people opt for extreme simplicity, like just a solid color with the title. There are artistic reasons for going with simplicity, and as long as it is an artistic reason that is driving it (and not a financial one) that is fine. It’s all art anyway, the novel and the cover. Other people go for a showy, eye-catching cover. In the realm of science fiction and fantasy books there have been some wonderful covers and cover artists over the years. The Hugo Awards started giving awards to artists in 1958. Prominent cover artists include Frank Frazetta, Kelly Freas, Boris Vallejo, Michael Whelan, and many others who are giants in their field, but whom the public may not know by name (though they probably know their...

I just finished The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. This book is an alternate history (I wrote about alternate history in another blog a few weeks ago). In this novel, history is the same as ours until about the late 1940’s, then there are some subtle changes. Then there is a dramatic change as a large meteor slams into the ocean just off the eastern seaboard of the United States. I am not really giving away a spoiler here as I think the meteor is mentioned in the first sentence of the book. The meteor and ensuing climate change caused by it force people to accelerate the drive into space. There is a drive to set up colonies on the Moon, Mars and other places as a Plan B, in case Plan A (Earth) becomes uninhabitable. There is a nostalgic feeling throughout The Calculating Stars . For me I got the thrill of sort of reliving the space race (even though it is a different space race than the one we went through). We are watching this happen from the inside as the main...

What makes something a hit, and something else a flop? Quality, obviously is the short answer, but not all hits and misses can be differentiated based on how good they are. Sometimes the whims of the buying public are just plain . . . well, whimsical. Geroge R. R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame) was a young writer whose first three novels had been reasonably successful, each one doing better than the last. When he produced his fourth novel, The Armageddon Rag , his publishers were very enthusiastic. They gave him a big advance. They publicized the book. It was met with critical acclaim. Movie rights were optioned. And then in George R. R. Martin’s words, “nobody bought it.” The failure of that book almost destroyed Martin’s writing career. Suddenly nobody wanted to publish anything of his anymore. George eventually landed on his feet and, as it turned out, has now done quite well for himself. I have not read the Armageddon Rag myself (though it is on my to-read list) so I c...

Not to be confused with historical fiction, alternate history is a fun subgenre of science fiction that starts with a “what if?” What if Oswald never shot Kennedy? What if Hitler had not declared war on the Soviet Union? What if cheese was never invented until the 21 st century? Sometimes alternate history comes about in a science fiction story because of time travel or dimensional travel or some such. In The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, a time traveler falls off a levitated path and crushes a butterfly. The death of the butterfly caused changes to the timeline thousands of years down the line. This story is not strictly speaking an alternate history since the main characters live in the future, but a similar mechanism has been used as the impetus for stories in the alternative history genre. (By the way The Sound of Thunder has erroneously been attributed as the source of the phrase “the butterfly effect”. Actually it comes from weather modeling and chaos theory. Meteoro...