A speculative mind

  I just finished Peter F. Hamilton’s The Abyss Beyond Dreams . This is part of the Commonwealth series, but it is also the first book in a subseries called the Chronicle of the Fallers, which follows a trilogy in the same series called The Void. Got all that? It doesn’t really matter. You can read The Abyss Beyond Dreams without knowing any of that and without having read the earlier books. I have read the first book Hamilton wrote in the Commonwealth series Pandora’s Star , and the second book Judas Unchained . I have not read the three books in between those two and this one. If I had, it might have cleared up some initial confusion, but I was able to grasp what was going on. Hamilton writes complex worlds and his novels have an epic feel to them. Some of the tech and concepts are mind-bending. I felt that way reading the first two novels, and the same can be said here. He writes stories that you have to invest yourself in. They aren’t a little light reading that you don’t hav...

  Once upon a time I was a pretty good athlete. I went to junior college nationals twice in the intermediate hurdles. I qualified for nationals in the decathlon, and I finished fifth in the national indoor pentathlon. I even had dreams (or delusions) of qualifying for the Olympic trials, perhaps in 1984. But an interesting thing happened to me when I left junior college and moved on to my next college. I started taking my academics seriously. I had always been a pretty average student in high school and in junior college. I got mostly “B”s with an occasional “A”, and an occasional “C”. Not grades to be ashamed of, but not grades to write home about either. I was certainly doing better than some on the track team. I remember one teammate who had become academically ineligible. Academically ineligible. That was really hard to do at my junior college. To stay eligible for sports you had to maintain a 1.5 grade average with a minimum of 8 credit hours. Two of those credit hours were ...

  When I was in school, occasionally a teacher would inform us that we would be required to do some kind of assignment (a book report or some such) and when we were finished, we would be required to give an oral report to the class. I cannot begin to tell you how much anxiety this put me through. If said oral report was a month away, I had a month of torture (self-torture). I guess I was envisioning all the ways it could go wrong, and how I would make a fool of myself. As soon as a teacher would announce it, I would start getting that feeling in my stomach, like I had just swallowed a bunch of lead weighs. I would think about it every night. Anxiety. I probably didn’t know what that word meant back then, but anxiety and I were fast friends. The day would eventually come and I would walk up to give my report, shaking. Somehow, I would get through it and the anxiety would drain away, at least until the next time. Sometimes when I didn’t even have an oral report scheduled, I would...

  Okay, one more about my high school track days. But this one is really about my track coach. And it is about character. The mile relay was a race I did not like (it was called the mile relay before the advent of the metric system. Now the almost equivalent race is called the 4X400 meter relay). The mile relay is the last event of the day. You have run your other races. You are tired, and now you have to run a grueling 400 meter sprint for your leg in the relay. Nobody on our team particularly liked it. But my coach said it was his favorite race. “It builds character,” he said. Much as I am loathe to admit it, he did have a point. Everyone is tired. Everyone is hurting in the race. It teaches you to work for something even when it is unpleasant. You do it for your team. As much as you may not want to inflict pain on yourself, there are three other teammates who are relying on you (not to mention the rest of the track team). You don’t want to let them down, so you give it your be...

  Since it is an Olympic year (sort of), I have been reminiscing about my former track and field career. I was a pretty good track athlete in my school days. One track meet stands out in my mind, one particularly bad meet. All athletes experience ups and downs, good days and bad days. I was no different. But the singular meet in question was the district track meet of my junior year in high school. I had great expectations for that meet and there was every reason why I should have had. The previous year’s district meet had gone spectacularly well for me. I had been a sophomore (my first year of high school) and I had finished second in the 100 meters to my fellow teammate, 3 rd in the 200 meters. Finishing first or second at district meant you were qualified for the state track meet. So, I had qualified in the 100 and just missed out in the 200 by a hair.   In addition, our school had qualified two 4 X 100 relay teams to the district meet (we had a lot of good sprinters in ...

  This year Martha Wells won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel. Her winning novel was Network Effect . I have never read anything by Martha Wells. I discovered that Network Effect is the fifth book in The Murderbot Diaries series. I decided I had better start at the beginning with the first book: All Systems Red . It turns out All Systems Red won the Hugo, the Nebula Award, and other awards in 2018 for best novella. The main character calls itself ‘Murderbot’. It is a SecUnit: a security unit, owned by “the company” and contracted out to provide security for survey teams or anyone else who needed security. The Murderbot is some kind of a cyborg, part human and part machine, but it is more machine than human.   It has artificial intelligence and human brain tissue. It does not have status a as person, hence it can be owned. All SecUnits come with governor modules that govern what they can and cannot do. Well, they are supposed to have governor modules. This ...

  “And by the way it’s not about making money, it’s about taking money. Destroying the status quo because the status is not quo. The world is a mess and I just need to rule it.” – Dr. Horrible, from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. The mad scientist is one of the classical literary tropes of science fiction. But wait a minute. What’s a trope? I know there are some out there who have heard the term but are too embarrassed to ask what it is. A trope is a literary device or motifs, something that is used over and over. It can be a figure of speech, an iconic character, a cliché.   In a mystery it can be the detective with personal problems. In a Jane Austin novel, it could be the young woman who is too smart for her own good. And In science fiction, we have the mad scientist. “My limbs now tremble and my eyes swim with the remembrance, but then a restless, and almost frantic impulse urged me forward. I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit.” – Vict...