A speculative mind

  Peter F. Hamilton’s A Night Without Stars is a sequel to The Abyss Beyond Dreams , which I reviewed a few weeks ago. Most of the story takes place many decades after the first book, so most of the characters are new. Though some characters come from the Commonwealth which has developed a functional version of immortality by downloading their brains into a new body or a machine body. But the people stuck on the planet Bienvenido have been sealed off from the Commonwealth for thousands of years (by their reckoning). Bienvenido is cut off from everything, having been cast out of the Void into intergalactic space. I am glad that this takes place so far removed from the first book because Svlasta (the protagonist from that book) grew increasingly hard to like as that book progressed. Thankfully he is long dead before most of the events of this book take place. And yet, we find ourselves with another troubling protagonist in A Night without Stars . Chaing is a security officer. His ...

  How to write science fiction? Well, here are a few tips.   To start with, you don’t get there by watching science fiction movies or television or video games. If you want to write science fiction, you need to read science fiction. And not just science fiction: Reading literary fiction will strengthen your diction, Read histories and mysteries, Biographies and classics, Everything you read, Will strengthen your mastery. Okay, so it’s not the greatest poem, but you get the idea. Reading is the best training ground. Next, if you are really going to be writing science fiction, you should have a better than passing acquaintance with science. You don’t necessarily have to have a science degree, but you need to have paid attention in school and maybe done some self-learning. For example, if you want to write a space opera then you should have an understanding of things like gravity and inertia, Newton’s laws, relativity, and how they might affect a ship or other bodi...

  Clearing Hurdles: The Quest to be the World's Greatest Athlete by Dan O’Brien and Brad Botkin, is the story of O’Brien’s life. Dan O'Brien won the Gold Medal for the decathlon in the 1996 Olympics at Atlanta. Biographies and autobiographies are not going to be very interesting if the subject in question has led a charmed life throughout with few challenges to overcome. It is the bad things that have happened in their lives, the journey overcoming the odds, that make the story interesting. Dan O'Brien certainly had his share of “interesting.”. Dan was an orphan. He was biracial living in a conservative small town. He did get adopted and that was a stoke of good luck. His family was poor but relatively happy. He went to college in Idaho and was not ready to be on his own in the world. He partied. He struck up a fond relationship with alcohol. He had shown great athletic promise in high school and had gotten a scholarship at the University of Idaho, but it wasn’t long bef...

  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...