A speculative mind

  As with all Philip K. Dick books, this is a little different. The title is not the weirdest thing about it. I think the first half and second half of the book are different animals. We begin the book with the Earth unbearably hot. He never uses the words global warming or the greenhouse effect, which were things that had been talked about in the scientific community before this book came out, but were not widely accepted yet (in 1964). Whatever the cause, the earth is hot. The UN, a much more powerful organization than it is in our world, is trying to populate other bodies in our solar system: the Moon, Mars, Ganymede, etc. There are too many people on Earth for the limited resources. The problem is, no one wants to live in a colony on another planet, where conditions are miserable. So, the UN must draft people. Our protagonist, Barney Mayerson, has received his draft notice and is trying to game the system so he doesn’t have to go. Barney is a precog and a high-ranking executi...

  I recently went for a vacation at Oregon’s Silver Falls State Park. We walked the trails and took in the splendor of a number of falls and the steep heavily forested canyons that they dropped into. While wandering one of the upper trails, we came upon a stone structure. It was something that had been built in the 1930’s as a kitchen for the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camp. It had later been restored to its more-or-less original condition. It put me in mind of when I had worked a couple of summers for the US Forest Service at the Cape Perpetua Visitor’s Center. On top of Cape Perpetua is a stone shelter and down nearer the base of the Cape are the remnants of a cookhouse. Both were built for and used by the CCC boys.   The Civilian Conservation Corps along with its brother organization, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), were part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies to fight back against the great Depression. These two organizations employed millions of m...

  As a kid, I didn’t understand the complexities of the Viet Nam War. I don’t remember when it started. I just remember that at some point we were just sort of in it. President Johnson talked about it. Nixon talked about it. Lots of people talked about it. Lots of people were against it. I had no doubt we would win it, because America always won its wars. As a kid, you don’t have much of a concept of war. There were war movies and television shows like Twelve O’Clock High and the Rat Patrol . There were even comedies like Hogan’s Heroes , or McHale’s Navy . These were not the sort of things to give a kid a realistic view of warfare. No maiming, no PTSD, no dead babies.   So I was more interested in the things that kids like me were interested in: toys, astronauts, games with friends. One of those games was “war” where we would run around the neighborhood pretending to shoot each other. When my oldest brother got to draft age, he enlisted in the Coast Guard. Our communicatio...

  Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse is the second book in her Between Earth and Sky trilogy . The cultures depicted in the series are inspired by Pre-Columbian Native American cultures from throughout the Americas, with perhaps even some Polynesian influences.   (There are spoilers ahead if you haven’t read the first book) I confess I had a bit of trouble at first remembering who was who from the first novel. There are a lot of characters and it is a complex tapestry. A polyhedron of politics is played out among the various clans. In the first book there had been a conspiracy to kill the Sun Priest Naranpa. But somehow, she survived and now must crawl (literally) her way back to some kind of life. The countries in this world are kept at peace by treaty, but that treaty is fraying. War seems likely in the future. Magic is supposed to be illegal, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to figure out how to use it. It is the use of magic that is one of the main contributors...

  In 1963 Cape Canaveral was the place all NASA rockets launched from. But then in November of that year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It was a shocking moment for the country. Other presidents had been assassinated before, but none in the modern age, with reporters giving minute by minute updates. Anyone who was alive on November 22 nd , 1963 would always remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. As a way of honoring Kennedy, who was linked to the space program in the public’s mind, President Johnson signed an executive order renaming Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy. But having the name changed on so prominent a geographic feature did not sit well with many Floridians. It remained Cape Kennedy until in 1973 when the Florida legislature changed it back to Canaveral. The oldest map that contains the name Cape Canaveral is from 1564. It was the Spanish who named many of the geographic features of the area and “canaveral” means canebrak...

  The other night I was flipping channels and came upon Zero Hour!, an old black and white movie from   1957. I had remembered hearing that the film Airplane! was taken from Zero Hour! I have seen Airplane! many times and in some passages can recite the lines (yes, I am a nerd). So as I was watching Zero Hour! (oh, these exclamation marks are getting annoying) I was hearing many of the same lines I knew so well, except without the comic twist. I learned that the filmmakers actually bought the rights to Zero Hour! so they could directly borrow from the script. Parody is making fun of something purely for entertainment (like Airplane! ), whereas satire is trying to teach us something about the institution or person (or us) being satirized. Parody is always played for laughs, while satire may or may not be funny. If it is of the funny variety, it can feel like parody. Spaceballs is a parody of Star Wars . There is no deeper lesson behind Spaceballs . Terry Gilliam’s Braz...

  The space opera is a classic subgenre of science fiction. It developed in the late 1920’s as fiction that romanticized space, space ships often at war with somebody, space battles, lasers, aliens etc. Think Star Trek or Star Wars . But space opera began in written form.   The pulp science fiction magazines like Weird Tales, Astounding Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories . The giant of the early days of space opera was E. E. “Doc” Smith, in particular his Lensmen series. But in the 1940’s consumers of written science fiction began to grow tired of the subgenre. Anything done to excess tends to wear thin. People were seeing too much repetition and were maybe beginning to think that all the best space opera stories had already been told. It was time to move on to other forms of science fiction. Hollywood didn’t get the memo about the death of the space opera. That is just about the time that Hollywood caught the science fiction bug. Often inspired by comic books, serials p...