A speculative mind

  Tis the season of gratitude. It is time to reflect on my situation in life. It’s easy to complain about things. Everybody has challenges. Everyone is touched by sadness. But you have a choice whether to dwell on the negatives or be grateful for the positives. Dwelling on the bad does not make your problems go away. It does not make you feel better. It makes you feel worse. It is unhealthy to hold on to anger, regret, worry. In short, there is no reason to do it. Yet, it is human nature to do so. A good tool in the arsenal to fight against that tendency is to practice gratitude.   Count your blessings, as they say. You don’t have to be religious to practice gratitude. You can thank God, or fate or the laws of thermodynamics. The important thing is to recognize the good things that have come to you. In my case I can be thankful that I grew up in a caring family and had good friends. I never wanted for food or medicine or anything truly important. I have been able to pursue c...

  I have a Biology degree and at one time, an active teaching certificate. But other than some stints as a substitute, the teaching career never panned out for me. I had done a variety of other jobs to make ends meet. When a summer job came available at the Cape Perpetua Visitor Center, it sounded ideal. I would be leading nature walks, giving campground presentations, and answering questions from the visitors. The job title was “Naturalist.” I was finally using my biology degree, and some of the teacher training as well. I loved that job. But it was a summer job. When my boss John mentioned an opportunity for me, working with someone from the Ranger Station placing structures in streams, I was less than enthusiastic. It sounded like cold, wet, hard work.   I am a creature of comfort. I have endless respect for loggers, fishermen, and farmers etc., but I know I could never be one. It’s just not in me. Yet, I felt like this was an opportunity for me to keep working a few week...

  I don’t know how many years it has been since I read the Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells, but it has been a long time. Other than the basic premise (mad scientist creates human hybrids with a predictable bad outcome) I don’t remember much. But I was intrigued by seeing The Daughter of Doctor Moreau in the library. It was written by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who wrote Mexican Gothic which I read last year and found satisfyingly creepy. This one, I would say is less creepy. It is told from the point of view of two characters: Carlotta, the doctor’s “natural” (bastard) daughter, and Montgomery, the doctors hired mayordomo. Montgomery comes to the doctor’s ranch with demons of his own: alcoholism, debt, and relentless bad luck. Carlotta has lived a sheltered life. She is sweet and innocent. Montgomery is far from innocent, but he knows right from wrong, and usually chooses right, even at his own expense. The doctor himself is not an evil man, but he is self-centered and egotisti...

  Seems like I have been reading a lot of classic science fiction lately. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham is another one. I remember something like 50 years ago seeing the movie, or part of the movie. It did not leave much of an impression with me. All I remember was something about attacking plants. It seemed par for the course for 1960’s horror movies. But I heard someone recommending the book and decided to give it a try. What I found was that this was not so much an attacking creature kind of book, as it was post-apocalyptic fiction. Most of the tropes we have come to associate with post-apocalyptic fiction are there. But this book (written in 1951) predated most science fiction books in that subgenre. The Day of the Triffids did not invent post-apocalyptic fiction, but I think there were many books which copied aspects of it. Figuring out how to start over after civilization suddenly came to an end. How to organize a workforce, grow crops, fashion tools and weapons...

  Solaris is a classic science fiction novel By Stanislaw Lem that has been made into three different movies. Solaris is one of those mind-bending experiences that leave you wondering what is real and what is hallucination. When we meet our protagonist, Kelvin, he seems a perfectly ordinary kind of fellow. He is on a mission to join the crew on a legendary station floating over a world that is almost certainly a living organism. When he arrives at the station, things are not as he expected. One man is dead and the other two are acting strangely. The book becomes a psychological thriller for the remainder (though “thriller” is perhaps too strong a word). But it does keep you guessing. Is he really seeing other people, are they ghosts, or is the planet manifesting them? Is the planet trying to communicate with them in some way, or are they all going insane? This is not a quick or an easy read. The pace moves agonizingly slow at times, and there is too much exposition about the h...

  Every once and a while I revisit an old TV show or movie that I loved as a child or a teen, to see if it is something that would still appeal to me as an adult. Usually, I am disappointed. Sometimes I am disappointed because the show was childish, and never was very good. Other times the show might have been okay for the time, but now is very dated or has cheap production values. With this in mind, I recently rewatched the pilot episode of My World and Welcome to it which aired in 1969. I remember liking the show and remember being disappointed when it was cancelled after only one season. The show was loosely based on the life of James Thurber and starred William Windom in the lead as a cartoonist named John Monroe.   Monroe has a vivid imagination which is displayed for the audience as Thurber cartoons. My wife was watching the episode with me (she remembered it too and also liked it back in the day). At one point in the episode, my wife and I uttered at the same time, “...

  Sunstorm By Arthur C. Clark and Stephen Baxter is the conclusion of the duology that began in Time’s Eye . The duology is a first contact story. In Time's Eye , our characters have been put through a ‘discontinuity’ where different pieces of earth have been scrambled into different times. For example, the helicopter gunship crew we have been following, find themselves trapped in time with people from other time periods.   The only clue to what is behind it are metallic spheres that hover over the ground. Our characters have taken to calling them “eyes,” and they do seem to watch events as they unfold. As far as we know, only one person gets back to her own time period. That is Bisesa from the helicopter gunship. Before she is taken to her own time, she is allowed to glimpse a far future Earth. A dead future Earth. As she returns to her own time at the end of the first book and the start of the second, Sunstorm, she knows something bad is about to happen to Earth. We so...