A speculative mind

  What fun!   A misfit crew in a ragtag ship. It’s a familiar theme we have seen before: Operation Petticoat , the Wackiest Ship in the Army , Galaxy Quest , Guardians of the Galaxy etc. When it is done well, it can be fun. Becky Chambers knows how to do it, and in her novel A Long way to a Small Angry Planet she does it well. The ship they are on is called the Wayfarer, and this book is the first novel in the Wayfarers series . What makes it work so well is the cast of characters. There are four different species living in and on the Wayfarer (not including the AI that aids every aspect of ship life and is a person in her own right). The plot . . . well, the plot almost doesn’t matter. We are fascinated by the characters and their relationships. The cast is an ensemble. We get a different point of view with each chapter. With each predicament each character finds themselves in, we get more engaged.   We root for all of them. The world-building (or galaxy-building) is...

  Probably the most common question a writer gets asked is, “where do you get your ideas from?” it is a legitimate question that is natural for a person to ask. Writers hate that question. If you ask them why, they will say it is because they get asked it all the time. But the truth is, maybe we hate it because we don’t have a good answer for it. Sometimes we know exactly where an idea comes from: an exciting incident that happened to the writer or to someone they know. It can be the sight of something beautiful or something ugly that starts the wheels turning. But often, ideas are just something that pop into our head, a flash of inspiration with source unknown. New and strange Ideas pop into people’s heads all the time, not just writers. The difference with writers (or other creatives) is that they see those ideas as something that might be worth exploring. Stephen King has said that the practice of keeping a pen and pad by your bed to capture middle-of-the-night ideas, is...

  I am a science fiction reader. I read lots of other things too, but science fiction is my genre of choice. I consider myself extremely well read in science fiction. I have read the old masters like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Mary Shelley, Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jules Verne, and the newer masters like William Gibson, Ann Leckie, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Simmons, N. K. Jemisin, John Scalzi, Cixin Liu. And many, many more. But . . . There are some important works of Science fiction that I have not read (Well, they are supposed to be important, but since I haven’t read them, I just have to go with my gut). This is my list of shame. This is your chance to say, “you call yourself a science fiction fan and you haven’t even read _________” So, here is my Hall of shame. The list of books that all worthy science fiction afficionados should have read by this point in their life.   Contact – Carl Sagan A Clockwork Orange – Anthony B...

  When I was a kid, ten or eleven, I was a hippie wannabe. I was too young to be a hippie. But hippies were cool. They were so free, so liberated. I think all my friends wanted the same. It was the late Sixties and hippies were in the news and we could see them around town. Two of my older siblings may have had leanings that way. The third sibling definitely did not. I did not do drugs and had no plans to ever start. But drugs were not what made you a hippie. Hippies seemed so cool because they were cool by definition. The word hippie comes from “hip.” You had to be hip to be a hippie. Hip was a word coined by an earlier group of outliers called beatniks. Beatniks were a group of poets and artists, and musicians who had the “beat.” Beatniks coined the term “hip.” Beatniks were clear outsiders. They were scoffed at or made fun of by the mainstream population. But some of that attitude of not caring what the mainstream thinks of you, carried on to the next generation. It turns out...

  It is nice to read a book that celebrates words. All books celebrate words in some sense, but Babel by RF Kuang celebrates words for word’s sake. Their origin, their interconnectedness, their power. Power. There is power in words, and power is what this story is about: Who has it, who lacks it, who doesn’t want to lose it. Set mostly in England, mostly in Oxford in the 1830’s, this is a fantasy and alternate history. There is magic in this world. The magic runs on silver and those who can find the right words in the right languages to use that silver. If you etch the right pair of words into a bar of silver, you can make it do amazing things, sometimes mundane things like making a carriage ride smoother, sometimes spectacular things like holding up a bridge. But finding the right words with similar meanings but in different languages requires translators. Our protagonist, an orphan from Canton given the anglicized name Robin Swift, is groomed by his guardian to join the famous...

  Last week I said I would post my journal entry about the play we performed for the inmates at a prison. I hesitated to post this because it is rather long. But it is somewhat insightful about what can go wrong with any planned adventure and there are some amusing moments. So continue on . . .   if you dare. This trip was to Two Rivers Correctional Institute in Umatilla, Oregon to put on a performance of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida for a select group of inmates. There were four vehicles going on the trip: the bus, Van’s car, John on his motorcycle, and Andrew and Terry in their car coming from Portland. We got on the bus which was a former airport shuttle (that had seen better days). The Myrmidon shields were already stacked and bungeed to the second door. Baggage was piled up against one wall. The bus had several bench seats and a large open floor area. There was a foam pad in the back for people to sit/lay on. We got started a little late which concerned me beca...

 I have never been incarcerated, not in a jail, or a prison, I never even got detention in school. But I have had a few opportunities to see the inside of a prison. There is a lot of gray in a prison: cinder block walls, gray paint on the bars, gray uniforms. Ironically there is nothing gray about the way society views prisons and prisoners. We all have our preconceptions of what the inside of a prison looks like. We have our preconceptions about prisoners. They are there for a reason, right? End of story, Black and white. No gray. Lock the door. Throw away the key, and never think about them again. The first time I went into a prison, it was not a pleasant experience. I was applying for a job in a lab that would be testing samples (mainly from parolees) for drugs. You walk in and the iron door clanks behind you. Then another iron door opens to let you through before clanking behind you again. There is something very final about that clanking sound. A tiny part of your brain worr...