A speculative mind

  I am making my selection for the best rock albums of each decade (in my opinion). You are going to disagree with me; of course you are. All art is subjective, but music is the artform that everybody has the strongest opinions on. Everybody is an expert on their own favorite music. And everyone is right!   Rock and roll was born in the 1950’s, but I am going to skip the 1950’s because I wasn’t there and it is not quite the same thing to listen retroactively to music as it is to be brought up with it. The 60’s and 70’s are going to be hardest to pick because this was the music of my formative years. Do you ever hear music the way you did when you were growing up? 1960’s Abbey Road -- The Beatles . If it is the 60’s, the best album has to be from The Beatles, and there are many to choose from, but I am going to give it to their swan song, an album that showed how far they had come from their beginnings. Honorable Mentions: Surrealistic Pillow -- Jefferson Airplane D...

  I have been reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and in the alternate world described in the book, there is the USS Enterprise. This Enterprise is the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, but in this version of Earth, the carrier has been purchased by a rich tycoon as his personal yacht. This did get me thinking about Enterprises of yore. There have been a lot of them. The first US Naval vessel called Enterprise that made a name for itself was commissioned in 1799. There had been a couple of earlier ships by that name but this was the first one built for the navy.   This Enterprise fought in the first Barbary War and the War of 1812, a contemporary of the USS Constitution (Old Ironsides). Though the Constitution was a 44 gun frigate and the Enterprise was a 12 gun brig. Enterprise’s most notable action was the capture of the HMS Boxer in 1813. In 1831 The 197-ton schooner Enterprise was commissioned and decommissioned in 1844. In 1874 the 615-ton sloop Enterprise was com...

  When I was a kid (eons ago) there was a TV show that no one talks about today. It was called The 21 st Century and was hosted by TV news legend Walter Cronkite. Myself, being a science fiction fan, I watched it when I could. I was then like nine years old, I knew the big newscasters: Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, but I was not a fan of the news. It was boring – mostly about the war in Viet Nam, or some protests somewhere. I was more into sitcoms or cartoons. But when an important news man like Cronkite started doing a show that was tantamount to science fiction, I took notice. But it was not treated like science fiction. There were no woo-woo special effects or outlandish statements. It was treated more like a news show, which is not surprising since it was produced by CBS News.   It was actually a follow-up show to the documentary series The Twentieth Century and ran from 1967 to 1970. The show took current trends in design, engineering, and social architecture and p...

  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...