Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
Who’s Connie Radar PhD anyway? As IO9 rightly defined her in this article, she’s a SF comics “badass, retrofuturistic space heroine”, who in her adventures lands on the lunar surface in 1957, well before the 1969 Apollo 11. And this 7-minute video “Over the…
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The Uplift War (1987) is a SF novel by David Brin and part of the Uplift Universe. It portraits a fictional future universe where species evolve with the help of more developed ones that help them in the “uplifting” process,…
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That SF has often inspired astrophysicists and theoretical scientists is not something that should come as a surprise. After all, space elevators, while first theorised by the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, were made famous by Arthur C. Clarke in his…
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Otherwise said: how to store your (terabyte) data on a DNA string. Amazing, isn’t it? The first time I’ve heard about this deceptively simple idea was last year on the New Yorker, in a article by Andrew Marantz “Petri-Dish Pop“,…
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Latest articles published on Serious Wonder, all of them devoted to space missions, present or future. UNDER THE KRAKEN SEA – A NASA SUBMARINE ON TITAN – February, 13 2015 DAWN MISSION UPDATE: CLOSING IN ON CERES – January, 24…
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Neptune’s Brood (2013) is a SF novel by Charles Stross. The story is set in the same universe of Saturn’s Children, but 5000 years later and with different characters. It features clones, bank-employed historians, assassins and the fantastic water-world of…
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Birth is certainly one of the most emotionally charged phenomena in nature, and a star makes no exception. For much as humans tend to think about space objects as eternal, they are not – they have a start and an…
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Written in 1983 and adapted into a movie in 1989, Pet Sematary is by any standard one of the more frightening books I ever put my hands on. I recently had a go at it again, and albeit I knew the story by heart for…
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One thing I have not paid (so far) the right amount of attention is all artwork produced by NASA, and with that I mean not only the beautiful posters done in occasion of space missions – which are truly beautiful…
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Yes, “on” it is the correct preposition. It’s not the continent I’m talking about; it is the Jupiter’s moon with the same name. Why so? Because NASA just got extra-money for its 2016 budget (of $18.5 billion dollars, i.e. half…
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