Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
Vampires, we know, are a popular brand at least since John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, allegedly inspired by Lord Byron during a fateful night at Villa Diodati I have already talked about. Joined a few decades later by a female vampire – Le Fanu’s Carmilla –…
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If there is something difficult to realise is how vast space is. No matter how hard we try, as humans we lack mental categories to figure it out. Another difficult thing is obviously to map it – and we do…
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The Player of Games (1988) by Iain M. Banks is a SF novel belonging to the Culture series. It features the most skilful and celebrate player in the Culture society, Jernau Morat Gurgeh, who travels from his world to a far-away…
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This Sunday Earthians will witness something truly unique, estimated to happen maybe once every million years: a comet the size of a small mountain will fly by Mars, becoming the first comet to have ever come so close to Earth in recorded history….
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Astrophysics has to make sense, especially in a SF book. When designing your fictional worlds you need to make sure things can survive on their own, short of creating an alternate physical universe – and I won’t even start imagining how difficult…
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Helliconia Summer (1983) by Brian W. Aldiss is the second instalment of the Helliconia Trilogy, set on the Earth-like Helliconia. The planet, orbiting a binary star, experiences seasons that last eons. This is the the rise and fall of a…
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I have posted a while ago something about the music of space – ie, the eerie sounds celestial bodies make when translated into plasma waves. Today we have a different category of… artists: sub-atomic particles, and the amazing symphonies a…
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Approaching the second instalment of a story without reading what comes first is never recommended, for obvious reasons, and this advice is even more crucial when the genre is SFF. Chances are that important details about world-building have been given…
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Today (or tonight, depending of your timezone) lucky people in North-America and part of Asia could watch one of the most beautiful shows known in nature, the so-called Bloody Moon – ie, a lunar total eclipse. In case you wonder, lunar…
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Spin (2005) by Robert Charles Wilson, describes a future Earth that a race of powerful aliens, the Hypotheticals, have put in protective cocoon – the so-called spin membrane – that shelters but also isolates it from the rest of a…
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