Every Labour Day weekend, somewhere in the world, thousands of peopld gather for the World Science Fiction Convention. This year they gathered in San Jose, California, for the 60th WorldCon, as fans call it, and I was there. WorldCon covers the whole world of science fiction and fantasy, with particular emphasis, not on TV and …
Category: Blog
Geese–and Goosezilla
Canada Geese are among the most identifiable birds on the prairies, but we tend to have a love-hate relationship with them. We love to see and hear them honking overhead on a quiet autumn evening–but we hate what they do to our parks, lawns and golf courses. But if you think today’s geese are a …
Invading Mars
One of the prototypical science fiction novels is H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which invaders from the Red Planet successfully conquer the Earth, only to succumb in the end, not to humanity’s feeble efforts, but to the attacks of Earth’s microbes, against which they have no defense. Wells may have been the first SF …
Air conditioning
If you were fortunate enough to be able to spend last week in a climate-controlled environment, give thanks to Willis Haviland Carrier, whose new-fangled invention, air conditioning, first went into service 100 years ago, on July 17, 1902. Modern air conditioning is an offshoot of an earlier invention, mechanical refrigeration, which is based on the …
Sandcastle science
One of the great joys of childhood is making sandcastles on the beach; and oddly enough, part of the fun is also watching a wave wash them away. It’s a little startling to find out, then, that something instinctively understood by children–that damp sand sticks together–was only recently explained scientifically in 1997. Dr. Peter Schaffer, …
Rainbows
Saskatchewan has elected to call itself “Land of Living Skies.” One good reason appeared in the sky on Canada Day following an afternoon thunderstorm: a rainbow. In space, the sky is black and the sun appears white, and that’s all there is to it. But before the light of the sun reaches us down here …
Robocup
Picture this: it’s World Cup 2050. The preliminaries are over and the two finalists are facing each other in the first-place game. Onto the field trot two teams–but only one of them is human. The other is made up of robots. Today we’re accustomed to robots that do everything from build cars to defuse …
Extrasolar planets
The idea that planets orbit most of the stars in the universe has such a firm hold on our imagination, thanks to Star Trek and Star Wars, that most people are surprised to hear we only found the first planet outside our solar system in 1995, and proof of other solar systems (stars with more than one planet …
Dreams: new research
The other night I dreamed I went into a Montreal restaurant with TV chef Emeril, where he annoyed the restaurant’s chef by taking over the cooking of a two-metre-long fish filet, which, when split open, contained a trilobite. “Monster darts!” exclaimed the restaurant’s chef, then demonstrated how to pull the legs off trilobites and throw …
Soccer
Watch me explain the science of soccer on CBC Newsworld, July 22, 2007: Hundreds of millions of soccer fans are now tuning in to the World Cup, where they’ll see, not just exciting games, but a fascinating display of scientific principles. Let’s start with the ball. The basic physics haven’t changed: when a ball is …
How to become a science fiction writer
Hello, my name is Ed, and I’m a science fiction writer. I’m the author of four young adult fantasy and science fiction titles, Soulworm, The Dark Unicorn, Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star, and Spirit Singer (all available at Book & Brier Patch as paperbacks; Spirit Singer is also available as an e-book from Awe-Struck E-Books). …
Space propulsion
It’s been more than 40 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, and, in the process, traveled faster than any human before. Today, we continue to send humans into orbit…where they travel at pretty much the same speed. Oh, sure, unmanned spacecraft have traveled much faster, and so did …
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