Arthur C. Clarke has died at age 90. He was the last surviving member of the “Big Three” of science fiction: Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein having gone on before. Those were names to conjur with when I was a kid, and they’re among the primary reasons I write SF today. I regret I …
Mind-reading machines
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. I’m a hard-line skeptic when it comes to the topic of ESP (extra-sensory perception). I don’t believe in telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, or people bending flatware just by looking at it. That said, I’m pretty confident that in the near future mind-reading will be possible. …
Marseguro a Science Fiction Book Club selection
Googling this morning I discovered that Marseguro is listed as a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club in the U.S. (though not yet in the Canadian version), due out in a hardcover book club edition in April. I presume it will eventually show up in the Canadian SFBC, but I don’t know for sure: …
‘Tis done!
I just emailed the finished manuscript of Terra Insegura, sequel to Marseguro, to Sheila Gilbert at DAW Books. Now I wait for her reaction and notes, after which I get to rewrite the whole thing one more time! And here, for those who have been following along at home, are the final stats for the …
Marseguro gets an A from Sci-Fi Weekly!
Woo-hoo! Lois H. Gresh reviews Marseguro for Sci-Fi Weekly (the very high-profile news service of the Sci-Fi Channel in the U.S.) and gives it an A! Some excerpts: The settings are well drawn and creative… The characters possess substance, emotions and realistic motivations… Most important, the action and surprises keep coming… She concludes: Overall…the flaws …
Science fiction architecture
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. Once upon a time, I took a vocational aptitude test in high school guidance class. By that time I already had a pretty good idea I wanted to be a writer–specifically, science fiction writer–and yet, writer did not show up very high on the …
Set art free from gibberish!
Thus asks Ann Althouse: Why do museum curators post such nonsensical texts on the walls next to the artwork they want us to take seriously? It’s a question I’ve asked myself: here’s the arts column I wrote on this topic a few years ago. *** Visual art and the text that explains it are uneasy …
Odd craters on Mercury
They’ve found some very odd craters on Mercury, some with dark halos, which they at least have a tentative explanation for, and one they cannot explain at all: Superficially, the bright patch resembles an expanse of ice glistening in the sun, but that’s not possible. The surface temperature of the crater at the time of …
Why is winter the flu season?
Scientists may have finally figured out why there’s a “flu season,” why flu is so much more prevalent during the cold months: Dr. Zimmerberg and his colleagues found that at temperatures slightly above freezing, the virus’s lipid covering solidified into a gel. As temperatures approach 60 degrees Fahrenheit, the covering gradually thaws, eventually melting to …

