Still Writing

Another year winds down, somehow we're all (most of us) still here. I call it a win. Still writing, sort of (barely). I used to pass this house on my way to and from a job years ago. I should drive out there and see if they're still putting up these decorations. My writing focus …

Language in Fantasy and Science Fiction

One of the things that really pulls me into a story and transports me to a fantastical or future setting is the language, specifically the invented slang and terminology for various things. For example in Star Trek we have "phasers," "beaming," "transporters," "replicators," "tricorders," "hyposprays," "Jefferies tubes," "Turbolifts," and on and on. Firefly didn't have …

Star Trek and Nostalgia

I’ve been working my way through the original series of Star Trek, which I have always adored. My family watched it together when I was a child. It was our Friday night ritual. We’d have cheese pizza (being good Catholics, so no meat on Fridays in the late 1960s) and watch first a series called …

A Crystal Age

Another of my Project Gutenberg finds, “A Crystal Age” by W.H. Hudson is an early science fiction story. Originally published in 1887 anonymously, later editions had the author’s name. One wonders why it was published anonymously to begin with as science fiction was not unheard of at that time. According to Wikipedia, utopia/dystopia literature was …

Are We Becoming Eloi?

The Eloi were, of course, the child-like, cattle-like race of humans in H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine." They didn't do anything except sit around in the sun, eat the food and wear the clothes provided to them by mysterious means without even wondering where they came from. They were used as food by the …

Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury

Born this day in 1920, left us (probably for Mars) June 5, 2012. Some of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen my tweet the other day about a lengthy dream I had in which I was talking with a young Ray. I can't really recall what we discussed, mostly I just remember …

The Casual Time Traveler

Time travel. Who hasn’t thought about what they’d do if they had the chance to go back in time and change something? Maybe you’d find a way to prevent an evil dictator from being born (Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot), stop John Wilkes Booth from assassinating Lincoln, save the Romanovs from being murdered. The problem is …

Future Sci-Fi

More random bizarro thinking on my part. I suddenly started wondering what science fiction of the future will be. Today most science fiction is focused on colonizing other planets, alien encounters, high-tech taking over, dystopias, the fall of civilization, robots, AI, time travel, extending human life. Ok, that's a whole lotta stuff. In say, a …

Weekly Card – Eight of Engines

I recently got the Steampunk Tarot by John & Caitlin Matthews so naturally had to use it for this week's card. If you're not familiar with what steampunk is, in a nutshell it's a subgenre of sci-fi/fantasy, typically set in the Victorian era, although not necessarily in England (Cherie M. Priest's "Clockwork Century" series I …

Good Saturday

I probably should have been more "responsible" but I needed some downtime so I went out for another bike ride. Did a little better this week than last week, much better than I expected for not having been on the bike in probably 9 months. Also have several writing projects going, which is interesting to …