A new short vignette by Torn MacAlester: Vul­cani Cinis   Gen­ny plant­ed her face against the liv­ing room win­dow, watch­ing the snow fall. The sky grew dark­er as she mar­veled at the dark snow cov­er­ing the grass. “Can I make a snow­man when it stops snow­ing, Mom?” “Hon­ey, come and sit by me,” said her […]

The Fer­mi Para­dox A few weeks ago, I began a dis­cus­sion about the Kar­da­shev scale.  The Kar­da­shev scale builds lev­els of tech­nol­o­gy that rep­re­sent advanced civ­i­liza­tions, most­ly beyond our own. Giv­en the tech­nol­o­gy scale, and spec­u­la­tion from sci­ence fic­tion, we can scale pos­si­ble galaxy cross­ing times. The galaxy cross­ing times can also be con­nect­ed to […]

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke It’s been 22 years since 2001.  The world in the nov­el and film has not qui­et been real­ized, but I thought it might be inter­est­ing to look at Clarke’s nov­el and film by Stan­ley Kubrick to see what has been real­ized. In con­text, the nov­el and the […]

The Kar­da­shev Scale The Kar­da­shev scale is a means of con­ve­nient­ly mea­sur­ing the pow­er out­put of a civ­i­liza­tion.  The scale tra­di­tion­al­ly has three lev­els, called I — plan­e­tary, II — stel­lar , & III — galac­tic. A Type I civ­i­liza­tion has a pow­er out­put of approx­i­mate­ly Watts. This is a fac­tor of ten thou­sand times […]

Here is my list of the best sci­ence fic­tion films. I tried to lim­it it to three films from each decade, start­ing from the 1950’s and con­tin­u­ing through 2019.  Of the three, I chose a best and a run­ner up for the decade.  I also cre­ate a cat­e­go­ry for hon­or­able men­tion.  I’ve tried to avoid […]

In sci­ence fic­tion, there has been a dis­cus­sion as to what con­sti­tutes sci­ence fic­tion.  In mod­ern terms, the thoughts are that mod­ern sci­ence has to be a part of it.  How­ev­er, this is not a uni­ver­sal opin­ion.  Many works in mod­ern times are not even close to being  sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly accu­rate. What about works from the […]

Con­grat­u­la­tions to NASA for their suc­cess­ful Artemis 1 mis­sion.  From launch until splash­down, this has been an intrigu­ing series of firsts. Though I write sci­ence fic­tion about the Moon, I rec­og­nize the efforts to make this sci­ence fact.  I look for­ward to the Artemis II mis­sion. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/splashdown-nasa-s-orion-returns-to-earth-after-historic-moon-mission https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/nasa-artemis-1-moon-mission-successfuly-returns-to-earth-175007566.html   Week of Dec 11 2022 [11th […]