Author: Doc
-
Wheee! Strip Mining the moon!
For thousands of years young lovers looked up and found romance beneath the full moon. Now they’ll have to make do with the sarred, skid-marked face of the man in the moon staring back. enshittification on a planetray scale. Whee.
-
So uh…
Wouldn’t that make Trump the Antichist? Military Leaders Say Iran War Is So Trump Can Bring About “Armageddon”
-
A Fresh Look
It’s been nearly five years since I last refreshed my website. Hell, it’s been a year since my last blog post before my Interstellar review. As you can see with your own eyes, the design of this thing is much changed. Or, maybe you never saw the old place. Well, trust me. It’s a change….
-
Interstellar: Beautiful lunacy
Lunacy – from Late Latin lunaticus “moon-struck,” from Latin luna “moon” The yearning to reach the stars runs deep in Baby Boomers like myself. We grew up with the deep, ingrained, cultural mythos that we were headed for a moon base by the end of the 1970s and, after that the planets. Beyond that, the stars. But then the…
-
Whiskey and Warfare
“Old Woman’s War” is how I characterized Whiskey and Warfare by E.M. Hamill when someone asked me what I was reading for SPSFC4. While I found John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War sort of meh, this book feels like a more mature, more heartfelt exploration of similar ground. Given the opportunity would someone of middle age…
-
EAT
“Night of the living furries” is how a character describes their situation a little more than midway through Jesse Brown’s EAT. I laughed when I read that line and I also nodded. That’s a good description of the basic premise, though replace cute or weirdly sexualized furries with the sleek, muscle-bound, eat-your-face-off variety. Caede wakes…
-
The Realists of a Larger Reality
Is there a science fiction author more akin to literature than Ursula K. Le Guin? I can’t think of any. There are others that may rise to her level. Octavia E. Butler, certainly. One day, I think N.K. Jemisin will have that luster. I struggle to think of a male writer with the same claim…
-
Cordwainer Smith – The Sci-Fi Master You’ve Probably Never Heard of
When I was a teenager, my brother introduced me to a set of books by a writer with a goofy name, Cordwainer Smith. The first was a short story collection called The Instrumentality of Mankind, and the other was a novel called Norstrilia. My mind was blown. These stories, published in the 50s and 60s,…
-
The Case for Astrology
Rational people will tell you that Astrology is bullshit. Astrology lovers will tell you it can be a profoundly accurate way to determine character traits in people and predict how they’ll respond to upcoming events. Rational people will respond with something like, the stars that make up the astrological signs are so far away their…