Calvin and Hobbes with the dialogue swapped for passages from Dune? Yes please.
More here.
Category: Random
I’m Baaaaaaack
[Silence. After a few moments, footsteps are heard. Faintly at first, but then louder as they approach. A man appears from stage left. His stride stutters for a moment as he glances toward the darkened auditorium, but he gathers himself and steps confidently to the microphone.]
*cough*
[He taps the microphone twice. Feedback whines through the auditorium’s speaker system, and the man winces. He moistens his lips and peers out at the shadowed space where the audience might be.]
“So. I’ve… been away for a while.”
Silence.
“I don’t know if anybody’s out there, but… well. Let’s just pick up where we left off, shall we?”
Sun Goes Mental, No One Really Knows Why
Late Sunday night, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the first ‘X-class’–i.e. really powerful–solar flare of 2013. Which was cool, and they’d been expecting it, so no biggie.
But then there were another two. In the next 23 hours. From the same spot on the Sun. Should we be scared? Has our reliable old star entered some kind of monsoon season that comes every 10,000 years, auguring the apocalypse and end of all humanity?
Seems not. Although “An X-class flare in our direction, combined with a colossal, interplanetary CME (coronal mass ejection), could have serious consequences here on Earth.”
And “X-class flares and their associated coronal mass ejections can lead to mindblowing northern lights at very non-northern latitudes… [and] can also trigger massive geomagnetic storms, jam satellites, ground airplanes, and precipitate global radio blackouts.”
Space, eh? It’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
Should I Be Giving My Books Away?
Amanda Palmer–alt-rock music star and wife of fantastical writing genius Neil Gaiman–did a talk for TED on ‘The Art of Asking’. The synopsis from TED:
“Don’t make people pay for music, says Amanda Palmer: Let them. In a passionate talk that begins in her days as a street performer (drop a dollar in the hat for the Eight-Foot Bride!), she examines the new relationship between artist and fan.”
Amanda and her band famously used Kickstarter to fund production of their new album, asking fans to contribute a total of $100,000. They ended up with $1.2M, donated by only 25,000 people at an average of almost fifty dollars a piece. Astounding.
Unlike Amanda, I’d hesitate to call myself an artist–it seems a bit pretentious, for some reason–but watching this made me think, as the parallels between music and books are obvious. The digital indie publishing revolution has brought writers closer to their readers than ever before, tearing down the barriers and hurdles of finding agency and publisher representation, of shipping physical copies to a bookstore.
What’s to stop me posting a new novel here, on my website, available to anyone to download for free? With just a PayPal or Google Checkout button next to it with a message saying “If you enjoyed this book, you can help me out here. Thanks.”
Nothing. There are no barriers.
But should I do that? It’s early days in my writing career, but I have a certain amount of confidence that ten or twenty years or novels down the line I might be able to make enough from my current, standard indie pub model that I could make a living at it. (Industry changes permitting, of course.) And if I did make that living, why would I change?
Might doing so make me richer? Would some deep-pocketed fans happily download one of my books, and give me $20 in exchange? $50?
Would it make me more famous? Would I care if it did? Would I even like it if it did?
Would TED invite me to do a talk? (That would be cool.)
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions.
Writers, would you consider giving away your work and trusting in the generosity of strangers and fans to pay your bills? Why? Do you yearn for the emotional connection to fans that Amanda talked about?
Readers, would you donate before you read, or happily accept a freebie? Or maybe come back and chip in what you thought the story was worth once you’d read it? Or maybe you prefer the Amazon shopping experience with eight million books at your fingertips, rather than having to traipse over to every individual author’s website to pick up your latest read.
What are your thoughts, folks?
In The (SFF) News This Week…
A super-nerdy but awesome explanation of the Kardashev scale, which is ‘used to classify hypothetical alien civilizations according to the amount of energy at their disposal’.
‘This led him to speculate about a Type II civilization. For an [extraterrestrial intelligence] to reach K2, it would need to capture the entire energy output of its parent star. The best way to achieve this, of course, is to build a Dyson Sphere.
Conjured by Freeman Dyson in 1959, this hypothetical megastructure would envelope a star at a distance of 1 AU and cover an inconceivably large area of 2.72 x 1017 km2, which is around 600 million times the surface area of the Earth. The sun has an energy output of around 4 x 1026 Watts, of which most would be available to do useful work.’
As anyone who’s read Ascension Point knows, I’ve always been more of a Dyson Swarm kind of guy, but each to their own.
Next up, are you ready for season three of Game of Thrones? I know I am.
We should stop using nuclear weapons as a unit of measurement, says annoyed atomic historian.
“In general,” he added, “What I don’t like is … the idea that kiloton or a megaton is just an energy unit, that it’s equivalent to so many joules or something. Because you could do that. You could claim that your house runs so many tons of TNT worth of electricity per year, but it sort of trivializes the notion.”
Also at The Atlantic, a spectacular NASA video of three simultaneous solar phenomena.
‘…a solar flare, a coronal mass ejection (CME), and coronal rain, “complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun’s atmosphere,” NASA explains.’
Finally, in Dan-specific news, Venus Rising goes to my editor on March 8th, which means it should be out in just a couple of months!
Spectacular Meteor Footage
Just in case anyone hasn’t seen the news in the last four days, a 56ft-wide asteroid weighing around 10,000 tons and travelling at 40,000 miles per hour entered the Earth’s atmosphere over Russia on February 15th. (At which point it became a meteor, not an asteroid, I’ve learned.)
It disintegrated under the force of atmospheric pressure nine miles over the city of Chelyabinsk, causing a shockwave that shattered windows across the city and injured 1200 people.
This write-up at the New Yorker sums it up pretty well, and io9 has some science here.
The key lesson in all this? Space is very big, and IT IS TRYING TO KILL US.
Sci-Fi That Became Sci-Fact in 2012
There’s a great article from MyScienceAcademy on some of the amazing scientific advances made in 2012. I’ll take a robot exoskeleton and living until I’m 200, please. Thanks.
Read it here.
What Kind Of Year Has It Been?
2013, eh? Damn. Where did that come from? All of a sudden it’s time to make plans for a new year to come, but not before taking a moment to review the one just passed.
Accurate Sci-Fi
Just a quick one: io9 have an interesting little article here where a few scientists talk about which science fiction depicts their field most accurately.
And what’s not so accurate:
“Whedon et al. also seem not to realize how big space is, even within our solar system. You can’t make a blockade in space. To give you an idea, the “asteroid belt” in our own solar system is supposed to be this incredibly dangerous region with rocks everywhere. In reality, the distance between big asteroids is more like a million miles.”
Of Atheists and Comic Book Movies
What have I been reading today? Well, there’s a great rant by Charlie Jane Anders on io9 here on why atheists should read more science fiction.
“Most of the time, these are geeks who have immense respect for science… and yet, they won’t recognize a situation where they simply have no data, one way or the other.”
There’s also a great quote from the legendary Carl Sagan:
“Carl Sagan is frequently described as an atheist — but there’s also a quote commonly ascribed to him where he rejects that label, saying: “An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid.””
Then in comic book movie news we have double-Xavier double-Magneto in the upcoming X-Men movie, and the completely unsubstantiated rumour that the marvelous Joseph Gordon-Levitt might be playing Batman when the long-anticipated Justice League film happens. No doubt paving the way for a truly shocking Batman-trilogy-without-Bruce-Wayne situation.
It’s a good time to be a comics fan.
DAN HARRIS: 10% SCI, 90% FI 