Flying On The Fringe

I saw Star Trek Beyond yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it. I spent a good part of the movie holding my breath. That’s all I will tell you about it. No spoilers here.

There were a few places in the movie where I also found inspiration for my next novel. Space fiction must be the most difficult genre of writing. Nothing can be assumed. Grass might not be green, the sun might rise in the west (or north or south), even the laws of physics can be challenged. The only sure thing about space fiction is that you have to stretch your own imagination beyond anything known to man, and then describe it in a way that brings it to life for your reader. No problem.

I am often chagrined to find that my own imagination is lacking, so lately I have been seeking inspiration from other sources. Fortunately, I have found some excellent ones. Star Trek Beyond offered a wealth of alien species as well as a very inventive space station, if not a particularly unique alien planet landscape. The WiiU video game Xenoblade has provided another great source of inspiration. Yasuyuki Honne and Tonny Waiman Koo are the chief artists for the utterly amazing art in the game. In addition to superb characters and alien creatures, the landscape forms are awe-inspiring. Honestly, it’s worth buying a WiiU just for this one game, assuming you’re a better player than I am and can actually keep your character alive long enough to enjoy it. Otherwise, the game comes with a beautiful book full of Xenoblade’s art.

I had finished a rough draft of my second novel, tentatively titled Man on the Fringe. With my imagination rejuvenated, I will be undertaking a major overhaul. I hope someday it will inspire someone else’s imagination.

Fly high and free.

A common annecdote states that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is put in cold water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of threats that rise gradually.

While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a submerged frog gradually heated will jump out. (Wikipedia)

Maybe the frogs are smarter than we humans. This past weekend Wikileaks released some 20,000 emails that had been hacked from the Democratic National Committee. The leaked emails revealed that the DNC had systematically undermined Bernie Sanders’ primary election campaign. The revelation forced the resignation of chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Notably, the FBI immediately announced it would investigate who hacked the DNC. There was no mention of investigating the DNC for violating democratic process.

Of course, Hilary Clinton could claim that she had no idea what her party was doing to benefit her. Bernie Sanders, not the insider that Clinton is, complained of the party’s bias more than once. How could he know, and Clinton not know? Like she didn’t know she was committing treason by allowing secret State Department emails on her private, un-secured private email account?

Of course she knew what was being done. How can we possible vote for someone who has such a blatant disregard for the democratic process, let alone such a blatant disregard for the law, and blatant disregard for the security of the United States when she is serving as Secretary of State?

So, our choices for President in this year’s election are a man who’s such a loose canon that his own party trembles in fear every time he opens his mouth, and a woman so determined to consolidate her own power that she recognizes no moral or legal constraints.

So are we frogs in the United States boiling yet? Maybe it’s time to jump.

I had reported previously that President Dadra had ordered the military not to fire on civilians protesting the new Blitzgan government’s policies. Sadly, it seems that policy has changed. There have been multiple incidents of the military police shooting and killing unarmed citizens. Of course, in each case, they were individuals opposing the government. Is this a return to the old way of doing things?

President Dadra has not denounced the killings, so he has given at least tacit endorsement of them. The commander of the military police has announced that the police are being allowed to open fire in self defense when they believe their lives are in danger. The police wear body armor and carry an array of high powered weapons, as well as weapons designed for close personal combat. How can they be threatened by citizens armed with posters and banners?

The commander also said civilians had thrown rocks, bricks, and other heavy objects at the officers and called them obscene names. We have a highly trained police force, prepared (supposedly) to deal with crowds, and they can’t deal with flying bricks and insults? The commander further stated that those killed had criminal records. Even before the revolution criminals had the right to a trial. Do our police now have the right to execute criminals on the spot?

President Dadra, I appeal to you—put a stop to this tyranny before we degenerate back into the militaristic police state that we fought so hard to end.

Pika RN2378, Editor, The Blitzgan Newscom

On June 28, 2016, Omar Almaini and his team from the University of Nottingham released the final images of what they call the Ultra-Deep Survey (UDS) performed over an area of sky about four times the size of a full moon. The scientists observed 250,000 galaxies in this region of the sky, in the direction of the constellation Cetus the Whale. Several hundred of these galaxies are so distant that the light we perceive is from the first billion years after the Big Bang.

The team says its goal has been to learn about the formation of galaxies and track their evolution over the past 13 billion years. (From earthsky.com by Daniela Breitman)

Did you get that folks? In just one area of the sky they observed 250,000 galaxies. Don’t fry your brain, but think about what that means for the entire observable universe if we could move the telescope and observe the universe in a complete sphere around our planet.

Earth scientists believe our planet is just over 4.5 billion years old. Life first appeared on earth at about the 3.8 billion year mark. The genus homo appeared approximately 2.5 million years ago, and homo sapiens (that’s us as we know us today) about 200 thousand years ago. It took less than a billion years for life to develop on a new planet, and about 1.3 billion years for that life to evolve sentience.

If the Sol system happens to be a younger-than-average star system, (there is building evidence that it is), then it would be entirely plausible to think that somewhere out there, a planet has an intelligent species far more developed than we are. At the very least, who in their right mind could believe earth would be the only planet in the universe with intelligent life?

The biggest problem, and one that still has our best and brightest minds completely baffled, is that even if we could discern intelligent life (we don’t yet have the technology to do that), we might never be able to communicate effectively, let alone go there and meet them. Most astrophysicists believe travel to distant planets will likely never be possible, at least within the physical lifetime of a single person.

For the foreseeable future, it is only through the free range of the science fiction mind that human beings will travel the galaxy and meet all manor of exotic sentient life.

Live long and dream big.

I may be late joining the party, but I just discovered a fascinating new project on CNET. Six months ago CNET launched a project in which it asked subscribers to participate in writing a science fiction novel—a crowd-sourced novel. The novel is now available on the following site:

http://www.cnet.com/news/crowd-control-our-crowdsourced-science-fiction-novel-starts-here/

Eric Mack, a CNET writer, launched the novel on October 27, 2015, in recognition of National Writing Month in November. Each year during November, writers are encouraged to attempt to write a full novel in thirty days. I have never attempted it, and I can’t believe anyone could produce much more than 30,000 words of garbage that way, but who knows. Lots of people have tried it, and a lot have discovered a talent they didn’t know they had, or the discipline to employ a talent they do have.

Mack set up the premise for the novel entitled Crowd Control and posted his own daily writings, allowing others to add to his base. The full manuscript totals around 50,000 words and had hundreds of contributors. The finished work is now available for reading at the link above, but the site is still accepting illustrations, so artists—get to it!

Those of us who are writers fully recognize that our profession is changing rapidly. With self-publishing becoming an affordable alternative while traditional publishers offer less and less for a huge chunk of the writers’ profits, writing is open to the masses as never before. True, that sometimes results in novels of inferior quality and writing expertise making it to print, but it also provides an opening for unrecognized but potentially outstanding authors like one of my newly discovered favorites, David Dalglish. Dalglish’s novels are currently published by Orbit, but he started out by self-publishing. Would we ever have had the pleasure of his novels if self-publishing hadn’t been an option?

Crowd sourcing seems to be a new opening in the realm of authorship. As a writer, it thrills me to see something develop that encourages the art of word smithing.

Thus far I have read only the first chapter of Crowd Control, but I intend to keep reading, and I’ll let you all know what I think of it.

Today at 5:34 p.m. central daylight time marks the summer solstice, the longest day of the year for the northern hemisphere and the winter solstice, or shortest day, for the southern hemisphere. What is significant to me is the fact that the entire planet experiences the solstice at the precise same instant, although you have to translate it to your own time zone. That was new to me. I had assumed the entire day was the solstice. In fact, the solstice is an astronomical event, caused by Earth’s tilt on its axis and its motion in orbit around the sun. At the June solstice, Earth is positioned in its orbit so that our world’s North Pole is at the point closest to the sun.

Most of us consider it the first day of summer, although our summer heat has usually kicked in well before that. Ancient cultures understood well the significance of the passing seasons, and monuments all over the world, from the pyramids of Egypt to the pyramids of Central and South America, were built to track the movement of the sun. Stonehenge in England aligns with the June solstice. In Egypt, if you stand at the Sphinx and look toward the two Great Pyramids, the sun sets exactly in the middle between the two on the June solstice.

The five phases of ancient Chinese philosophy were associated with specific things: directions, colors, sounds, organs in the body, fundamental elements such as water or fire, and real or mythological beasts. The summer season is associated with the direction south, the color red, the sound of laughing, the heart organ, the fire element, and a creature often referred to as red phoenix.

If you wish to celebrate the solstice as a Chinese philosopher would, you might stand facing south, and honor the “southness” of summer. Go swimming in a cool pool or stream to balance your fire element. Laugh. Laughter is good for the heart, the summer organ. And don’t forget to scan the skies for a red phoenix. What better image to apply to a setting summer sun than a fiery red bird? I think the Chinese absolutely nailed it. What could be better for you in the summer than beating the sizzling fire of the red phoenix by leaping into cool water and laughing like a child?

Happy solstice.

Credit: Deborah Byrd, earthsky.com.

We often tend to assume that we know all there is to know about our world. When I was in my twenties, I worked with a secretary in her seventies who lived in a retirement village. She once told me that a friend of hers had said he thought young people must be discouraged because there was nothing new left to discover. Without hesitation, I rattled off a list of things right off the top of my head that hadn’t yet been unraveled, including how to cure cancer and all the mysteries of black holes. I finished with “the only thing we’ve really learned is how little we know.”

I still feel that way, and it’s a thrill for me each time a major new scientific discovery hits the news. May 10, EarthSky.com carried an article by Deanna Conners highlighting the “Top 10 New Species of 2016.”

Hold the phone. Not all the new species, just the top ten. Scientists estimate there are over ten million distinct species on earth, of which only about two million have been identified and cataloged. This year’s top ten include a bizarre looking fish, a sea dragon, and a new species of pre-human hominid. Intrigued? Visit earthsky.com for the details.

Where did this incredible explosion of life come from? Certainly, the perfect position of our planet in relation to the sun and the abundant presence of water enabled the propagation and differentiation of species. But scientists have for some time debated the possibility that our planet’s water, and even the building blocks of life itself, were delivered to us by a comet or asteroid.

May 27, The European Space Agency announced that it’s Rosetta Spacecraft, which has been studying the Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko for the past two years, found glycine and phosphorus on the comet. Glycine is one of the amino acids considered a building block of life, and phosphorus is a key component in DNA and cells. In addition to glycine, researchers found other organic molecules that could be precursors to the formation of glycine.

So, if life on earth didn’t begin here, where did it originate? Where in the galaxy is planet (or comet) zero?