Category: Science Fiction
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It’s election season here in Japan, and this morning the full listing of competing parties fell through my mailbox. This multi-page, newspaper-style document lists the major parties and their main candidates, along with a very brief statement of their agenda. It’s a useful summary of the state of policy debate in Japan, I suppose, though…
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Yesterday’s role-playing was a session of Saga edition Star Wars, set in the era just after the clone wars, and my character was a Rodian scout – that is, one of Gredo’s race, pursuing essentially the same trade and with probably just as much aplomb and skill. My character, Seredo, was joining an established group,…
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I finally got to see the Avengers today, and a fine romp it was too. I’m still chuckling now about the encounter between Loki and the Hulk, and the movie has much to recommend it. It has good characters, excellent explodiness, very snappy dialogue, and some very smooth cultural references. I know nothing about the…
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This month’s rapid and unexpected disappearance of the Arctic sea ice is perhaps the first time that global warming (AGW) has really shown an ugly side that can’t be easily put down to just weather and/or luck. But something that surprises me about the sci-fi genre is that AGW’s worst case scenarios don’t seem to…
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Apparently an Australian company has developed a Star Wars style speeder bike to the point where it can hover and move, and has posted video footage to prove it. I think I deserve one of these for being me. There needs to be more of this kind of development. Where is my jetpack? My AT-AT…
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During the later years of the flood, many people took to the water independently, taking to ships and rafts and trading with the remaining parts of the land for food. Rather than developing communities through the seizure of large facilities, these formed communities over time through accretion. Small boats might gather around an abandoned collection…
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In the first chaotic years after nations ceased to exist, before the last of the land disappeared, many people would have set out on their own, by whatever means they could secure, to make a new life on the waves. These people would have formed small bands and taken whatever they could find on shore…
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In the novels Flood and Ark Stephen Baxter describes a natural disaster that leads to the complete inundation of the earth by a massive flood. This flood is not a global warming horror story, but a completely new disaster in which oceans of water leak out of fault lines in the earth’s crust, submerging the…
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It appears that Certified Practicing Accountants Australia (the CPA) has scored a rare interview with Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. The interview is about an hour long and can be viewed at the CPA’s blog, where Mr. Armstrong holds forth on a variety of matters related to the space race.…
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John Carter came out late in Japan, but I got a chance to watch it last night after a day of role-playing, and while I was impressed by the authenticity of its representation of Barsoom, I wasn’t so impressed by its general cinematic properties. It was a fun romp but it suffered from what seems…
Compromise and Conceit 