Tsana Dolichva's Blog, page 3

Relatively Faster

Image credit: ISS Expedition 28 Crew, NASAFollowing on from my last blog, in which I talked about travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, today I'm going to add acceleration into the mix. But first, a few other funky consequences and transformations that apply when travelling close to the speed of light.

To recap last week's post, when travelling close to the speed of light, time dilates and length contracts. That means time moves more slowly and distance shrinks. The...

Review: Nightsiders by Sue Isles

Nightsiders by Sue Isles is a collection of four short stories set in the same world. It is part of Twelfth Planet Press's Twelve Planets series, twelve collections which are showcasing the work of twelve Australian female authors. I believe it's the only one so far to be entirely science fictional (that said, the only other I've read is Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts -- an excellent blend of Roman mythology, the past and the future -- and I'm not sure what's planned for the rest ...

Rapid slow space travel

Credit: Craig Crawford on APoDI have posted in the past about mundane space travel such as might be used with the solar system (or another star system if we're talking aliens or whatnot). However, with speeds that slow, it would take an extremely long time to reach another star, even the closest. To have any hope of reaching another star, we need to be able to travel much faster.

Right now, we aren't technologically equipped to do so and that's not what this post is about. What I'm going to...

Review: Spare Parts by Sally Rogers-Davidson

You may recall me posting about the Australian Women Writers Challenge at the end of last year. Well I just finished reading my first science fiction book for the challenge, which I will review in this post. Actually, I'm undertaking two challenges, the other not being restricted to only science fiction books (although it is mostly fantasy). One of the books I've read that I've decided to count as not science fiction was a bit borderline. That's Hoodwink by Rhonda Roberts, which is about a...

Living in the Future

It being the new year and all, I thought it might be nice to reflect upon what we, as a whole, have achieved that was once science fiction but is now commonplace. Or at least existent. And I'm not going to focus on the big obvious things, because those are boring and, well, we know smartphones and iPads and modern medicine are crazy futuristic devices/advances. That's obvious. But what about the little things? Specifically, what about food?

Foodtastic

I was inspired to write this post when I...

Weird Worlds: Kepler 22b

It's what all the cool kids are (still) talking about, so why not a post on it? In the glut of Kepler mission transiting planets, a new planet has risen to the fore as the possibly most Earthlike extrasolar planet. Huzzah! (And in a few months yet another new planet will take its place. Just watch).

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
What we know

Kepler 22 is a star very similar to our sun. It is slightly smaller (0.98 times the radius of the sun) and slightly smaller (0.97 times the mass of the...

Australian Women Writers Challenge

Next year, I am going to take on the Australian Women Writers Challenge. To make it particularly challenging and to tie in better with the contents of my blog, I am going to try to read only science fictional books by female Australians.

The specifics of my challenge:


Genre challenge: Purist: one genre only

Challenge level:Miles (read 6 and review at least 3*)

* Should include at least one substantial length review


I'm excited! But also kind of glad that there are still a few weeks left in 2011...

Measuring distances: the furthest away objects

[First up, apologies for the unscheduled hiatus. Being sick and moving house (mercifully not simultaneously) sort of quashed any blogging plans I may have had. OK, so I don't mean so much quashed as put out of my mind entirely, but whatever.

Also, thanks to changing life routines, I think I'll be changing my update schedule from Wednesday nights to weekends. For the time being it seems more manageable.]

This week I thought I'd talk about something a little bit outside the realms of foreseeable ...

Strong Characters (Audience participation post!)

Although not strictly science- or space-based, this post has been kicking around my mind for a while. I decided that today (when my sinuses are trying to kill me and I don't quite have the energy to talk about exploding meteorites in Terra Nova), would be a good time to write it. And fair warning, I am going to Use Examples from Harry Potter, because JK Rowling not only provided good examples, but most of the world already knows what happened in the end so I don't feel bad about possible spoi...

Future Tech in Fiction

I thought this week I'd talk about some incorrect technology predictions in fiction. My aim is more to highlight ways in which authors can be wrong rather than mock them. I mean, you can't expect to be right all the time, but I think it's interesting to note exactly how they were wrong and why (from a somewhat philosophical point of view).

So I've chosen three books, all old (60ish years) and all containing some piece of technology which didn't quite work out as foreseen.

Second Foundation by I...