Sable Aradia's Blog, page 53
November 22, 2017
Exoplanet 55 Cancri e Likely to Have Earthlike Atmosphere
Twice as big as Earth, the super-Earth 55 Cancri e was thought to have lava flows on its surface. The planet is so close to its star, the same side of the planet always faces the star, such that the planet has permanent day and night sides. Based on a 2016 study using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists speculated that lava would flow freely in lakes on the starlit side and become hardened on the face of perpetual darkness. The lava on the dayside would reflect radiation from the star, contributing to the overall observed temperature of the planet.
Now, a deeper analysis of the same Spitzer data finds this planet likely has an atmosphere whose ingredients could be similar to those of Earth’s atmosphere, but thicker. Lava lakes directly exposed to space without an atmosphere would create local hot spots of high temperatures, so they are not the best explanation for the Spitzer observations, scientists said.
Read the full article at NASA.
November 21, 2017
Book Review: Gold by Issac Asimov
Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Read for the Genre Non-Fiction and the Collections! Reading Challenges.
This collection represents the last batch of stuff that Isaac Asimov gave to us. Half of it is stories, and the other half is a collection of essays about science fiction and writing in general that he produced, mostly as editor of some of the most legendary sci-fi magazines ever. As a result, it qualified for both a short story collections reading challenge and a genre-related non-fic challenge that I was doing, and I counted it for both.
This is going to be a short review because, in a nutshell, you can see why Asimov remains a legend. He was a master of his craft, and this writing spanned the breadth of his illustrious, long career.
I enjoyed his non-fiction writing immensely. He was a thoughtful, intelligent man with a self-deprecating, dry wit that I think tickles my Canadian sense of humour especially well. He was also capable of doing a great thing that I admire in intellectuals; he was capable of thinking harder about an issue and then changing his mind! Asimov is somewhat infamous for having directly contributed, for example, to the stereotype against women writing sci-fi. In one of these essays he apologizes and confesses that this view was mostly was the result of having been told this by people he admired when he was still a young writer, and he clearly begins to change his approach, including his use of pronouns in the course of these ongoing essays. I learned an amazing amount about the genre and its evolution through his eyes.
The short stories were like reading liquid light. I had forgotten, since it’s been a while since I’d read Asimov, what an amazing storyteller he could be. As a reader, I felt his prose flowed like magic. His stories were all page-turners that left me feeling satisfied, whether it was a light snack (there’s a couple of three-page stories) to a full meal deal (Gold, the title story).
And as a writer, I know enough about the craft to recognize the technical minutiae of his style and the way he told his stories, and I think I learned some things by watching this master at work that might help me to write better short stories.
Why did it take me so long to read it? I started with the non-fiction, and I tend to read non-fiction in snippets, and also the book was misplaced for a while. When I got into the fiction, I couldn’t put it down. Don’t think the long reading time is in any way a comment on its quality!
A must for anyone who considers themselves a sci-fi fan, and recommended for anyone else also.
November 20, 2017
Why Your Favorite Author Probably Can’t Give You a Free Book
It’s a dilemma that many in my circles are puzzling over: in today’s world, authors have nearly limitless creativity and research sources and opportunities to get their stories out to a wider audience…but fewer people are willing to pay for them.
I’m an administrator for a few dozen authors’ Facebook pages, and from time to time I glimpse notifications of another message with the same question, phrased in a few different ways: “Why is your book (or ebook) so expensive?”
If you’ve ever wondered that yourself—and I don’t blame you, because I did too before I started working in publishing—here are a few thoughts that authors probably want to say but feel they can’t, because it seems a little too direct, a little too self-serving (even though it really isn’t).
It’s the same reason restaurant owners can’t give you a free dinner: because that’s how they make a living. Sure…
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November 18, 2017
Cosmic Search for a Missing Limb
This new Picture of the Week, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the dwarf galaxy NGC 4625, located about 30 million light-years away in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). The image, acquired with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), reveals the single spiral arm of the galaxy, which gives it an asymmetric appearance. But why is there only one spiral arm, when spiral galaxies normally have at least two?
Read the full article at spacetelescope.com (Hubble’s official website).
November 17, 2017
On the Horizon Boxed Set Announcement!
Pleased to announce that I am going to be in this outstanding boxed set! An international bestselling cast of 22 authors, and don’t let the stats fool you, that’s a dummy file, each one of us will be writing a minimum of a 40k word novel! You can’t beat our starting price for all of that! Pre-order now for a great introductory price and help us go for a bestseller!
November 16, 2017
The Hopeful Side of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
By Megan Hunter
I can chart the progress of my life through the types of apocalypse I have feared. As a child, the endings I imagined were natural, even cosmic: the land swallowed by the sea, the sun swallowing the earth. When I was an adolescent the man-made came to the fore, as I searched for mushroom shapes in clouds and imagined the exact moment of an explosion: would I know it was happening, I wondered, or would there only be after; dimness, blood, confusion.
As a young adult, I would visualize the carcasses of the planes I traveled on, post-crash, the way their bellies would be lifted from the sea with a winch, spun around like part of a whale. This was a smaller-scale disaster, but I could also imagine all the planes falling from the sky at once, dropping in a synchronized movement to the land below.
When I had my first child, my visions took on a new realism: the key dates of climate change no longer had a vague, post-death strangeness to them. They were the likely years of my son’s life. Now, I imagined him walking through a world too hot to exist in, or living in a city that had become a new Atlantis, its underwater streets swum through by fishes, its buildings draped in seaweed.
Read the full article at Literary Hub.
November 15, 2017
Jupiter’s Colourful Clouds
By Calla Cofield
Jupiter’s southern hemisphere is a swirling, curling sea of colorful clouds in a new image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft and two citizen scientists.
The new image comes from data collected by the JunoCam instrument on Oct. 24, 2017, as Juno performed its ninth close flyby of Jupiter (its eighth science flyby), according to a statement from NASA. The raw data from the instrument were uploaded to the JunoCam website, and citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran took that data and processed it to create the image above. [Amazing Jupiter Photos by Juno and Citizen Scientists]
Read the full article at Space.com.
November 14, 2017
How Vintage Rocket Tech Could Be NASA’s Ticket to Mars
I thought I would share that for me, this was one of those happy moments in the life of a sci-fi writer where I said, “I thought about that!” Of course, I am by no means the first sci-fi writer to think of the use of nuclear rockets, especially when the tech was new. But as a solution for the immediate problem of getting deeper into the solar system, and Mars in particular, I considered using vintage nuclear rocket tech as the logical solution for the extended time in space problem; and also for minimizing space radiation exposure. This is part of the backstory to The Cloud. So I was very excited to see this article.
Now I’ll go one step further, and I will point out that if this technology is successful, it could finally be the solution to nuclear waste disposal. The reason why we do not just put all the nuclear waste on Earth in a rocket and blast it off into the sun (which is a natural high-test fusion reactor, in case you are not a science nerd type and you are reading this) is because we tried that and it blew up in high atmosphere, providing quite a light show in the magnetosphere for a few days, I understand. But if we can stabilize this technology enough to make it safe for human transport (well, as safe as astronauting gets, anyway) then I imagine it could be stabilized enough to provide a safe(ish) container to transport nuclear waste in. Just sayin’.
By Charlie Wood
Dangerous radiation. Overstuffed pantries. Cabin fever. NASA could sidestep many of the impediments to a Mars mission if they could just get there faster. But sluggish chemical rockets aren’t cutting it — and to find what comes next, one group of engineers is rebooting research into an engine last fired in 1972.
The energy liberated by burning chemical fuel brought astronauts to the moon, but that rocket science makes for a long trip to Mars. And although search for a fission-based shortcut dates back to the 1950s, such engines have never flown. In August, NASA boosted those efforts when the agency announced an $18.8-million-dollar contract with nuclear company BWXT to design fuel and a reactor suitable for nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP), a rocket technology that could jumpstart a new era of space exploration.
Read the full article at Space.com.
November 13, 2017
We Are All Allies
By Dan Koboldt
I
n some ways, publishing is a zero-sum game. There are only so many slots in the schedule of traditional publishers. Only ten books can occupy the top ten list, and only one can win the Hugo. Yet the most dangerous and pervasive threat to the aspiring author is not another author, nor is it a big bad publisher. Nor is it a certain online store. No, the biggest threat is the ever-shrinking reading time the average person has in our modern world.
Books once enjoyed very little competition in this arena. Now, time that was once given over to reading is spent on the internet, on social media, on Netflix. The geek who used to read forty hours a week now spends them playing Dragon Age. That’s why authors need to band together: to remind the world of the importance of books. To get them to choose reading over skimming and streaming. Mark my words, fellow authors, we will live or die by our ability to do so.
Read the full article at SFWA.org.
