(1) ALIEN HECK. Yahoo! Movies has the latest Alien: Covenant poster: “’Alien: Covenant’: Third Poster Welcomes Moviegoers to Extraterrestrial Hell”.
After decades away from the franchise that he began back in 1979, director Ridley Scott has become unbelievably gung-ho about the Alien series, promising that he’s got perhaps another half-dozen sequels already planned out for the near future. Before he can get to those, however, he’ll first deliver the follow-up to 2012’s Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, which by the looks of its recent trailer, is going to be a no-holds-barred descent into extraterrestrial madness. And now, its third theatrical poster (see it below) makes plain that its action won’t just be otherworldly; it’ll be downright hellish.
The path to paradise begins in hell. #AlienCovenant pic.twitter.com/QuMfpGFQjU
— Alien (@AlienAnthology) March 23, 2017
(2) BRAGGING ON BATMAN. Is this claim big enough for you? Why “Batman: The Animated Series 1992-1995” is far better than any other incarnation before or since.
(3) EVIDENCE OF GENIUS. Up for auction the next six days — “Remarkable Letter Signed by Albert Einstein, Along With His Initialed Drawings”. Minimum bid is $15,000.
Albert Einstein letter signed with his hand drawings, elegantly explaining his electrostatic theory of special relativity to a physics teacher struggling to reconcile it with experiments he was conducting. In addition to the letter, which is new to the market, Einstein generously replies to a series of questions the teacher asks him on a questionnaire, providing additional drawings and calculations, initialed ”A.E.” at the conclusion. Dated 4 September 1953 on Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study letterhead, Einstein writes to Arthur L. Converse, the teacher from Malcolm, Iowa, in part, ”There is no difficulty to explain your present experiment on the basis of the usual electrostatic theory. One has only to assume that there is a difference of potential between the body of the earth and higher layers of the atmosphere, the earth being negative relatively to those higher layers…[Einstein then draws Earth and the atmosphere, referring to it for clarification] The electric potential p rises linearly with the distance h from the surface of the earth…For all your experiments the following question is relevant: How big is the electric charge produced on a conductor which is situated in a certain height h, this body being connected with the earth…” Also included is Einstein’s original mailing envelope from ”Room 115” of the Institute for Advanced Study, postmarked 7 September 1953 from Princeton. Folds and very light toning to letter, otherwise near fine. Questionnaire has folds, light toning and staple mark, otherwise near fine with bold handwriting by Einstein. With an LOA from the nephew of Arthur Converse and new to the market.
(4) PROFESSIONAL FAKE REVIEW. As announced in comments, Theakers Quarterly have posted their fake review of There Will Be Walrus. They’re doing these as a fundraiser for Comic Relief on Red Nose Day. This is the first of four paragraphs in the review:
Military science fiction is a part of the genre that does not always get the attention it deserves, but thank goodness Cattimothy House is on the case, producing an anthology of stories and essays that ranks with the very best sf being produced in the world. Overrated social justice writerers such as John Scalesy and Jim B. Hinds might knock this kind of stuff and despise the fans who love it, but us real fans know the real deal when we see it, and here we do!
(5) NEW TAFF REPORT. Jacqueline Monahan published her TAFF trip report and earned a $500 bounty for the fund from the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests. More details when I find out how fans can get a copy.
(6) SALLY RIDE. At UC San Diego, where Ride served as a professor, a new graduate fellowship — the Sally Ride Fellowship for Women in Physics – has been established in her name to inspire future generations of boundary-breaking physicists who will contribute to the public good.
The pioneering astronaut Sally Ride was a beloved professor at UC San Diego for years. Brian Keating, professor of physics and Associate Director of the Clarke Center, and his wife, Sarah, recently provided the lead gift to fund the Sally Ride Graduate Fellowship for the Advancement of Women in Physics. “We thought this would be a great way to honor Sally Ride’s accomplishments and at the same time, motivate young scientists,” said Brian. “We hope that UC San Diego students will be inspired by her contributions to science and society.”
(7) STATISTICAL ACCURACY. Lately Cecily Kane has tweeted more than once about File 770 not linking to the Fireside Report —
https://twitter.com/Cecily_Kane/status/845280299412062208
File 770 has linked to the Fireside Report. Before that it was discussed last September in comments. The thing I have never done is written an article about it, as I recently did with the FIYAH Magazine Black SFF Writer Survey.
This latest tweet came after I quoted Lela E. Buis in yesterday’s Scroll. That wasn’t the most popular thing I’ve ever posted and the comments section is open — it’s a shame to think we’ve been stuck reading Vox Day’s ridiculous attacks when we might be hearing something useful from Cecily Kane.
(8) SCRIMSHAW. We Hunted The Mammoth understands what’s happening — “Vox Day publishes book with near-identical cover to John Scalzi’s latest, declares victory”.
Beale’s master plan here, evidently, is to convince enough of his supporters to buy Kindle copies of the ersatz book out of spite so that it outranks Scalzi’s book in Kindle sales, a somewhat meaningless metric given that Beale’s books is priced at $4.99, compared to Scalzi’s $12.99, and that Scalzi is also selling actual paper copies of his book, while Beale’s is only available as an ebook. (Beale’s book has been taken down from Amazon several times already in the brief time it’s been out, apparently because, you know, it looks almost identical to Scalzi’s book, but at the moment it’s up on the site.)….
Beale, for all of his many defects, does seem to understand the art of the publicity stunt.
(9) THE LINE STARTS HERE. Can it be true that Kelly Freas and Pablo Picasso agreed about how nude women look? Go ahead, look at this Freas abstract now up for bid and tell me I’m wrong.
(10) DOUBLE UP. Rich Horton takes a lighthearted look back at “A Forgotten Ace Double: Flower of Doradil, by John Rackham/A Promising Planet, by Jeremy Strike”.
The covers are by probably the two leading SF illustrators of that time: Jack Gaughan (in a more psychedelic than usual mode for him), and Kelly Freas. So, I spent a fair amount of time on the background of these writers. Could it be that the novels themselves are not so interesting? Well — yes, it could.
Rackham, as I have said before, was a pretty reliably producer of competent middle-range SF adventure. And that describes Flower of Doradil fairly well. Claire Harper is an agent of Earth’s Special Service, come to the planet Safari to investigate some mysterious activity on the proscribed continent Adil. Safari is mostly devoted to hunting, but Adil is occupied by the humanoid (completely human, it actually seems) natives. But some plants with tremendous medical properties are being smuggled out, and the agents sent to investigate have disappeared.
(11) POETRY OF PHYSICS. In advance of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination’s upcoming event, “Entanglements: Rae Armantrout and the Poetry of Physics”, they have produced a bonus episode of their podcast: a conversation between poet Armantrout and Clarke Center cosmologist Brian Keating.
The event takes place April 13 at UC San Diego. Armantrout, Keating, the writer Brandon Som, and the critic Amelia Glaser will discuss how Rae’s poems mix the personal with the scientific and speculative, the process of interdisciplinary creativity, and what her poetic engagement with physics can teach those working in the physical sciences.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born March 24, 1874 – Harry Houdini
- Born March 24, 1901 – Disney animator Ub Iwerks.
(13) TEN MYTHS. Carl Slaughter, recommending “10 Sci-Fi Movie Myths That Drive Scientists Crazy” from CBR, says “Instead of discussing science movie by movie, this debunk video is organized by topics. I would add lasers, but more about laser myths another time.”
Outer space is vast and holds a multitude of mysteries that have yet to be solved. But for some reason, the mysteries we have solved are still be represented incorrectly by Hollywood today. We understand these movies are all fiction, but with our growing knowledge of the universe it’s hard to ignore the glaring mistakes made in movies that make them less realistic. Here are 10 space facts movies ALWAYS get wrong.
The video covers: gravity, no helmet, black holes, sound, explosions, speed, time, distance, dogfights, and Mars.
(14) THEY DELIVER. According to the maker of “Futurama: Authentic Science, Sophisticated Comedy, Cultural Commentary,” their video takes “A look at the show that brought humor and emotion into the sterile world of science and arithmetic.”
(15) FINNISH WEIRD. Europa SF reports that the latest issue of Finnish Weird is available.
This is a fanzine from Finland that features stories on speculative fiction, this time from Magdalena Hai, J.S. Meresmaa and Viivi Hyvönen.
The text includes an English translation. The issue is available as a free download here.
(16) FIVE STAR TREK CAPTAINS AND ONE DOCTOR WHO CAPTAIN. Another Carl Slaughter pick: “There are so many delightful memories and insightful comments during this discussion with 5 Star Trek captains, I can’t even begin to list them. Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, and Archer were all on stage in London in 2012. To top it off, the discussion is hosted by yet another captain, Captain Jack Harkness of Doctor Who/Torchwood fame.”
(17) BOMB OR NO BOMB? Digital Antiquarian tries to answer the question “What’s the Matter with Covert Action?”, game designer Sid Meier’s biggest disappointment – mostly to Sid himself.
But there are also other, less scandalous cases of notable failure to which some of us continually return for reasons other than schadenfreude. One such case is that of Covert Action, Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley’s 1990 game of espionage. Covert Action, while not a great or even a terribly good game, wasn’t an awful game either. And, while it wasn’t a big hit, nor was it a major commercial disaster. By all rights it should have passed into history unremarked, like thousands of similarly middling titles before and after it. The fact that it has remained a staple of discussion among game designers for some twenty years now in the context of how not to make a game is due largely to Sid Meier himself, a very un-middling designer who has never quite been able to get Covert Action, one his few disappointing games, out of his craw. Indeed, he dwells on it to such an extent that the game and its real or perceived problems still tends to rear its head every time he delivers a lecture on the art of game design. The question of just what’s the matter with Covert Action — the question of why it’s not more fun — continues to be asked and answered over and over, in the form of Meier’s own design lectures, extrapolations on Meier’s thesis by others, and even the occasional contrarian apology telling us that, no, actually, nothing‘s wrong with Covert Action.
(18) UNEARTHLY VISIONS. In Jaroslav Kalfar’s A Spaceman of Bohemia, “A Czech Astronaut’s Earthly Troubles Come Along for the Ride”: a New York Times review by Hari Kunzru.
The reason the Czech Republic is launching a manned spacecraft is the arrival of a strange comet that has “swept our solar system with a sandstorm of intergalactic cosmic dust.” A cloud, named Chopra by its Indian discoverers, now floats between Earth and Venus, turning the night sky purple. Unmanned probes sent out to take samples have returned mysteriously empty. Likewise a German chimpanzee has returned to Earth with no information save the evidence that survival is possible. The Americans, the Russians and the Chinese show no sign of wishing to risk their citizens, so the Czechs have stepped up, with a rocket named for the Protestant reformer and national hero Jan Hus. At many points in the novel, Kalfar sketches key moments in Czech history, and the very premise of a Czech space mission is clearly a satire on the nationalist pretensions of a small post-Communist nation. Financed by local corporations whose branding is placed on his equipment, Jakub is the epitome of the scrappy underdog, grasping for fame by doing something too crazy or dangerous for the major players.
(19) NO GORILLA. The Verge interviews visual-effects supervisor Jeff White about “How Industrial Light & Magic built a better Kong for Skull Island”.
When you have a featured character like this, how do you determine what techniques you’ll use to realize him? Particularly when it comes to performance — do you go through different approaches as to whether to use pure motion-capture, or pure animation?
We definitely did. We were very fortunate to work with [actor] Terry Notary, who I’d worked with before on Warcraft. He did a lot of body performance work. We had a couple days in mo-cap where Jordan could iterate very quickly with Terry to work through different scenes, then also try different gaits. And try things like, “Give us 10 chest pounds.” So he’d try different cadences. Is it three, is it alternating hands, is it hands together? Just trying to give us a nice library of things to pull from.
Then I would say the same is true of the face. We had a day of capture with Toby Kebbell (A Monster Calls, Warcraft), where he works through some of the scenes — particularly the less action-heavy scenes, where you really have a lot of time to look at Kong’s eyes, and the movement of the face. There are some shots where that facial capture is used directly, but through the production process and the reworking of the scenes, a lot of what Kong needed to do changed so much that the capture was used a lot more as inspiration and moments to pull from. And then ultimately a lot of the animation was key-framed. I think that was actually important to do, especially when trying to sell that Kong was 100 feet tall. Because even weighted down and moving slower, anyone that’s six feet tall is going to be able to change direction and move much faster than Kong would ever be able to.
It’s not even just a matter of saying, “Let’s take that and slow it down by 25 percent.” Once the arm gets moving, it can actually be pretty fast. But then when he needs to change direction, you need to have that appropriate, physically accurate process of getting this massive arm to move a different direction. With the animation in particular, it was a real challenge between making sure Kong felt slow enough where he was huge, but at the same time not letting the shots drag on so long that it no longer became an action movie.
(20) AN ALTERNATE INTERPRETATION. Carl Slaughter explains:
“Chain of Command” is usually included in lists of Star Trek’s best episodes. This is the one with “There are 4 lights !” The antagonist in this two-parter is Captain Jellico, who clashes with the Enterprise’s crew and even deliberately endangers Picard’s life. This video essay depicts Jellico as the protagonist who made all the right decisions for all the right reasons.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, rcade, Michael J. Walsh, Iphinome, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
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20)
I do like this episode because Renny Cox plays an authoritarian blowhard of a leader rather well (c.f. Total Recall, Robocop).
And isn’t Jellico mentioned but not seen as being the captain of the Enterprise in the episode where Picard dies and lives the life of quiet desperation as a Lieutenant without being stabbed years ago?
Second!
And 7) Yeah. Distracted by Beale.
@17 – Covert Action is a very good game that has stood the test of time. I got it when it came out and played heavily. Then software changed and it became unplayable.
Then we got dosbox and you could play it again. Now http://www.gog.com sells it with the dosbox emulator. I bought it for the 2nd time.
I will take it out and play it every four years or so. It has a lot of fun mini-games and the “solve the mystery” and capture the international terrorist mastermind theme is a lot of fun.
Sid – you made me and a lot of other people happy with this game.
@17 – Thanks for posting the link to this site.
Hollywood, please enough with the sequels.
The Walrus review is really good.
(7) Statistical Accuracy
There aren’t very many people I wouldn’t rather have drop by than Beale, but Cecily Kane would have been quite a big step up, its true.
I note that she also tweeted that the fifth question “unrelated to methodology” sent to the Fireside Report by the rebuttal authors was an attempt to obtain information relevant to the identity of the Fireside Report’s authors. Hmm. (Gosh, that sentence was a mess. At least people can go look at the tweets if they get confused, right?)
Second fifth.
Regarding Spaceman of Bohemia, the book is published by Little, Brown and Company instead of a SF/F imprint and launched two weeks ago with big publicity from mainstream media outlets including the New York Times, NPR and the Wall Street Journal.
A question for Filers: Do these things make you doubt the novel’s SF/F bona fides even though the subject matter fits in the genre? I read the sample and was impressed and intrigued, but I ended up choosing another book that’s more clearly and indisputably SF/F.
Let’s go Scrollin’
In Wonderland.
(2) Bragging On Batman
This claim is both big enough for me and exactly right. 🙂 The Dini/Timmverse is where I’m happiest. I only wish the DC cinematic universe was even a tenth as good.
(13) Ten Myths
Despite kidlet me’s fierce hatred of the Jurassic Park sequels for making up dinosaurs why would you do that – ahem, these days I watch and read science fiction almost like fantasy. Something obviously wrong? Oh, well, must just be an alternate universe where that would work.
—
@rcade
Not especially. I think the book I’m halfway through at the moment, The Power by Naomi Alderman, is due to be published by Little, Brown and Company in October and it’s very much sf/f. The content of the book is more important to me than the publisher or the imprint. I only really pay attention to that in comics, and only then for context reasons.
ticky a.k.a. Second Fifth.
Mr. Bond had to Scroll a long way down with this one.
(2) Well, of course all right-thinking people agree. This doesn’t even require discussion.
(4) That review’s so good I suspect he actually read the thing, or at least gave it a thorough looking-over. He definitely read the 5 introductions. Timothy will be pleased to have another ally in the war against squirrels.
(7) So I’d much rather hear from Cecily than all this third-hand stuff. Why isn’t she here instead of tweeting? All the characters at a time she wants, not just 140!
(16) Must watch this later, it sounds delightful.
I wish Ridley Scott would stop making crappy Alien movies and finally make The Forever War. He has been sitting on the rights for years. Joe Haldeman periodicall complains about it on his forums. That would make a great movie.
@13: amusing, but frequently inaccurate itself. Clarke would certainly argue with the claim that 15 seconds in a vacuum produces unconsciousness (or doubling in size due instant boiling of body fluids, if I understand the gabble correctly), and IIRC he’s been shown to be reasonably correct. Then he tells us that journeys would take far longer than shown, showing that he has no idea how numbers work when a vessel is constantly *celerating instead of mostly gliding (e.g., matching orbits with Pluto would take not the 9+ years he cites but 16 days at 1G from Earth (per an RAH short story — very rough head-math says 20 days but RAH probably actually looked up and ran the numbers). And he doesn’t know the difference between hyperspace (which as handwavium sets its own rules, borrowed from some theories) and mere lightspeed. All that by 2/3 of the way through, at which point I asked why I was bothering with something that had so many holes in its hole-picking.
@Meredith, re to rcade: just so. OPMMV, depending on what elements (plot, realism, literaryness, …) they expect to dominate — but those also vary widely among SF labels.
rcade: Do these things make you doubt the novel’s SF/F bona fides even though the subject matter fits in the genre?
My experience with SFF books published under literary imprints and promoted as literary genre fiction has been very mixed, so I do take it into account when deciding whether to read one and where I rank it in my priorities. At this point, I’m done with Priest, Mitchell, and Atwood (Handmaid’s Tale notwithstanding), and The Tourist has permanently crossed Robert Dickinson off the list. I thought that Station Eleven was worth reading, but really not worthy of all the acclaim it got. I have found that my opinion of books which are promoted as “literary SFF” is frequently much lower than the general public’s opinion.
On the other hand, I have bounced off a bunch of stuff published by Tor Books. Orbit and Gollancz seem to hit my sweet spot quite often. So I do use the Publisher as one of the factors in decisions on book reading, but not the only factor.
Overrated social justice writerers such as John Scalesy and Jim B. Hinds might knock this kind of stuff and despise the fans who love it, but us real fans know the real deal when we see it, and here we do!
I’m still chortling over this.
@(7)
Maybe I’m just tired but I don’t see where the ‘fifth question’ is all that bothersome.
Granted, this is not high up on my list of things to worry about–I read the original article and after a while just dropped it. Too many leaps of faith and unsupported premises for me to take it seriously.
And, in my opinion, the whole “cough” thing in her tweet wasn’t necessary. Why not just say alleged?
On another note, I just got Kim Stanley Robinson’s “New York 2140” and I am really enjoying it.
Scrollfinger
A View To A Scroll
On Her Majesty’s Pixel Scrollage
The Pixel Who Scrolled Me
License to Scroll
You Only Fifth Twice
20) Not going to lie, when Jellicoe told Troy to put on a uniform I cheered. That alone is enough to put me on his side.
JJ: Priest is published by Gollancz, which is an SF imprint.
Mitchell’s Slade House made me grateful I hadn’t invested the time in reading The Bone Clocks.
@Guess: I wish Ridley Scott would stop making crappy Alien movies and finally make The Forever War.
Word.
@Nancy Sauer:
I know right?!? And to be kinda shallow, I thought Troi looked a million times better in the uniform than in any of her various low-cut outfits.
@Chip – I felt the same way. I have to admit, though, that my understanding of human survivability in the vacuum of space relies entirely upon my readings of Adams (Douglas, HGttG). I’ve never found a reason to doubt him, and so I assume he is correct. But the hyperspace stuff especially bugged me. As you said, it’s handwavium. You can’t argue physics with handwavium.
I’m on a rewatch of ST:TNG (first time for 2 of the kids) and no, Jellicoe is not Captain of the Enterprise in the Episode where Q shows Picard a possible Lieutenant Picard.
I need Google to find who was…Tapestry, ok Memory Alpha says Picard then asks who the captain of the ship is and Worf replies that it is Thomas Halloway..
Also: Halloway may or may not actually exist. Halloway was never actually seen, and for a time the “Tapestry” writers considered referring to Edward Jellico as the Enterprise captain in the altered future.
And of course Jellico was right about everything, and Riker was just being a jackass as usual.
Jellico’s most important influence on the show is he told Troi to wear her damned uniform, and from then on, she did.
@rcade: “Do these things make you doubt the novel’s SF/F bona fides even though the subject matter fits in the genre?”
Not exactly, but reading a sample is key. Occasionally I find a strongly-SFF novel from a non-SFF publisher or a barely-SFF novel from a SFF publisher. I’ve noticed books written/marketed as lit fic (for example) tend not to work as well for me. But if the premise intrigues me, I’ll check it out. I may have a little more skepticism, though, sure. A lot of factors go into my impression of a book, so . . . it all depends. Not a very useful answer, I suppose.
I tried to skim the sample of “Spaceman” and it seemed lit-fic’y and tedious, although part of the premise did interest me. So I’m unsurprised it’s not published by an SFF publisher, though I didn’t actually notice that when I looked at it; I don’t check the publisher name! BTW I just skimmed the NPR review of it and it just reinforced my impression of the book. Probably great for some SFF fans, but probably not for me.
@17: Well, of course, this is more about the dreaded definition of the word “fun”. Some people think sitting in a crowd of tens of thousands of other people screaming (and sometimes dressed in silly costumes) and watching small dots (dressed in similar silly costumes) running around for several hours is fun. That’s their problem, not mine.
Also, I think that whilst the author has a good point about ideologues, he then comes dangerously close to implying that his position is the self-evidently correct one, even as he tries to cover himself in his last paragraph. But that may because I’m more on the other side of the argument. He argues that experiments in procedurally generated narrative have largely failed; given that these ideas have only really been explored in recent years, compared to the millennia of evolution that author-driven narrative has had, I’m not necessarily willing to write them off just yet.
(20) Yes, Jellicoe was an authoritarian blowhard, but he was also right on most things. Where he wasn’t actually right, he was at least not wrong; just a different style of commanding officer than Picard, and Riker was a jackass, and also a bit of a slacker.
PhilRM: Priest is published by Gollancz, which is an SF imprint.
Ah, in the U.S. he’s published by Titan.
PhilRM: Mitchell’s Slade House made me grateful I hadn’t invested the time in reading The Bone Clocks.
I read The Bone Clocks and it was like 2 very different books spliced together. The first half had some intriguing SFFnal ideas, and seemed like it was going somewhere interesting. The second half basically blew all that off, and went somewhere else, completely ceasing any further mention of the interesting stuff from the first half. It was baffling and annoying.
So I didn’t even bother with Slade House. I think that you and I both arrived at the same place on Mitchell — just from opposite directions.
20) @Niall
And she didn’t go back. Poor Data got the reset button on his uniform, but Troi’s non uniform uniform went away and stayed away.
And thanks, Niall, I guess I misremembered the Picard episode’s dialogue about who was Captain in the alternate timeline. Halloway. Hunh. I wish it WAS Jellico, that would have been a nice tag back.
And Jim le Blanc would argue with Clarke’s argument, given that he is the only person to actually have that happen to him, and he was unconscious within about 10 seconds.
[god-scroll]
…And survive. There’s now plenty more evidence for the 15 second limit that didn’t end well.
Clarke would almost certainly not have argued, his story (from 1955) was based on the best theories available at the time which didn’t take account of the lungs going into reverse. 11 years later after the incident he’d more likely have read up on the incident and suggested an article for JBIS or Spaceflight.
Yeah, I didn’t mention the Soyuz crew because they weren’t exactly able to provide a timeline of the experience afterwards.
When I took USAF high-altitude flight training in 1990 (a requirement for flying on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, a modified C-141 with a telescope mounted in it, which flew at altitudes between 37,000 and 41,000 feet for the observing), we were told you could expect about 8 seconds of ‘useful consciousness’ in the event of catastrophic depressurization of the airplane if you weren’t using an oxygen mask.
@4 “Jim B. Hinds.” I am amused 🙂
For those who wanted a Chuck Tingle take on recent Voxman events, he has obliged on his rabid puppies website with a response of the appropriate length for this one-sided tantrum.
Pluto can be anywhere from to 4.3 billion kilometers to 7.5 billion kilometers from Earth. At 9.8 m/s/s, accelerating half way and decelerating the other half, anywhere from about 15 days to 20 days. Peak velocities of 6400 to 8500 km/s, which means even with a mysteriously efficient fusion drive it would be a bit challenging.
It’s best not to rely on Heinlein actually doing the math, because increasingly after about 1952 he either chose computationally simple propulsion solutions (the one gravity forever solution, which ignores issues like heat dissipation [1]) or he got the details wrong [2].
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is particularly annoying, as it convinced generations of innumerate space perverts lunar bombards make any kind of sense, which they don’t.
1: In his defense, at least he had a good enough grasp of the power output implications of high thrust, high acceleration systems that he did not couple “power systems that pack a Pickering A worth of output into something the mass of a VW Beetle” to “Alas! Alack! Energy shortages for all!” Unlike, say, Ben Bova.
2: Sometimes both: he was very confused about mass ratios for total conversion drives, and he really didn’t get relativity at all.
“How long does it take to get to Pluto” is very dependent on what tech you have to play with and how risk averse you are. It’s true that MEF one gravity drives can do it in less than a month but we have few plausible ideas how to build one, and certainly don’t have them handy now [1]. The rockets we can actually build have kind of shitty exhaust velocities, which limits plausible delta vees to the point where most trips outside the inner system [2] take years or decades. Our own fault for being native to a stellar system with the scale of the sun’s, rather than a nice little one like Trappist-1.
There used to be a great little program called swing-by calculator that would let one plug in delta vees and close encounters with planets to see how long trips would take. Unsurprisingly, for most plausible propulsion systems, Jupiter and to a lesser extent the punier worlds are very convenient sources of free delta vee. Although in the case of Jupiter maybe not for crewed ships since Jupiter’s Van Allens can deliver a surprising amount of radiation in a very short time.
1: An interesting implication of a throw-away line in The Mote in God’s Eye is that civvies do not have the insanely powerful drives the McArthur had, which has interesting but unexplored implications for intersystem trade.
2: Excepting to Mercury, which delta vee-wise is a pain in the ass to get to, which is why it took so long for it to be allocated an orbiter.
I would like to thank whichever filer recommended “Code Name Verity” to me however many umpteen months ago it was. Great book.
> “Mitchell’s Slade House made me grateful I hadn’t invested the time in reading The Bone Clocks.”
You might or might not like “The Bone Clocks” (many didn’t think as highly of it as I did), but I will say that this is kind of like reading, say, “Heretics of Dune” and concluding that “Dune” probably isn’t all that good. “Slade House” is pretty crappy, but “The Bone Clocks”, love it or hate it, is an ambitious and thought-provoking book.
But then, I love many works of both “genre” SFF and “literary” SFF, and consider the theoretical distinctions between them mostly a matter of marketing, coupled with a few minor differences in storytelling conventions.
For the various people arguing that oxygen loss generates unconsciousness in a few seconds: what about minimal preparation? When I was a teenager I could \swim/ close to 25 meters underwater; as I never qualified for even the junior swim team, I can guarantee that this took more than 15 seconds, and it required just a few breaths (as Clarke shows in Earthlight). I’m specifically curious about @Anthony’s “lungs going into reverse”; description/reference? Note that the above did require opening the mouth wide to let out every bit of air in the lungs, not unlike the maneuver for getting out of a sub quickly in one of Schenk’s stories; does gas come out of the blood so quickly that this doesn’t help?
@James Davis Nicoll: so the basic numbers are right according to Newton, it just requires some handwavium (smaller than hyperspace) for the engine? The gabbler missed that subtlety, treating 9 years as a hard limit.
Rcade:
No, I do not care that much about SF/F bona fides. I will buy a book if it looks interesting.
Pluto was at perihelion in 1989, so it’s not unreasonable for Heinlein to have used the perhelion distance of 29.6 AU for his trip. I calculate a 1-g trip time of 15.6 days, a peak speed of a bit over 2% light speed, and a difference due to relativity of 108 seconds.
My favorite example of Heinlein not quite getting it was the alignment of Jupiter’s moons in “Farmer in the Sky.” All four moons line up and trigger an earthquake on Ganymede. Unfortunately, the inner three are in resonant orbits, and so the alignment described can never occur.
He clearly cared about the science, and he made an effort to get it right, but he doesn’t seem to have been willing to talk to experts. It all looks to be stuff he worked out himself.
@Chip: but you were holding your breath underwater. You can’t do that in a vacuum – your lungs would rupture.
I don’t know if anyone else has shared this piece about the casting in the new Andy Weir series: http://www.thewrap.com/cbs-mission-control-pilot-white-actors-lead-roles-written-minorities/
I had some good conversations last week with students in Calgary about (among other things) the casting issues in Iron Fist as part of a larger point about how the factors that affect diversity representation in media are more likely to be about unasked questions and unquestioned assumptions than any active prejudice. This story would have made an interesting counterpoint; during the casting process, it seems, nobody ever asks “Does so-and-so have to be White,” but someone inevitably asks “Does so-and-so have to be (Latinx/African-American/etc.)?”
@Chip: Clarke was an experienced diver and best theories at the time of Earthlight were based on that sort of situation. Lungs have very little pressure differential across the surface under normal conditions which is why you need to not try and hold your breath during rapid decompression, the high pressure gas will rupture things. The difference with decompressing to vacuum is that your internal body pressure has a minimum largely dependent on skin elasticity and blood pressure. That differential causes the oxygen to come out of the blood as it passes through the lungs instead of more being absorbed (it’s vacuum, there isn’t any to absorb) and the 15 second limit is related to the time it takes the heart to pump all the blood in the body through the lungs. It would be interesting to know if research showed someone with a lower pulse rate could stay concious longer than someone with a high pulse rate, although I suspect pulses would be racing anyway…
The Earthlight rescue could still be done, but the rescuees would need to be tied together and the rescuers with suits would be handling bundles of unconcious bodies.
Chip Hitchcock:
Take a look at the Wiki page for the earlier alluded-to Soyuz 11 mission. The one cosmonaut with a monitor was dead within 40 seconds of decompression, and:
I had credited RAH using the wrong surface gravities for Jupiter’s moons to Science Marches On but now I wonder if he calculated them himself and used the wrong densities. How long ago did we get good values for the densities of Jupiter’s moons?
One of the many ways Variable Star irked me was Robinson’s mish mash of Olden Timey SF tropes with actual history, which meant I was not sure if when he gave an incorrect value for Ganymede’s gravity he was referencing Farmer in the Sky or just confused.
Regarding works with SFnal topics published as mainstream:
a. I like borderlines – the borderline between mainstream and SFF, the borderline between SF and fantasy, the borderline between adult and youth, the borderline within youth between children’s and YA – I find that what’s going on there is often more interesting than what’s happening at the core of genres and agebands. So I’d often be interested in reading such things irrespective of the question of whether they are SFF or not.
b. I think there can be works with SFF subject-matter that are plausibly seen as not-SFF, just as there can be stories about crime which are not Crime, and stories about romance that are not Romance. Genres are not just defined by subject matter, but by communities and traditions and expectations. If it’s addressed to a mainstream audience, building on their expectations rather than those of an SFF audience, it can be reasonably seen as a mainstream work. So I don’t accept the ‘this is totally SFF and how dare you say it isn’t?’ approach. (Sometimes followed by ‘and what’s more you’re doing it wrong!’.)
c. That said, there certainly can be works sold as mainstream that seem indistinguishable from SFF in their approach. I’ve noticed several books originally promoted as mainstream jumping to the SFF shelves lately, including Station Eleven, The Watchmaker… and Arcadia.
d. As for Mitchell – I think there are very good reasons why both Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas are borderline – the SFF elements are essential to them, and yet it would not make sense, for specific reasons in each case, to present them simply as SFF works. After that, though, he seems to have become determined to put everything in the same universe, which means all his books have to be borderline whether there’s a reason for it or not. There’s a distinct smell of glue in The Bone Clocks.
“Smaller than hyperspace” is still a pretty big just!
One of the downsides of buying into skiffy’s propaganda and educating oneself on the fields relevant to the stories [1] is that it gets much harder to willingly suspend disbelief in various stock tropes in SF. That may be at work in the video or the reviewer just wanted to score points without bothering to include minutia like “without significant improvements to rockets”.
1: Not that other fields of fiction are immune. There’s a terrible mystery series I used to be sent about a DA whose only failures to get the death penalty were because the defendants got themselves righteously killed first. They seemed marginally less terrible before I noticed the state he works in hadn’t executed anyone [2] since the 1960s.
2: One of the weird little sub-genres I’ve been the chosen reviewer for was non-fiction about capital cases in Canada, which often featured extremely horrific executions because we had so few of them our executioners weren’t really what you would call skilled.