Category: Reblogs

Eulogies

On By Matt FraserIn About the Author, Reblogs3 Comments

Why have I been so quiet lately, you ask?

I have been a little busy, dealing with a bit of a family emergency. However, I have not gone away. You’re not getting rid of me that easy! But, if you would like to know a little more (warning: this has nothing to do with science fiction, nor fiction of any kind, but it does involve a little writing), delve a little further into my own personal life, then I invite you to take a peek at my other, older, and until today much dustier, blog.

I don’t advertise the existence of that blog very much, because it has no real meaning except for my own family and myself. Strictly speaking, it’s a genealogy blog, but it’s also a blog where I share thoughts on things going on within my own life.

Until today, I had not written anything over there for five years. The last few posts I had written all had to do with the death of my father, six years ago, and my experience as executor of his estate.

And then a month ago, my mother passed away. And now I am writing about that.

I’ll have more to say before I’m done with that subject, and then I will be getting right back into the thick of it over here, but meanwhile, feel free to peel back the covers of my life and see what lies hidden away.

It starts on February 6th. That is the day the office at your mobile home park, where you have lived for twelve years, calls your daughter to express their concern. It seems you forgot to pay the rent for the space your home sits in, and in twelve years this had never happened before. You are in the habit of visiting the clubhouse each day, making a pot of coffee, and chatting with the manager there, but on this day you seem to have trouble with the coffee pot, and when the manager asks you about the late rent, you don’t know what she’s talking about.

Read the rest at https://clan-fraser.org/2019/04/06/eulogies-part-1/

header image credit: pixabay.com

Are The Stars Beyond Our Reach?

On By Matt FraserIn Other Authors, Reblogs, Science and Technology10 Comments

via Stars Beyond Our Reach

We dream of reaching the stars. Indeed, it’s at the core of what I’ve been writing, and the same is true for many other science fiction authors. It’s also the subject of intensive research by some fairly serious scientists, even if they don’t quite get the billing and notoriety of NASA projects focused right here in our own Solar System.

But is it truly possible?

I like to think so, but I also understand that the challenges are incredibly daunting, more so than the majority of interstellar-themed science fiction stories would have us believe.

Bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson tackles the challenges of so-called generation ships, in which people will be born, live, and die during the voyage, and only the grandchildren of the original astronauts will be alive at journey’s end in his 2015 novel Aurora. It’s a great read, and I highly encourage you to check it out. I won’t spoil it for you by talking about his conclusions in the novel.

But Robinson also wrote a blog post discussing his thoughts on the various challenges faced, Our Generation Ships Will Sink, and perhaps the title gives it away. He goes into some detail about the issues faced with biological, ecological, physical, sociological, psychological… lots of logicals there. Even upon arrival, the problems don’t cease.

Robinson’s article is a great read, but if you want a nicely wrapped up synopsis of it, I recommend Richard Rabil Jr’s Stars Beyond Our Reach, linked at the beginning of this post. Rabil is a technical writer, who writes both fiction and essays on subjects as diverse as technology and faith, and he tackles many interesting subjects on his blog (which I’ve only just discovered, but so far it’s very promising). He also does a great summary of the evolution of science fiction as a genre, another post I can strongly recommend.

If, like me, you are fascinated by realism in our quest to reach the stars, Rabil’s summary is a good place to start.

Stars Beyond Our Reach

header image credit: Reimund Bertrams (user:DasWortgewand) / pixabay.com under Pixabay License

The Sci-Fi Cliché

On By Matt FraserIn Reblogs5 Comments

Does the tension in your novel come from (yet another) threat to blow up the world? If so, does the world actually end? Is it clear from Chapter 1 that the hero will save the day? Can we recognize your characters from the latest blockbusters and bestsellers? Yeah, maybe you should rethink that (unless you’re the author of that blockbuster/bestseller, of course), and Liv Archer explains why, in her usual engaging, ironic, and highly readable way.

(header image credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech)

livarcher

With the advanced technology of today, there’s not much limitation on what we can put in movies. Unfortunately this means that everyone goes for the biggest possible special effect: exploding planet.

Every superhero out there is fighting the threat of the end of the world. Somehow the bad guy is gonna end all life on earth – and yeah, I guess that would be concerning – but am I the only one who gets bored when the bad guy starts talking about his weapon that has the ability to destroy a planet?

Yeah, it was devastating when Vulcan got swallowed by a black hole in 2009 but isn’t that the only planet that’s actually bitten the dust anyway?

The ‘human residence’ was almost incinerated in Doctor Who and the new Justice League was kind of apocalyptic.

Everywhere you turn, the whole world is being threatened and it’s ironically anticlimactic.

The…

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Spaceflight in fiction: Faster or slower than the speed of light?

On By Matt FraserIn Reblogs, Science and TechnologyLeave a comment

Owen James writes about some of the concepts I’m exploring in my work-in-progress, and that I’m considering exploring in other stories. Just how does one manage to ‘appear’ to go faster than light, if the speed of light truly is a limit, as relativity tells us it is? Even at lightspeed, the distances between stars are so great that a journey would be quite a lengthy one. And as technology advances at an increasing rate, would a voyage that set out earlier simply be overtaken along the way by a voyage that set out later?

Time dilation does not enter into my story, for the primary reason that current thinking on the workings of an Alcubierre drive is that warping space is not the same as moving at lightspeed, so there would not be a time dilation effect. Time would move at the same rate for travelers as well as those at either end of the journey. On the other hand, there is some theoretical thought warping space in this manner could have some other, perhaps even stranger, effects upon time. I’ll just leave this right here for the moment…

Owen M. James

You might not think it at first, but that’s a decision that affects a story’s whole world, assuming the story spans multiple planets, star systems, or even galaxies. Of course, a story can have multiple forms of space travel.

I’ve previously toyed with the idea of a scenario where an ancient colony ship comes out of stasis, only to find itself overtaken by a shiny new cruise ship with a warp drive. That premise may have been done, but it’d make for some interesting stories.

But let’s look at the different methods on their own, one after another…

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