Science Fiction

It’s a slow week with nothing much to talk about. I am in the middle of a great book called “Mammoth” by John Varley, and have a few work related tasks keeping me busy. I’m working on a story that is, for once, coming along nicely. Saturday was my birthday, and even though I turned 25 for some reason my auto insurance rates didn’t go down. That, or my insurance guy is a moron, which could very well be true. Also, I’m learning the guitar since Katy bought me one for my bee-day.

Other than that, I was thinking about science fiction the other day, and what exactly makes it science fiction. For example, stories about aliens are automatically science fiction because life forms other than those on Earth are both scientific in nature and fictional, since they (to our knowledge) do not exist. But on the day that aliens arrive on Earth, are we going to have a mass re-categorizing of all alien-visitor related science fiction to just fiction? I don’t think so. It would be too expensive. For that reason alone, we’ll never make contact with aliens and we’ll never invent time machines. Evil robots remain a possibility since the first thing on their agenda is always annihilating everything with nuclear weapons, thereby destroying all of the fiction anyway.

Anyway, I do not have a point. But Arthur C. Clark died last week, and that means people will automatically like his books more. Case in point, I bought one of his books thanks to a memorial article recapping his work. I was also reminded of the story, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” which I read in 2003 and remember, almost word for word (okay, paragraph by paragraph), which is huge considering I forget nearly everything.

Read it here. (It’s short, I promise, and like biscuits and gravy, will stick with you).

Also, if you are a sci-fi fan like myself, you sometimes lose sight of how awesome (as in awe, not “duuuude”) the universe really is. It’s hard to believe that stuff like this actually exists out there: