Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
An Author's Adventures in Space Travel, Science Fiction, and Worlds Beyond
Happy Fourth of July, everyone! I have a special post for y'all, in the patriotic spirit of this great holiday. Right now, we're at a critical juncture in space history---any month now, we're supposed to see SLS and Starship take flight, after many years of waiting---and it's clear that there's a different energy in the... Continue Reading →
One afternoon in tenth grade, when I was home sick with a nasty cold, I curled up beneath some blankets and watched an old 1950s sci-fi movie about a mission to Mars. I ended up drifting in and out of consciousness through most of it. Afterwards, I only recalled bits and pieces, but the images... Continue Reading →
You may have noticed, reading this blog, that I don't dive into hard science or serious calculations very often. That is because I am a squishy liberal arts major who dropped out of engineering school three years ago. My good friend Eamon Minges, however, has me covered---he has previously furnished Let's Get Off This Rock... Continue Reading →
Hello again, everyone! I have awakened from my long slumber---not since the ancient year of 2021 have I uploaded anything to this site. Now, that may be due to a combination of procrastination, a busy couple of terms at school, and getting distracted with other projects, but the more interesting explanation is that I was... Continue Reading →
Happy November, everyone! I'm starting up my blog again with what is admittedly an oddball of a post. It was originally a handwritten exercise for my personal nonfiction class, until the thought occurred to me: "Hey, this is about Star Trek, and I write about Star Trek sometimes on my blog, so why not upload... Continue Reading →
I know what you're thinking---The Hunt for Red October isn't even sci-fi or alternate history, so why am I reviewing it? I could make the (weak) argument that it is alternate history, as a 1990 film depicting events in 1984 that did not really take place. I could also say that the movie is science... Continue Reading →
Ranking the Star Trek movies is always a fraught question. Wars have started that way. You can hop onto message boards dating two decades back, and see countless battles between angry fans at the dawn of the internet---like the clash of titans when the world was young1. Their disputes still echo: is Wrath of Khan... Continue Reading →
Nuclear power has had a long and complex history in outer space. Starting in the 1960s, both the US and USSR deployed full-on fission reactors aboard Earth-observing satellites; more recently, high-profile probes---Cassini, Curiosity, New Horizons---have all used safer but far less powerful radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which extract energy from the waste heat of decaying... Continue Reading →
A think piece for today: If you want to get a rise out of space nerds, bring up Mars colonization1. These days it's the subject of countless op-eds and heated Facebook discussions. The Elon Musks and Robert Zubrins of the world are fierce proponents, viewing the expansion of humanity as a matter of survival; on... Continue Reading →
Hello, all! I'm following up on last week's book review with... another book review! I've been reading a ton lately, so you're probably going to get a lot of these---and where Deep Black was sci-fi, the usual theme for this blog, today's exploration is in another genre entirely: alternate history. We will be taking a... Continue Reading →
