Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
An Author's Adventures in Space Travel, Science Fiction, and Worlds Beyond
Not all the worlds in our solar system are created equal. Some are enormous, some are vanishingly small; some are scorching hot, others freezing cold; some (one) are clement to human life, while some (all the rest) are inhospitable deathtraps. And if I may be frank---some are just better than others. For today's post, we... Continue Reading →
At long last, we return to the Star Trek franchise. For today's post we're going to follow up from my review of The Undiscovered Country with the next installment in the series. This is a deeply uneven film that attempted, with some success, to pass the baton from the Original Series crew to the cast... Continue Reading →
One of the many utopian dreams of the last century was that space travel would become possible not just for carefully selected astronauts, but for the common man. 2001: A Space Odyssey famously depicted a passenger flight to the Moon; the 2004 book Eyewitness: Future promised that by 2020, people would book hotel stays in... Continue Reading →
Some of you may remember my previous posts about secret Apollo missions: Apollo 18, the ill-fated landing which fell victim to rock spiders, and Apollo 20, a joint US-Soviet effort which recovered a living alien from the far side of the Moon. Both are fictional, of course. One is a horror movie, the other a... Continue Reading →
The 1990s were not a good time in the former Soviet Union. When the central government fell, it wasn't just a political collapse, but a collapse of just about everything---the military, the economy, society itself. Ethnic tensions erupted into raging civil wars; rushed free-market reforms threw countless millions into poverty; amid political turmoil, President Boris... Continue Reading →
Very early on, my family instilled in me a love of coffee table books: hefty, hardcover volumes, large enough to double as paperweights or even footstools1, bedecked with photographs and artwork from front to back. Instead of reading straight through, you could open one to whatever page you fancied. They covered all sorts of topics,... Continue Reading →
It was on October 7, 1959, that the dark side of the Moon finally came into the light. Mind you, it was never "dark" in a literal sense; all parts of the Moon undergo a complete day/night cycle, with the far or "dark" side being lit when the near one is in shadow, and vice... Continue Reading →
The Soviet space program was more cautious than people give it credit for. Sure, the Soviets had their share of disasters1, but unless one subscribes to certain theories about lost cosmonauts, they didn't just send people into space without any preparation at all---they sent dogs, first. Scores of them. You see, the epic flight of... Continue Reading →
Welcome back, everyone! This week's entry will be a little lighter on text and heavier on visuals---which, judging by the success of my previous posts on AI-generated art, ought to be a popular decision. But this time I aim to focus on a particular theme. You see, ever since I was a kid, I've been... Continue Reading →
For today's entry we're welcoming back my friend Eamon Minges---who, as an engineer, brings a welcome dose of technical rigor to this website. You can find his other pieces here, here, here, and here. I wanted to start off by saying a quick thank you to my good friend Nic Quattromani, the originator of this... Continue Reading →
