THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Run for your lives. The Mars Hoax is back. Coming to a forwarded email near you.

It’s been an amazing six years for the Martian rover Spirit. But the little robot may finally be dying in winter temps of almost seventy degrees below zero F. It hasn’t been heard from since March 22:
“The earliest date the rover could generate enough power to send a beep to Earth was calculated to be around July 23. [...]

“Every time we’ve encountered Mercury, we’ve discovered new phenomena,” said Sean Solomon, the [NASA] mission’s principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “We’re learning that Mercury is an extremely dynamic planet, and it has been so throughout its history. After MESSENGER has been safely inserted into orbit around Mercury next [...]

I kept waiting for something to happen in this novel. It never did. It turned out to be a story about institutional food preparation, coffee-making and forming a sales cooperative for flea markets. The hero makes a mean omelet. The crew drilled for emergencies, but never had one. I didn’t need [...]

A funny yarn for the Kindle that doesn’t seem to go anywhere–until it does. And leaves you with a satisfying tale of two planetary explorers, man and woman, chosen by the bureaucrats for their “gender balance” but whose relationship matures into something closer to love.
While their indigenous scout has romantic notions [...]

Literary agent Nathan Bransford is always coming up with something interesting to post. The other day it was one that sounds old but was new to me: If you could live in the world of one novel, which would you choose? I’d choose the space opera world of Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath, as created [...]

Looking more like a giant X-ray machine than a telescope, McDonald Observatory’s 107-inch reflector inside its closed dome on Mt. Locke is one of the few, if not the only, modern telescopes with bullet holes in its primary mirror. I’ve heard and read several versions of the tale. This one pretty much echoes most of [...]

Dome of the telescope at McDonald Observatory in West Texas that helped map the near side of tidally-locked Luna before the landings began in 1969.

Powerful book, this, despite the irony that fifty years after it was first published, nothing remotely close to its apocalyptic vision of nuclear holocaust has yet occurred or even seems likely. Not even with the Iranian push for nukes.
There is another irony about this classic SciFi tale (which is only really SciFi at the end [...]

I enjoyed the hard-science aspects of this book, despite its unusual number of typos (proof that even mainstream publishing needs line editing) and Sawyer’s penchant for callous heroes. I was lucky in that I’d never heard of the TV series (until I read some of the other reviews at Amazon) and so [...]